Something Rotting in the Basement

I am indeed back -- spanning the continent from Vegas to Toronto (with an unnecessarily long stay in the airport in Chicago) -- and I am here to discuss an issue that is important to, likely, everyone. Yes, I want to talk about the way my apartment smells.

I was only back in town for a few hours on the terrible travel day after getting back to Kalamazoo (at 2:30 am) before turning around to leave on a bus for a weekend trip to Toronto (at 6:30 am), but I did notice something in the flurry of action and sleep that I managed in those four hours.

My house smells like cat pee. Like, really strong cat pee. It was awful really. For those needing a reminder, here is the leading candidate (of those in my household) to produce horrible smelling feline urine:

Well, after determining the main cause of this problem was likely two towels he had, ahem, marked, the situation in the bathroom -- and the house overall -- was improved. The place smells mostly of bleach now. Which is, if you were wondering, not quite what Bender's pee smells like. His pee smells more like futility and laziness.

This whole "bad smells" thing reminds me of something I was going to blog about before I left for Vegas -- I was minding my own business one fine December day last month, relaxing (not chillaxing, mind you, just relaxing) after lunch, when my wacky upstairs neighbor Amanda came by. Here's the packaged meal I had prepared and eaten that day (something I didn't think was half-bad):

Well, Amanda came into my kitchen and nodded with satisfaction, discovering the source of a smell that had been bothering -- nay, torturing her -- for a few minutes. Enough, evidently, to go downstairs in our shared basement to see if an animal had died and started rotting. Which she told me -- among other descriptions of what my lunch smelled like -- while it sat there in my stomach, likely being a bit offended. In my mind, my Simply Asia meal smelled and tasted fine, but to the outside world it was apparently more like the one out of three restaurants I passed in Toronto's Chinatown that had a pile of vomit sitting outside the front door.

So don't be a strong be a strong smell in my apartment, that's my warning to you. You might be too much for me and my friends to handle.