Wednesday, January 27, 2010

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???

4 comments:

  1. Oh, they can smell it. They just know it takes work to get rid of it. Reference Cheryl's "vent mode on" post for further confirmation!

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  2. I don't think they did, though. Gary had some damage to his ability to smell. One time he asked me to come over to church and see if I might smell gas; as soon as I opened the door at the opposite corner of church I was overwhelmed by the smell. So I'm never surprised when he can't smell something. But the kids kept wondering what it was I was talking about. If it had been avoidance of a job, they wouldn't have been so perplexed by my compulsion to get rid of the smell.

    By the way, is the line about "horseshoes, hand-grenades, and global thermonuclear war" from a movie or something?

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  3. Bethany is generally the only one around here who can smell many of the things I smell. Patrick can sometimes.

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  4. No, not really. It's Peterman-speak. We started saying, "Almost oly counts in horseshoes." When the boys got older they added "hand grenades." John one day just popped in "global thermonuclear war." It comes from the game of that name in the movie War Games. We had to rent the "tired, old film" (the boys' description!) just to explain the connection. Now it's a permanent part of our family lexicon. When (and if) I get around to painting movie quotes on the wall of our TV area, it'll be included, even though it's not technically a movie quote.

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