The World According to Tiff Sniff

Trip was wonderful. I got home last night just after 9:00, completely exhausted. The only thing that kept me from just staying at my parents' house after they picked me up at the airport was the promise of sleeping in my own bed, in my own room.

So imagine, if you will, what you would hate to come home to after being gone for 10 days. No, my apartment hadn't burned down. No, I hadn't been burglarized. What did happen is number 3 on the list of worst possible things to have happened.

My refrigerator broke.

Now, it didn't just quit working. Somehow, the cooling/freezing function quit. But the motor has been running. So the temperature inside the thing is actually warmer than room temperature.

I'm a smart girl. Before I left, I took out the trash, and cleaned out my refrigerator of anything that would spoil while I was gone. However, I didn't feel the need to clean out my freezer. You should know that, because I live alone and don't eat here a whole lot, I tend to buy frozen meat and just thaw what I need. So my freezer is mostly full of chicken, a couple of stakes, and ice cream (which mostly just adds to the sticky factor).

So when I opened my apartment door, I was hit with an indescribable stench. My first thought was, "What is that? There's nothing IN this place that could create that smell!" Oh, my naivete.

I followed the aroma to my teeny kitchen, where the floor was covered with a coat of some reddish, foul liquid. Now dried, of course. I made the mistake of opening the fridge to see what was happening, since I could hear it still running.

Then I promptly called my parents and burst into tears.

This week was mind-blowingly fantastic, but I have been "on" for 10 days. I was one of two leaders of our group, but the other had never been to England before. So a lot of the decision-making and planning while we were there had fallen to me. Not a big deal, but by last night, I had nothing left to give. I couldn't even begin to think how to deal with it. I knew I couldn't sleep in my apartment with that smell, but the idea of getting back in my car and going somewhere else, or even of sleeping in another bed than my own, was just devastating. Not to mention, the fear that now everything in my place will smell like this for weeks to come.

My wonderful, amazing father came down from Nashville with buckets, rubber boots, trash bags, and cleaning supplies. He wet down the mess on the floor (oh my ew) and scrubbed it, then mopped it up with paper towels and threw them out for me. He went to the store and bought a bag of cat litter, to help absorb the smell, and spread it out over my kitchen floor.

In the end, we've decided to just pay someone to come pick up the thing, nasty insides and all, and get rid of it. It's old, and doesn't even have handles anymore (you have to open it by grasping the doors at the top), so it's not worth spending anything to fix, if it could even be fixed. Plus, that would entail actually dealing with what is inside, and frankly, I'm not up to it.

So, I had hoped to write a huge long post about my week (no internet access while I was there, or I would have been posting all along), and I might still do it later today, but first I'm going to exorcise my apartment of all things gross.

Happy Monday, everyone!