Can I Make a Mess or What?

June 10, 2013 · Filed under life in Florida

I was going to go to my mom’s house and pick some blueberries tomorrow, so early this morning seemed like a good time to clean old blueberries out of the freezer. I filled up a small plastic garbage bag with quart-sized freezer bags of blueberries, then put the bag on the kitchen floor to go back outside and get a 5-gallon bucket to empty blueberries into. I had LOTS more in the freezer to get rid of for last year was an excellent year for blueberries. I planned on taking them outside to feed to the livestock when I finished. Alas, I was interrupted.

“Hey, are you busy?” SwampMan inquired.

“Well, a little.”

“I need to drop my truck at the mechanic’s so he can look at the A/C system. I’ll buy you breakfast if you follow me and pick me up!” Well, that wouldn’t take long. I left the bag sitting on the floor by the sink so that I could empty it out when we got back from breakfast. The berries would still be frozen, no doubt.

He dropped off his truck, I picked him up, and went down to the end of the road to the stop sign. I turned on the right blinker, and he said “No. You need to turn left.”

“Hunh?”

“We have to pick up that chair to deliver for the ceremony, remember?”

Um, no, I didn’t. Hadn’t. Dang. That hour away was going to be more like two and a half or maybe even three hours. Oh, well. It would probably still be okay.

We dropped off the chair right before the recipient arrived. He spoke to the recipient about how much he appreciated her while I rolled up tarps and ropes and such. At least, I assume he did. That would have been the right thing to do, but it is SwampMan.

When he got back in the truck, he told me we needed to stop at a hardware store. I remembered that I needed a few grocery items from Walmart. We stopped for food on the way back. I completely forgot about the blueberries on the kitchen floor. We’d spent about six hours away. The temperature inside the house was in the mid 80s.

When I walked in, the blueberries had all thawed out, and the plastic freezer bags they were in LEAKED. I’d put them in a plastic garbage bag which also leaked. There was a giant sticky purple puddle about 4′ x 4′ right on the kitchen floor.

Aaaaaaaargh! I yanked up that bag and ran to the trashcan, the bag spewing a big splattering trail of purple blueberry juice along the floor. I was about to throw it in when I looked down, saw the leakage, and ran back to the sink and threw the bag in there to drain, leaving another big fat splattery purple trail across the floor, down my clothes, and down the white cabinets. There was not much of the kitchen floor that was not covered in purple. DAMN!

There are now three formerly white towels that are purple from sopping up blueberry juice, the floor had to be bleached to return it to its previous (non purple) color, as did the cabinets. The freezer is still full of blueberries. The chickens, sheep, and ducks did get blueberries for desert. While I was cleaning blueberry mess off the floor, it was raining on the clothes that I’d hung out to dry that morning.

I hope he gets his truck back soon.