The End (of the corn)

The End is the title of last night's episode of LOST. The Last Episode Ever. But I'm far too numb in that regard to ruminate on it here. I just needed to get that out of my system; this post is really about the corn.

Over a year ago we attended a birthday party for one of our little friends. We got to leave with a 50 lb. 'goody bag' of dried corn. Since then I'd kept it on the deck and used it as a texture bin for Sabine.










I left the bin on the deck for the winter, underneath something else protective, but at some point during the frigid winter the box cracked and water leaked in. I didn't know this until we went to use the corn for some project earlier this spring and saw that the bin was half full of water. I tried to salvage some of it but quickly realized most of the corn was green.

I've been doing my fair share of the yard work this year but the 50 lbs + whatever the water weighed was too much for me. Zach told me to leave the dirty job to him. He kept telling me he was going to do it, but then would forget. A couple months went by and we had a couple very hot streaks. Can you imagine what that crap would look like trapped inside a plastic bin in the hot, hot sun for weeks on end? Well, lucky for you I took a picture, so you don't have to imagine it.

Normally in a case like this I would have just kept on leaving it, but this past weekend I hosted the spring party for my moms' group. We had 14 families coming over, some of whom had never been here before. I couldn't go and let this be their first impression of my home. I would have called it my Third Annual Husband Experiment in any other circumstance, and I'm sort of sad that I didn't get to see where this would go, but at least that stank is out of my yard! Seriously, the smell was getting really bad. I couldn't open a couple windows on the back side of the house because when the wind blew the smell came right in. When I took the top off to take these photos I had to hold my breath, it was that bad. I thought it might be crawling with maggots and half expected it to take form and swallow me whole.

So Zach did fulfill his long-ago promise and he dumped it in the woods behind our neighbor's house where we always take our clean fill, though there's nothing clean about this fill. Anyway, I had had plans for that bin that it was in, but in the end there is only so much to the claim Plastic makes it possible. There was no saving that thing. After the garbage gets collected in a couple days I'm just going to toss it right in there - to hell with recycling. I don't want to be the cause of one of those recycling people to be rushed to the hospital.