I know. Where the heck have I been? Instead of answering that question, I am going to tell you a story.

We went out of town over the 4th of July, and had a fun vacation in Monterey and a relaxing time with family in San Bruno. Sharks were seen, faces were painted, things were exploded, hot dogs were eaten- in short- it was a good time.

The thing that really made it great was that I left the house completely clean, so I knew that even with all of this relaxing and partying, I would be able to come home and dive into the many tasks that awaited me without the suffocating presence of a filthy house to trip me up. After four days of R&R, we returned home. I walked in through the garage door and my first thought was, “My house stinks.”

I had completely emptied the fruit bowl before we left, so I didn’t have any rotting avocados or bananas. The diapers were all clean and dry, so I couldn’t blame the smell on those. There weren’t any dead bodies rotting in my bathtub, either, even if it did smell like it. I then began entertaining the horrible notion that perhaps my house always reeked like this, and since I was home so much, I had become so used to it that I never noticed. It could explain why we don’t get much company. Disgusted, and unable to locate the source of the smell, I lit some very strong candles, and went back to taking care of my family. Maggie was hungry, and since I had tossed all of the bananas (her first food group), I went to get something from the other food group, cheese. I opened the fridge and the stench hit me like a two by four and sent me running for the door, gagging and heaving. I then remembered that when I left, I had forgotten to take a package of chicken that had gone bad out of the fridge. I held my breath and darted back to the fridge to remove the offending foul, and when I opened it again, discovered that the entire cooling system had broken, most likely three or four days before, and everything in my fridge and freezer had been sitting at a room temperature of about 80 degrees the entire time.

Since I am a person who tends to stock up when she finds a sale, there were at least ten pounds of rotting flesh, three gallons of spoiled milk, and an entire crisper full of vegetables that had achieved putrefaction. The only thing in that fridge that hadn’t gone bad were the batteries.

Chris had to work, so I had no one to delegate the awful task of cleaning up that mess to. After calling my mother and bemoaning my situation, I took her advice, and brought the outside garbage can inside, and started dumping everything directly into the trash can. As far as items in containers went, if it wasn’t Pampered Chef, it was thrown and considered a joint casualty in the fridge’s demise. The garbage can filled to over flowing, and I still had more stuff that had to get out of my house, so I threw a few cardboard boxes into the can, got a chair, climbed into the trash can and jumped up and down to squish the mess and make more space for the rest of the decay. Definately one of my finest moments.

Since my kitchen was basically Salmonella Central, I then got out the bleach and disinfected everything. The maintenance guy came, declared my fridge legally dead, and brought me a new one. I went shopping, and we filed a claim to be reimbursed for the cost of food. All of this took over a day and a half, and while I took care of these things, the luggage that been neglected in the entryway multiplied and spread into the living room, and the children added their toys to the mess, ground a package of crackers into the carpet, and drizzled yogurt onto the couches. So after I dealt with the fridge, I had to deal with those messes, and the other pressing things I had to accomplish got pushed farther back until finally they sucked the life out of the following week. So, even though I started out ahead, I ended up behind. And that’s why I’ve been MIA.