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.