What's That Smell?

This is a little island I set up in my long, narrow kitchen.  I like to change it out seasonally.  Down below is a place for rolling pins and vintage bowls that I collect here and there when they are not ridiculously expensive.  This was a microwave cart in another life left out for garbage collection.  I love red spray paint, what can I say?

And there is my morning cup of Joe as is said in the Navy, in my dear Starbucks mug with the NY skyline and the yellow taxi in the lower left near the corn husks. One of the small luxuries of my life, which I'd find difficult to part with, is the cup of coffee, laced with cinnamon, which Bruce leaves for me every morning, in that cup.. On the weekends, we get all fancy and froth it up with a cool device my sister got me for my birthday.  It also froths eggs for amazingly fluffy omelets.

The last couple of mornings have been marred by THE SMELL (cue in the music from Jaws).  Ever have one of those phantom smells, unpleasant ones, of course, that waft from some unknown spot in your home?  You look in the fridge and the freezer.  Yesterday, we pulled out the stove and cleaned behind it.  Didn't help.

Lulu, a former stray who used to survive from garbage cans and road, kill now literally turns her nose up at plain ole kibble.  We rig up all manner of human food to put on top of the dreaded Kibbles and Bits to entice her.  Lately, her snack de jour has been stinky canned salmon.  She loves it...the stinkier, the better.  The smell first thing in the morning makes me want to barf.

I pulled everything off the counter and cleaned with diluted bleach.  I thought I might have spilled some stinky salmon juice on the curtains I have under my sink.  Nope, but they might have needed a wash and an iron, though, so I did that.  

I boiled an apple and put cinnamon and vanilla extract in the water,  The downstairs was suffused with cinnamony goodness, but that smell about mid-kitchen was still there, getting grosser and grosser.

That smell was starting to take on epic proportions for me. Ugh...was it a dead mouse?  We don't have mice, but it is an old house and it was possible that one could have happened in during this cold snap.

See that cleverly eclectic Indian corn and all on the kitchen island?  I used to have a cool glass pumpkin filled with little gourds.  Gourds, which were liquidizing and rotting inside.  Not too cleverly eclectic.  The word ooze comes to mind.  Actually, if you get right down to it, it was a totally disgusting science experiment.

I really wonder about myself when I realize how many times I walked past it but didn't actually see it.