I went into my stores to save a trip to the store and discovered a possible big mess about to happen. A very large plastic jug of liquid laundry soap had a small crack in the bottom seam. The soap was beginning to run off the shelf and onto other supplies. I thought I was checking the storage enough, but I did not catch this until it had caused somewhat of a mess. I am now really checking, shelf by shelf and every container. It only takes a little mishap to ruin a lot. Say your syrup bottle seeped a little, here comes the bugs!

-- Carol (glear@usa.net), August 11, 1999

Answers

Regarding the laundry soap mishap post above, I now have the cleanest laundry room floor for miles around. When I discovered the leak in the soap jug,I grabbed an empty gal milk jug to hold the laundry soap, thinking I would just go ahead and use it for laundry now. I sit it on top of my washer and when I went to do laundry today, the jug had collapsed spilling soap all over the washer, under the washer and running under the dryer! It was very hard to clean up such a concentration of soap in such a small area. All of my morning was spent cleaning up this mess, just because of one itsy, bitsy, tiny crack in a seam and the way I chose to fix it......y2k in a nutshell!!!!!!

-- Carol (glear@usa.net), August 11, 1999.

Yesterday morning I was upstairs watering my plants from a gallon jug when I noticed the jug had been leaking on the tile floor. Unfortunately, next to the jug was a cardboard carton that I was storing some of my paper products in and the bottom of the box was now wet. I had several boxes of tissues that had one damp end but was able to put them in a sunny window to dry out. The rest of the paper goods were OK due to their wrapping. I took a trip to Wal-Mart and got a 33-gal plastic container and placed the other cardboard boxes on top. I'll buy more of the plastic containers soon. Obviously my Y2K water supply will not be in the 1 gal. water jugs. Check your supplies on a regular basis.

-- Arlene (araynor@concentric.net), August 11, 1999.

Hey, two of my one-gallon jugs collapsed and leaked--the soft plastic, which I don't like but got delivered by mistake. It was a moderate mess, but I have my food and water separate.

-- Mara Wayne (MaraWayne@aol.com), August 11, 1999.