guilty as charged

Let's start with a positive, shall we:  the good thing about having everyone home is that there are MANY sets of hands to put away the groceries.

Also, I can always find a person with time on his/her hands to jog down to the basement to retrieve something from the fridge, or look for something in the fridge.  I JUST praised the shit out of Reg for always hopping up to do my fridge search and/or grab duty.  

Parenting tip:  did you know kids will do more things faster and more frequently when they get the shit praised out of them?  Please do not ask me how many years it took me to figure that little nugget out.  

Weeks, as in maybe a month ago, I froze one morning in my kitchen.  "Wait, did I buy pork chops at Costco, or did I decide not to?"  

I used to make this awesome sweet and sour pork recipe in my crockpot, but the pork always came out tough.  Upon doing a little research, I learned that  it is sometimes best to tenderize the pork (now see, I am tossing around lingo and I am not even sure I am using it right . . . that is how long ago I looked into this recipe-fix that I needed).  I think I ended up just cooking the pork a bit on each side BEFORE dicing it up to put in the crockpot.  

Anywho, I could not recall if my masked-self felt adventurous enough to buy the chops or to pass on them.  Did I pass on them because I remembered that Kraft no longer makes the sweet and sour sauce I used in the recipe, and who wants to complicate life right now and go to 3 stores to find a sauce that would work?

So, I did what I normally do, "Reg, go look in the basement fridge and see if I bought pork chops?"  Meanwhile I hollered to all available awake people:  Does anyone remember putting pork chops down in the basement fridge or somewhere else?

Reg returned from the depths:  NOPE.  NO RANDOM PACK OF MEAT.  

No one else chimed in with the "Oh, I saw pork chops" response, so I decided that I had NOT in fact bought them.  I was secretly breathing a sigh of relief because it had been over a week since my Costco trip and I was worried that if I had bought them they would be too old to cook, so maybe I just liked Reg's response.  I was off the hook.  

The other day someone complained about a smell in the basement fridge that they couldn't identify.  Coach was down there and he smelled something 'off', but he didn't find it.  (Please don't ask me if I know whether or not he even bothered to look, because I don't want to think about this).

I thought nothing of it.  

Is there a correlation between low brain function and quarantine?  Asking for a friend.

Then when I was down in this-here backup fridge that I rarely have to poke around in anymore because I am surrounded by bodies, I found the smell.  

I grabbed a casserole dish that looked black on the inside, mumbled "Dumbasses" and hauled it upstairs.  

I thought the black food was a delicious Pyrex of cheesy chicken that we forgot was down there.  I opened it and found it was fish.  The dark color fooled me.  It was not orange colored cheesy chicken covered in black mold, and it was not expired.  

Did I venture back down to the basement at that point?  No.  I stuck the fish Pyrex container in the kitchen fridge and went about my day.   

Go ahead, point out the fact that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and a real adult would have gone back down there and searched for the issue.   Guilty as charged.

This is the part of my kitchen nearest the mudroom.  Note the entrance to the mudroom mere steps away?  These are shoes, a sweatshirt - or two, slippers, a duffel bag, athletic slides, and workout bands dropped in the corner of my kitchen.  These people can live with a rotting meat smell and not decide to investigate. 

AND, I must confess: 
I kicked my slippers out of the way before I snapped the photo. 
Dear God, I am ONE OF THEM.  

This morning my minions were still sleeping when I needed skim milk.  I ventured down the stairs all by myself and there in the middle of the fridge in plain sight was an orange Costco bag full of rotting pork chops.  As in:  SERIOUSLY ROTTING.  I didn't get close enough to look at the date, so I don't know how old it was but I did notice that it cost $17.  

Ouch.  

How.  Could.  I.  Have.  Been.  So.  Stupid?  

The smell combined with the current cluttered status of the house (read current as:  constant) almost had me texting Coach:  TIME TO MOVE.