The Stinkpire Strikes Back

Posting about my neighbors' cooking habits in January seems to have kept the dogs of stench at bay for much of the last couple months. Unfortunately, I seem to have either done something to stockpile some bad karma, or the neighbors have company coming over...

They've been cooking up a storm all morning, such that I couldn't even concentrate to post about it until things cleared up some now. It was truly a debilitating funk, a stronger version of the one I'd almost forgotten after becoming so familiar with it through the fall.

I can only imagine it's similar to broccoli with its awful smell/delightful taste (with cheese) ratio. Otherwise, it is clear the neighbors must not only hate me, but themselves as well... unless, and this thought just occurred to me, their cooking-odor bomb is like a hurricane, in which the eye is quite pleasant, and in fact the only safe place to be, assuming you can move with the storm.

Regardless of their motivations or personal experience, this morning they took it to 11 by burning some or all of the meal, and let me tell you, tear gas has nothing on what was flowing into every open orifice of our apartment. I'm gagging at the mere memory, which even the aforementioned dog food factory can't quite muster at this point, even though it sees the cooking smell's recency and raises it with pervasiveness and familiarity.

Anyway, I'm just counting my blessings that the burning caused an overload even for them, and they apparently stopped the presses and aired out their apartment-- it is the silver lining to the vicious, stinky storm cloud the kids and I wrestled with this morning. I'm hoping my deliberately positive outlook, combined with posting about the subject again, will buy us another stench-bullet cease-fire for a couple of months.

Yet another reason why I love my son

After intently watching the anti-blind-consumerist The Story of Stuff (maybe another post on that later) on the computer with me, I put on Wallace and Gromit's three shorts, since I promised D- we could watch a movie while Momma was out of town for a few days. Just as the third one was finishing, he sat up on the couch and said, "I wanna turn off the TV."

Perhaps there's hope for the future after all.

P.S. Just now, he wanted to sit on my lap to see what I was doing that was so much more important than playing with him (what is, really?). He looked over the page, pointed to "TV" and asked, "Why did you write the word 'TV'?" The reading begins.

Part of a balanced breakfast

Let me tell you, there's nothing like waking up to the sight of this first thing in the morning:

Curious what that might be? You shouldn't be.

But since you're still reading, I'll tell you.

That's avian feces that somehow managed to travel roughly dead east with enough velocity to slice through the screen and spray itself all over the inside window. How this was achieved, and whether the bird from which it was deployed actively hates us or merely felt compelled to send us a message, I do not know.

What I do know is that the effect is even more disgusting than any picture could ever do justice. I think I'll stop writing about it now, just as we've tried to stop looking at it whenever we go in the dining room.

Any cleaning tips for the screen? I'd like to take care of this mess before any of Buzzy's relatives come in for Fly Thanksgiving.

A breath of fresh hypocrisy

For Christmas, M- got a toothbrush that plays music for 2 minutes, to serve as a reminder for how long one should brush (though with only three tooth-tips so far, 2 minutes would seem to be beyond overkill). The brush has a sticker on it that says "For better sound and a better planet -- turn off the water while you brush!"

Very subtly on the back of the package, it also says "Batteries included! Contains two AAA or R03 size non-replaceable batteries", and in case that wasn't bad enough, they add "Brush head is not replaceable." So the water-saving tip hardly evens things out. But at least all the ocean life living off the East Pacific Garbage Patch will have sparkling white teeth...

Beyond the environmental damage, though, these things cost $15, so your choices are to either spend $90 annually on toothbrushes (or a lot more, considering how quickly you'd get sick of hearing the same song, which plays louder the harder the kid brushes), or you could spend $10 on toothbrushes and $5 more on one stopwatch.

(Thanks to Amazon for the product image.)