17 Pounds

I am indebted to one of my two lovely daughters-in-law for the idea for the following story.

This past weekend we were five adults, one child and one baby.

When I got home from work, I found that someone had shopped for the weekend meals and I discovered grapes (red and green), cherries strawberries and blueberries lurking on the counters. They had come from a store that I generally disdain, mainly because of this very issue - the size of the units they are sold in. I did a quick calculation, adding up all the various items and discovered to my horror that we had a full 17 pounds of assorted fruits and berries that had to be eaten in a few days because there wasn't enough room in the refrigerator to contain all that bulk.

Whipping out my trusty calculator, I determined that every man woman and child would have to consume 2.429 pounds each in order to prevent any spoilage. It seems to me that a normal person doesn't eat much more than about 1 lb of food at a meal. So the entire inventory of fruit and berries would pretty much take up all the eating power among us and there wouldn't be room for eating anything else if we were to consume the produce before it rotted.

When I pointed this out to the chief multi-tasking householder here, aside from a pained look, I got an excuse about the red and green grapes being a mistake because she had asked someone to buy green grapes and red cherries and this got misinterpreted to green and red grapes and cherries.

OK, so 13 lbs.

What I hadn't seen at first were the THREE melons (they come in a net bag) each one weighing at least 4 lbs each. When were we going to eat all this?

As of now (Tuesday evening) the cherries are gone. There are more than 4 lbs of mixed grapes left acting as a force to keep the refrigerator door from closing properly. There are also about a pint of blueberries left (they don't take up too much room in the fridge). I noticed that about a pint of strawberries had become moldy yesterday and presumably were disposed of in a discreet manner, and one melon was pressed upon one of my hapless children who happened to visit at the height of the food disposal crisis.

What of the other melons you may ask? One of them is disintegrating on a kitchen counter, the other one rolling around in the fridge door already beginning to develop soft spots.

We are planning to have even more people for this weekend. I hope our multi-tasker didn't ask the produce truck to stop in our driveway before going on to Costco.