If something is given orally, there's an easy way to divide it up -
pour it into an ice cube tray and freeze. As soon as it's frozen, empty
frozen electrolyte or pedialyte cubes into a freezer storage bag and
keep in the freezer. For quicker freezing just freeze in a storage bag
as a thin layer of liquid, then just break into smaller pieces when
frozen and take out what you need.
Pedialyte does come in frozen formats (flavored popsicles I believe?) -
And the unflavored pedialyte form is (I think - don't have a bottle
here) mostly electrolytes, dextrose and water. Dextrose - a form of
sugar survives baking, boiling and cooking. Salts (electrolytes) are
stable to freezing. Must admit before I switched to Lactated Ringers
solution for my rehab activities, I used to have pedialyte in the
fridge for a few weeks and it looked OK - no floaters or cloudiness
after shaking. However the top was always closed after I opened it, I
never touched the opening with my fingers, and I kept it refrigerated,
so nothing much could get into it. However the manufacturer is probably
covering its butt to make sure that someone (whose child perhaps drinks
out of the container directly, contaminates it, doesn't seal it well,
then drinks from said contaminated product which them makes the kid
sick) doesn't sue them.
Unless you contaminate it with bacteria or funguses directly it
probably isn't as good a medium for growth as cheese or bread - both
good growers of strange looking molds after a week or two of being
forgotten in the back of a fridge. Must admit a few weeks ago to not
having noticed the mold on some bread then noticed it part way through
chewing because of the odd taste. But then I grew up in a rural area
in the UK where if there was mold on the food, you cut it off and ate
the remainder. I had a frugal mother. I'm still amazed that here at
home in the US an organism managed to inoculate a jar of mango chile
salsa that I forgot about - the lid was not on securely - back of the
fridge and way past the "best by" date. The fungus colors were amazing
and various. You'd think the chile (capsaicin I think is the hot
molecule) would be a preservative/antifungal. Guess there's some
organisms that feed on almost everything on the planet.
That reminds me of our organism Foster. He gets in the fridge
periodically (door on the first fridge did not seal properly, now we
have a new fridge with a better seal, but he still sometimes gets in
if we don't really push it shut).
He'll take anything in a plastic bag and haul it out, and try to carry
it into the bottom kitchen drawer below the knives and forks where
he and Ferris sleep at times. He has carried off half a cantaloupe
(twice), the first time it hung suspended outside their drawer for 5
minutes as we laughed at his frantic attempts to haul it in. Next,
part of a papaya, then a bagged dead bird specimen I was saving for
our natural history museum (you can guess what happened to it - I
found the torn bag and "parts" later hidden in his drawer), and a bag
of pine nuts (the noise of cascading nuts on the wood floor caught our
attention).
Recently he managed to get in and was hauling out a bag of "designer"
salad greens. Rotting expensive greens in his lair would have been the
final straw. He avoids the veggies usually - though he once hauled out
and scratched and chewed on a zucchini - tooth marks and claw marks,
but nothing ingested by the look of it. One wonders what he thinks he's
going to find. Maybe he's just got an adventurous palate? I suspect
the addiction to "crinkly" sounding bags comes from the crinkle of
the plastic bags the "ferret treats" he gets once a day come in. His
neurons are wired to assume crinkly sounds mean Bandit treats. But he's
probably also discovered that his efforts make the humans shriek --
always a source of joy and entertainment to the ferrets as they scurry
off dancing (probably laughing) after they have made something crash,
spill, or play a tune on the Thinkpad keyboard (laptops are such fun
for ferrets -- I should buy them one of their own).
Meryl
[Posted in FML 6254]
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