We have several systems in the Flanigan house. I just wish one of them was a working system of indoor plumbing, especially in the winter. Brrr. Anyway, our leftover system is very simple. If any leftovers remain in the refrigerator for more than a couple days, I eat them. And any open jars that are put into the refrigerator should have the date they were opened written on them. As my youngest daughter looked in the refrigerator yesterday for some opened pasta sauce to add to some leftover pasta of hers that she knew I had been eyeing, we were both stumped when she encountered this jar’s lid with a curious inscription.
That’s my middle daughter’s unmistakable handwriting. So, 8/22/23 means she opened the jar in … the future this coming August. Oh, but wait a second, the date is probably written like the rest of the world writes it with the day first and month second. That means she opened it on the 8th day (that works) of the 22nd month (that doesn’t work) of 2023. My youngest daughter and I checked the official expiration date printed on the lid, smelled the sauce, checked for any blue fuzzies growing, and decided that it was safe to injest.
I asked my middle daughter when she got home from work (yes, despite the date mystery, she holds several jobs) about the date. Keep in mind that my middle daughter recently graduated from a university with two majors and two minors, and she has started graduate school in a program where she could earn a double master’s degree. She was also stumped as to the date and seemed not to care in the least, which I decided is probably normal for someone with several jobs who is also going to grad school.
I put Occam’s razor to work and determined that it is most likely that my middle daughter unknowingly astrally projected herself into the future to the 22nd of August this year where she ate some pasta, used that jar of sauce, properly marked the lid, and shoved it into our current refrigerator by somehow bending the space-time continuum. That was, in fact, pasta sauce from the future and not the pasture. I’m hoping that eating future sauce (good name for a band) may grant my youngest daughter a superpower of some sort, like the ability to keep her room clean. After one day, it doesn’t look promising.
Jim Flanigan Looks at the World 