My Super-Sense of Smell

. . . is NOT my favorite out of my superpowers.  I am far more partial to my super-sense of hearing, that allows me to hear gossipy women talk about me from two rooms over (gossipy women, beware) and to hear my children plotting things that they ought not.

Actually went to bed early last night, hoping to get a full eight hours.  At 4:09 AM (ironic; keep reading), I was awakened from a dead sleep by an awful stench:  one of the beasts (the well-mannered dog who almost never poops in the house) had decided to alert us to the fact that she is still having intestinal troubles by leaving a very smelly pile.  On my side of the bedroom.  Because she knew that I would wake up?  After all, it has happened before.  And it also makes me wonder:  if a fire breaks out in the middle of the night, and the smoke alarms fail, will I be awakened by the smell of smoke?  OR IS MY SUPERPOWER LIMITED TO SMELLING ANIMAL FECES IN MY SLEEP?

Anyway.  I punched Spouse (who can, and does, sleep through anything) and suggested that he take care of the dog mess.  My argument:  I had my bite guard in my mouth (yes, it can be easily removed), and if I had to smell the mess from close-up, I might gag, and if I gagged, I might choke on my bite guard, and possibly throw up, and I could aspirate the vomit, and/or the vomit would mix with the dog mess and make a bigger mess.  YES, I was reaching.  But Spouse is incredibly gullible when he is half-asleep.

Only problem is, when half-asleep, Spouse also has a tendency to half-a** things.  Thus:  he picked up the dog mess, flushed it, washed his hands (thank God for that), and then climbed into bed and mumbled, "There's a stain on the carpet.  You need to clean it."

Why me?

"Because that's what you do.  You get stains out of carpets."

True dat.  Stain removal is another one of my superpowers.  When we were moving out of our first married apartment and into our house, I was pregnant at the time, and my mother was very concerned about my hydration.  So she poured me a glass of some V-8 fruit-and-vegetable juice concoction that we had in the fridge - and she used the first vessel that she happened to come across, which was an opaque plastic travel mug (the kind they serve hot chocolate in at football games).  When I was half-finished with said concoction, my dad got a wild hair to help us pack.  (This almost NEVER happens.)  So he packed the mug.  He didn't notice that it sloshed.  I didn't notice that it was missing.  When we moved things over to the house, we staged boxes in the home office.  It was several days before we got to the boxes at the bottom.  You guessed it:  the box with the mug was on the bottom, and the mug leaked.  GINORMOUS REDDISH-ORANGE STAIN ON MY NEW (well, new to me) LIGHT-COLORED BERBER CARPET.  IN (of course) THE EXACT CENTER OF THE ROOM.

Did I mention that I was pregnant, and therefore hormonal?  Unfortunately for my parents, they were still in town.  I may have accused my father of ruining my first house and, therefore, my life.  Shrieking definitely was involved.  Then I became a woman obsessed.  Vinegar and water was applied.  Then a mixture of water and dishwashing detergent.  Much blotting followed.  The process was repeated, roughly, EIGHT THOUSAND TIMES.  I went through every towel in the house.  Spouse, at various points, attempted to physically (albeit gently) remove me from the general vicinity of the stain.  I refused to yield.  My mother, who knows me fairly well, told him to give up.  He gave up.  I did not.  AND I CHALLENGE YOU TO FIND THAT STAIN, because I nuked that puppy to the Stone Age.  (You'll have to look for it pretty fast, because the Berber is getting torn out shortly.  Bye bye, carpet, hello, stained concrete.)

So shortly after 4:09, I found myself, ironically, on my knees scrubbing my floor.  Not with 409, but with vinegar and water and a series of rags.  As it turns out, I was not far off on the gag-reflex prediction:  I failed to take out the bite guard, and I started to gag on it, and I was not ABOUT to remove it from my mouth using a hand that was sullied from poop stain-blotting, so I had to yell for Spouse to come remove it for me.  Kind of an amusing sequence, actually.  How my children slept through it, I'm not sure.  Apparently, sleeping through their parents' (and pets') weird nocturnal activities is their superpower.

Got the stain up, rubbed in a little baking soda paste for good measure (you leave it on, and then vacuum it up - it's quite effective) and then decided to spritz the air with this cedar-and-lavender spray that I acquired from The Container Store.  Very clean-smelling and odor-reducing . . . when used in moderation.  However, SOMEHOW, BECAUSE CLEARLY SOMEONE DID NOT WANT ME TO GET A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP, the spray nozzle was halfway unscrewed, and a bunch of the stuff leaked down the sides of the bottle before I could react.  So, instead of a horrible poop stench, we were left with a horrible cedar/lavender stench.  (Believe it or not:  jump ball.)

I turned on the ceiling fan.  I opened the window a crack.  EVENTUALLY, the stench dissipated.  But not before I broke out in hives.  (As you may recall, another one of my . . . um, I'm not going to call it a superpower . . . another one of my QUIRKS is that extreme smells can make me hive-y.)  So, if the smell wasn't enough to keep me awake, the itching was going to do the trick.

The moral of the story:  I was not meant to go to bed early.  When I do so, the universe goes dangerously off-kilter, and it finds ways to punish me.

Really, really odd and nasty ways.