Soy Sauce.

Since buying a home, we are trying to operate under the "Lots of Crap is Going to Go Way, Waaay Wrong" principle, or LOCIGTGWWW for short. This seems the smart way to go. The thing is, the stuff that tends to go wrong tends to be stuff no one would ever in a bazillion years have come up with as a Potential Thing to Go Way, Waay Wrong. So, really, in some wacky alternative universe, one could say that we have been enjoying Surprise after Surprise. Whee! Surprise! Whee!

Bah.

Lat Thursday night, we were rushing around our old apartment like the proverbial beheaded chickens in an attempt to get all the crap Sean left in it OUT and get it cleaned up in time to perhaps get a refund of a week's rent. (As our fellow Bostonians can likely attest, this is HUNDREDS of dollars and totally worth a good amount of effort!) When it became obvious that there was no earthly way that this would be accomplished in a single evening, Sean relented and made the decision to take part of the next day off in order to help me finish the job. We would get it all finished up in the morning, then he would head off to work for a few hours before we had to catch our flight to Maryland for my family reunion. Stellar plan! Right?

Enter our good friend the LOCIGTGWWW principle.

After a busy morning of scrubbing interspersed with many, many trips up and down approximately 34 flights of stairs to load items into our trusty VW's, Gunther and Gustav; we were finally nearing completion. Sean and I were making the second-to-last trip downstairs from our sparkling clean ex-apartment when It happened.

I was carrying a bucket, a mop, and a brand-new half-gallon container of Kikkomen Light Soy Sauce (Sean really likes his sticky rice). Somehow, negotiating the stairs must have become too much for the little bit of coordination my limbs possess. The bucket tipped and the soy sauce flew through the air; gracefully tumbling over and over until it landed, conveniently enough, on the landing.

Sean holds that it sounded sort of like this: "CRASH! CRASH! Glugglugglugglugglug"

Soy Sauce. Oh, the soy sauce. You have never seen such soy sauce. There was soy sauce on the ceiling, on the walls, on the neighbors' cooler and fishing rods. There was soy sauce on the windowsill, on the porch, on the radiator. It coursed down the stairs, puddled on the floor, ran down the walls in great brown rivulets. It was a sight to behold. I can liken it only to the bloody walls scene in The Shining. Except, you know, much more Asian in nature. Although those little girls from The Shining do sort of remind me of the little girls from Mothra.

To his credit, Sean laughed good-naturedly for a good ten minutes before we set about scrubbing the floors and walls till the paint was coming off and repositioning itself elsewhere. So then we had to clean that up, too.

For the record, he did not make it to work that day. And we did make our flight, just barely. And as for whether or not you can still smell the soy sauce? I'm not entirely sure.