Jan
12
1) Brief, mostly non-satisfying update to the Mystery Smell: we had a furnace technician come in and he acknowledged there was in fact a Bad Odor and it was probably originating from the crawlspace. (Yay for someone besides me smelling it!) (But boo for lingering corpse/WTF-reek under the house.) He suggested having someone come out and sanitize the crawlspace, which I assume involves something like the part in E.T. where they wrapped the house in plastic and a bunch of creepy government guys in biohazard suits scurried around being all conspiratorial and cover-uppy.
2) After 3 months of consistently being the slowest/weakest motherfucker in my class, if not the entire gym, I’ve become slightly obsessed with improving my CrossFit performance. I don’t expect to be slinging around the heaviest weights yet, but I hate being the straggler who gaspingly finishes when everyone else has been done for five minutes. So here’s what I did: I stopped eating a big old dinner right before my workout. Duh, right? I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier, but it turns out that having my largest meal of the day an hour before attempting to rupture my own spleen wasn’t exactly helping me be light on my feet.
So I switched to a snack beforehand and a protein shake right afterwards, and while that isn’t necessarily ideal in terms of having a normal dinner when I want (my class is at 6:30, we eat as a family around 5-5:30) I’ve already noticed an improvement in speed and recovery.
Five years of being interested in health and fitness and I think the only thing I’ve truly learned is that the most critical element of success is to be grudgingly willing to do things you don’t really want to do.
Now if I could just resolve the Crunchy Knee Thing, which has plagued me for years. It isn’t painful (I asked a doctor about it once and he said something vague about extra cartilage under the kneecap, nothing to worry about until there’s something to worry about, ma’am), but it’s kind of gross/embarrassing to sound like an amplified bowl of Rice Krispies every time I do a squat. Do any of you have a Crunchy Knee? Is there, like, a supplement or some shit that helps?
3) JB is in Austin tonight for business and I decided that since he was enjoying BBQ and peaceful hotel solitude while I’m stuck here with children whose love for Parry Gripp continues unabated, I was going to get a damn manicure. Black tips, even, because that was the most impractical thing I could possibly think of.
The fact that I am so stupidly thrilled by the results reminds of the other night when JB turned and asked me earnestly if 10 PM was too late for a piece of gum. Welcome to your late thirties, self, where late night Trident and silly French manicures are AS WILD AS IT GETS.
Jan
9
Did you ever see the movie Safe with Julianne Moore where she plays a woman stricken with a bizarre sensitivity to chemicals? Doctors find nothing wrong with her and ship her off to a psychiatrist, while she claws at her face and turbo-horks whenever she’s near someone wearing perfume and wonders if she’s going insane, or, like, what the fuck?
I’ve been thinking about that movie lately because I started smelling this awful, fetid aroma wafting from the vent in the floor of the furnace closet—the vent that opens straight into the crawlspace below our house—and I’m basically the only one in our house bothered by it. JB dutifully shimmied under the floorboards to check things out and discovered a long-dead rat, at which point I celebrated and banged an imaginary gavel and declared the mystery solved, but the (dried-out, non-gooshy) corpse has been removed and O god, it still smells.
The furnace circulates heat throughout our house and I’m convinced the smell is now everywhere—coating my tongue, somehow—but particularly in this closet area and hitting you like a rotting, zombified Mike Tyson when you walk in the house.
JB, naturally, can’t smell a damn thing.
So either I have a brain tumor; the bloodhound-like pregnancy Dog Nose has randomly returned despite me being, I assure you, most definitely NOT pregnant; or JB has a typical male inability to detect when something disgusting is present and in need of being taken care of (see also: refrigerator spills, tracked-in poop, liberal sprinklings of beard hairs coating every surface of the bathroom sink, etc).
The whole thing has led me to believe there is a very small but eager market for objective sniffers-for-hire. A nice dependable person you can order off the internet who will arrive at your house, take a deep whiff of the questionable item, and tell you definitively one way or another if the smell is enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon or not. This could work for milk gallon containers, your breath, one of those diapers where things aren’t Incredibly Obvious, and that workout shirt you didn’t have time to wash before heading to the gym.
Seriously, though, I’m a little desperate. What on earth could make the underneath of the house suddenly smell like Satan’s Taint, when it’s essentially dry and barren and as far as we can tell, carcass-free down there?
If you’d like to advise me on a different subject entirely, Riley’s kindergarten registration starts at the end of the month and I see there’s an option to pay extra for a full day of school in addition to the regular 9-11:30ish schedule. My inclination is to stick with the half-day, for a number of reasons, but I’d love to hear what some of you think about it. If the parents’ work schedule doesn’t come into play, and there’s no academic catching up to do, is there any real benefit to doing a full day?
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