Yesterday I encountered another bomb. Unlike the previous one this one was probably not intentional, and also not a bomb – at least not in the traditional sense. In short, someone in our office building had found two plastic bottles full of rotten apple juice and decided to put them into the hallway. I noticed them when I went downstairs to get the mail. When opening the mailbox (at which I didn't succeed because I'd grabbed the wrong key) I heard a loud bang. After jumping up into the air, grabbing my chest and generally feeling a heart attack coming I figured someone probably dropped something (though by the sound of it it must have been a bathtub or something equivalent) and went back up the stairs. There I found everyone staring at the remains of the apple juice bottles. With my incredibly quick wit I concluded that it must have been one of them, and not the bathtub, that made the noise.

Now, I don't know about your background but mine allowed me to instantly figure out the reason for such uncharacteristic behaviour of the apple juice. Here comes the explanation in the form of a flashback story:

For the first 14 years of my life I lived with my parents and grandparents. There were many apple trees in the garden and every autumn we produced more apple juice than any one family could drink. So part of it went into wine-making. I have no idea what wine made of apples tastes like but it couldn't have been very good. Alas, this is the trouble when living in a country where it's too cold to harvest grapes, you have to make do with what you have. So that's why my family made wine out of apples. Every autumn there was a big bottle, and by big I mean about 30 litres, in the corner of the room.

I don't know what went into it apart from the apple juice, apparently my parents didn't think a 10-year-old girl should know the specifics of wine-making. But I do know that a short time after bottling it started emitting gas in the form of bubbles. There was some glass contraption attached to the neck of the bottle to allow the gases to escape without ruining the wine.

So that was probably the reason for the exploding bottles. It was apparent the owners of those two bottles had never witnessed such winemaking. Because it isn't difficult to see that if you keep apple juice (and I mean fresh home-made apple juice, not the pasteurised stuff you get from shops) in a bottle in your room, it starts to ferment and emit the aforementioned gases. The ordinary plastic bottles are very secure when it comes to releasing some pressure and therefore it took some time (and a lot of pressure) to finally break through the bottle. It's cap flew about 30 metres and the bang, as mentioned before, was impressive!

The fact that the cap might've actually hit me if I'd gone downstairs a minute after or before the time I actually did, didn't occur to me until much later. So that's the moral of the story: get the mail first thing in the morning, before your co-workers have had time to clean out their desks and place their explosive apple juices in the hallway!

*****

I had my first truly free evening in a long time yesterday. I finished the work I was supposed to do during the previous weekend and had absolutely nothing to do. And I did absolutely nothing. Do you have any idea how enjoyable that is? I know I'd get bored with it eventually but for now I could do with some more of those free hours.

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