Not a Nice Surprise

I have to go back to work tomorrow.  Surprisingly, I am looking forward to it!  So, yesterday, I decided to go and work on my classroom for awhile.  We teachers have to pack everything up for the summer so that the custodians can uberclean our classrooms.  It takes me hours to putter around, getting everything "just so" in my room after unpacking all of my teacher treasures.

Just as I was getting ready to leave, I decided to plug in my refrigerator so that it would be ready to keep my drinks and snacks nice and cool for me to enjoy.  I opened up the door to the fridge to see if there was anything that needed wiped out after sitting unplugged all summer.  Of course, OCD person that I am, I had wiped it out before I left for the summer, but things do have a way of growing anyhow!  Well, something had gone awry inside of my fridge since the end of May when I had last perused its inner contents.  It was filled with mold--disgusting, stinky, possibly toxic mold!  How could this have happened?  I was so careful to take everything out of the refrigerator and wipe it down with Lysol disinfecting wipes.  What had I missed?  A quick examination of the mold trail led to the culprit.  Ice cream.  Left in the freezer all summer long.  This was not my ice cream, mind you.  It belonged to two of the girls in Advanced American Studies who had asked me to keep it safe for them until the end of the school day and then had forgotten to retrieve it.  It had been there, in the freezer, waiting for them to remember it, since April.  Obviously, I too had forgotten its existence or I most certainly would have eaten it.  It was Ben and Jerry's, after all! 

Now, no one in their right mind would eat that ice cream.  Unlike the Burger King sandwich from my college days which had sat on a shelf in a boy's dorm room for a year unscathed by mold, Ben and Jerry's had created a lot of mold.

After I left my classroom in dismay, I felt my throat getting sore and a headache coming on.  What if I had breathed in some awful toxins that would soon have me starring on an episode of Mystery Diagnosis?  I envisioned myself lying in the hospital, in an isolation room, with loved ones only able to visit me after they had donned a mask and gloves.  If I do become incredibly ill at some time in the future, will you all please remember this incident and tell the doctors that I am most certainly dying due to breathing in toxic ice cream spores?

So, today, I return to my classroom, armed with all sorts of germ, mold and bacteria murdering substances.  I am not going to wear a mask.  Instead, I will quickly open the door to the fridge and start spraying the unwelcome inhabitants of my refrigerator with the lemon scented Lysol cleaner that I purchased last night.  After it has committed germ genocide, I will use paper towels to wipe them away and I will throw them away in a hallway trashcan so that I don't ever have to look at their disgustingness again.  They weren't even a pretty color.