Diseased EPI dog + my carpet = frenetic mad scientist

Repeat after me:  I promise I will NEVER EVER GET A DOG.

Great.

Why the angst?  Let's begin with the stench that is permeating my bedroom at present. I'd say it smells something like a bath of cat urine combined with sour diseased feet.  Yumsters.  That, my friends, is the smell of a dog with EPI (a dog who has a disease wherein they don't have any pancreatic acids and you have to digest their food for them).

The dog isn't even IN THE ROOM.  She's put the stench into the carpet.

For the last four hours I have been on my hands and knees forcefully scrubbing and convulsing over the carpet trying to get it out.  I have tried many things.  Many, many things.

Do you know what my husband says?  He says HE CAN'T EVEN SMELL IT.

I couldn't fall asleep a few days ago because it was so bad.  Dude.  He's like a mosquito that got used to jungle DEET or something.

It is not humanly possibly NOT to smell it.  I HATE bad smells.  More than most people, even.  It is some kind of whimpery torture for me to go through.  

As you know, I can't just go and burn filthy candles or spray essential oils all over the world to try to cover it up.  (I tried.  Not the candle thing.  I'm tired of painting.)  That just makes essential oil flavored diseased feet cat urine smell fill the room.  And that, if you can believe it, is worse than the original putrid vomiticious odor.

I began by pouring vinegar all over the place.  That works at about 90%.  Basically, you trade in the scent of barftastic for vinegar.  Yes, vinegar is sour, but I would stick my nose over a vinegar bottle all day long rather than get a whiff of that dog odor.  So I tried to scrub it out with some vinegar.  The stench returned.

Then I tried various essential oils.  This was the point that I realized that even though essential oils are great, they do not smell great when combined with vinegar and dog stench.  In fact, it is pretty much guaranteed an instant gag reflex.  Lemon, rosemary, mint, even grapefruit filled the air.  For ten seconds.  Then the stench returned to tango with the essential oils.

Then I poured rubbing alcohol all over the carpet.  This did work well.  It pretty much just burned out my sense of smell for an hour or two.

I found a Crunchy Betty recipe for a carpet cleaner that I thought I would try for the heck of it since I was scrubbing away with so many things on the carpet anyway.  Her carpet cleaning recipe is this: 1/4 cup vinegar (hello again), 1/4 cup borax, 1/4 cup coarse salt.  Mix together, dump on carpet, scrub like a maniac.  Let dry, vacuum up, wash carpet with towels.

It actually works really well.  Except now I was even more disturbed because my black dog has left many dog oil marks everywhere she has laid and I decided to go all neurotic on it and scrub the bedroom frenetically.

In my cleaning tornado I decided it would be a great idea to get nearly boiling water and mix it with Trader Joe's lavender dish soap on top of the Crunchy Betty carpet cleaner idea.

I have no more clean towels in the house but I do have a neck cramp.  And a bit cleaner of a carpet.

But if I suck in really hard and sniff, I can still smell the lingering stench of diseased feet cat pee.

I'm still waiting for you to come pick her up.

I'll pay you.

Peace, love and I wonder if I should have just went with a hardwood floor in here...
Ms. Daisy

I CAN STILL SMELL IT!!!!!

Saran Wrapping a Lawn: Concrete Evidence of Insanity

Let's talk about how to make your neighbors think that you are absolutely, certifiably, and completely nutso in the head-o.

What?  Do I have experience in this area?  Funny you should mention it, because, why YES, I DO!

Let me begin by saying that I love a good lawn.  I suppose I love a good garden even more (UK-ers - lawn = garden; garden = the place you grow flowers and veggies).  After I watched that video from that lady from the U.K. (speaking of which!), I would one day consider turning my lawn into a food plot, but for now, I'm still growing grass.

Anyway.  My grass is HORRIBLE.  This makes me sad.  I try to fix it but I refuse to put bomb salad on it (chemical fertilizer.  You do know that's where they got that from, right?  No, literally.  It's the same stuff that's in bombs.  After the second World War, they had to figure out what to do with the ultracrap and saw it killed weeds and greened up your grass real nicey-nice like.)  

So the main problem is my dog (speaking of ultracrap).  My dog has this special problem.  She...how shall I say it...has liquid poo six times a day.  It kills grass.  Nearly instantly.  So the backyard has a myriad of brown spots.  The front yard is utterly murdered because of the large tree that sucks up all of the water instead of sharing it with the grass.  

One thing is a must - even though I may have a crunchy brown lawn, I insist on having it edged.  Nothing is worse than when the grass hangs over the crack of the sidewalk or driveway.  It's like a kid who has hair so long it's hanging over his ears in an unsightly manner.  (I can't stand that either.)  It lets me be in control of something in the horrid world of crispy crunch lawn.

Did you just tell me to water it?  Oh my goodness, you are so smart.  I can't bear to have that high of a water bill, though, so thanks anyway.

So instead I've done something else.

Go ahead, it's time to get worried.

So my brother was an engineer in his past life and rubbed shoulders with other such folk.  They like nothing more than to do crazy experiments on things to figure out what works best.  One of his buddies did such an experiment on his lawn.  He got plastic cups and filled them with different soils, put them in different areas (shade, sun, half, etc.), did different stuff with them.  He found that the best growing one was when it had its own personal greenhouse.  What does this look like?

It looks like saran wrap on your lawn pinned down with toothpicks.

So that's what I did.  

You basically dig up some ground, add your seed and water it up and then cover over it with your fancy schmancy handy dandy plastic wrap.  

Now you're thinking, hmmm, that's kind of interesting.

What my neighbors were thinking was, "SHE'S kind of interesting.  She's pinning saran wrap onto her grass.  I knew she was weird, and now I have empirical evidence."

They slow down and stare and elbow the passenger in the car.  The people walking their dogs stop and scratch their heads.  I am nearly as special as an Ohioan.

Oh, but soon, very soon, I am hoping for little green sprouts.  

So my dog can kill them.

Insanity is really hard to get rid of.  But for now, you'll have to excuse me, I'm going to go check on my saran wrapped lawn.

Random Nancy Perkins

This is about to be random.  Yeah, you're like, +ahem+, you're always random.  Yep, I know.  It may be even random-er.

1.  Essential oils are flammable.  Very.  And you'd think they were, you know, what - with that word "oil" in there and everything.  So when you add them to let's say, a tea light candle, just for kicks...to see if it will smell up the place - the answer is yes, it will smell the place up like burnt smoking soot and on-fire oil.  In case you wanted to experiment to see what would happen, let me recommend to you that you not do it.  Stick them straight into the warmer thingy thing with the tea light underneath.  Works way better - if that whole pleasant smell is what you're after.

2.  I went to a large gathering today.  I saw one of the best grammatical errors there in a long time.  It was GREAT.  Well meaning people were labeling (which I totally appreciate, by the way) containers to tell you what kind of drink was in there.  This very sweet person wrote these two:

"Kool Aid"  and  "Lemon Aid"

Which I was really thankful for, I had a whole bunch of lemons in the car, all hurting and in need of special aid.  I was wondering what was in there, perhaps bandages, little zesters in case of special operative emergency situations (like if a lemon surgeon needed to see what was going on below the pith), maybe some ice for bruises or whatever.  I didn't look inside, though.  I guess I like my suffering lemons too much to peek inside the special party kit for them.

3.  Please do not tell me what is in Bon Ami (the powdery cleaner).  I know it is vintage, it's probably some radioactive fallout or something, but it works GREAT.  It does not contain bleach (so what IS it?!  no, no, not really - DO NOT TELL ME) but I am serious, I think it is the magic ingredient in the Magic Erasers.  I put some of that wild stuff on a wash cloth and that stuff whitened up my dirty, disgusting walls, the floor boards, the door, plenty of things.  I was just telling my hubster how discouraged I was.  You see, we used to have a clean house.  I mean sparkling, eat off of the floors clean.  Almost eat out of the toilet clean.  Now we have a dog who believes it is her inherent right - nay! duty! - to proliferate herself in any possible way, mostly via shedding an amount of fur that would make any thinking person wonder if she believed in reincarnation and was trying to do that herself.  I am pretty sure she sheds a ball of hair that could be shaped into another entire dog daily.  Anyway, I was all sad, picking up hair, scrubbing floors, scrubbing walls, dusting, wistfully thinking back to the good-ole-days, asking why was it never so perfectly clean as it used to be?  And then as I scrubbed the gray film off of the walls and floor boards, I knew why.  BECAUSE IT WAS VERY VERY DIRTY IN HERE, mostly due to a nasty, pancreatic acid-lacking ratty dog.  (Don't worry, I only wax disdainful toward said pet when I am cleaning the house or cleaning her and her cage due to a large amount of dog poo slathered all over herself and it, for example: today.)

4.  Bentonite clay made into a facial mix for your zits, while fun, elicits many responses from family members.  Stuff like, "What is that stuff on your head?", "Do you know you have weird stuff on your head?", "You have some weird junk on your head.", "When are you going to take that weird stuff off of your head?", "What in the world is that weird junk stuck to your head?" and finally, "Can I touch it?"

5.  Last one.  Back to the large gathering.  The party was coming to a close.  A thoughtful, well-educated, pensive man commented, "Is there anything sadder than a deflated bouncy house?"  I answered, "Um, I dunno, maybe a dead clown?"  I'm pretty sure they're going to take up some sort of collection for me to go to a professional psychotherapist.

See, told ya it was random.  ;)  And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.  (Don't you like it when people spell it "programme"?  It's so fancy!)