Welcome to the House of Nast

Nast was our way of saying "nasty" or "gross" in college. Just in case some of you couldn't make that mental leap on your own. And if that isn't enough to keep you from reading on, well, that's your own darn fault.


(Just a little photo to distract from the nast to follow.)

So we have kind of a long-running joke in our house in which anytime Matt asks what's for dinner or if I'll make a snack, and I ask him what he wants, he answers, "A pork chop!" Now pork chops aren't actually difficult to prepare, and we usually have some in the freezer, but I am not a fan of microwave defrosting (for no explicable reason) so I don't find pork chops to be a spur of the moment food. Anyway, I decided yesterday that I'd actually humor Matt and make pork chops for dinner. I went down to our freezer in the basement and two things happened when I opened it:

1) I reached for a pork chop and thought, "Huh, it shouldn't be soft. . . "

2) I was simultaneously nearly knocked over by the smell of rancid meat that was coming from our freezer which had apparently stopped freezing. Eeeewwww!

I regained enough sense to close the door but that smell followed me all the way upstairs and seemed to linger in the shirt I was wearing. I say this with no sarcasm or disrespect intended: Smelling the smell from that freezer gave me a teeny tiny insight into what life in New Orleans (and other devastated areas) must have been like after the hurricane last year. I cannot fathom being surrounded by a smell worse than the one I experienced last night.

Needless to say, we did not have pork chops for dinner. And we had to throw out probably $100 worth of spoiled food (that could have been much worse). Matt cleaned most of it out, as I was still recovering from unknowingly sticking my face into that nonsense. (As I am typing this, I swear the smell is still lingering in my nostrils.)

That was only nast thing number one.

Number two came during dinner. I was telling Matt that Harper ate a decent-sized, relatively healthy lunch: most of a banana, some applesauce, a cheese stick, raisins, and some Quaker Oatmeal cereal. He looked at me like I was crazy and swore off changing any more diapers that evening. Just as I was saying it wouldn't be that bad, I become acutely aware of how vigorously Rebound was licking Harper's chair. He often hovers when she eats and laps up stray crumbs, so I wasn't concerned about this at first. Then I realized he was really going after something and I wondered what it was. I looked down and saw a dark spot at least five inches in diameter on the leg of Harper's pants. There had, in fact, been a diaper explosion of epic proportions.

It was so nast that, despite my best efforts to avoid making things worse, it got smeared down her entire leg. Matt gave Harper a bath while I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to save the pants, I'll spare you those details.

The freezer, sadly, has reached the end of its working days. But the pants are stain-free (thank you, Baby All) and the basement now smells more like Pine-Sol than rancid meat. Things are looking up.