Disaster Strikes

Yesterday Seville was napping and I was fertilizing my roses. I use an organic fish fertilizer, which is essentially a bottle of pureed, rotten fish-parts. The stuff is rank. My mom and I have joked many a-time about how you can still smell it on your hands 3 days after using it. You water it down to a tablespoon or so per gallon of water, and it just reeks -- and YOU reek if you touch even the watered-down version, no matter how many times you wash your hands.

So, anyway, I'm wandering around my yard fertilizing and decide to cut through my house instead of going around the side. I walk in my front door, and SWOOSH, the bottle slips out of my hands, hits the floor, goes CRACK, splits open, and dead rotten pureed fish splatters and oozes out into a big puddle all through my entryway. "CRAP!" I shouted. This is the concentrated stuff, not the watered down version that makes your hands smell for merely 3 days. I ran like the wind downstairs to fetch every towel I could find that I would mind throwing away. After wiping up as much as I could with raggy towels (while trying not to vomit from the stench), my definition of "what kind of towel I don't mind throwing away" changed, and I grabbed just about any absorbent object I could find to get this stuff OUT OF MY HOUSE! After wiping, washing, scrubbing, mopping, spraying, washing, scrub-brushing, fingernail in the crevices-ing, washing, mopping, deoderizing, etc, you could still hardly breath to save your life if standing in the entry. Even Richard Parker (my cat) stopped dead in his tracks when attempting to cross the threshold. He paced back and forth for a while before he gave up and went downstairs.

This is my ultimate fear in life: having a weird, smelly house. You ever go to someone's house and it smells funny? And of course, you never say anything. But I always think, "Man, I'd hate it if my house smelled weird." One of the main reasons I don't want a dog is that (forgive me, my dog-owning friends) dog-owning houses almost always smell like dog. Even very classy, very clean dog houses smell like dog. I know you just get used to it, but I abhor the idea or having a house that smells gross to outsiders. And here I have managed to make my house smell like dead, rotten fish. Good one, Skye.

I ended up calling an industrial-cleaning supply company and buying this crazy enzyme/deodorizer that eats any human or animal matter (vomit, poop, urine, blood, rotten flesh) and I've used it 50 million times in different concentrations on the area. After which I showered using every soap I could find, and then put every smelly lotion in my possession on my body. I still gagged when smelling my hands last night.

But I think I may have got it out of the entryway, believe it or not. At least I can't smell it now. But I'm afraid that maybe I just got used to it throughout the afternoon. So, here is my charge to all of my in-town friends:

When you come over pleeeeeease tell me if my house smells weird! It's the only way I'll ever know for sure.

Keeping Up With Skye (& Seville & Jared)

My blog has a new feature! Now you don't have to go to both my personal and family blog to see what's new. You can just look at the "Skye's Family Blog Posts" widget over there on the right. If there's one you haven't seen, you can click on it. -->

Thus I intend to stop double-posting stuff. Family stuff goes there. Personal stuff goes here. All accessible from one big happy webpage. :)

Anonymous Comments

Occasionally I get an anonymous comment to one of my blog posts. And I see them on my friends' posts too. They are almost always negative, and very often -- or am I biased? -- grammatically incorrect, conceptually unclear, and misspelled. Okay, that part might be my imposing an overly-critical eye to people who won't fess up to who they are. But, seriously, I get annoyed. In a way I totally understand people wanting to be anonymous when they are going to say something negative. But, hey, I put myself on a limb to be personal here. If I didn't ever say anything frighteningly honest it wouldn't be interesting to read. And if you aren't willing to sign your name to something you say, maybe you shouldn't say it.

The creepy part is this: there is a limited circle of people who check and comment on my blog. Every time I get a negative "anonymous" comment, I naturally assume it's from some schmoe who just happened to stumble across my post. But in all likelihood it's actually one of my friends, whom I would never suspect could be so vitriolic. So every time it happens I invariably end up thinking about each of my friends in my mind wondering, "could it be him?" That's the part that sucks. I don't like imagining my friends saying those things. And I don't feel like I can ask any of my friends this lest I offend them (I'd be less than excited if one of my friends thought I had done it) (Except maybe not James. But I don't think James would ever feel the need to hide behind an "anonymous" tag, even if he were going to say something opinionated and un-p.c. In fact, I can only imagine James using the "anonymous" tag if he were going to say something that was p.c., boring, unremarkable and totally inoffensive.)

So... I have to assume it's strangers. Strangers who never post on my blog otherwise. Strangers who.... wait! Strangers are reading my blog? Now that's creepy.

ooooh! ooooh! I just had the creepiest thought of all! Maybe it's my husband, who never comments on here. I don't even know if he reads this. hmmmmm....

How does anyone else feel about anonymous posters. Does it bug other people too? Obviously, I "allow anonymous comments," so I think there's a place for them. But... I guess it seems like sometimes people feel that common decency isn't required if no one knows who you are. This just highlights the value, to me, of real interpersonal relationships.

Jared and I were talking the other day and I lamented that I didn't live in my childhood "hometown." I never run into high-school friends and have no around who has known me longer than about a decade. He was like, "you would want that?" We then speculated on what it must be like for some people we know who are grown up and married but attending their parents' church congregation. We both agreed we would hate it and we feel sorry for them. But it also makes me wonder if there isn't something valuable about a life-long community that we're getting away from now in our post-modernist, detached, individualistic culture. People used to grow up in a town from birth to death. People knew each other and watched each other move through phases of their lives. And along with that, people had to be careful with other people. People had to be careful of what other people thought of them. People were less inclined to go offending their neighbors unless it was for a cause they believed in. People cared about honor, responsibility, community, integrity. Sure, some of that was because of others and not from within, but does that matter so much? Isn't that how we learn?

These days everyone can hide behind something -- telephones, computers, other obligations. Everyone can move around and discard people and friendships when they're used up. Even marriages get discarded more often than not now. As if hiding behind a screen-name isn't enough, we can now hide behind an "anonymous" tag. And thus with the freedom of our newfound alienation we are alienating ourselves from each other. Is the freedom and individuality worth the cost?