Dr. Egon Spengler is My Favorite

“I collect spores, molds and fungus.”

Love that line.

In that picture? Our sink-side compost container. It’s the holding pen for coffee grounds and onion skins and root ends of broccoli rabe and egg shells and squeezed lime rinds, cooked rice that was stuck to the bottom of the pot and didn’t make it into the bowl. That sort of thing. We also pour in water from when we’ve rinsed off salad greens or cleaned dried chicken poop off of eggs before cracking them.

It’s kind of a treasure chest.

And we usually let it sit there and…ripen…for a couple of days before dumping it in one of the compost bins outside. It helps (or so I’ve read) break things down, soften them…it gives all the happy enzymes a kind of jump start.

Anyway, it was full last night when I went to bed, so I figured I’d add it to the outside bins today. And then this morning, when I came downstairs, I noticed that a very thin white film had formed on the surface of the water and up the edges of other things….and air bubbles of various sizes had appeared just below this film, pushing up on it and forming these really cool white blobs or collections of tiny blobs.

(“Blob” used to be a mathematical term used by my Algebra II teacher in high school. It stood for a variable – like X or Y. She also used “squiggle” as a variable. I guess X and Y were too boring. And…it worked, maybe. I remember that class. Well…I remember blobs and squiggles, anyway.)

And, because I am me, I couldn’t just run the compost outside.

I had to take pictures. First just with the normal lens, and then with one of my macro lens attachments. I bumped up the contrast a bit on the images, and sharpened some of them a bit.

And lucky you, I’m sharing.

Now, before you go “eewwww” or anything…just try to look beyond the egg shells and match stick ends (yes, they’re compostable) and see the beauty in the shapes and patterns. It’s just as pretty as blossoms unfurling