Name That Smell!

So I was reading my BFF's blog and Beau had a mystery smell in her laundry room and it brought back some pretty painful memories of my own. So here they are:

It was a little over 7 years ago and I was just pregnant with Cyrus. Now if you have ever been pregnant you sense of smell is heightened to some level as what dogs hear at. It was early morning in the summer and I noticed a smell, it wasn't that bad and was eliminated with the lighting of a candle and opening up a window. So I carried on with my day. The smell kept getting worse as the day wore on and the heat of the day swept in.

Curtis came home for lunch that day and said "whoa, what is that smell" together we spent the next hour looking for the stench. He went back to work and I started to power clean the house determined to find the odor. By the end of the day I could barely stand to be inside with what now has become the stench of what I can only assume is a rotting carcass of some sort.

At 5pm I had all but given up and was just going to move out and find a new place to live. Curtis got home and almost passed out when he walked in the front door. I was sitting outside and figured this was no doubt some how his fault and he could deal with it. So here we are again, looking for the stench.

On a small table in the kitchen next to my tiny deepfreeze is a couple of balled up Walmart and Safeway plastic bags, the ones you use for garbage. So Curtis picks them up and further investigates. Under the wad of bags is yet another wad of bags and one of them is leaking some kind of Motor Oil.....weird right.... Yeah well we have indeed found the smell. Turns out that when you take minnows (bait) out the freezer and don't put them back in they tend to rot and turn into a oil of sorts. They had infact taken on a life of their own and were only a day a way from walking themselves to the garbage.

Well now that we had found the smell the next problem was eliminating it. So my cute little table was taken out and we spent the next 3 days with all the windows and doors open trying to rid the left over smell. There was also quite a lot of swearing done by me and a few death threats to Curtis that if he ever, ever brought bait into the house again the smell of HIS rotting carcass would be the problem.

I don't think I will ever forget that smell as long as I live.

So a couple years pass and again we play the name that smell game, Round 2....
everytime I walk into the kitchen it smells funky, around the fridge area. I open the fridge door and peek in, no smell, I close the door and smell it again. It is rank and I can't find where the smell is coming from or what would cause it. I procede to clean out the entire fridge. I take everything out and get the spraynine and give it a well overdue cleaning out. I close the door and I can still smell it.

Well it can't be coming from the fridge so I take everything out of the cupboard near the fridge, I clean out and under the microwave, still the smell eludes me. At this point I am tired and cranky and overwhelming stench is still there. I make Curtis pull out the fridge and I clean under it, put it back and I can still smell it.

I open the fridge and the smell is gone, close the fridge, smell is there....WTF. So I am now getting a bit hungry and we head out to Micky D's for dinner, come back and I open upo the fridge to grab the ketchup out of the door.... Wow found the smell.....In the door where I didn't clean was some black forrest ham from the deli that Curtis had bought who knows when and had forgotten about. So when I walked by the closed fridge I could smell it, but when I opened the door and smelled inside I couldn't. Once I got rid of the ham, I got rid of the smell.

Now you must now be thinking who are these people and why do they live like that? I have no answers for you. I am thinking the same thing. I don't claim to be a housekeeper, but my home is usually tidy. I never worry that when I sit on the sofa I will be sitting on a PB and J sandwhich as well. Yet on these rare occasions something gets by me and it is like I am living in the houses you see on talk shows, you know the ones where the womans house is so horrible you think my God how can people live like that.

Anyway, that is my horrible smell story and I feel for you Beau and anyone else who has suffered the fate of bait left out, or the hamster that escaped and you prayed that it found its way out of your house only to find out days later that in fact it was not so lucky....here's to you!

I am going to have a glass of wine now and try to once again bury those memories....