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.