Stinky Kitchen

When I arrived home from Fort Wayne on Friday night, the kitchen stunk. Nobody else smelled it. I looked for dead mice. I took out the trash and washed the garbage can. I wiped the counters, expecting to find a sticky & stinky spill. Nope. Still smelled it.

When I arrived home from Minnesota on Monday night, the kitchen still stunk. Still, nobody else smelled it. I scrubbed the garbage can that holds the recyclables. We looked through all the potatoes, expecting to find a rotten one, but they were nice, unstinky, unslimy potatoes. I took the kitchen towels and washcloths to the laundry room in case there had been a milk spill that had been wiped up with an inappropriate cloth. And the kitchen still stunk.

But now I've found it! I tried scrubbing the kitchen sink. While at it, I used cleanser on the screen-like drain-traps and scrubbed them with a brush. Black gunk spritzed from the screen all over my clean sink. After I rinsed all that stuff down the drain and scrubbed the drain-hole too, the smell began to disappear.

So now I'm wondering what it is that I do in the kitchen, different from what Gary and Maggie were doing, that prevents food and gunk from sitting and rotting in the tiny holes of the drain-trap. Is it the heat of the water I use? Is it my anal desire to dump the gunk from the trap multiple times each day? Is it how long dirty dishwater sits before being thrown out? And the other thing is -- why couldn't anybody else smell it???