One way to clean a kitchen sink....

….and so the other day, I arrived home to be greeted by a really foul odor. Being a nurse, I’m accustomed to almost every noxious odor known—and it bothers me none. Usually. This stench, however, knocked me completely over. It was as if every inhabitant of hell released their collective bowels of hell inside my apartment… and I yakked.

Finding the source of the stink was not difficult.

It’s been almost a year since my garbage disposal chewed a spoon. It’s not been the same since. My attempt at getting it fixed has been futile. See, if it makes noise—my landlord thinks it works. Yes, it makes noise, but it also registers on seismometers. No USGS, St. Helens is not waking up, that’s just me using my garbage disposal. I’m not kidding. The disposal shakes the counters to the point where glasses will dance off and land on the floor.

Since then, the sink occasionally takes on whatever stink until it’s cleared of all the gunk.

This particular day, I just finished off a long 12-hour shift and I was tired. I had yet another 12 hour shift that night. The last thing I needed to be doing was clearing the pipes. So, I dumped a couple of boxes of baking soda down the sink and went to bed—with the intent of dealing with the issue when I woke up.

Immediately, the sink no longer stunk…

Now, if anyone knows me well… I simply do not do much in the way if housework when I am in the middle of shift work. After a couple of days, there are always dishes in the sink waiting to be hand washed.

In my bleary state, I did not notice that I knocked over an open bottle of dish soap into the sink. It precariously landed, nozzle side into the drain and bottom end wedged between two coffee cups. Practically full, I lost a good ¾ of the bottle down the drain as it leaked out. I only noticed when I woke up.

Upset to have wasted so much of a cleaning product, I completely forgot about the baking soda down the sink and proceeded to fix dinner. I completely perseverated on the fact that I nearly lost all of a bottle of dish soap. I was out of sorts.

Do you know there is such a thing as putting too much baking soda down a sink? Evidently, I didn’t but I do now. Yeah, and with a bottle of soap down a sink, the stuff just doesn’t flush out easily.

Oh well, I thought, it’ll eventually dissolve and flush out. So I ate dinner. Leftovers and whatever is easy to fix. I don’t rightly remember what I ate except for one thing: marinated cucumbers. Let me extrapolate. Cucumbers marinated (read bathed) in undiluted apple cider vinegar. Just so you know, I have no problem dumping a quart or two of vinegar over cucumbers… but I get all testy about dish soap. To boot, marinated cucumbers taste much better than dish soap. Oh, such irony.

Between the kid and myself, we polished off all the cucumbers.

OK, not wanting my house to linger of the smell of vinegar from dinner, I thought it would be wise to dump the waste down the sink.

Oh, yes I did.

The end result was not pretty.

My drain belched forth suds.

Unlike that third grade science experiment where students learn about lava flows from volcanoes, this was more like grown-ups learning what it means when their kitchen sink has rabies.

Naturally, I did what came naturally. I screamed. This alerted my son, who came running to see what the commotion was about. Upon seeing the sink, filling and overflowing with suds, he stood looking at the sink, mouth agape.

Seriously? Only you ma.

So, the kid decided to be helpful and flipped on the garbage disposal. One might thing that would be a logical thing to do—that is, if only the stupid thing worked which it didn’t. It sucked nothing down. No, everything went in reverse. Suds shot out, spraying both the kid and myself with suds that smelled like pickled lavender with a hint of putrefaction.

This all happened 5 minutes before I had to leave for work. No time to bath myself, let alone clean a kitchen.

I felt oddly self-conscious at work, smelling like rotten pickled flowers and all. Fortunately, strange odors aren’t uncommon for the unit I work on and if I smelled funky, it was largely ignored.

I fully expected to come home from work to find the world’s biggest mess in my kitchen—awaiting my attention. Instead, I came home from work to find my kitchen the cleanest it’s been in months. The kid spent hours cleaning up the mess.

My kitchen drain has not stank since.