The Uncommon Bond of Electricity, Coffee, and a Deep Freeze

This is what happens when you are a single mother and your daily things to do far outweigh the hours in the day…..

For several days now I have noticed a strange…..odor, shall we say…..throughout the house.  Having two cats, I made a mental note that I really needed to get upstairs to change their litter and completely clean out the boxes.  When I noticed the smell lingering in my bedroom last night, I began to think it may not be from the cats, but maybe a leftover from our old 18 year old pug who passed a month ago.  In the last weeks of his life he had uncontrollable issues with the eating and bathroom processes so natural to most of us.  Again, I made a mental note to clean my bedroom carpet, as I probably just did not thoroughly clean a prior area due to the overwhelming grief of losing our beloved dog.  I quickly put that painful memory aside and did not think again of the strange smell that seemed to randomly drift through the house.

This morning I was putting wash in the drier, and bent down to pick something off of the floor.  Noticing this ‘odor’ was slightly stronger in the laundry room, it made me pause.  The cat boxes are no where near my laundry room.  My bedroom is on the opposite side of the house.  Neither of my previous deductions would be the solution to the laundry room smell.  Being that the laundry room is more of a rectangle, and the washer and drier are right inside the door, I very rarely veer off to the left to the other side of the room. 

Early this morning making the veer to the left, I noticed the smell was more concentrated near the area by the deep freeze which sits behind the laundry room door.  It took me a moment to process.  I had not even finished one cup of coffee this morning, and was still not fully functioning.  I looked to the outlet – the plug on the deep freeze was dangling.  It took me a moment, but I did put two and two together, and sure enough it equaled four.  For at least a week if not longer, the food in the deep freeze has been left to its own devices.  Not thinking in my half comatose early morning state, I lifted the lid.  (Please let this be a warning to those of you with a deep freeze – should this ever happen to you – do NOT open the lid until you are ready with a mask and gloves to fully empty and clean out the remains.  And yes, I call them remains, because that is exactly what it smells like.)  Now my entire house smells like the inner most area of the rancid freezer. 

At this point I know you are probably calling me an idiot, and other not so nice terms, but may I please digress so you understand the cause of the useless opening of the dead freezer door.  I awakened earlier than normal this morning to find the electricity off for no apparent reason.  Even first thing in the early morning the full impact of this hit me – no coffee.  That is emergency status in my house.  If there was a code red for coffee issues, this would be a flaming hot red code.  Standing in the center of the kitchen I calmly assess the dire situation.  We have several routes to take.  The no coffee route.  I quickly move on, as this is certainly not an option, and I would rather eat coffee grounds than to even remotely wander down this path.  This thought leads me to thought number two; if I use the filter basket and run what’s left of the hot water from the tap through it I wonder if I would at least get muddy water that has any slight resemblance to coffee.  Not plausible, but better than eating grounds.  Thought three is a wonderment of what may be in the back of my pantry, and by chance is there instant coffee or cappuccino mix buried from years past that I could use with my dwindling hot water supply.  This is the option I am deciding upon, but I realize that the baby may have to forego a warm bottle in order to squeak mom out one cup of old, stale coffee from a mix.  In the grand scheme of things, I am okay with this.  The baby will still have his milk, albeit not warm, and I’ll still have semi-coffee.  It’s all about sacrifice, you know.

It is at this point that God knows what is coming next, and He must have decided not to torment me any further, as the electricity resumes its powered state.  Praise God!  The first thing I head to is the coffee pot – I am not going to take the chance that the powers that be in the electrical world will turn off the power again, leaving me in the dark.  I then immediately turn to the washer, as I have a full load to get in and decide to do so while the electricity is still cracking.  And, with this load of laundry, we come full circle back to where I digressed, and you may now begin to understand why I opened the lid in the first place.  I awakened early only to stand in the dark, and was threatened with the prospect of no coffee.  In my early morning haze, I decide to try and beat the clock while the electrical is back on – because really, who knows when it will decide to cease its magical power – and in my pre-coffee, early morning haze, I follow my reaction to open the freezer door to see if indeed this is where the smell is coming from.  Had I been more in my right mind, I would have never even cracked that lid.

I still can’t figure out how that plug got pulled, but in reality it does not matter now.  I pulled up my to do list on the computer, and added fix freezer and buy bleach to the list.  This is going to be a very, very long day….