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ancona

Praying Mantis
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For dinner.

That was the note on the table when I got home last evening. The wife went to some womens meeting so the kid and I had to go it alone for supper. 'OK, I said, I can handle that. The kid opted for tater tots and a Michelina's frozen whojmawatzit, but I couldn't stomach that so I waited for her to finish cooking it up and took my turn. I went to the 'fridge and stood there with both doors agape looking for some nutrition. Now let me explain, since we bought this fancy schmantzy new French door refrigerator, all it seems to have accomplished was to make more room for leftovers we aren't going to eat, because although the damn thing was full, I just couldn't seem to find anything that struck me as delicious.

After a few minutes of rooting around, I came across a Tupperware container that i vaguely remembered from the recent past. I popped it open and revealed the contents. MMMM! Sloppy Joes! What a score! Now, armed with my Sloppy Joe mix and two hamburger buns, I loaded a bowl with the mix and popped it in to the microwave for three minutes. It came out all bubbly and hot, and I spooned it generously over the two buns and made my way to my trusty Barcolounger to eat.

My first mistake here was not checking the date on the container, as I usually do when the wife is there to scold me to do so, and my second mistake was eating the fucking sandwich. Sure, they were five kinds of tasty, and they were hot and satisfying, but they were also loaded up with some kind of insidious bacteria that had been festering for what turns out to be five weeks in the cool darkness of my high tech refrigerator, just waiting for some dumbass to give them a nice warm new home in their intestinal tract.

Now I'm no authority on bacteria and I am most certainly not a doctor, but I am now an expert on gestation period and multiplication rate for whatever it was that I ate, and let me tell you right here and now, it’s fucking fast. By the time I went to bed my guts were rumbling a little bit, but nothing too uncomfortable. By around 1 a.m., I woke up with a cramp that felt more like a shotgun wound, and I launched out of bed, making my way to the ‘necessary room’.

You can guess the rest.

Well, 16 immodium later, my guts are somewhat calmed down, at least to the point where I’m not afraid I’m going to shit may pants anyway, but I am nauseous as hell and feel like I’ve been beaten with a sock full of marbles. I was completely amazed that the human body can continue to puke for hours after the last little bit of bile has spewed out of your mouth. I felt like I did six leventy thousand crunches.

The moral of this story boys and girls is to CHECK THE FUCKING DATES!

One would think that Mother Bear would have some sympathy right? WRONG! Mother Bear laughed her ever ‘lovin ass off when I told her what I had to eat, scolding me with, “What did I tell you….What did I say”?, “I told you to check the damn date dum-dum, and what did you do”? “You ate five week old poison and now you’re shitting yourself…..that’s what”. “Oh, and by the way………you can sleep on the pull-out in the living room as well…….nite-nite honey……love you…..[bedroom door closes]”

Flash forward to this morning. I wake up and stagger in to the kitchen where I decide to have a glass of water and oxygen for breakfast. It feels like I’ve been through a prize fight, only all the punches were gut shots, and the object of the fight was for my opponent to pull my digestive tract inside out.

I think I lost that fight.
 
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It's a constant battle for me to be cleaning out the refridgerator of old (and likely spoiled) left overs. As a general rule, if it's over a week old in the fridge (not freezer), it gets pitched. When in doubt, throw it out.
 
Some things can be ate- past the date- tho nothing in a can that I can think of
 
:rotflmbo: ancona, I am no less sympathetic to your unlucky ordeal, but the way you describe that... :rotflmbo:
 
ancona, do be careful if you ever go to any of the below, I have as bad (or worse) from casual eating. But, I DO feel your pain, as I have been there too!

-- Peru (various times)
-- Egypt (oh, that was NOT pretty!!!)
-- Mexico (just because it's our neighbor, well...)

***

PMBug! Maybe we need a "smiley" for being nauseous or feeling like we are full of...
 
Back when I had a wife, we kind of solved that one by simply freezing all leftovers, period. This is partly because if I ate it last night, it's the last thing I'm going to want tonight - I'm into variety and try to hit what my body is wanting (kind of like ancona did).

So, even on reduced power (solar) I bought a top loader chest freezer that holds a lot, and lives in an unheated/shaded outbuilding. More hassle to go get goodies, but never get sick either. Worth it.

Now that I'm single, it's even harder to cook for one than two - I cook less, eat out more, and give the leftovers to the cats. They'll eat anything it seems if it either has ketchup (or spaghetti sauce) or salad dressing on it. The first time I saw a cat eat a salad...pretty surprising, but it got gone.
 
Bearing's Stomach Flu Adventures: Al-Minya Edition

ancona's adventure with bad microbes kicked off a memory I thought I would share re getting sick on bad food.

Many years ago (when I was a single pup of 28), I was traveling with my cousin in Europe and the Middle East. We split up in Cairo, he wanted to go to Greece to connect up with a girl he met on our trip. I took a train to Al-Minya (south of Cairo on the Nile, maybe three hours by train), which had some minor ruins but more importantly looked like a good place to chill...

That first evening there, I went out for a beer and dinner. While working my way through Beer No. 1, I started talking with a guy who looked very European, we spoke in French. Turned out he was Syrian (!), but with red hair. He was also a Christian monk of some sort.

Well, I decided to have dinner (alone) in the same place, and ordered up roast chicken. It was good! I had a couple of more beers, and went back to my hotel to go to bed. Less than an hour I woke up and made a dash to the bathroom to puke my brains out (yes, that's where my brain went). Dry heaves on and off for a few hours. And the diarrhea, well let's not spend any time on that topic, other than to say it went on and on, even to the next day.

Well, that next day I was to take the train back to Cairo to resume my trip (retreat to Paris!). I had a terrible headache and non-stop diarrhea. So, I wolfed down 3 codeines and waited in the November heat for the train. It came on time, and I vaguely remember the trip back to Cairo. A few days later, I was back in a (relative) paragon of civilization: Paris! It took a few more days to clear my system of the bugs though...

Moral of the Story: Watch what you eat when traveling! But, the place in Al-Minya where I ate, was the biggest and cleanest-looking place in the center of town. So you never know...

Moral Number Two: YES, when traveling overseas, TAKE THE WHOLE D**N PHARMACY WITH YOU!!!
 
Note, a lot of food poisoning is due to things no longer alive, but toxins they produced while they were. So it's not always bacterial, directly.

If you're taking any significant pharma with you on a trip - remember the DHS - you'd better have recent dated copies of the prescriptions - with you, or they'll just hand you over to the local gendarmes on a drug charge. In fact, they do that a lot more often than actually catch a terrorist or whack job.
 
Very true, DCFusor. Take your prescriptions with you! At any of the airports, they can ALWAYS say: "Papers, please"... And you want those prescription papers too.

***

And, now that you raised that, DCF, do check the laws of countries you go to. IIRC, Greece does not let you bring in codeine, PERIOD! It's completely illegal!
 
Yeah, very true - Aspirin is ILLEGAL in Ireland, but aspirin is legal - the muppets have not only banned one of the most benign drugs, but they also banned it by capital "A" (which as far as I understand, is a brand, not substance name) :)

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
 
Penn, many things in cans can be eaten past expiry date, that date is there for manufacturer liability and grocery store convenience. We frequently eat out of date canned stuff as part of food rotation.
Also, in Texas there are no laws concerning meat expiration dates except that it must be removed from the shelf if it smells bad or turns green. After a couple of days we grind ours into hamburger.

Ancona, I sympathize. I got gastro-enteritis about ten years ago eating at a Mexican restaurant we sold the tainted hamburger to (saw that in the paper later). I have never been so sick in my life, including when I drank heavily. Bing drove me to the doctor (I couldn't walk, just puking (nothing left to puke though) and crapping. (75 percent of the patrons at the restaurant got sick alsom wasn't just me).

Now the funny part:
Dr. Stone: you are severely dehydrated and need to drink lots of fluids.
Me: I can't, I keep throwing up.
Dr. Stone: I'm going to give you a shot in the butt for the nausea, but it's going to hurt a lot (it did).
Dr. Stone (after shot): There. That will stop the nausea. Do you have someone to drive you home? You'll be asleep in fifteen minutes. (He had seen Bing bring me in).

I agree with the double wide refrigerator thing. We have all kind of mystery things in ours. But I haven't had to buy dog food for years. We also have about 75 pounds of dog meat, currently.
 
Bearing's Stomach Flu Adventures: Lima Lights Out!

Travel to the Third World at your peril! But, the joys and learning DO outweigh the getting sick. Nonetheless, I thought I would toss another stomach flu episode (and my digestive system is fairly tough, but I go places...) for your entertainment.

Soon after our marriage, we were visiting my wife's family in Lima, Peru. This was before I got into the bearing business. One evening we were all just sitting around their house. And, just like that, the lights went out (this was very common in the mid - late 1980s when Sendero Luminoso came close to taking over Peru).

I had enough experience with sudden blackouts to know that most were not resolved very quickly, so I suggested to my "harrier-chested" in-laws to decamp to a local restaurant that I had seen a lot on a major corner just walking distance away.

So, we went to "El Paso" and ordered up "chicharron de pollo" as a snack, kind like chicken fingers with our beer... We ate up and drank up! Bad chicken! I did not know that I would soon suffer several days of Hell... Throwing up, fever, headache, the runs... For days... And I had a business meeting to attend on Day 4, at least I was through the worst part.

LATER ON, my (women) in-laws told me that was not a good restaurant...
 
According to this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin

You could have avoided your sickness (assuming it was the common botulism) by simply heating the "bad" food well above 176f before eating it. This can be hard to do in a microwave unless you have one that lets you do it at low power for longer to get everything truly heated up all through. "sensor reheat" will not accomplish this with my fancy inverter microwave, at any rate - it just stops as soon as there's any steam at all.

I also eat canned foods way past their date if they seem ok. For awhile, one general store here had some truly old stuff - thick dust on it - but also at the old prices (50c a can for campbells soups etc). It ate just fine, thanks. Till they caught on and restocked at the new prices (including putting the new prices on the old stuff).

But I'll say this - a wimpy not even boil isn't how I re-heat them. I gotta see the entire mess get to rolling boil or even stick-to-pan temperatures. My ex used to laugh at me for that, her heating only till the first bubble (usually a dissolved gas and not an indication of boiling at all), but then, she got sick sometimes, but I never did.

I think the shelf life of spam is longer than the average human lifetime, and most acidic things (tomatoes, pickles) are a close second.

I've been rotating my stock of (real, warfighter) MRE's, most nearing or past their date, and they seem just fine, actually, I've paid more for worse food lots of times in restaurants. I was surprised at the increase in quality and content over the ones I bought before the "y2k" issue. Add a little rice and one will feed a few people, soup to nuts.
 
Not really on rxs- yes be meticulous- but in my experience you can buy codeoiine over the counter elsewhere.
 
Not really on rxs- yes be meticulous- but in my experience you can buy codeoiine over the counter elsewhere.

for those of ya'll stockpiling medications, the rules vary. the government has determined that MOST antibiotics are good 18 years after their expiry date (we have stockpiled some fish Mox, my Koi get pneumonia all the time) however TETRACYCLINE turns t poison after a year and do not use it after expiry date. This is one to determinately DYODD.

For those who are curious, there are three grade of medication. Pharmaceutical, human, and veterinary. Fish Mox (in various antibiotics) is pharmaceutical grade sold labeled for Koi, terefore legal to buy over the counter. Same stuff, cheaper.

And yeah, Penn, you can buy about anything over the counter in the Philippines. Second largest marijuana exporter in the world.
 
Thats how I get my pain pills- I order out. Then I decide what I want.
 
Jay- it is a curious balance- to feel good but not be a junkie. When bush was in it was real easy to score-

Locally- the dr will send you to a pain clinic- and their job is to say no. I have 4 herniated disks-(among the T C AND L, and 2 mris to prove it. Yet- for me it is easier to order out. I will mention it is only the light stuff that you can get- medium is possible- but pricey. Tramodol seems to be the best bet- which is mild but better then nothing. I have friends here that are far worse then I am- and the pain clinics jack them around as a routine practice.

Back to Mark- Mark- I do not wish food poisoning on my worst enemy. I had it once over bad shrimp cocktail. I wanted to die. I know some will eat expired stuff- I am picky- on what it is - if I will eat- it.
 
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hey
its a great way to start a diet .......... works for me anyway

Once 'died' in the bath with both ends ejecting (-:

so now i always fit out any bathroom so that the porcelain and a washbasin can be 'used simultaneously'
 
Well there's easier way to do this (have had once a bad case of "stomach bug", as they call it here in Eire) - you just put one of your "exploding ends" on the toilet, and equip yourself with a bucket, to service the other end...

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
 
if youve got time to go hunting for buckets or bowls, it isnt the real thing Bushi, its just a mild upset, something a full english breakfast would normally fix :flushed:
 
There's a plastic-bag lined trashcan in my bathroom that has seen this service, no need to hunt around, just take whatever book I'm reading there off the top and bingo -
 
yep theres always a bucket or a bowl tharashing around in my bathroom too - I didn't need to look for it

...yeah, I've seen how "full english fry" can cure upset stomach - if you are by chance referring to "How to loose friends & alienate people" starring brilliant Simon Peg, and his "perfect hangover cure" recipe - with the following outcome ;)
 
if youve got time to go hunting for buckets or bowls, it isnt the real thing Bushi, its just a mild upset, something a full english breakfast would normally fix :flushed:

If you've had small kids, then you know the true meaning of projectile vomiting....
 
Use the microwave to heat it. it kills bacteria much better than the stove, although it doesnt taste as well.

...no it does't, in general. Microwaves do not heat up the whole mass evenly, there are hot spots and cold spots in the heated mass (that's why you have to put your meal aside after reheating - for these temp. differences to settle). There are numerous stories about "WTF, I had fruit flies in my microwave, and they have survived the cycle in, how come?!!!". So if flies can survive on numerous occasions, the bacteria would most certainly survive, too.
 
i know its a bot OT but why have some countries banned microwave cookers ?

probably for the same reason that most countries (and some of California and Oregon I believe) have banned "smart meters", two of which are on my house. Health risks. Of coursem the TPTB WANT us sick.
 
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