Katrina Disbelief

Howdy,

This is Nick. I don't ever blog, but bear with me. Gutting houses is a smelly job. The particular house that I helped to gut was putrid. Upon entering, we found parts of the kitchen in the family room. The family that had lived there had a lot of glasses and dangerous things lying around. The kitchen sink had become home to a rather large rat, approximately one foot long (including tail). Now my first mistake was letting everybody know there was a rat... When I flushed it out of the sink it made a b-line toward a herd of girls who were gutting the garage. The screams I heard were piercing. But soon the rat was hidden in the tall grass outside.

Back to the smells. I could devote a whole paragraph to the smells. As a matter of fact I just might right now! In the bedroom, there was a pile of socks about a foot high that I don't think had ever dried out since the flood. Now these socks weren't just wet, they were oily! Now to give you a good sense of what I mean by oily, if you could imagine ten rotten bananas in a gallon of olive oil blended together, soak socks in that and you have the sensation we experienced.

In the kitchen there were bowls and containers full of rotten... ocean, for lack of a better word. Normally ocean smells sweet and salty and happy, like an ocean, but this ocean had been fermenting for two years. Needless to say, two years ago was not a very good year.

The apparel we had consisted of masks and gloves. Now, I had been having a runny nose problem since a week prior to this trip, so my nose was running so much in that mask it was hard to distinguish the sweat from the snot. I swallowed an awful lot. Speaking of sweat, the house didn't get very good air flow, so man and woman alike were sweating like pigs. But as my buddy Brent reminds me, pigs don't even sweat. So I don't know where that leaves us. But we did sweat an awful lot.

In conclusion, it was hot, sweaty, stinky (I purposefully avoided sitting near any girls after work) and uncomfortable... but on the emotional side of things, to be honest with you I really wasn't in a happy mood, so I had this "break down the walls" mentality. Nothing ever really hit me as I was cleaning the house, but I was conscious of the fact that this was someone's home, and we were gutting a lot of memories in addition to junk.

These are my thoughts brought to a loving close.

Love, Nick.