20 Dec 2005
The Professor and the Cadaver: A Laundry List.
Mrs. Floon used to housesit for a very strange professor and her much-older-than-her husband. (She was 50; he was 85 or so — and the rest of the department referred to him as “The Cadaver.”) Besides the gap in their ages, there was apparently a large gap in their brains as well, for they were hoarders.
And one day we decided to count things.
I’m not sure if they were preparing for nuclear war, or a really heavy snowstorm, or if they hit upon a really great sale one day. But there were too many of this many items to ignore that the professor and her Cadaver were nuts.
12 wooden spoons
9 packages of rice cakes
4 4-pound boxes of dry milk
23 cans frozen orange juice
69 used baggies
39 plastic lids for freezer containers [no extra freezer containers found]
12 large plastic clothes protectors (the hangup kind for the closet)
10 new, unopened packages of pillowcases
14 new, unopened packages of flat sheets
2 new, unopened packages of sheet sets [lame, sorry–included for sheet completion factor]
35 lights in the house
86 lightswitches (for the 35 lights)
69 working lightswitches (for the 35 lights)
17 unworking lightswitches (for the 35 lights)
15 dimmer switches (for the 35 lights)
21 rolls of paper towels
25 boxes of Kleenex
443 rolls of toilet paper
My favorite, even more than the 443 rolls of toilet paper: the 69 used baggies.
December 20th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
whatever their story is they certainly sound like competent ravers.
December 20th, 2005 at 1:24 pm
What I’d like to know is where on earth did they store all of this crap? I can’t even find a home in our garage for the extra-large cases of soda from Costco.
443 rolls of toilet paper… wow. And to think that my husband teases me when I buy the family-size 12-roll pack. (It was on sale! Honest!)
December 20th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
If these people are who I think they are, I saw the inside of that house, and……whoa. But the backyard? Pristine enough to be a Merchant-Ivory location. (If they’re not who I think they are, please forgive.)
December 20th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
This isn’t the couple with the house that is beyond compare (but why have I never described it before?), although the male half of that pair could also be described as cadaverous.
No, this is a MUCH older man. The story about them is that once they had a party in the 70s and the usual suspects showed up expecting the usual beverages and were dismayed to find the chairs in a circle and the Cadaver serving milk and cookies.