Sometimes, you get a scent on your hands that makes you smell your hands throughout the day to see if the smell lingers. Well, I do. For example, the weekend before last, I continued my futility in starting my tiller (my ineptitude with small engines is just short of being legendary, which makes me fall short in that regard as well). As such, my hands smelled like gasoline for a day or so even after using mechanic hand slime a couple of times.
But this last Saturday, I had a succession of scents to enjoy.
- Chlorine
When I treat the pool, I have to touch the 2″ chlorine tablets that go into the slow-dissolve chlorinator, so I had the clean scent of chlorine on my hands until…
- Barbecued Chicken
We went to the Crane (a town in Stone County south of here) Broiler (the small chicken) Festival on late Saturday afternoon. We had gone to Ernst-Fest in Freistatt the week before (whilst my hands smelled of gasoline), but that was a small Lion’s Club German-themed shindig. It had a beer garden, some brats, and a couple of small games geared to kids along with some polka music. It was small, and we ate and left.Crane Broiler Festival is a full town fair; it had two music stages (bluegrass and gospel), craft and local organization booths, carnival rides, a couple of carnival games, and a barbecued chicken dinner. We walked the booths, entered a few gun raffles, and had a chicken dinner, which left my hands smelling of barbecued chicken even after washing them a couple of times. The boys didn’t want to do any carnival rides–they were a little skeptical of their safety as they’ve gotten older and have gotten used to full-scale amusement parks over the last two years–so we left. But it was great chicken.
- Toad Urine (Presumably)
I was doing something at my desk in the early evening, when one of the boys ran down the stairs, claiming an emergency in the kitchen. I heard the words “garbage disposal” and was afraid that it had fallen off again. My oldest was laughing about something, and I discovered the “emergency” was that a toad had gotten into the house, gotten in the sink, and when startled by one or more of my boys, hid in the garbage disposal.Now, the obvious solution had occurred to my oldest (and to me), which was why he was laughing: turn on the garbage disposal, and the problem is solved. However, this would not suit my beautiful wife’s sensitivities. Her proposed solution was to get a pair of spoons and try to capture the toad, sight unseen, that way. Which ultimately would likely have had the same effect as solution #1, only slower. The most obvious solution, maybe only to a man or maybe obvious but unpalatable to a woman, was to reach into the disposal and grab the toad. Which I did. And I conveyed said toad out onto the back deck, where he could feasibly find something to eat under our back light.
As toads and other reptiles are known to urinate when a predator attacks, one can only assume that the toad wet me, but my hand got wet was I pushed it through the rubber in the drain, so it was not like I went from dry to wet when I grabbed it. And, honestly, I did not sniff my hands all night to see if I could smell it. But perhaps other toads and their actual predators could.
As I sniff my hands this morning because I have nothing else to blog about this morning, I can’t say exactly what they smell of. Perhaps waffle cereal as I recently handled cereal bowls from the boys’ breakfasts.
Sorry if I have planted this noseworm in you, and you spend the day sniffing your hands.
