The exorcism of my laundry room...

I love my little house, but sometimes I just want to break up with it! I have to remind myself to give it a little grace. I mean, it's 56 years old for chrissakes. Nevertheless, I often dream of a house where the bathrooms are big enough to walk straight in (and not have to scuttle sideways between sink and shower... yes, i have to do this.)(heck, I'd even settle for just the 'bathrooms', plural!), a house where there are pantries, shelves, and all manner of storage options, a house that doesn't have a basilisk living in the crawlspace, a house with new pipes, drains, and even, dare i say it, an INSINKERATOR! Oh, how I do daydream...

But, being a firm believer of working with what you have, making the best of it, and being thankful... I will cease my home-bashing for the moment and get on with my story...

I'm mainly issuing a formal apology to the friends who came for dinner last night and so sweetly did not mention the glaringly obvious gross smell emanating from somewhere.
I cooked a pork roast all day yesterday, and hopefully that smell did enough to cover up the other one lurking about. Hopefully.
But, all I know is, this morning, upon waking, "It" was here. "It" haunted me all day, and I almost lost my sanity while trying to find the source of it. Is it the drains? Is it the trash can? Is it the rotting fetid corpse of Satan!? Yes, it drove me to madness. If you had been a fly on my wall at 8:30AM, you would have seen me shoving a concoction of baking soda, kosher salt, vinegar and boiling hot holy water down the kitchen sink. And still... no relief.
I had to get out!... So Jack and I went to lunch, the playground, and the grocery store.

When I walked back through the front door, I nearly fainted. The smell hit me in the face like a pimp that means business!
Somehow, I managed to get the groceries put away and then frantically started lighting candles, and slicing lemons to place around the kitchen and over the drains in the sink. Jack wanted to go out onto the back porch (and who could blame him, poor kid.), it was as I was opening the back door, that I came into the strongest concentration of evil vapors yet! It was coming from the laundry room. On hands and knees I searched... but could find nothing. So I did the only thing logical at that point... I called Andy at work and started raving about how he needed to come home now! I'm going to lost it! I need him to help me exorcise the demons!
He called me a nutcase and promptly hung up on me.

Then, by some divine inspiration, I opened the washing machine.

AAAHHHHH!!!

A towel that I had used to sop up a gallon of milk I had spilled 2 nights ago still lay in all of it's putrid disgusting rottenness in the bottom of the machine!!! I nearly wept. I turned the water on HOT, poured in a ton of CLOROX, said two Hail Marys and did that cross your heart thing...


And. I'm. Spent.