So a week or two ago I had one of the worst mornings. I just woke up in a foul mood and was running late. Then as I am climbing into my car I see creamer that I had packed in my satchel leaking out. I go back up to my apartment and upon opening my bag see about five inches of creamer floating around – the whole bottle had spilled. I quickly cleaned my new monogrammed planner, rinsed off my notebook, threw out the saturated junk floating around and held back tears as I pulled out my CD case with all 40 or so of my favorite CDs. I quickly set about to rinsing them off and setting them out to dry on bath towels. Finally I went back out to my car with a rag to wash the drips of creamer off the leather passenger seat.
I only got to work about 15 minutes later than usual so major crisis was averted.
Right?
So sometime last week I noticed a very bad smell in my car. It smelled like vinaigrette. Actually, it smelled like raspberry vinaigrette. It wasn’t exactly bad, but it definitely wasn’t good. I tried to drive with the windows down but that actually seemed to make things worse! When I left the windows up, I just got used to the smell after a few minutes…
The thing is, in the back of my head I kept wondering, “Does spoiled hazelnut-flavored creamer smell like raspberry vinaigrette? But, I didn’t want to admit I was screwed. After all, I had cleaned all the visible surfaces in my car. If creamer had leaked down to some weird place and then gone bad… Well, what was I to do?
This all goes on for a couple of days and then after a bit my boyfriend and I swap cars. Now, my boyfriend can’t smell. Really! He just doesn’t notice odors. But I was on the phone with him when he got into my car for the first time and it was like hearing death by asphyxiation over the phone line.
My car was in bad shape.
In the days since this has all been going on, I have driven around with Febreeze in my car. It doesn’t get rid of the smell though. So I just suck it up – literally – and drive. Then a couple days ago I go to get something from the trunk. The trunk door opens and out pours this ghastly vinaigrette odor. It’s like ripe death.
And there, sitting on the carpet of the trunk is a bottle of vinegar that I had bought a while back at the grocery store, which had clearly rolled out of the grocery bag, frozen while left out in the car and the glass bottle has cracked leaving intermittently frozen and melting vinegar in my car.
There was really vinegar in my car this whole time!
Naturally, I threw the frozen chunk of vinegar out into someone’s yard and then threw away all the broken bits of vinegar bottle. And now I have a direct target at which to point the Febreeze.
Still breathing vinegar though…
