Olfactory Overload

Headed out from Jackson LA this morning without time for a ride, dropped The Wife off at the Baton Rouge airport, and headed for New Orleans. It was pretty smooth going until around LaPlace. From there all the way into town it the speeds on the interstate were very erratic. There must have been an accident or something, but I never saw anything but one little fender-bender. So I finally get to the house, park the car and when I open the door it hits me. Oh man, it was bad. They had been picking up refrigerators, and must have basically emptied one of them right next to the house. There was nasty fly-infested refrigerator juice all down the gutter. I pulled the car up the street a bit and spent about an hour with the garden hose washing that rank stuff down to the storm drain. I never did get rid of all of the smell, but at least I got it down to a tolerable level. One of my mother's tenants, a Tulane student, was coming in from Houston to clean out her stuff from one of the flooded apartments and was supposed to be in around 10-11:00, but she got a flat somewhere along the way and was delayed, so I decided to turn on the gas and light the pilot lights on the stove. Well, that went fine, but when I went down to the basement later, I could definitely smell gas. I ended up turning the gas off again, and much later in evening I went around with a spray bottle of Windex, which BTW is great for finding leaks in gas lines, tires, etc. I found a couple of tiny leaks at some of the valves and tightened them up, so I'll seen how it smells in the morning. Next, I discovered that the toilet was running nonstop, which of course meant that crud from the water lines had clogged up the valve, so I shut off the water and disassembled the float valve, cleaned it out, and got it working again. Yeah, it was just handyman heaven around here today!

Anyway, I eventually met the tenant over at the apartment and helped wash down a bunch of her stuff with bleach and water and brought most of the furniture over to my basement for storage until the Spring semester starts. That took most of the afternoon, but when I drove past the neighbor's house (whose roof I had patched up last week) on the second trip to put stuff in the basement, she came over with three bottles of Rogue ale. Better yet, they were cold!! Not having a refrigerator at the house right now, a glass of cold Red Ale really hit the spot!

I'm planning on making the Giro ride tomorrow morning and then meeting the insurance adjuster at 11:00. She called to reschedule this afternoon because there was a death in her family and she needs to drive back up to Alabama tomorrow. Wish me luck!