Over at A Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche features a very beautiful chicken soup, comfort food she cooked up after an extraordinarily rough week. Meanwhile, Frugal Scholar, feeling a little anxious after links to her site in Funny’s recently gone-viral post pulled traffic upward there, too, also covets comfort food, in her case a lush-sounding broccoli soup with an egg-parmesan swirl-in…glorioski!
Cassie and I could use a little comfort food ourselves, and as a matter of fact we have some chicken that I could cook up into a lovely soup. What a wacky day!
I’m sitting here in the counting house along about 2:30 this afternoon, trying to figure out how to finesse payment for the mountain of clothes I bought this week, when all of a sudden I smell…mothballs. Really, really strong stink of mothballs.
Mothballs? What? That would be 1,4-dichlorobenzene these days, a slightly less toxic product than the stuff that used to grace this common household insecticide, naphthalene, replaced because of its flammability. The newer ingredient is known to be carcinogenic, and god only knows what it does to 25-pound dogs.
No mothballs reside in my house, and the strong stench is fast getting stronger. I get up to see what the heck, wondering if there’s some sort of fire in the attic or something that’s releasing fumes. The closer I get to the center of the house, the stronger the stink is.
I’ve left all front, side, and back doors open because it’s a spectacular day and, after the recent cool snap, probably the last comfortable day before summer sets in. Outdoors I either can’t smell it or the odor is much fainter than inside the house, where the fumes are so strong they make my eyes water.
Leash up the dog and get outside. It occurs to me that maybe the workmen at Biker Boob’s former abode are using some sort of chemicals, so I go over and ask—nope, they’re not doing anything with any chemicals, not even Dap or paint. Walk back toward the alley behind the house, where the stench is now very powerful. I again wonder if it’s originating inside my house.
The young mom across the street is hauling soccer balls out of her SUV. She also smells the odor and wonders what it is. After some speculation, we decide to call the fire department.
Fire dudes show up in due course. They explore the alley. At first they think it’s coming from the big garbage bin between my house and Sally’s–possibly illegal dumping. Proceeding up the alley, they find oily stuff on the ground. Now they’re thinking maybe it’s dioxin. (Firemen must love these little adventures!) 🙄
By now Sally has come out, and Manny across the street from her has joined the party. Fire dudes ask Sally if she’s sprayed or used any chemicals. She says not. But the guy two houses up the street is installing a swimming pool…could there be any industrial chemicals involved in that?
The firemen proceed up the road and interrogate the suspect homeowner.
Turns out this moron has sprayed Ortho’s Groundclear all over his entire backyard and up and down the alley! He claims he’s mixed it according to the package instructions, but it seems highly unlikely that applying it according to the instructions would fill a distant neighbor’s home with choking fumes and stink up the air for four city lots in all directions. Though this stuff is supposed to be relatively benign, IMHO nothing that smells that foul can be good for you.
So I load the dog into the car and drive down to M’hijito’s house. Takes an hour for the nasty aftertaste to clear out of the throat and nose. Ugh!
We leave the dog in his house and make a Costco run. Now that I’ve decided to go back on Atkins to pare down about 10 pounds, I need a lot of lettuce and other low-carb veggies, plus a ton of meat. And meat for Cassie the Corgi. This occupies a couple of hours. We loaf around for a while. When it becomes clear that M’hijito wishes to go hang out with his friends, Cassie and I return to the war zone. By now the fumes have died down. A steady wind is blowing away from the house and has probably dried the oily liquid this clown has dumped all over a quarter-acre and 100 feet of alleyway.
Moving on: now it’s almost 7:00 p.m. I’m hungry; Cassie has no food prepared and neither do I. The bookkeeping isn’t done, the house is an even more incredible mess than it was last weekend when I hadn’t cleaned for four weeks.
M’hijito having fed me a bottle of ginger ale by way of clearing the vile taste, I guess I’m off Atkins today. That is, I expect, a good reason to serve up either the dregs of the wine or a bottle of beer. And so, to work…
OH blegg! Glad you both got out of the neighborhood for a while, no good can come of inhaling such nauseating fumes for long. And I hope the odor didn’t cling since I presume you had to shut up the house with the travelin’ fumes inside when you left.
It had pretty well cleared out by the time we got back — the house is old & leaky. Plus apparently the odor of the stuff dies down as it dries. There was a breeze all day, at times brisk, so that may have helped to dry it. Just hope the spray didn’t carry on the wind into other people’s yards.
Sheesh! People are so stupid. I hope your neighbor never had any offspring. He sounds like a dangerously unintelligent person.
I can taste the mothball smell just thinking about it. Hideous.