Shark Nose

I have a shark nose. By that I mean I can smell pretty much everything at a super human level. This is so very annoying. If something stinks, it's like it's been shoved right up my nose holes. Even if something smells good, it's often times too intense and distracting. I am constantly bombarded by smells that overwhelm my senses. As I'm already often overwhelmed because of my OCD and social anxiety this makes it even harder to regulate myself in a overloaded world.

The other day Andrea came home from a trip and I gave her a welcome home kiss and immediately recoiled. "Why do you smell like metal? It's like kissing a fork!" She was like "WHAT?" And then after a minute said "Hmm, now that you mention it, my mouth does taste metallic..." It took about 3 days for the smell to go away. We don't know if it's because she ate a lot of fish when she was in Monterey, or if it was the coffee at the conference, or something else. But for 3 days I had to hold my breath and stifle the urge to recoil whenever she kissed me. That night in bed I had to have her turn away from me (rather than spoon me) because the metal smell was overwhelming and I couldn't sleep.

I can't use too heavily scented shampoos or conditioners because then I can smell my hair all day and I can't concentrate.

I can't stand scented lotions that are overpowering. Andrea has a vanilla lotion that makes me cringe it's so fragrant. She used it one morning because she ran out of regular lotion and when I saw her 12 hours later it was the first thing I noticed (even though she'd washed her hands and used other lotion during the day). She was amazed that I could smell it from that morning. And then she went and scrubbed her hands and arms as much as she could to reduce the smell. I could still smell it, but it was more tolerable.

I can smell when Andrea is about to get sick (not like barfing, but like cold/flu/respiratory infection). She has a "sick breath" smell to her mouth that apparently only I can sniff out. The good news is that we can pump her full of vitamins and zinc and it often reduces the illness. In that way I'm kind of like a service dog sniffing out a seizure before it happens. But I'd gladly give that up for a normal sense of smell. There's mostly only downsides to it.

Just one more weird thing that makes my life more difficult than it needs to be!

365: Blurry Vision

I think I got something in my eye whilst hiking yesterday (see? Nature does attack me!) and I subsequently scratched my eye with the foreign object. My eye felt wretched last night so I threw out my contacts and when I woke up this morning it was still feeling wretched so I decided to wear my glasses all day.

I hate wearing my glasses.

Besides the fact I don't like looking out little widows, they are very inconvenient in other ways. Especially when getting ready. Blowing drying and flat ironing your hair with glasses on is nearly impossible and doing it blindly isn't much fun either. I tried to recreate the essence with this picture. This is what it looks like when I try and get ready with non-vision corrected eyeballs. Good thing we only went to Target and Costco today, and we went early. Less chances of seeing people I know!

365: Trimming is Necessary

Confession: I hate trimming my fingernails. 

Confession: I hate long fingernails. 

Confession: I hate chewed fingernails. 

Sigh. I have to trim my finger nails because it's the least of all evils. I trim them about once a week. If I could wish them to stay one length at all times and never grow I would totally do it. It's one of my biggest pet peeves. Sigh.

Call me Grace

It's no secret that I *may* be the clumsiest person on the planet. Srsly. I fall down more than anyone I know. 

Well, except maybe my mother. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Pun TOTALLY intended. 

Today I got home and, as usual, was going to let the maniac dogs out so they could pee and frolic and generally act like idiots. Being that it was the day time and I didn't actually need to turn on the hall light to see I mozied down the hallway towards the back door. 

The next thing I knew I was tragically falling down into a heap on the floor. 

What caused me to twist my right ankle so hard it took my breath away, nearly fold my left foot in half, bump and scrape my left knee on ceramic tile and smash my right shoulder into the wall?

The answer lay in the pee that I now laid in. 

Fucking asshole dogs. Thanks for peeing in the hallway. I was gone all of 20 minutes. 

And to add insult to (serious) injury, they were still jumping all over my head trying to get to the back door. As if I was letting them out now. I took my clothes off right there in the hallway and got in the shower. 

My loving partner cleaned up the mess and let them out when she got home 10 minutes later. Love her.

Hate those jerks sometimes.

How I Feel About My Neighbor

I headed over to Imagination Prompts this morning to help me find something to write about. The first good prompt/question that came up was "How do you feel about your neighbor?" Ooooh. I have a lot of material for this one. 

I hate my neighbor. 

He is a dirty rotten scumbag.

All the rest of my neighbors have been cycled through in intervals between 2 months and about a year. Scum bag has been here for about 5 years. He is probably going to outlast me. Yuck.

Scum bag neighbor moved in after that house had been abandoned for several years. Some neighborhood kids almost set the house on fire once. I wish now that I'd let them. I just didn't want MY house to catch on fire in the process. 

When he first moved in he was quiet. Then he got two annoying shithead dogs that barked non-stop whenever my dogs were outside. His dogs stayed outside nearly all the time. I only let my dogs out to go to the bathroom and to play occasionally. My dogs don't bother anyone normally. But they hate other dogs. When his yappy dogs would stand at the fence and bark it would drive them nuts. Duke has smashed several fence boards trying to get to those little dogs. Daisy tried to burrow through to the other side. Of course neither of them were successful at getting through because I am a good dog owner. He is not. One day one of his stupid little dogs came into our yard and my dogs almost killed it. Luckily again, I am a good dog owner and stopped the death from occurring. However, the dog was hurt and I felt bad about that, but keep your yappy annoying dog out of my yard and that won't happen. This started a vicious battle between my ex and the scum bag where they would scream at each other over the fence and ended up with him calling Animal Control on us numerous times. After about the 3rd or 4th time I finally called Animal Control and told them that they were being used as a tool of harassment by my delusional neighbor and if they didn't stop I was going to sue everyone. I have not heard from them since. 

My ex worked for a short time (her jobs were always short...but that's a whole other can of worms) as a prison guard. This is how we found out that scum bag was a parolee. We didn't get any other info about him other than he'd been in jail for 10 years. Lovely. In her training as a prison guard she learned to spot different types of tattoos and she recognized several of his tattoos as being Aryan Nations tattoos. Double lovely. It did explain his nasty treatment of my ex. Hates the lesbians too. 

Luckily after the ex moved out we've lived side-by-side in quiet hate and solitude. He got rid of his dogs so that has kept the peace. I had my stepdad come over to "fix the fence" and flex some muscle so he knew not to screw with me anymore or that Dale would come over and pound him. That's what I imagine he thought anyway. Dale wouldn't pound anyone, but he has the handy advantage of looking big and mean and scary. 

Things have taken a turn for the weird this past year. We don't think scum bag has any electricity over at his house. He cooks everything outside on a smoker/grill (which has an added bonus of making our backyard smell like a campfire 24-7, YUCK). He has a wood burning stove inside that is ALWAYS going and we have not seen any signs of lights on in the evening in about 6 months. I'm thinking he is in the poor house in a major way. I keep hoping it is a sign that his house is about to be foreclosed on, but since his mom actually owns the house (another useful tid bit we found out along the way) it probably isn't. He's just a weird scum bag who was sent to torture me until we move. 

In sum, I hate my stupid neighbor.