It’s a Fine Line Between Good and Rotten

Geezus!  What’s that smell?!

I was going for my second cup of coffee, opened the fridge door for the cream……Sniff, Sniff.  Something died in there!

I didn’t smell anything the first time I put cream in my coffee.  Can something go from perfectly fine to Holy Shit Rotten in a half-hour?  The Viking has a Super Sniffer that can smell a Bastard Fart from a kilometer away, so it’s virtually impossible that he missed the odor of a veggie contemplating its own death.  And, I would have heard about it if he had because he usually makes a loud and public proclamation……

via GIPHY

“Something fucking stinks in the fridge!”

…….and I run for the hills because there will be an in-depth lecture on the wastefulness of food in our house and how no self-respecting Danish person would ever find a rotten anything in their fridge.  Because they all plan their meals a week ahead, purchase all the ingredients in one trip to the store, and do all the meal prep in advance so no food is wasted and no one has to lay on the kitchen floor crying because they don’t know what to make for dinner.  And, in case you are wondering about leftovers, every Sunday, every Dane eats Biksemad (bik-si-mel), which is short for a gawd-awful concoction of every item in the fridge you couldn’t bear to eat during the week, topped off with a fried egg.

I had other plans for the next hour but obviously something had to be done about the fridge if I wanted to avoid another episode of “Why Can’t You Be More Like A Dane?”.  I started rummaging around, looking for fresh veggies that aren’t so fresh anymore.  That’s usually the smelly culprit and finding it could make this task short if not sweet.

Unfortunately, there was no obvious suspect, which meant an aggressive, frontal assault on every container and condiment.  Sigh.  Don’t tell The Viking, but there was a bottle of Bar-B-Que Sauce with a ‘best before’ date of March 2019.  On the bright side, I didn’t find a single container of Science and that should count for something.

The problem then isn’t with the fridge.  The smell is coming from somewhere else…….

Please Gawd, don’t let it be a dead mouse/bird – a gift from a cat – behind an appliance!  

Before I called HazMat, I decided to put all the sinfully wasteful fridge items in the garbage.  I won’t be avoiding the “Why Can’t You Be More Like A Dane” lecture if he sees all the waste on display just begging for comment.  Better to hide that shit as quickly as possible.

I grabbed the garbage from under the sink and…….

Sweet Baby Geezus!!!

Well, shit.  It wasn’t the fridge after all.

The smell coming from the garbage was so smelly and heavy that it took the 3 seconds between the garbage and the fridge for the smell to catch up with me.

In the half-hour between coffee refills, the smell went from nothing to Holy Shit Rotten and that’s just not fair. How can I avoid the “Why Can’t You Be More Like A Dane” lecture if I only have a scant half-hour window?  What if I’m busy during that half-hour?

I’m sure Science can explain the exponential multiplication of odor molecules within a finite time limit but it doesn’t help me be more Danish.

I cleaned out the fridge for nothing.

Shit.