Hey hey hey, it’s yet another blog post coming to you from somewhere other than my apartment!  This time, I’m at my sister’s place in New Jersey, where I’m spending the night before driving up to camp with her in the morning.

Hopefully we don’t hit any deer.

Before I vacated my apartment for the last time this summer, I figured it would be a good idea to clean up my room a bit.  Everything started off fine: putting old clothes away, folding sheets and blankets that were tossed on the floor or hanging from the windows, etc, but eventually I had to address the elephant in the room:

The twelve or so mostly empty jars of tomato sauce lined up along the wall.

Twelve or so mostly empty jars of tomato sauce lined up along the wall that have been there for over a year.

In New York (and I assume most other places) citizens can’t just throw dirty containers into recycling, they need to be cleaned out first.  Now, I had been putting off cleaning these babies due to my fear of there being an awful smell.  You might be saying to yourself that with each passing day of putting it off I was making the problem worse, and you would be right in saying that.

The smell was awful.

However, it wasn’t the smell that took me by surprise.

The jars… had become pressurized.

The lid instantly shot off of the jar when I attempted to open it and, the jar, which had previously been transparent, was suddenly opaque.

There was also a ton of noxious smoke flowing from inside which, despite my best efforts, I was unable to keep from breathing some in.  Upon entering my unwilling nostrils, I began to gag and hold the jar as far away from me as possible.  Cleaning it was an absolute nightmare, an experience so heinous that I wished to never ever have to repeat it again.

Unfortunately, there were still eleven more jars to go.

I think I felt just like Guy in the comic above.

So remember guys, if you have any old nasty jars, now might be the time to bust out the sponges and soap.