That Smell

It's Monday, garbage day, thank God. Usually that isn't such a big deal, but three days ago I started to gag and die notice an odd smell every time I went to the fridge (which is often) and ended up spending a better part of the morning hosing down cleaning and disinfecting it. Even though this effort left me with a large sense of pride and personal satisfaction, as well as leaving Pearl the Pig with a full belly, the smell remained. My mind went immediately to the mice and snakes that the cat has brought in the house throughout the summer as offerings, and could we possibly have dead vermin under one of the appliances. I decided I needed some time to work out a plan, and that I would sit awhile with a hot cup of coffee while looking at Pinterest for a few hours minutes. When I reached for the powdered creamer the dish felt a little light so I went to the back corner cupboard to get the giant Costco container to refill it and it was then... that I smelled... The foulest stench... To have ever been stenched by any living thing on the face of this earth. Potatoes, rotting potatoes, they were the cause of the smell that had then been released by the opening of the cupboard door, the smell that could have very well caused bodily and spiritual harm, rotting, molding, liquefied, potatoes that had spilled out of the bag and run all o v e r the cupboard. I looked over at Wyatt who had fallen to the floor, writhing and covering his face and burning eyes with a towel and very calmly told him to put a few things that mattered to him in a sack and go stand in the driveway while I poured the gas and lit the match to burn the place to the ground. Then I had to stop and mentally go over the insurance value of the barn house and decided that wasn't a viable option. I briefly considered moving, but decided that I would have to clean the cupboard to sell the place anyway, and then clean everything else and pack boxes, and then move all of our shit in and out of cars and trucks and then unpack somewhere else, and then, the probabilities of something like this happening again, e.g the hard boiled egg in Wyatt's dresser incident of '07, were high. That left me with only one option, clean the corner cupboard of the liquefied potato waste.

The rest of the story is really too horrible to repeat, and I would for sure have to put an NC 17 rating on this post due to language, so let me just wrap it up by saying it will be a while before we consume anything potato based in this house again and an even longer time before purchasing and storing excessive amounts of potatoes.

So now you are probably wondering why the excitement of garbage day, when we obviously don't have the stench in the house anymore. Right, we don't, but, we were faced with a new problem yesterday when Wyatt went in to the utility room to start a load of wash. He came running out into the living room with the same towel over the face routine, and I looked at him and shook my head and told him he was definitely over playing whatever it was that was causing this display of over reaction. He said we had another smell so horrible he couldn't even breathe due to his melting nose hairs and the burning in his lungs. I almost threw a shoe at him, but thought better (CPS, jail time and court fees) of it and decided to go have a look. Let me just tell you, whatever the smell in the cupboard, it was a day at Disneyland compared to the vile smell in the utility room. With bleeding eyeballs, and failing lungs we set to work of finding the source. We started going through every single thing in that room, one at a time, item by item, taking things out arm full by arm full. At one point, I emptied a little trash can into a bigger trash can and sent Wyatt out to empty it, and that's when it happened. Remember when you used to watch cartoons and an anvil would fall out a ten story window onto someones head and the scream that would follow?

Yeah. That was Wyatt. So. I guess I may have tossed a salmon skin from dinner two nights before straight into the trash without wrapping it or putting it in a sealed bag, and I guess I may have put it in the outside garbage so it wouldn't stink up the inside garbage. That's what the smell was, the rotten potato met the stinking salmon and what followed was a heinous stew of decomposing, 100+ degree swill that was wafting in through the open windows of the utility room.

We sealed the garbage can and moved it into the yard far away from the house and may God help the garbage man when he picks it up in the morning.

That's why I'm glad it's Monday. How was your weekend?