Can You Beat This?

Spicin' Up Saturdays with Joni

We are home from our wonderful vacation to Disneyland. My previous post about getting ready for a vacation was written a few weeks ago, before we left. Now we are home, dealing with the after vacation blues and with colds :( Here is my challenge to all those reading. I want to see if anyone can beat this experience. So here we go... I thought I would share about coming home. We got up last Sunday morning and headed home from St. George around 9:30am. We wanted to get home early so we could rest and get settled before we got back to life on Monday morning. My mother in law called and asked, since they were on the way, that we stop for lunch. I didn't want to. I was SO tired and car sick and I just wanted to get home. We stopped for a short visit and got back on the road. The whole drive home I was giving myself the pep talk of, "Life is good. I can be happy even if I am not at Disneyland, etc." When we pulled into the parking lot of home, I was happy to be there. I was going to rest on the couch and make dinner and that was all. As I was slowly making my way into the house, Jaron came down the stairs with a horrified look on his face. I quickly asked what was wrong. He said our fridge broke while we were gone and everything inside was bad. I quickly knew what he meant because there was a smell of DEATH coming from our apartment. We quickly went inside to assess the situation. The fridge was so hot inside. The freezer, which was full of deer meat had all thawed and gone bad. The smell was so bad and there was blood oozing everywhere. We got to work right away. We cleaned out the fridge and all the meat. Good thing I don't throw up easily or we would have been cleaning that up too. Once we had the fridge emptied, we cleaned up all the blood. We decided that the blood was in every crack and we would never get the smell out. We decided to take the fridge outside. We were the only ones home in our apartment complex so I had to help Jaron. Since I couldn't lift it, we decided to turn it on its side and slide it down the stairs. The problem was, we didn't know there is a pan at the bottom of the fridge that catches liquid if the fridge defrosts. So as we turned the fridge on it's side, blood came pouring out all over the carpet in the stairwell. It was horrible. I yelled to just hurry and get it out, so we pushed it down the stairs and outside. Now we had a bigger problem. The carpet was covered in rotten blood. With tears in my eyes I tried to clean the blood up. In my head I was thinking, "I was supposed to be resting on the couch, not cleaning up blood. I came home with a good attitude that life was good. Life wasn't good. It was horrible." After attempting to get the blood up, we went back to our apartment to start airing it out. With all the windows open and fans going, it was so unbearable. I called our repair man and told him we needed a new fridge and carpet cleaners first thing Monday morning. All night long Jaron and I tossed and turned as we tried to sleep with the smell of death in the house. My entire Monday was spent spring cleaning my kitchen, hoping to get the smell out. After of full day of cleaning and windows open, and after THREE carpet cleaners came, we can breath again. It isn't perfect, but it is SO much better. Carpet cleaner #2 came and said, "Wow, that smells bad." I told him he should have put his head in the freezer where it came from and then he would have understood how bad it smelled.
Sometimes it feels like when we are trying to improve something in our lives, like trying to be more content with our situation, some unseen force pushes us down and makes it even harder to do better. Its like someone was saying, "Joni, You are going to try to be happy? Well, try being happy when you are cleaning up rotten blood and your house stinks!" Luckily, it is a new day. My house smells better. My kitchen is spotless. I have a new fridge and I don't have to eat deer meat until next season! So I guess there is silver lining in all situations. I hope your life smells better today!

So, see if you can beat that! Have you come home from vacation to find something happened? I would love to hear!

Weekly Recipe: I can't even think about food after writing that post, so until next week...