S1E33. Poor Judgement

Sally went away last week to help a friend, leaving me alone at the apartment…an accident waiting to happen…and it did…twice!

Episode 1: Stinky Onion.

I’ve never lived anywhere with a garbage disposal and so I’m just learning how to use the one in our new apartment. I googled it to learn the basics about what you can and can’t put in it, but the whole idea is still pretty new to me.

Around the fifth day Sally was gone, I noticed an acrid smell coming from the pantry and discovered a thoroughly rotten onion. Oy! What to do?

I could have put it in a zip-loc bag and put it out with the rest of the garbage two nights from then or I could have put it in a bag and walked it to the garbage chute down the hall right then and there. Or I could have put it in the garbage disposal.

For reasons that are unknown to me as I write this, I decided to use the garbage disposal. If I had thought it through, I would have reflected on the fact that chopping an onion releases tear-inducing chemicals into the air along with a strong onion smell. It might have occurred to me that running it through a garbage disposal would probably be like dicing on steroids! But I didn’t think it through. I just went ahead and ground it up and flushed it away.

Within seconds the entire apartment was fouled with a putrid odor. Oh lord! I tried filling the sink with hot soapy water and letting it flush out the unit, but that did nothing. Then I poured some bleach in and let it sit for an hour, but with little effect. I pushed a lemon in and let the disposal grind that up, but it only provided relief for a few minutes. I turned on the apartment fan and opened the doors and windows. That worked as long as there was a breeze.

By the time Sally returned, the odor was faint but still noticeable. We’re lighting scented candles now and close to getting back to normal.

Episode 2: Blackout Curtains.

I was reading up on the connection between sleep and brain health (see last week’s post) and learned that sunlight in the morning triggers the wake cycle of our circadian rhythm. It was suggested that blackout curtains could help you sleep a little longer in the morning by delaying the interaction between sunlight and your brain.

So I went to Amazon and ordered a blackout curtain and curtain rod for our bedroom. There were a mind-boggling number of choices and so I decided to keep it simple. The curtain I chose was white linen so it wouldn’t clash with our bedspread and the curtain rod had a nickel finish to match the doorknob in the bedroom. My thinking was that we could use this set to test out the idea and return it if either it didn’t help us sleep or if it did help us sleep but we wanted a different look.

But before going any further, you need to understand how radical a move this was for me. 

Since I have no design talent or taste whatsoever, Sally has taken the lead in the nesting process. So for me to initiate something as monumental as selecting bedroom curtains was really beyond my pay grade. For some reason, though, I thought Sally would be happy that I was finally taking the initiative on something.

Secondly, we always talk about improvements we’d like to make before actually doing them. It’s true that she was an hour away and would be gone for several more days…but her cell phone was still working so there was no reason not to have a discussion. But then again, the curtains would arrive the day after she got home and it might be a fun surprise.

Wrong and wrong again!

My initiative was not appreciated and Sally was a little more than miffed by my failure to share my thoughts with her. How did I misread this so terribly?

Hopefully, I’ve learned something from both the onion and blackout curtain episodes as I’d hate to experience anything like either of them again! And hopefully, too, this is not a harbinger of things to come in the coming decade.

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