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Edited on Fri Dec-28-07 02:52 PM by ocelot
processing invention she had hastily assembled in a corner of the kitchen next to the litter box (which provided some of the materials for the process), and which she foolishly assumed would win her a Nobel Prize but had negligently failed to patent, had of course fallen into disrepair, causing the end-products of her unpatented anaerobic digestion process to become odoriferously aerobic and leak fetidly across her dining-room floor, staining the shag carpeting and collecting in a mephitic festering pool behind her grandmother's old sideboard, the only upside being that it was a cold winter and there were fewer than the expected number of flies collecting around the mess; and now the soul-destroying stench was threatening to ruin the lovely Christmas dinner she had prepared for her handsome but equally feckless boyfriend, Fernando -- a fine feast of turkey stuffed with stewed gizzards and Malt-O-Meal, beets and tripe with a peanut-butter remoulade, and lima bean aspic followed up with a splendid lime Jell-O and whipped elk gravy dessert; but Fernando was due to arrive within the hour -- and Ursula, having finally run out of Christmas-tree-shaped car deodorizers, which she had strung everywhere, hoping they would be mistaken for ordinary Christmas decorations (she even glued glitter on some of them), was panicking, so she resolved to clean up the mess with her new Sears Craftsman Shop-Vac; she plugged the vacuum into the closest wall outlet, but since this was the 220-volt outlet for the biomass processor (and nature abhors a vacuum anyhow), the Shop-Vac promptly exploded in a shower of sparks, plastic parts and particulate matter, a development that complicated matters considerably, since now the pool of festering biomass was covered in a layer of dust, cat hair and vacuum parts, as was the Christmas dinner, so Ursula uselessly gave up with a sigh, poured herself a big glass of Chateau Thames Embankment, lay back carefully on her ineptly-assembled IKEA sectional sofa with the wobbly legs, took up her iPod and inserted the ear buds (left bud into right ear, of course), and turned Beethoven's Ninth on as loud as she could stand it; and then finally Fernando appeared at the door carrying a Christmas bouquet of spiny buckthorn which he had mistaken for holly, and he sniffed the air and frowned and said, God, it stinks in here! to which Ursula, languidly removing her ear buds, replied, yes, I know, it's Beethoven; he sure knows how to decompose."
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