I’m taking care of a friends house while she’s deployed.  I had been over to the house right after she left and all was well.  About three weeks later I stopped by again to see how every thing was and I noticed that the power was out.  It was the dead of summer so I suppose it was more than just “noticed.”  It was more like, OMG.  IT.IS.FREAKING.HOT.IN.HERE.   So, after much searching I found both circuit breakers.  One is in the bathroom above the door (hard to find!) and the other is outside on the garage.  Flipping them got the desired result and the power (and more importantly – the AC) came humming back on.  I hadn’t thought much about it because she had been so proud of cleaning out the refrigerator (since the last deployment she hadn’t and everything went bad).  But, then I remembered.  The FREEZER!

First I drove back to my house and prepared myself with bags and gloves and then headed back to face it.  I thought about stopping at a convenience store and picking up a face mask and why I didn’t, I don’t know.  It was horrible.  It literally looked like a maggot bomb had exploded inside.  Chicken, fish, fruit, vegetables and unidentified organic matter was everywhere.  The smell was…that bad.  I actually had to unscrew and take out the panel at the back of the freezer to get all of the maggots.  It took me five hours of cleaning to get it done.  Holy God.

So, if you ever leave your house for more than two months,  don’t leave anything in the fridge/freezer.  AT ALL.  Please.

This house should be in the middle of another stressful international move.  Instead we are waiting around for the military to get its act together.  Here’s the deal….there are three actors playing a part in this, (we’re the fourth and powerless actor) my husband’s current job (in Japan), the future job (in NC) and Bupers (basically the HR department).  We have orders to go to North Carolina in November, however, the current job says that we cannot go until Bupers has someone to relieve us.  And Bupers has known about our impending move for two years.  Someone dropped the ball and we’re stuck.  The people in North Carolina say that if we don’t get there by December we can’t come at all…the current job says we’re not leaving until we have a replacement and Bupers thinks they might have someone to relieve us in February.  Oh great.  We’re doing as much as we can to try to speed up the process, but who knows.  Everything is up in the air.  Don’t you just love bureacracies?