First, you have to understand that I love milk. Skim milk. I imagine being lactose intolerant is like the Seventh or maybe Twenty-Fifth Circle of Hell. The average trip to the grocery store might have me buying three or four gallons of the stuff, which is just what I'd done the other day when I staggered through the front door under the weight of my own personal dairy farm.
Having sensibly loaded myself down with far more than I could carry, I managed a complete isometric workout just trying to heave the bags onto the kitchen counter. Having sensibly heaved more than the counter could hold, I turned my back just in time for a gallon of milk to tip off the edge and drop to the floor. Upon hitting the floor, the jug split along the seam, breaking clean in-half like some giant egg, and as giant eggs are wont to do, promptly flooded my kitchen from end to end.
Its not that its small, my kitchen, its just than until that moment Id never appreciated the total area a gallon of skim milk was capable of coating when you lay it out 1/16th of an inch deep.
Second, you have to understand that I have a cat. Louise. She was a stray for a couple of years before a friend at the SPCA finally caught her and gave her to me. Apparently, in the wild, cats learn to instantly recognize the sound of a gallon of milk hitting a linoleum tile floor, because Louise came rocketing through the advancing tide of lactose like some tiny, contemporary, fur-covered Moses. To discourage begging, its rare that I feed my cat any human food, but now, she inexplicably found herself surrounded on all sides by this veritable delicacy! She was so deliriously happy that she initially forgot to actually drink and spent several seconds just spinning in ecstatic little circles out in her oasis of dairy.
By this point Id retreated to kitchen door, and attempted, quite pointlessly, to implore my cat out of the pool of milk. My cries of Dammit, no! were wasted, especially since through force of repetition the cat seemed entirely convinced that was actually her name. Through frenzied waving and a series of Jurassic sound-effects, I managed to scare Dammit-No out of the milk. Having never been in this situation before, I failed to predict that a cat frightened away from a milk-lake will proceed to juggernaut around your apartment at top speed, trailing said milk with it as it goes.
I had to address the larger of the two problems, and the still-expanding flow of Skim commanded my attention. No sooner had I grabbed a mop and bucket to begin cleanup than I saw Louise: She had found her trail of flavored paw prints and was intently following them back to the source. Re-entering the kitchen, the wonders of feline short-term memory allowed her to discover this bonanza of milk all over again, whereupon she deftly re-enacted her whole series of earlier acrobatics.
The hell with me, the hell with the mop and bucket, this cat was not to be moved from this skim milk. I had to clean around her as she held a competition with the mop to see who could absorb the most of the spill. It was only as I reached the edges of the kitchen cabinets that the full force of the problem became clear to me: Id sponge dry a slight depression in the floor near the toe-board, and watch as it mysteriously refilled. It was under the cabinets! Milk! The substance for which the Expiration Date was invented! It was under the cabinets and I couldn't get it out!
All I could do was stare at my mop-bucket full of tan dairy; at my cat as it attempted to lick the patterns clear off the linoleum, and try to ignore the faint odor of sour-milk that had already started to form in my nostrils.
Having sensibly loaded myself down with far more than I could carry, I managed a complete isometric workout just trying to heave the bags onto the kitchen counter. Having sensibly heaved more than the counter could hold, I turned my back just in time for a gallon of milk to tip off the edge and drop to the floor. Upon hitting the floor, the jug split along the seam, breaking clean in-half like some giant egg, and as giant eggs are wont to do, promptly flooded my kitchen from end to end.
Its not that its small, my kitchen, its just than until that moment Id never appreciated the total area a gallon of skim milk was capable of coating when you lay it out 1/16th of an inch deep.
Second, you have to understand that I have a cat. Louise. She was a stray for a couple of years before a friend at the SPCA finally caught her and gave her to me. Apparently, in the wild, cats learn to instantly recognize the sound of a gallon of milk hitting a linoleum tile floor, because Louise came rocketing through the advancing tide of lactose like some tiny, contemporary, fur-covered Moses. To discourage begging, its rare that I feed my cat any human food, but now, she inexplicably found herself surrounded on all sides by this veritable delicacy! She was so deliriously happy that she initially forgot to actually drink and spent several seconds just spinning in ecstatic little circles out in her oasis of dairy.
By this point Id retreated to kitchen door, and attempted, quite pointlessly, to implore my cat out of the pool of milk. My cries of Dammit, no! were wasted, especially since through force of repetition the cat seemed entirely convinced that was actually her name. Through frenzied waving and a series of Jurassic sound-effects, I managed to scare Dammit-No out of the milk. Having never been in this situation before, I failed to predict that a cat frightened away from a milk-lake will proceed to juggernaut around your apartment at top speed, trailing said milk with it as it goes.
I had to address the larger of the two problems, and the still-expanding flow of Skim commanded my attention. No sooner had I grabbed a mop and bucket to begin cleanup than I saw Louise: She had found her trail of flavored paw prints and was intently following them back to the source. Re-entering the kitchen, the wonders of feline short-term memory allowed her to discover this bonanza of milk all over again, whereupon she deftly re-enacted her whole series of earlier acrobatics.
The hell with me, the hell with the mop and bucket, this cat was not to be moved from this skim milk. I had to clean around her as she held a competition with the mop to see who could absorb the most of the spill. It was only as I reached the edges of the kitchen cabinets that the full force of the problem became clear to me: Id sponge dry a slight depression in the floor near the toe-board, and watch as it mysteriously refilled. It was under the cabinets! Milk! The substance for which the Expiration Date was invented! It was under the cabinets and I couldn't get it out!
All I could do was stare at my mop-bucket full of tan dairy; at my cat as it attempted to lick the patterns clear off the linoleum, and try to ignore the faint odor of sour-milk that had already started to form in my nostrils.
umeko:
yea it was... errr ... ok lol. Ended up playing mum to the birthday boy who threw up on me! JOY How was your weekend? x
katieesq:
This blog is hilarious.