A few days ago Clancy came up and said, “Will, we’ve got to do something about the garage. It smells awful in there.”

To which I replied, with not an ounce of sarcasm, “Hot damn! That’s great!” and rushed down there in excitement.

Clancy did not know that I was running a little experiment and the smell in the garage confirmed a relatively best-case scenario. As I mentioned in the original DAMN That Odor post:

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

With time, that smell only got worse and worse and I was sort of able to pinpoint the smell to somewhere in the trunk. There was a jug of fake fuel or anti-freeze or fertilizer or something (the label came off) and I had hoped that was it. Taking it out seemed to do no good, though. The rest of the contents of the trunk seemed pretty straightforward: Some CDs, a few comic books, roadmaps and atlases, some dominoes, and some gift that was directed to Clancy’s mother that somehow ended up in my car trunk. I thought maybe it was the gift, but it was from a place that didn’t do anything food or perishable. So my fear was that it was the Mystery Bottle and that some had spilled into the trunk and that it was going to smell this way for the rest of the car’s natural life.

So I decided to take the contents of the trunk and put it all in the garage. After a day or two, either the car would still smell and the garage would be fine or the other way around. Whatever the case, the odor was something that I was going to have to take care of before I swapped out cars with my father.

So the garage stunk and that meant that my car was not terminally stinky. Unfortunately, as with the trunk, it was really difficult to isolate the smell. I could tell that it was coming from the trunk, but I could not smell any particular item and notice that it smelled stronger than the other items. That’s what made me think that maybe something had spilled. And so it was in the garage. By process of elimination, I determined that it had to be either the domino can or the mother-in-law’s gift. The domino can contained… dominoes. So we said “screw it” and opened the gift addressed to Clancy’s Mom, which contained… gravy.

Extremely pungent gravy. Noxious gravy. Gravy that, as near as we can figure, has probably been in there since last Thanksgiving. The smell was hard to pin-point because it was leaking out of the sealed box. Even when I held the thing in my hands and sniffed through the cracks I wasn’t sure. It was only when it was opened and the garage exploded with foul that it was settled. The sealed box was likely something that the mother-in-law had simply re-purposed and was strangely thorough about repackaging tightly.

So the car is fixed. Now… if only I could figure out what to do about the damn smelly garage.