Death by Mothball

Hello New Year! I'm back! I'm here. It was almost like I died I have been blog-less for so long, except not like that at all, but you know what I mean. I started the new year with work , exercise and diet. As you may know this deadly combination will suck all the joy from your life and what you are left with is sleep, work and household chores because you are too tired to even care about anything else. However, I am starting to get used to my 5 day a week work outs during my lunch hour and I am now resurfacing mentally once more.

so we didn't go to Oregon. That's it. That's all I will say about that as of now, because at this point in time the reasons are not funny enough yet to go into detail about, but with some time and space there may be some funny yet to discuss at a later date.

So, back to the important stuff. Two days ago there was a Great Smell in our hallway. When I say 'Great' I don't mean awesome, I mean large. The Great smell was difficult to diagnose. If you know me at all, you know that I have a major smell situation happening in my life. I can smell everything in intense waves and can easily tell you what the source of the smell is immediately, I am 98% accurate most times. This smell was hard for me to decipher, it smelled chemical, oily, deathly and yet, familiar- hard to put my finger on. I also cannot tolerate a bad smell, it needs to be figured out and dealt with immediately. Therefore when The Great Smell happened I was obviously irked.

Husband could also not identify The Great Smell, and being Husband with smells didn't seem to care one way or the other, which I find mind boggling! Smells OFFEND me. How could he be so blaze?! I made sure that the smell was not penetrating Babies room, or our bedroom as we slept, because this is the type of thing that will keep me up at night, literally worrying about what it could be. Will it kill us? Will it make us retarded? will the house explode? vaguely in the back of mind I recall telling signs of toxicity levels that will indicate onset sudden death, things like: blue fingernails! coughing blood! feeling dizzy or faint! I creep into babies room and made sure that he was still breathing. For the first time I was grateful that our bedroom is so drafty and thanked our crappy louver windows for letting in so much fresh outside air! Husband was clearly un-alarmed by The Great Smell lurking in the hallway and went to bed as usual.

Meanwhile I lay in bed that night wondering what it could be. I got up and creep around the house which I am prone to do at night if I hear a weird noise, and realized The Great Smell was coming from our creepy basement door-the smell seems to be hallway and basement door centric to which I deduce that obviously something has died in the basement, or the dead body I have always imagined down there has been uprooted by the recent rains and we will soon realize that we are living in a real life poltergeist house. I retreat back to the bedroom trying to formulate a plan. Husband snores idly in bed next to me and all I can think is how can he just lay there when we have a smell crisis on our hands!

Lets be clear: the source of many smells in our house come from the basement, or as I fondly refer to it "a place where child molesters might go to die". Our creepy basement smells like death on a good day. It consists of old wooden steps that go down into a dark dirt hole where we keep things we don't want but can't throw away. I am so fearful of this place, that when I have to go down there I leave the door wide open and turn all the lights on. I do a safe jog quickly up and down the steps for fear I will accidentally be trapped in this tomb if I linger too long. we actually keep the door locked with a special key that's how serious the basement is. Nanny won't even go in there at all. We had thoughtfully suggested that we keep the mop at the top of the stairs as a convenient place to be able to retrieve it. Nanny silently refused this placement by shaking her head and frowning and then in broken English explained "I no like, I put mop outside" where the mop now lives next to the house ever since.

Day 2 of The Great Smell started to make me mad. If Nanny wasn't such a Nazi about cleanliness and so sensitive herself to smell, I might not have even gone to work due to the fear of Baby being subjected to The Great Smell all day. Luckily for me the first thing Nanny did upon entering the house was squinch up her nose and announce that she would be opening all the windows immediately. I knew Baby would be safe on The Sarges watch. By the time I had gotten home from work that night the house reeked and I had had it! It was time to take back my house from the looming enemy of The Great Smell. With Baby on my hip I marched over to Husband and declared that I would be calling Landlord! "oh Jesus" Husband said rolling his eyes, "well I'm not dealing with him". He then took his dinner plate and went into the bedroom and closed the door. I yelled through the door self importantly after him: "I will be dealing with this!" Baby and I were on a mission. "for Gods sake" Husband adds through the door "Don't tell him you think something died down there, then he'll never come over". Good point. it happens to be a fact that our basement is a place where animals go to die. It may even be used in our neighborhood as a formal animal morgue for all we know. Husbands right, its not breaking news if something "died" down there, Landlord will just say in his casual Texas drawl"yeh, I guess you'll just have to wait it out".

I knew Baby and I needed to be smart about this, we couldn't just say 'anything' to get this problem solved, we had to be clever. While Baby negotiated how my chandelier earring worked by tugging harder every minute on my ear, I texted Landlord. I wrote that there was a "strange smell" in the house, that I was "concerned" about. He swiftly texted back asking "does it smell like gas?". It was obviously not gas, I'm not an idiot, but I also knew that my lackadaisical charming Landlord would call it an evening if I didn't put some merrit behind the issue, so I wrote: "I don't thiiiink so, but maybe??" . I hate to admit it, but I will use the dumb blonde approach when I need to, to get what I want from time to time. It worked because immediately Landlord responded "be right over!"

Baby and I stood watch and awaited Landlords arrival. When Landlord showed up two minutes later to survey the situation, it was clear that he could smell The Great Smell however, similar to Husband he seemed un-alarmed by this clearly hazardous situation. His first question was "where's Husband?". Translation: "you have a Husband why don't you make him go down to the basement and figure out what is causing the death scent?" again I played dumb, as if the question was merely factual and not intended to question the validity of my predicament: "he's getting ready for bed" I lied. With this Landlord made the executive decision that he would need to go into the basement to investigate further. I helped promote this idea by throwing out "maybe its something coming from the heater??" knowing this would concern a Landlord. He took the bait and asked for the basement key. I quickly busied myself with walking to and fro with baby acting as if there was important work to be done, and therefore I would not be able to perch at the top of the basement steps or worse have to go down into basement with Landlord.

After about 7 minutes, which seemed like a million years Landlord emerged "well.." He stated factually "its what I thought..." A dead body! I almost exclaimed, "there's a box of Moth balls that someone has torn open next to the water heater and the smell is coming up through the stairs". Huh? Then with his usual 'come what may' disinterest he shrugged, as if to say "someone should really clean that up". As if we had gone down there and opened the fresh box for kicks and it all just got out of hand. Then he helpfully added "you should probably crack a window in here". and that was that. problem solved. Its only a-toxic-bug -killing-banned from use- hazardous to your health- emitting unexplained from your basement poisonous gas that you have lived with for two days-nothing to worry about!

In all honesty, knowing for me is 90 percent of any solution, so I was actually mildly calmed by this information. However, doing research today at work one of the first things it says is "do not have fumes around infants- could be fatal!". While I flaffed about afterward, putting baby to bed consumed with thoughts that clearly we would have to put Baby in a special needs class when he reached school age now since all his brain cells were obviously destroyed by the killer moth balls Husband was going up and down the basement stairs cleaning and getting rid of the death balls without even being asked.

The bigger question is: how did they get down there? and who mysteriously opened this box obviously trying to kill us? it will unfortunately remain a mystery for now...