Someone set us up the bomb!
In this post I gave you a glimpse into the drawbacks of living with my ex wife. Two days earlier, in this post I gushed when writing about the 25th anniversary of meeting Ailsa, my first girlfriend. Well, lest you get a lopsided picture, I thought I’d relate a story that casts Ailsa in a very different light.
Ailsa and I lived together for a brief time after my divorce. It was another period of intense learning for me. Some of those lessons were rather pleasant, as I alluded to in my Valentine’s Day post; and then some of them were less than pleasant, like the explosion.
Imagine sleeping peacefully and being suddenly woken up in the dead of night by a loud explosion. Something like a gunshot, actually. When I got up to investigate, everything looked okay until I got to the kitchen, where nothing was amiss… except for the blood dripping from the ceiling and all the shelves.
After some very traumatic WTF moments, I discovered that, no, it really wasn’t blood; it was orange juice. But it was f-ing everywhere!!!
Apparently what had happened was that Ailsa had taken one of those cans of frozen orange juice concentrate out of the freezer and left it on top of our microwave to thaw a little, before mixing it up in a pitcher with water.
And then promptly forgot it.
For several days.
Nature taking its course, the stuff thawed, warmed, and eventually fermented in its surprisingly well-sealed container. When the internal pressure reached a sufficient level-which of course happened at 3am one night-the can exploded like a water canon in a mostly-vertical jet of warm orange slop.
It coated the under-sides of four rows of shelving as well as half the ceiling before giving in to gravity and splooshing the shelves a second time on the way down, then the microwave, the countertops, and eventually the floor. I have never seen a mess like that in my life.
Of course, I’d like to say Ailsa’s OJ and Linda’s cookware behaviors were isolated incidents, but these kinds of hazards never came up when I lived with other guys in college. But then maybe I’m just prone to dating women with underdeveloped survival instincts.
Euhhh! I still have nightmares about that…