We have a gross mystery! This reminds me of the times I have searched/scoured the kitchen for That Terrible Smell, and it has almost always been (1) the sink disposal or (2) potatoes. Except this time it is happening not in our kitchen, but in our car.

Here are the facts:

• Wednesday afternoon, Elizabeth asked me to give her a ride home from school, and I did, and nothing seemed amiss in the car. If it is helpful: the car in question is a Toyota Camry—a 4-door sedan.

• Thursday morning, I got into the car to go to work, and there was A Terrible Smell. The smell category was “spoiled milk”/”liquefied potatoes.”

• Thursday afternoon after work, I looked around a little to see if somehow something from one of my grocery store trips (Monday and Wednesday, or the previous Wednesday) had rolled into a dark corner to commit dark deeds. In the trunk, I saw a little bit of liquid down underneath the floor, in a hard-to-reach area by the spare tire. It smelled accurate. It looked like a couple of teaspoons’ worth at most. My starting theory was that a grocery item (milk carton, half-and-half, yogurt?) had leaked a little bit, and then gone very, very bad.

• Thursday afternoon/evening, I left the trunk of the car open, to air it out / dry it up.

• Friday morning, the smell was CONSIDERABLY MORE INTENSE. I thought, “Okay, it’s only a couple of teaspoons’ worth, but surely if I CLEAN THAT UP the smell will go away more quickly.” I took the carpet layer out of the trunk to get at the spill, only to see that there was A LOT MORE LIQUID THAN PREVIOUSLY OBSERVED. Like, a pint? or more? I am not good at estimating. But it took a roll and a half of store-brand paper towels to soak it all up. Paul had to take the spare tire out so that I could get at all of it.

Did you want a description of the fluid? It was translucent and yellowish/brownish. I guess kind of like pee, except it did not really look like pee, and did not smell at all like pee. It smelled like spoiled milk.

One theory is that a grocery item (gallon of milk, quart of light cream, quart of yogurt, etc.) LEAKED. But…then surely we would have noticed a gallon of milk / quart of light cream / quart of yogurt that was MISSING A PINT OR SO OF MATERIAL.

Another theory is that an entire grocery item (potato, pint of ice cream, individual container of yogurt, etc.) was left behind in the trunk, and went bad. But no such item, or any packaging/residue of such item, was discovered during the excavation and clean-up.

Another theory is that Paul’s coffee-with-cream thermos could have leaked everywhere, without him realizing it. But: (1) this is the car I drive and (2) even if he used my car, as he sometimes does, he would not have put his thermos in the trunk.

Elizabeth wondered if perhaps the trunk lid has a leak, and rainwater got in and then developed a bacteria or something and went very smelly. This is a possibility. But…would water go THAT BAD? And we don’t immediately see anything that looks like a hole in the car trunk.

I can’t find it on Twitter now, but someone started a thread for people to recommend VERY LONG books, and someone else responded by recommending The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox (Target link, Amazon link). I don’t think I follow any of the people involved—not that “seeing tweets by people whose tweets you want to see” has ever been Twitter’s plan or interest, but it does make it harder to re-find the tweet I’m looking for. And as it happens, I WAS glad to have seen the tweet, and I wish I could find it again because whatever they said about this book was enough for me to request it from my library system and read it without knowing any more, and so I would like to wield that tweet at you and see if it makes YOU go read the book.

(image from Target.com)

I linked to the paperbacks because Target has only the paperback available and it bothered me to link to one paperback and one hardcover; but Amazon’s hardcover price is actually less than the paperback price right now, and now that I have finished reading the book I have ordered a copy for myself in hardcover, because this book seems too thick to be manageable in paperback. If I hadn’t been so impulsive, I would have instead bought a copy from eBay. And for you, I recommend being even less impulsive than THAT and seeing if your library system has it.

I think the very best way to read it is to go into it without knowing anything about it: that’s one reason I’m recommending LIBRARY, because then you can follow that advice at no risk at all. The tweet I can’t remember used a description that was something about it being a book that “had everything” and “didn’t even seem long” and “you’ll wish it were longer,” and that seems pretty good to me as an enticement. Also, I might be making those quotes up. Those might be things I’D say about it.

I will leave a little spacer here for those of you who would like to go get the book and read it without knowing anything about it, and then I will go on to discuss a little more about it, for those of you who aren’t going to read it otherwise, and for those of you who might be looking at it as a gift idea.

I will be giving what I would consider vague, fair-game spoilers: they will be about the TYPE of book it is, with some mention of THEMES and ELEMENTS, plus things you could get by reading the book flap. I personally was glad to have read it without receiving these vague, fair-game spoilers—but if I HAD received these vague, fair-game spoilers, I would not have considered the book spoiled. It’ll be the equivalent of, like, telling you that a book is a light funny romance, when maybe you wouldn’t have guessed that from the cover because, unlike every single other light funny romance coming out right now, maybe the book in question didn’t have a sherbet-colored cover with cartoonily-drawn characters (perhaps a glasses-wearing woman who has lost one of her high-heeled shoes is being pushed in a wheelbarrow by a tousle-haired man in a business suit!) and a whimsical, children’s-book-esque title such as Fiona McFly Gets By or whatever.

La la la. We are waiting for some of us to leave. We will not be talking about anything you can’t come back and read LATER, after you have first read the book without knowing anything about it.

La la la. Just filling some space.

La la. It’s not even going to be something you’ll want to come back and read later, I don’t think, because I’m still only going to speak about it in general terms.

La la la. Loop-de-doo.

This is the KIND of book that starts out seeming like one kind of book (a book that takes place in our familiar reality, albeit with the rage-inducing murder of a main character’s sister in the very first sentence), and then after a hundred or so pages following this main character’s life and feelings and memories and family, the book abruptly makes a shift into a book with magic and other worlds and mythical beings and so forth. Like the Narnia books, kind of, where first some kids are spending their holidays with some old uncle in some old house, and then abruptly they’re in a snowy forest and there’s a talking faun. I greatly enjoyed encountering this shift with NO PRIOR WARNING: I was amazed and enchanted. But if I’d known about the shift, it would only have made me MORE likely to read the book, so.

It is a LONG book, but it did not feel long, and I wanted there to be more of it. There are parts that are easy to race right past, because you want to get to the next part of the action—and then you realize you raced right past some of the action because it was so calmly told. There is real-life peril! There is a lot of mixed religious/mythological stuff: Odin! Purgatory! Angels! Demons! Souls! Ancient scrolls! Special swords! There are underlying themes of stolen land, stolen people, bad bargains that no one fixes because it’s been so long with things the way they are. There’s some environmental stuff, and there are some brief parts about food/nutrition that made me a little eye-roll-y. There is friendship! romance! superior species / inferior species interactions! other kinds of relationships! There’s a lil bit of sex, but it’s not explicit. There are themes about secrets, and family, and revenge, and regret. There’s MAGIC! SHAPE-SHIFTING! PORTALS TO OTHER WORLDS! I had a lot of fun reading it, and would definitely want to read it again.

I am very late to this post, really TOO late for practical purposes—but I was distracted by college-selection stuff and then I was out of town (my brother and I went on a fun quick trip to see our parents), and so it is only now I have thought to say this: If you are someone who would normally think of Mother’s Day as a special day for yourself, but your family has historically been…lacking…in celebrating that day, this is your reminder to lay in some supplies.

What I personally like to do is buy some Plausible Deniability Items. Perhaps a can of Pillsbury orange rolls from the grocery store, or a nice box of pastries from the grocery store bakery! Why, we might have those ANYWAY on a Sunday! Perhaps a box of See’s chocolates—it’s not for Mother’s Day, no, it’s just that I like to collect the pretty SPRING FLOWERS TINS they normally have around May! Maybe I buy something that’s been in my online shopping cart for a long time; the early-May timing is merely a coincidence. Anything where, if the family DOES in fact take action this year, I won’t feel silly for having made these purchases I might easily have made ANYway.

If you’re like me, you might feel silly no matter what. You might feel self-indulgent, or self-pitying, or over-reactive, or like it’s Worse Than Nothing if you have to do these things for yourself. You might think, “This is ridiculous: I don’t REALLY CARE about Mother’s Day!” Well then, isn’t it nice that you didn’t buy those items with any special day in mind, but instead just happened to buy them in early/mid-May! But what I have learned is that when Mother’s Day actually arrives, I am very glad to have a few things on hand, even if ahead of time I thought it was worse than nothing.

This year I bought the full-ounce bottle of Pacifica French Lilac perfume that LAST year I bought the .33 roller size of. (It smells like if you had a lilac bush growing right outside your open window, or I guess growing right outside your shoulder.) It was on a sale, so I might have bought it anyway.

(image from Target.com)

And I finally hit the buy button on the lilac cotton sweater I’ve allowed to linger in my Amazon cart forever, despite already owning the same sweater in green and knowing I love it; I got the green one on some $15 flash sale, so for some reason was balking at spending $25. (For sizing purposes: I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy, and I like this sweater in XXL—but I do not like FITTED clothing. I like to be INSIDE a sweater.)

(image from Amazon.com)

At the grocery store today I bought a Cadbury Caramello bar and a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar, which I might have bought anyway, as they are some of my favorites and they were on sale. I bought the tube of Pillsbury orange-iced rolls, which I might have bought anyway, as a nice treat for any Sunday morning. I bought a pot of sprouted tulip bulbs, which I DEFINITELY would have bought anyway, ever since finding out that if I then carelessly flung those tulip bulbs (after the tulips wilted) into a carelessly shoveled hole in the ground at ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG TIME OF YEAR (spring), they would COME UP AGAIN THE NEXT YEAR, LIKE FREE BONUS RERUN TULIPS.

Also: if you normally do chores of any kind on Sunday (grocery shopping, bathroom-cleaning, laundry, changing the sheets, etc.), may I suggest you plan to do those things sometime between now and the end of the day Saturday? It is very nice, on a Sunday that is just like any other Sunday, to not have any chores to do. If you normally make dinner on Sunday, plan to make a dinner you personally like best, even if (especially if) other people don’t like it as much as you do; or, spontaneously, for no particular reason, plan to order take-out from a place you like, just on a whim because you don’t feel like cooking that particular evening.

Well! Elizabeth decided on a school: she chose the art college within a university, rather than the only-art-college.

THE MOMENT AFTER WE PAID THE DEPOSIT, her whole mood changed from morose to perky. She started filling out the roommate-selection application, complaining perkily the whole time about the dumb questions. She started talking perkily about which things from her room she planned to bring to college, and which she planned to leave behind, and which she planned to use the transition as an opportunity to cull. Her voice stopped doing that about-to-cry thing. She went from looking unhappy to looking happy. She started shopping for Senior Prom.

I was very relieved, because up until that point, my main concern was her despondency about the choice: I wished we had tried harder to find a place she Really Wanted; I felt bad that she felt like she was choosing between two such imperfect options; also I felt a little irritable because I TRIED to help her find more appealing options but she kept being so meh about everything and rejecting my attempts!! Anyway, it was good to see her perk up.

Now we wait to hear from Edward’s first-choice/waitlisted college. They say they don’t have a ranked waitlist; instead, they reconsider the entire waitlisted pool again, for the remaining available slots, like a microcosm of how they consider the entire pool of applicants for the original available slots. I wish I had ANY IDEA how many waitlisted students there were, and/or what Edward’s chances are. Are we talking a 1 in 100 chance? a 1 in 1000 chance? a 1 in 2 chance? Is Edward a shoo-in as long as the expected number of students decline their acceptance, or is he a long-shot even if there are record-setting declinings?? We just don’t know. We also don’t know what the financial-aid situation will be, but it seems like it would be less for a waitlisted student than for a first-round choice.