Oh.My.Gosh.

That was my Facebook status today because at the time, I had no other words for the following story, which is indeed true, shocking as it is. Gross as it is. Whatever works. Brace yourself--here it goes...

Jared's parents have been storing their food storage in our garage since well before we moved in. They didn't have anywhere else to put it, so it has been sitting there since 2008. Jared and I decided today to clean that part of the garage, and we know canned food like that (we are talking oats, rice, wheat) can lose its nutritional value in the heat. Thus we decided to move 48 boxes (6 cans in each box) into the boys' room and store them under their beds in lieu of a box spring.

We had about 30 boxes moved in and in place when I felt some granules moving about in one of the boxes. I slit it open, thinking one of the cans had been opened and would be no good. I found the bottom of the box lined with dark brown stuff that looked like dirt. After asking Jared, he confirmed it was rust. We noticed on the sides of the cans, there were rust spots, and we thought, yikes, they are starting to rust. I took one can all the way out to assess the damage when I realized it was really, really light-nothing was in it. I flipped it over, and the can had no bottom-it was rusted through all the way. We were shocked, thinking, what in the world got through the rust and ate all those oats? We thought we had rats or something like that.

After further investigation, and much to my gross dismay, we finally realized the truth: the oats had somehow molded to the point of liquefying and then turning into a gas. Nothing ate those oats...they literally molded into noxious fumes. We opened several other boxes to find the same thing. Some of the cans weren't showing signs of rust, but there was some puckering in the metal. I took a knife and lightly pressed the tip onto that spot of metal. The knife sank into it like butter and rust colored slime came oozing out-I kid you not.

All in all, there were 31 boxes of oats in that garage, 6 cans each for a grand total of 186 cans of oat flavored, slimy fumes.

**Update-Jared just told me there were actually 34 boxes for a total of 204 cans of gelatinous oats.

Definitely not how I prefer my oatmeal.

So we moved all said boxes back out of the boys' room, fumigated fabreeze style, and ended the day thoroughly grossed out...and very educated on what happens when certain food storage items are left in a garage in Arizona.

That was our disgusting story of the day.