75 days and counting

Mood: Relieved that my internet connection seems stable enough to catch up on my blog...

So, along with my blog every day I think I'm going to start posting happy thoughts. I've been posting a "happy thought of the day" every day (sometimes more than once) via Facebook statuses for a while and people have been responding really positively to those. They will literally come up to me on campus and tell me that my happy thought from whatever day really made them smile. So that's cool.

Without further ado, today's happy thought: Adorable pictures of animals on the internet. I could waste hours online looking at those pictures.

Anyway, now let's get down to today's story.

A few years ago I was grocery shopping with my parents. We were in the produce section and they both became frighteningly excited over a particularly perfect white onion they found. They were positively delighted to have found such an exemplary vegetable. Then they found out that toilet bowl cleaner was on sale that week. Whoa, buddy.

I remember wondering to myself if that's what being an adult boiled down to - amazing finds in a bin of onions and 50 cents off toilet duck.

This memory came to mind as I was looking in my refrigerator today. For the past couple of days, my roommate and I have noticed a particularly heinous smell coming barreling out every time we open the door. It was near vomit-inducing as I actually gagged a couple of times.

I looked and looked and looked for the source, but couldn't find it at all. I took everything out of the fridge and sniffed each thing individually, but didn't find anything the least bit rank.

Today I decided that perhaps the refrigerator just needed a good washing down. Perhaps some yogurt spilled on the bottom and we couldn't see it anymore but it was going sour. Something like that.

So I emptied the fridge again (and smelled everything a second time - just to be sure) and washed the shelves and the sides and the bottom. Then my eyes fell on the vegetable drawer.

My roommate and I don't use the vegetable drawer. Partly because I don't remember the last time we had a vegetable in the place and partly because it blends really well with the rest of the fridge so most of the time we just don't notice it.

Well, I noticed it today.

I opened it, knowing without a doubt the hair-curling stink would be in there. To my surprise there were no forgotten vegetables in there at all. Rather 1/4 inch of water. Sludgy, grey water full of unimaginable, miscellaneous flakes of fridge funk.

I wanted to die when I pulled it out. My roommate was sitting at the kitchen table (eating, of all things... how she could eat with something so revolting in the room, I have no idea) just watching me do this, too, which I was really appreciative of.

I quickly poured the questionable gunk down the sink and washed and dried the drawer. I then reassembled the refrigerator (and freezer) and put everything back inside. My roommate, meanwhile, still didn't offer any help. Maybe I should get my own refrigerator and let her refrigerator rot in its own stink.

Anyway, the point is that finding and eliminating that smell was seriously the best part of my week. I am so thrilled to be rid of it. I would literally not eat sometimes because I knew I'd have to open the door. But that problem is gone now and I'm freakishly excited about it.

And thus I have concluded, I am an adult. In retrospect, I would most certainly have preferred the prize onion, but locating and eradicating sources of malodorous-ness seems to be a crucial adult skill, so maybe I'll just chalk this up to a learning experience .