Mr. Clean, Where Are You?

I told Mike about the phrase I coined-- Meat Water--and he was laughing so hard, repeating it all day long. "That is so funny," he said. Yeah, its funnier to hear than to clean up, that's for sure.
We finally made it through the week. The first week of Hurricane Ike's aftermath. It's been a crazy week.

You have to wonder what happened to people who had weddings or funerals scheduled and couldn't move them. One of them was my best friend Jess. She had her wedding (finally) scheduled for Sunday the 14th. Too bad it ended up being the day after the Hurricane Ike tore up the town. She already had family fly in internationally and many more on the way. They had to ride out the storm with no power or water right along with the rest of us. Welcome to Texas, folks.

Jess moved the wedding to Friday, and Mike and I had the most wonderful time there. He said it was the happiest I'd been in a really long time. I agreed. It was a beautiful, intimate wedding and a breath of fresh air in my chaotic life. I finally was able to dress up for once. Unfortunately, Mike had gone to four different dry cleaners, all of whom were without power, so my dress was not so fresh that night. Oh well. I figured the alcohol would mask any scent. Ha ha. And it did.

Meat Water: A Hangover Cure Alternative
Needless to say, cleaning a defrosted refrigerator is not easy when you've been drinking the night before. I do not recommend it.

Saturday, Mike and I went back to the house to clean up the refrigerator and remove the boards from the windows of the house. Amazing thing what letting the sun in will do. It almost made the smell go away--but not really. Remember, our house is so old, that the windows are painted shut and only doors open to let air in. Come for a visit, you'll love it--I promise. (Sarcasm.)

We slapped on our bio-hazard suits, latex gloves, and face masks and got to work on the dying food in the fridge. Ok, I seriously wish we had bio-hazard suits but we did don masks and gloves. According to Mike rotting meat does not come off your hands for days. I trust he knows a thing or two about rotting meat. I let him do most of the emptying and I did the clean up. Either way it was pretty gross.

He gagged a few times on beef and pork smells, but I think the shrimp was the all-around stinky winner. For your viewing pleasure:

Bag O' Meat

"I'm going in." Please make sure you give him a hard time regarding the above photo! Come up with your own caption and leave a comment below--there is a "comments" link at the end of this post. (Ha ha.) We need a little levity around here.

Meat Water: On the floor and in the fridge. Yummy!
"Wait, is this still good?"

Guys tarping the house a few days ago. We still have no power...see the power line under the tree? So much fun around here.

By The Way
Even with our hurricane situation so sucky, I've still been thinking a lot about Childhood Cancer Awareness Month--this month, September. It's almost over and I haven't done a darned thing about it. So frustrating.

Next month, I want you all to consider this: Everytime you see a pink ribbon, every day that you hear the words "fight breast cancer," I also would like you to think about the 11 children that lost their fight with cancer that day. Yeah, eleven kids daily.

Then think about how much money didn't go towards research to cure childhood cancers.

I feel bad about it. I read something, a Forbes editorial piece, that said that the reason why the Childhood Cancer issue is underfunded and relatively unknown is because "for one thing, children with life-threatening diseases exhaust their families emotionally and often financially; even after recovery, neither the children nor their parents find it easy to advocate for themselves." It goes on to say "unlike other health care lobbies, they do not have the energy to march in the streets and call for action."

And its true. I wish I could. The author Helen Jonsen put it so perfectly "it often takes one person's passion, born of pain, to raise awareness and start a movement." I really hope I don't have to endure much more pain, real pain if you know what I mean, in order to do something about it.