Life's Lessons

I went to Walmart today, because Leslie is coming home tomorrow and I wanted have the pantry stocked (with my food) when she got home. I spent all morning cleaning the house. I vacuumed (well, Roomba vacuumed), I Swiffed and Windexed the floors, I cleaned the bathrooms, and I changed the linens. I was pretty darn proud of myself.

After I loaded the groceries in the car I stopped by Tropical Smoothie on the way home, the intent being that if I had a smoothie now I wouldn't be tempted later by a burger or something else laced with lipids and salt. I picked up a Blue Lagoon, unable to resist the delicious mix of blueberries, strawberries and banana.

When I got home, I quickly got inside with the smoothie and my library books. The smoothie was already quickly transitioning to the liquid phase, so I stuck it in the freezer door while I unloaded the car. This will be important later.

I brought in the dozen or so bags of food and quickly sorted out the freezer items. Desperate to get the lasagna and chicken strips (Leslie will be so pleased) into the freezer, I whipped open the door and watched 22 ounces of minced fruit fall swiftly to the ground below. The result was catastrophic. I went through the stages of grief in a record fifteen seconds. I couldn't believe it at first, and then quickly became agitated at the $4.74 that lay on the ground before me. I tried to scoop it up, trying to save it. When I saw the blue streaks on my walls I vomited a little in my mouth, and slumped into the only clean corner in the kitchen, where my silhouette was clearly visible, my body having shielded at least a portion of the wall. After two quick tears, I grabbed the six-pack of paper towels I just purchased (Scott, pick-a-size quilter) and got to work.

Having been inspired recently by Obama's ability to turn anything into a lesson, sort of like life gives you lemons, make a racial relations team-building exercise, I took inventory of everything I could learn from this event. The list is quite extensive, as it took me a very long time to clean up the mess. Here is that list. It has been formatted to fit your screen and edited to run in the time allotted.

I have learned:

1. That freezer doors are useless places for storage.

2. That a falling body, beginning from a height of four feet with an initial vertical velocity of zero, assuming negligible air resistance and a sea-level acceleration due to gravity of thirty-two-point-two feet per second squared, will reach a final velocity of ten-point-nine miles per hour when it reaches the floor.

3. That ten-point-nine miles per hour is more than enough to destroy a Styrofoam cup.

4. The plastic lids on Tropical Smoothie cups will blow out before they separate from the cup.

5. Tropical Smoothie cups will rupture in multiple locations if given the opportunity.

6. That as a rule, splatter can travel up to three times the height of the initial fall.

7. Blueberry juice stains everything.

8. That for some inexplicable reason, the floor slopes down underneath my refrigerator.

9. That I should clean under the refrigerator more often.

10. That the idiom, "clean enough to eat off," should be literally applied only in the cleanest applications, and never with a liquid.

11. That the floor was not as clean as I thought it was.

12. Blueberries and strawberries have a lot of seeds.

13. These seeds are a pain in the ass to pick up.

14. Blueberry juice rivals industrial adhesives in stickiness.

15. That our cat Mimi has a new reason to lick my feet.

16. That the sticky floors feeling is the worst feeling in the world.

17. That it takes ten rinse-soap-rinse iterations before this feeling goes away.

18. Quilted paper towels really do hold more liquid.

19. That wood laminate floors covered in Dawn dish detergent are slippery.

20. That the limits of my flexibility are now painfully defined.

21. That some categories of groin pulls don't really hurt until two hours after.

22. That I am definitely eating something high in lipids and mercifully solid tonight.