Peacf

I was talking to my husband about what to write for my post tonight.   He had just destroyed me in Type Racer.   He unfairly won, because of some Mac formatting incompatibility with the game, but seeing as that wasn’t his fault, I don’t plan on holding it against him.   Also, he types faster than I do, so I was doomed from the start.

I had two topics, ‘Peacf’ and 'Pineapple Sludge'.   He said the Peacf topic was about our daughter, and I’ve written about her a lot, so perhaps the Pineapple Sludge story…only that one was gross, so it was up to me.   And I suppose since I’ve mentioned them both, and leaving a topic with a name like ‘Pineapple Sludge’ dangling doesn’t seem polite, I’ll do a rundown of both.

It started with a smell.   It came and went and was hard to track down.   But it was musty and in the general area of the laundry room but it meandered into the hall outside it and sometimes towards the garage door.   Edna and I had smelled it but we couldn’t trace it down, because once you walked into the area where the smell was, your body moved the air around enough that it dissipated.

Everything was sniffed.   The sink in the laundry room had things dumped down it for odor, even though it didn’t seem like it was coming from there.    We looked over, under and around everything and nothing smelled bad.   But it would come back.

Then tonight it hit me it might be the ice machine.   The machine would really like to be cleaned every three months, only I put it off for far longer.   Eventually it gets a little funky—with a smell not unlike what we were smelling only the door was shut.   But it still dumped water overage down a drain that was in the back of the cabinet in the center of the area where the smell kept appearing.   So tonight after the children went to bed I started in on the pieces removal, hand cleaning and chemical additive put into the unit after initiating the clean cycle.  

That should fix it, I thought.   As I was putting up the box of cleaner pouches in the cabinet beside the ice machine I saw the five year filter in the back and wondered if it had been five years since we put it in.   It had, not surprisingly, been longer.    I was moving things out of the way to get a picture of the filter so I could order it online when I saw this black sludge on the lower shelf.

The contents of that cabinet, including the filter, were probably all put in over five years ago.   I had some mini cans of pineapple juice I’d forgotten about—which had subsequently imploded or exploded into a viscous black sludge.   No smell, just sticky and black.  It didn’t smell and wasn’t even hard to clean up, leaving no residual mark on the cabinet itself.   I have an entire cabinet empty now because everything was out of date or unused so I threw it all away.

That was meant to be the short part of the blog post but it got away from me.   For my daughter, we’ve been trying to give her some control in her life since she can see very little at all.   This is one small example of how I rearranged the refrigerator today so she could be more independent.

I cleared a spot in the door for her water bottle and put her name in braille on it, her brother’s name on his same-shaped water bottle and put tape on her handle so she could find it quickly and easily.   She’s also been wanting to eat a lot of yogurt lately.   I got a selection of five different kinds at the store today and asked her when she got home if she’d like to have each kind in its own row?   This would necessarily take up more space in the refrigerator, but would help her not only be able to find the yogurt, but the flavor she wanted.

Prior to this she was bringing them to us to ask which kind she had, or she would just eat whatever she got and have no control over what flavor she got.   Today, we made braille labels for each row and put them at the edge of the shelf so she could read the types of yogurt just behind the labels.

My husband and I were excited to show her, asking her if she could tell what it was.   She said, “p-e-a-c-f?  Oh, mom, did you mean to write peach?  You did an ‘f’ instead of an ‘h’”.  And so I had.   But she was excited nonetheless.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Beyblades Update:  My son became obsessed with Beyblades (a spinning top battle game) when he was at camp last week.   He spent some stamps and ordered the plastic battle arena and some Beyblades to battle.   His sister told him there was a Beyblades show, which he didn’t know about.   And it turns out, the two of them are pretty good at battling together and they’re both all into the show now.