Not the actual arrival-- that usually goes OK. More often than not, our luggage is the last to appear, but that's a small thing, a mere annoyance.

Riding in the taxi through the familiar streets, heading for home-- that's kind of nice, really. Of course, these are Lisbon taxis we're talking about, which means we're taking our lives in our hands, but that's a familiar feeling as well. I just try not to pay too close attention to what the driver is up to, and say the occasional Hail Mary, and so far I have a 100% survival rate so far. In any case, it feels good to be back home, wherever home happens to be.

Getting to the apartment building, getting ripped off by the taxi driver, lugging our bags upstairs-- all not much fun, but nothing terribly bad. In fact, it's not until we approach our very door that we're filled with a sense of dread: What has gone wrong this time?

I always feel kind of reluctant to open the door and go inside, and have to fight the sudden urge to just hang out in the hall for a while, put it off a bit. This is because I am certain that behind that door, something is very wrong. We may not know just what it is yet, but we will, soon enough.

This is not paranoia. This is a rational response based on empirical evidence.

A couple of years ago, for example, we went back to the US to visit our families for a couple of weeks. We were living in Milan at the time, and we returned to an apartment completely devoid of electricity. It seems the jewelers (who frequently managed to short out the electricity for the whole building) had really blown a big one, big enough to blow the main circuit breaker in our apartment. So when they went down to the basement and restored the electricity to the building, it never came back on in our apartment since no one was there to throw the switch. Not a big deal, really. I knew right where the flashlight was, we flipped the breaker on, and-- hey presto-- electricity. It didn't become a big deal, really, until I checked with our antique satellite receiver to see what day it thought it was and figure out how long the electricity had been off.

Two weeks. The power had evidently been off for two weeks. Elvis and I looked at each other in dismay, only one thought on our minds: Refrigerator. Then we went into the kitchen and stared at the fridge for a while. It didn't smell out in the apartment, because no one had been there to open it up and let the smell escape. I had cleaned out the fruit and veg, of course, and the dairy products and whatever else that wouldn't survive for a couple of weeks. But there was still stuff in there-- condiments and the like-- and the freezer was full of meat.

I remember thinking about Dirk Gently, and wondering if some new type of Norse god was going to jump out as us once as soon as we opened the door.

Finally we mustered the courage to open the door and start dealing with the disaster, and it was every bit as bad as you might think. Worse, probably.

The next year we spent our summer vacation travelling around Sicily, Capri and Calabria. It was a wonderful, magical time, perfect in every way.

Or it was, until we got back home, opened the door to our apartment, and were greeted with a smell that rivalled the fridge disaster of the year before. It wasn't the fridge, though. The electricity was on (I'd arranged for a friend to drop and and check on things every few days, just to make sure), and things in the fridge were cold and didn't smell. Obviously, some small animal had died somewhere and was decomposing none too gently. That was my initial thought, anyway.

It took us a while, but eventually we found the source of the odor. I think I've mentioned before how hot it gets in Milan, and I'm sure I've whined about how hot, specifically, that apartment got. I'm absolutely certain I've bitched about the air conditioner, or lack thereof, in that apartment many, many times. What happened is that I'd inadvertently left a potato in the vegetable basket cart that I kept against the kitchen wall. The potato had fermented in the heat, and kept on fermenting until it exploded all over the wall and the floor under it. All that potato goo was rotting and the smell was unbelievably bad. All of which was strange enough, but the truly weird thing was that the part of the potato skin facing out was perfectly intact, which is why we didn't figure it out immediately. We looked at the baskets, mentally said 'potato', and kept on looking for the smell.

At least we didn't have jetlag when we were cleaning up that particular mess.

So, yeah, I had a brief sense of foreboding as I turned the key in the lock on our return from Greece.

But then I thought "Hey, what could possibly be wrong?" Lady Jane had been coming in daily to feed Calliope and do whatever else needed to be done. I had thown out the lone potato in the vegetable baskets before we left. (Same baskets, in case you're interested.) I had neglected to clean out the crisper drawer before we left, but I had texted Lady Jane from the airport that there were cukes in there, and would she please take it home and use it. I had meant to use them the day before we left, but never got around to it.

So my mental answer to my mental question "What could possibly be wrong?" was "Plumbing." It seemed like a safe bet, really, but as it turned out, I was off base on that one.

Our apartment smelled. It smelled bad, in fact, and I knew just what it was. Turns out Lady Jane hadn't removed the cucumbers after all. They had gone all moldy, predictably, and taken the oranges, apples and lime that I had forgotten about down with them. So I cleaned out the fridge, opened all sorts of doors and windows, and ran through the apartment with a can of air freshener. End of story, except . . .

The next day the fridge still smelt bad. The smell had permeated any type of cardboard container, and there was some cheese that had gone bad as well. So I threw out more stuff, anything that had been opened, and a couple of eggs, and anything that looked a bit iffy. I was out of baking soda, and we had hardly any food in the house, so I planned to go to the store and get some, plus some fridge deodorant if I could find any, before I started in on the towering mountains of laundry-- which is another thing I hate about coming home, but there's no help for that one, is there?

I was starving, though, so I ate a yogurt that had escaped the giant purge because it was only five days out of date and what is yogurt, after all, but milk that's been infested with bacteria? Good bacteria, mind you, and good for you.

Unless, that is, it gives you food poisoning.

On the bright side, I did manage to get to the small but nearby grocery before I started throwing up and being miserably sick in general. If I hadn't had all that laundry to do, I would have gone to Jumbo and probably embarrassed myself in the bacalau department, or possibly in the back of the taxi on the way home.

The laundry itself stayed in towering mounds, until I started feeling well enough to do something about it.

I did a lot more purging of the fridge, especially once I discovered that the smell had permeated into an unopened packet of cheese. Not only that, but my pickles went bad, even though they were in a glass jar.

How do pickles go bad?

The fridge still sort of smells, and I've got great big dishes of baking soda on every shelf.

I'm on my last load of laundry, though, and I'm keeping my food down, so it's all good.

I will say one thing: there are MUCH better ways of avoiding doing the laundry.

I talked to Lady Jane, who said "I looked for those cakes, but I couldn't find them."

"Cakes?"

"Yes, those cakes you texted me about from the airport."

"Um, not cakes, CUKES."

"Cukes? What are cukes?"

"Cucumbers?"

"And you call them cukes?"

"Ye-es. Don't you?"

"No. Never heard of it."

"A-ha. But I wrote cukes, didn't I?"

"Yes, but I figured it was a typo."

"On a phone?"

"Well, it was six am when you sent it. . . . You know, I saw those cucumbers, but I figured that if you wanted to throw them away, you would have."

.

So, that's one mystery solved. I asked Miss Kitty, and she's never heard cucumbers called cukes before, either, so there's another instance of how the American language differs from the English language.

Who knew?