What's that smell?

I'm sitting on my back deck, taking a break. I apparently need one. I just returned from a week long vacation and have been using the day to put my world back together again. While making my cleaning rounds throughout the house, I noticed that one of the kitties had thrown up in the living room while I was away and had also peed beside the basket full of shoes under the television. No big deal in the grand scheme of things, I thought. I made a mental note to lock the basket away with the house plants the next time I went on vacation. Whenever I go away, the kitties express their displeasure by tearing something apart in the house so I usually convert my office into a safe haven for all things that need protecting.

I began the cleanup process by taking the basket outside to spray wash the edge that had been sitting in the kitty pee, cleaned up the floor, then doused the area with a bottle of kitty deterrent spray I had purchased a long time ago. It was right about that moment when I noticed an awful odor. I figured it was coming from the puke spot I had reconstituted in order to remove it from the floor. I ignored the smell and went outside to spray the basket with the kitty deterrent. I immediately noticed that the basket had the same putrid scent I had smelled in the house.

When I walked back into the house I discovered the smell was so bad I had to open the front door and turn on the fan in order to keep myself from dry heaving. I grabbed every cleaner I had under the kitchen sink and frantically began scouring the area until the smell began to dissipate. Taya walked into the room during this process and, after one whiff, gave me a startled disgusted look and quickly ran away. It smelled like an animal had died in the room so I pulled all the furniture away from the walls and shined a flashlight in every dark space, looking for the culprit, to no avail.

Baffled, I continued scrubbing the entire room trying to determine the cause of the stench which had not been present when I first arrived home. When the smell began to subside, I put the furniture back in place, picked up the bottle of kitty deterrent and began dousing the area where the basket would eventually return.

Almost immediately, the smell returned and, in a singular moment of clarity, I remembered the bottle of kitty deterrent was actually the bottle of rotten egg solution I had mixed up earlier in the summer to deter deer from my garden. I had left the bottle outside in the garden bed, forgotten I had swapped the contents, and was now spraying my house with the worst possible odor man or animal could imagine.

So, there you have it. A relatively minor problem turned into a horrendous disaster. My specialty. Thank you very much.

Taya made a smart alec comment about the whole ordeal so told her to mind her own business and we aren't speaking right now. She's reading the paper and I'm calmly eating my dinner on the back deck while we wait for the air to clear. I think I need a vacation.