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First I will tell you about my room. It was 5x4m, with a table, a chair, a bookcase, a refrigerator, an open space in the wall for my clothes, a couch you could change into a bed, a fireplace that had been closed by plywood, and of course stuff for my daughter (a fold up baby bed and toys, etc..).
The stains were all over the wall with the bookcase, the wall with the table, the middle and right window and all over the carpet and my things in that area. As you can see, there is nothing suspicious in my room that can explain the mystery mess. I can hear you think, "the refrigerator"! No, it was closed when I came to see the spectacle.
If you read carefully, I had already ruled out any animal involvement. Some of you still insisted that it was caused by a feline
Carol guessed:
Was there an animal, like a dog in this house? Someone clipped its nails too short and it got in your room and bled everywhere. This happened to me once, only it was my dog, and my daughter was the culprit. D. Max, author of the first Mystery Mess,
came very close with his guess.
I'm going to go with my first instinct here and guess that the mess is some kind of tomato
product splatter. Does your daughter like to finger-paint with ketchup? Have you ever tried
stomping on those little ketchup packets you get at fast-food restaurants? Big mess. Or, how
about giving a good squeeze to a juicebox full of tomato juice? Did you know that if you leave
tomato juice for long enough, it will start to ferment. Those little yeast organisms turn those
simple carbohydrates into water, alcohol and carbon dioxide. The
pressure slowly builds up, and then KABLOOEY! Heinz instant bloodbath.
Back to the mess:
After becoming of the initial shock of the actual sight, and of course thinking "how am I ever going to clean this up?" and "how can I explain this to my landlord?" I wanted to know what it was. Together with my boyfriend, I looked at the stains very closely (a little frightened of course, because it did look A LOT like blood) but we couldn't figure it out. Being the bravest and the most curious person of the two of us (after all I am a woman) I decided to smell it. It smelled sour. Taken by curiousity, I took the courage (I wanted to KNOW and NOW!) to taste a stain. And then I knew...
IT WAS RED CURRANT JUICE!
What had happened? I had a few sore spots in my mouth and somebody told me I had to rinse my mouth daily with red currant juice. And it helped very well. But, because I wanted to be smart and healthy, I bought a small bottle of juice from the health-shop (very expensive of course). Because the fewer "chemicals" they put in it, the more expensive it gets. I never quite understood that. After rinsing in the morning I had put the bottle on the table near the door. Being on a very hot day in a very hot room and having no preservative stuff in it, the bottle must have been fermenting and then exploded. We found the bottle under the table and the screwcap two days later in the corner of the room near the left window. From the explosion it had just gotten a little hole in it..... Unbelievable how such a little bottle with such a little hole in the screwcap can make such a mess and give us so much to wonder about!
And that is the end of the story of my mystery mess.
Ed. Note: Get rid of berry juice stains from clothing by rinsing the stain as soon as possible with hot water.
Let us know what you think!
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own Mystery Mess.