Cleaned Out the Refrigerator Today
Monday, September 28th, 2015 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amarie24...Eew
Ya'll know how yucky a fridge can get? All those icky yucky nasty sticky stuff, crumbs, a grape that done died and became a raisin (yes, I cleaned that out too), old sauces way past their expiration dates & just more icky yucky nasty sticky stuff?
Welp. That was my fridge (And it's a simple single door, with a freezer door atop) for a long time and so I declared that today would be the day for me to clean it! For it is nasteh and it is getting on my goddamn nerves! It also happens to be the same day my mom would bring more groceries into the house and I actually prefer to clean the refrigerator when there's not much food in it so that we have far less perishables waiting out on the counter until I'm done cleaning it up. So it was a bit of crunch time, but she most certainly didn't mind me still cleaning up the fridge after I helped bring them into the house.
My mother has, in fact, been quite fatigued and just lagged down with work (cue me totally not feeling intense guilt because I do not have a job and therefore I do not have an income to contribute to this household and therefore I cannot work more or even at all so she can actually have more than two days a week to just sleep all day for once in her life). She'd been meaning to get to the fridge, but I got there instead for her and she's very, very grateful and I'm just like...but I don't make any money. And I live here too, anyway.
So yay for clean refrigerator! Looks wonderfully brand new inside and no more icky ooky stickiness! YAY!
Do you have any clean refrigerator stories to tell? Or just cleaning stories and possibly some tips, period? Please feel free to share! Open cleaning thread below! :D
Ya'll know how yucky a fridge can get? All those icky yucky nasty sticky stuff, crumbs, a grape that done died and became a raisin (yes, I cleaned that out too), old sauces way past their expiration dates & just more icky yucky nasty sticky stuff?
Welp. That was my fridge (And it's a simple single door, with a freezer door atop) for a long time and so I declared that today would be the day for me to clean it! For it is nasteh and it is getting on my goddamn nerves! It also happens to be the same day my mom would bring more groceries into the house and I actually prefer to clean the refrigerator when there's not much food in it so that we have far less perishables waiting out on the counter until I'm done cleaning it up. So it was a bit of crunch time, but she most certainly didn't mind me still cleaning up the fridge after I helped bring them into the house.
My mother has, in fact, been quite fatigued and just lagged down with work (cue me totally not feeling intense guilt because I do not have a job and therefore I do not have an income to contribute to this household and therefore I cannot work more or even at all so she can actually have more than two days a week to just sleep all day for once in her life). She'd been meaning to get to the fridge, but I got there instead for her and she's very, very grateful and I'm just like...but I don't make any money. And I live here too, anyway.
So yay for clean refrigerator! Looks wonderfully brand new inside and no more icky ooky stickiness! YAY!
Do you have any clean refrigerator stories to tell? Or just cleaning stories and possibly some tips, period? Please feel free to share! Open cleaning thread below! :D
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Date: 2015-09-29 07:49 am (UTC)You're so good to your mother to take that load off her!
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Date: 2015-09-29 05:54 pm (UTC)Yep. I know that feeling!
And d'aaw! Naw, I just try to pull my weight as much as I can around here. ^ ^
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Date: 2015-09-29 02:40 pm (UTC)I swear I am only laughing at your raisin because I have found those myself... some months after raisinification. Ew.
Tips... uh, vinegar. Vinegar is my go-to for almost all the things. If it's turning funky colors it gets one-tenth bleach-water instead.
Stories... hoo boy, have I got a story. The faint-hearted may not wish to read this...
We had a little dorm fridge where I used to live. One of those tiny little single-cubic-foot deals. It had a glass door and no freezer, since it used to be a soda-fridge before it was given to Star.
When Star moved in with my roommates and I, the fridge became a soda-fridge again, until a roommate (B, who liked to drink) dropped a crate of Smirnoff Ice on it. Yes, dropped - which meant the bottles broke, except for about six, and the poor little fridge got gummed up extravagantly with nasty, sticky, sugary alcohol.
As I recall, we took a sponge to it, and then made a mental note to take it apart one day and get the interals, since it had that faintly sweet Smirnoff-smell forever more - but we never did it.
Cue moving day. By this time, Star and I had already moved out, and Star, not wanting to move the little fridge again, had officially given it to B.
We got a very alarmed phone call from B and his girlfriend later that day. They'd attempted to move the little fridge, and realized we'd never fully cleaned it only after they disturbed the hundreds-strong colony of earwigs that had been living in the nice warm coils, feeding on fossilized Smirnoff.
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Date: 2015-09-29 05:53 pm (UTC)Like, I said Oh. My. God. twice out loud before I had to leave my room for a while. My goodness!! I can't...I don't even...now that is the motherfucking story of the year. WOW.
All I got the space to say is at least it wasn't you and Star that took that refrigerator! Gracious me, that so disgusting and unfortunate! Yikes!!!
I am so, so glad that that fridge wasn't taken by you and Star. You don't even know...damn.
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Date: 2015-09-29 07:30 pm (UTC)... is it bad that that's not even the worst fridge story I have? Though the worst one is actually Star's, not mine.
Ohh, I'm glad we didn't take it too. I hate earwigs with the burning passion of a fiery earwig-hater, so every time I think about it, I'm glad we missed out on the mass earwig exodus.
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Date: 2015-09-29 09:17 pm (UTC)I am right with you in that hate, friend. Yep, yep!
Also a new ATLA post is up, if you like. I got a lot of gifs for the fighting & action. :D :D
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Date: 2015-09-29 10:23 pm (UTC)Oh man. So: The Very Worst Fridge.
Star's grandfather, you see, lived in a little bitty mobile home in Nowhere, USA. When he passed, Star's father - torn by the kind of grief that he really doesn't know how to handle - decided just to keep everything as it was. There's some other things in play, here - family issues around the will - that meant nobody was willing to sell the place off.
What it boiled down to, though, was no cleaning for somewhere approaching twenty years.
Someone did eventually break into the place and steal a bunch of stuff. This was the trigger for Star and Caveman to approach their father about cleaning the place out. He wasn't willing to do it (still) but he got out of their way, so that they could take anything they wanted from the house and do a bit of cleanup. See, Grandpa Star had smoked so much that they weren't sure what would be usable. I don't go in there, because asthma and cigarette smoke don't mix well, so I didn't go along.
But: the fridge.
The fridge, and a chest freezer, had been sitting in there, sans power and uncleaned, for nigh on twenty years. Caveman had thoughts about keeping them. I advised Star to take gloves and bleach.
That, as it turned out, wasn't enough.
The fridge was bad - moldy, nonfunctional, full of decay. The freezer was worse. It turns out that given long enough, the contents of a chest freezer will liquify. They managed to stifle the gagging long enough to get it outside, tip it over - spilling out the contents - and rinse it out with a hose. And oh, how it stank.
It stank after they washed it.
It stank after they bleached it, twice.
It stank so bad they couldn't stay near it for long, so bad it burned the throat and made the eyes water.
Caveman managed to get the dead appliances onto the trailer they were using to haul back anything still usable, and they took them straight to the dump. And on the way back, they saw a black bear, moseying around the area they'd used to drain the freezer.
It stank so much that an actual bear came down the mountain to find out what all the stank was about.
And THAT... is a fridge whose equal I hope never to encounter.
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Date: 2015-09-29 10:47 pm (UTC)And they bleached it twice and it still didn't get even a bit of that stench out? Twenty years? Two whole decades? Not a single soul in there to clean? To organize? To salvage?
Like, no seriously. All of that shit was liquefied?!
Just...oh my goodness. Oh my goodness gracious. When I was reading the part about how even a goddamn bear came down to see what the stink was? I swear I could almost imagine that horrific odor coming through my computer screen. This...this is just...damn. Wow.
And on a more serious note, I am so, so, so very sorry for Ms. Star's family's loss. I do hope that Mr. Star's father is better today and either way, I'm keeping their family in my thoughts.
Uhh...who is "Caveman", doe? Is that Ms. Star's brother? :O
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Date: 2015-09-30 02:19 am (UTC)And, I stand corrected (by Star!) - one decade, not two. Still bad enough. Still inches of liquid in the freezer (the origin of which was, apparently, Totino's pizzas.) Still no salvaging that; the stench got into the plastic, I guess? I didn't know it could DO that.
And.. yeah. No work, no maintenance, no salvage or organization... for all that time. :(
Thanks for the kind thoughts!
...and for laughing along with this story about a really, really bad freezer. xD
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Date: 2015-09-30 10:19 pm (UTC)No need to thank me for the kinds thoughts and thank you for giving me those laughs, haha! I needed them! :D :D :D
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Date: 2015-09-30 10:27 pm (UTC)Nope, that's pretty much it - my family is really really small (10 people over 3 generations, only one other member of whom is below 50) and, while Star's extended family approaches triple digits, Caveman's their only sibling.
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Date: 2015-09-30 10:30 pm (UTC)And...wow. Triple digits for Ms. Star's extended family. Kewl-io! :O