Let’s just say I’m neurotic in an endearing way. Is that fine with everyone? It may not be true but we can all pretend.
This morning I started doing the dishes because our maid seems to have forgotten to come to work for the last 36 years and as I rinsed one of the plethora of dirty glasses that somehow procreate offspring faster than you can say GO OUTSIDE AND USE THE FRIGGIN HOSE NEXT TIME! I caught the scent of mildew. Mildew, again! I’m not even kidding when I tell you for the past week I’ve been on a tear when it comes to isolating and obliterating the mildew. Mildew must die! And every morning when I start to do the dishes I’m sniffing like a crack whore looking for her next fix trying to find the source. We have at least 145 dishrags and they’ve all gone through the washer this week at least twice because they don’t pass The Sniff Test. I sniff them before I put them in the dryer. I sniff them when they come out. All fine. And then I pick one up to use it and it smells musty and mildewy! (not a word? bite me, spellchecker.) So I stand there, sniffing and tossing just washed dishrags back into the washer for their 4th rotation.
Which brings us to this morning, standing over the sink and once again, smelling the mildew. I picked up the rag I had just retrieved from the cupboard and sniffed it. Mildew! I angrily threw it in the general direction of the garage and got another. Mildew! My hands smelled! I scooped a little water in my hand and smelled it. Mildew. How can water smell like mildew?!
After huffing and puffing and telling Joe for eons about how whack this house is and how the kitchen sucks and everything smells like mildew and now EVEN! THE! WATER! smells like mildew he looked at me and said, ‘Well, that would be bad if the water really smelled like mildew. It would make us sick.’ And then he just looked at me.
As I started to question myself, I took one of the many, many glasses from the counter, filled it will water from the tap and inhaled deeply as if it were a fine wine – A hearty bouquet with a hint of oak. No mildew. Not even a bit. I had no choice but to dump out the water and admit I may have been overreacting.
And then I couldn’t smell it on any of the rags. I think someone is playing a trick on me. Like the time in Junior High when the tip of my nose smelled sour for over a month. It did! I couldn’t get it to stop no matter how many times I wiped it, washed it and dabbed on perfume. I walked up to people, some I knew, some I didn’t, and asked them to PLEASE smell my nose because it was driving me crazy. I needed someone to verify that I wasn’t crazy.
Funny story – I was crazy.
I think your neuroses are very endearing.
I sometimes have these smell memories where I smell something and then I have weird flashbacks to that smell for weeks.
It’s sometimes HOURS before I can get the crapstench from my girls’ diapers out of my nostrils, so I definitely hear ya on the perpetual stink. Who knows – I could be crazy, too.
I like how this story makes me sound as though I’m the sensible one.
Additional, slight grammatical critique: the house is not “whack” — it’s wack, slightly different word. It is “out of whack” though.
Why are you even using dishrags? Those things are disgusting mildew havens. I use this sponge thing and this brush thing.
@ PMichelle – i have those tooooooooooooooo but how do you wipe the coooounters? that is why i have the raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaags. (can you hear the whining?? it’s terrible.)
@ Joe-my-beloved – i must differ on this point. the house is whack, dude. behold definitions #2 and #3: http://tinyurl.com/lulv3
@ ozma – thanks you. you are very sweet to say so. xo i also get lost in my head for a few minutes when i encounter a certain smell. corn chex cereal can almost induce a coma.
@ loren – you seem perfectly nice and hardly crazy at all except for the fact that you live in iowa where there is no ocean.
This blog rules. I’m blog rolling you right now. I found you through Kelly LC Russel – a/k/a the awesomeness that is West Coast Grrlie Blather. She voted for me.
Google is running loads o’ ads for mildew remover in the sidebar. hehehehe! I love targeted marketing 🙂
rockin’ writing’, this post is! funny across the board. great way to greet the morning…
Happens to me all the time. Pour bleach down the drain. Like, three cups of bleach. Lemon-scented bleach if you dont like the smell of bleach. And pull up the rubber drain cover and clean the underside.
i can hear your pain. i have a “thing” with smells too. actually, it’s a family tradition. to smell everything, (just about everything).
it’ is truly weird how smells get up in your nose and won’t leave.
i come from a long line of women that use rags, but use paper towels. lots and lots of them. i realize that isn’t environment friendly but i would rather die than have a mildew experience.
oh, and another thing. i am now using vinegar (and lemon) with almost every load of laundry i do. it helps to remove the moldy smells.
p.s. a spray bottle with vinegar and lemon is also a helpful thing to have around for wiping counters with rags or whatever. helps to keep that mold thing down.
women’s sense of smell is greater than men, and i thinks it plague’s us more frequently. you was not crazy 🙂
I occasionally have a problem with the slightly fishy smell of wet dog. Everything I eat will smell of it, it will waft in on a breeze, it will be in my kitchen. It is maddening. And then, just as quickly as it comes, it leaves.
i also suffer from smell-the-dish-rag-itis.
and this unsolicited advice may sound slightly crazy, but if you microwave the dishrag for a minute the smell usually disappears…
@erika
The microwaving the rag concept is smart. Microwaving kills bacteria and fungus — and the mildew is caused by those critters. So microwaving doesn’t sound crazy at all. If you’re in a desperate medical situation you could do worse than to microwave objects to make them sterile. Of course, NO METAL. 🙂
Just make sure to microwave a WET dishrag/sponge/etc/. Dry ones will burn, leaving you with another annoying smell to get rid of…
Good luck!
We had the mildew water over here in Ventura. They said it was an algae bloom at the lake. Everything smelled craptacular for about a month.
If you get an odor stuck in your nose, try smelling coffee beans to get rid of it. It works most of the time.
this happened to me. turned out it was the sponge we use for washing dishes. after about a week, if we don’t really diligently keep it dry when it’s not in use, it starts to really stink. and boy does that smell sticks to your hands. somehow, my husband can’t smell it at all….