After two-plus miles on the treadmill and two nights of very little sleep, I was looking forward to a good night's sleep Friday night, at least eight straight hours unheeded by thunderstorms, hyperventilating dogs, and canine vomit. Maybe I was looking forward to it a little too much. Maybe I even said the thought out loud and thereby allowed it to succumb to the bad karma gods. I must have done something because I totally jinxed myself.First, I stayed up a little later than I intended. Although the later bedtime didn't throw off my my plans for slumber, what I discovered on the way to bed did. I had left the door unlocked since getting the mail eight hours earlier. I never do that. Never. Not both locks. My door knob has one of those fire safety locks, the kind you don't have to turn in case of a fire. I have left that one unlocked before, but I have never left the double bolt unlocked at the same time. Turning the double bolt when I walk in has become almost an automatic reaction, like flipping off the bathroom light. (Don't even ask me how many times in college I accidentally turned the light off on someone in the dorm showers because I was so used to turning off the bathroom light on the way out the door. I'm too embarrassed to answer.)
Since I have that realtor lock box on the front door, I suddenly became paranoid that maybe I wasn't the one who left it unlocked and that there was some crazy person waiting to get me from the shadows of my house. Sure, the dogs hadn't barked, and the alarm hadn't gone off, but at 1 a.m. those two things didn't mean a heck of a whole lot. After all, the alarm code is in the lock box, and I tend to tune out the dogs' barking after awhile. So what did I do? I called my mother, woke her up, and made her stay on the phone with me while I checked the house for ax murderers. Better safe and paranoid than sorry.
Cue Dumb Brunette Moment #2. While searching my closets for Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, I noticed a weird smell in my house, a sour odor that hadn't been there before and that seemed to get stronger the closer I got to the garage. My hot water heater is in the garage, my gas hot water heater. Guess what my next thought was. That's right, that I had a gas leak.
I didn't call 911. I didn't call ADT to see if my carbon monoxide detectors, which hadn't gone off, were functioning properly. I didn't even call the gas company. Instead, after sniffing my house from top to bottom--just picture a pajama-clad woman wandering around the house at 1:30 a.m. with two lap dogs at her feet sniffing everything that she can possibly sniff, including garbage, drains, carpet, food, furniture, and the hot water heater--I called my mom again.
Needless to say, after being woken up twice in the middle of the night, she wasn't too happy, but like I told her, would she have rather me let her sleep and then she could hear about me and the grand-dogs blowing up in a blaze of glory on the morning news? I asked her what natural gas smelled like. I got a groggy, "I don't know. It stinks." Yeah, like that answer helped.
So I made her stay on the phone with me again, only this time it was while I Googled "natural gas odor" instead of while I looked for the Boogie Man. According to everything that I read online that night, the additive that the gas companies add to gas makes it smell like sulfur or really bad farts. It doesn't make it smell like rotten lemons, which is what my house and, more importantly, my garage smelled like.
That information should have set my mind at ease, but it didn't. I became convinced that Atlanta Gas Light was the only gas company in the country to add a lemony-fresh smell to its natural gas. However, I wasn't so convinced that I thought it was necessary to call 911. Around 2 a.m., I went to bed instead. I figured if I was going to die, it might as well be in my sleep.
Obviously, I didn't die, but I did have an epiphany, albeit a day and a half later. Maybe it was that box of candles in the garage that stunk. It was hot Friday so maybe the high temps activated the scented candles and turned my garage into one, big, Glade plug-in. That could happen, right? And apparently it did. I took a whiff of the box yesterday and discovered that it was where the rotten lemon odor was coming from, not my hot water tank.
So the good news is, I'm not going to blow up if I light one of those candles. The bad news is I can be a totally idiot when I'm sleep deprived. Actually, I can be a totally idiot when I've had a good night's sleep as well, but at least this time I can blame the dumb brunette moment on the dumb blond dog who wouldn't let me sleep for two nights in a row.
