Deals.Woot

this wasn't in my food but... while tearing down my old kitchen cabinets, behind the cabinets between the wall and laying on top were mounds of what i call dead "roach babies". small rice and dot looking things hard as rocks along with some small dead roaches. apparently my old building used to have a terrible roach problem. thankfully all of them were dead and i paranoidly plugged all the drywall holes where the trail of dead roach babies came from

another time when i was helping a friend move, we were cleaning and i decided to clean the kitchen while everyone was busy packing. i found small black pellet things in all the lower cabinets so i swept them out and threw them away. later on my friend asked "who cleaned out the animal droppings?"
i was like... was that what was in the lower cabinets? i don't think she ever used them thankfully, they were empty. and she kept even her clean empty drink glasses in the fridge, which i thought was strange until then

@captainsuperdawg: that made me laugh! not as sad as my kitchen horror story

So, we have a pull-out vent over our stove-top (this is important because most of the time, it is tucked away and out of sight). About a year ago, I went on a health-kick for a while where I cooked all my meals. Once the vent stopped functioning well and the kitchen filled with smoke, I decided I should clean it.

After wrestling around with the mesh filter for 20 minutes, I finally got it loose and the grease, grime and dirt that accumulated fell directly onto my face and in my mouth. After flushing out my mouth with all the chemicals under the sink, I was told that the last time it was cleaned was 1989.

Yes, 20 full years of grease and grime. It wasn't just the age either, the sheer amount of it was staggering. Imagine a jar of molasses and that matches both the color, consistency and amount. The grime was so thick, it took two hot showers to completely remove it off my skin. My mind, however, could not be cleaned of this experience.

I was sweeping Thursday and found a piece of broken beer bottle from 2 years ago. Don't know where it came from, just showed up while sweeping. Might have come from under the dishwasher, IDK.

My cousin, he's a real dumba$$. I still don't know how he found out where I live.

We went on vacation once and as we were getting on the plane we realized that we had forgotten to grab the bag of garbage we had tied up and set in the kitchen to throw it in the outside bin. There were raw steak scraps in it. We had sent our dogs to a kennel, so we hadn't left keys with anyone that could deal with it for us. It did NOT smell good when we returned a week later. Fortunately the smell hadn't spread to the rest of the house and we were able to get the house aired out relatively soon after returning home!!

Ya'll live lives entirely too civilized. I have found centipedes, scorpions, childs of the earth, roaches and mice racing for the shadows in my kitchen. I have all manner of science projects in my fridge, including 3 lbs of cheese that have been there for several years. They are in their original package and don't have any mold and when I opened one last summer it was still good, so they may be as well. The worst thing I can recall finding in the fridge was when I pulled out the crisper drawer for a once a decade cleaning and found an open and moldy package of lunch meat that had been trapped under there for probably years, in a soup of some unidentifiable sticky burgundy colored substance (possibly the life blood of vegetables allowed to die in the crisper). The Happy Homemaker I am not.