On Second Thought

Last week the riveting topic of Spring Cleaning got brought up. The unanimous opinion was that Spring Cleaning is a bit overrated and tasks that fall into this category should be more efficiently dealt with at the time of a move. In other words, the back of a closet, the junk drawer, and the toiletries should remain untouched until moving boxes are involved. Otherwise, who really cares?

However, my opinion may have just changed.

I was having a few friends over this week and on the menu was cheese and crackers. My sister, my live in, and I were in the grocery store picking out items for the evening. When we came down the cracker aisle I waived it off, telling them we had plenty of crackers at home. I mean plenty.

Perhaps it was a hostess’s intuition, perhaps it was sheer luck, but something said we’d better open the crackers we have at home and make sure they are still good. After all, I couldn’t exactly recall when they were purchased. We opened the 1st box…they were all natural, all organic, whole wheat – maybe that’s why they tasted a little dry? We were onto the 2nd box. Not good. Couldn’t figure out why though. 3rd box. 4th box. Not good at all. In fact, they tasted so bad we immediately spit the cracker back out, drank some water, and made faces that looked similar to that of a screaming newborn. 5th box…still terrible. 6th box? So freakin’ awful the live in brought it about two inches from his mouth and the stench was so strong he had to throw it away. We’re talking, really, really bad here friends.

6 boxes later (and a trash bag full of reject crackers) we checked the expiration dates. 2004. Hmm. The oil in the crackers had gone rancid. We were eating extremely expired food. I was about to serve my guests extremely expired food. Not only could my digestive system not handle this, I would have lost any street cred I once had as a party thrower. And that, my friends, would lead to clinical depression of the worst kind.

Even better…we had to have moved those crackers with us when we came to the loft, the 2004 expiration date it a dead giveaway. We couldn’t even abide by our ‘wait till moving day to clean out the pantry’ rule. Who are we?

Maybe now that we have more shelf space we can transfer the Top Ramen we moved with us to the more convenient cabinet…that stuff NEVER goes bad, right?!