At this point, you might or might not know that I occasionally fall victim to unfortunate situations involving baked goods. Today, I inadvertently expanded my repertoire to include unprepared produce.
Okay, to allay your suspense, this isn't really about the death of a piece of produce. There is no honeydew melon splattered on a sidewalk, no chalk outline of a pineapple. All my Trader Joe's bounty is intact, with the exception of the mango I devoured earlier, which was intact until I deliberately disemboweled it. No, this is about my bag.
I have this bag. It is a stupid little canvas bag from Wishlist in New Haven. In case you are not familiar with Wishlist, you should know that the majority of its shoppers are Uggs-and-Juicy-wearing 15-year-olds. In case you don't know me very well, I will note that I am neither Uggs-wearing nor Juicy-wearing nor 15 years old. That said, every once in a while, in a fit of dubious judgment, I used to buy something at Wishlist, including an overpriced teeshirt for my sister for her birthday. My sister is neither Juicy-wearing nor 15 years old, though she finally caved and joined the Ugg'ed masses. She claims it was in the interest of warmth.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I should not like this bag. It is from a store that causes me embarrassment when I admit to shopping there. The handles are kind of awkwardly too long, so it drags on the ground if it's not over my shoulder. It has a silver peace sign on one side and 'Wishlist' in curly script in hot pink on the other side. It is an affront to me and everything for which I stand (which is not to say that I don't stand for peace, but you get the idea).
Which is why it makes no sense that I am so attached to this bag. Except that it is the perfect size for two boxes of Kashi, six apricots, and a pound of zucchini. And it was free, which means that I can take it places that I don't want to take my bags that I really love. And it's shockingly durable, having survived a department booze cruise (after which I thought I had lost it; my coworkers can tell you how upset I was-- though mostly because it held my Mount Gay hat) and a downpour that turned it green, thanks to a file folder inside.
Which is why I was a little stunned after work, when I went to pull The Little Beige Bag That Could out of the freezer in the 9th floor pantry, where it was keeping my three bags of cranberries safe (I love cranberries even more than this stupid bag). The thing to know about this freezer is that it is essentially a microcosm of the frozen food section of Trader Joe's, so there isn't much open space.
Given this circumstance, you can understand why I put my cranberries right next to the out-of-commission ice cube maker. And you can probably also understand my surprise when I realized that the ice cube maker had begun to ingest my bag.
Seriously, no one has taken an ice cube out of that freezer in at least two years, I'm guessing. In the little ice cube tray beneath the mechanism is a lone, leftover popsicle from an event about five months ago. I was convinced that ice cube maker was just decorative. Apparently, I was mistaken. I don't know exactly how that thing works, but it had that piece of canvas in its plastic jaw, and it was not letting go.
So you might be wondering what happened to my bag and its contents. I extricated the cranberries and went to work on the bag. But once it occurred to me to close the pantry door to muffle the sound of shattering plastic and pull as hard as I could--ice cube maker be damned--I decided that 5:30 on a Monday was possibly the worst time imaginable to attempt freezer surgery (the other contender being 5:30 on a Friday). So the bag is still in the ice cube maker, and I am going to have an interesting email to write to the operations staff tomorrow morning.
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