tonight was a little weird.

i took some of the tape off of the kitchen cabinets, and what it revealed was this overpowering smell of bay leaf, that i remember smelling when i first moved in - and which was in fact the initial reason that i taped up the cabinets. the smell of marijuana only presented itself once the smell of bay leaf had subsided.

see, here's the thing: i don't actually care about the smell. this is a rank, nasty smell - granted. but, it's a minor annoyance. what i care about is the damage caused by second hand smoke - which means that burning sage inside would be as bad as smoking pot. worse, really, because it's pointless.

as it is, i don't know if the request not to smoke was heeded or not because i couldn't smell anything over the bay leaves.

i'm not sure where the smell of bay leaves is coming from, but i suspect that re-opening the hole on the bottom of the cabinet has left me at the whim of a number of tenants. i remember concluding at the time that the cabinet must be connected to six units moving down, around the plumbing, and that it was just never properly finished - thereby meaning that i can plausibly smell the guy three floors down when he makes a burrito. it's maybe facile to suspect that the smell of indian food is coming from the indian tenant, but it could very well be true. at the least, this is the same stench that came in when i moved in, so it's not infrequent. and, in the end, whether this is by design (by the pothead) or by coincidence doesn't matter.

i need to reiterate that bad smalls are not the same thing as second-hand smoke, and that this is a fundamentally different type of problem.

nonetheless, while the tape was only partly successful in keeping the smell of marijuana smoke out of the cabinets, it was actually quite successful in keeping out the smell of everybody else's food. if she surprises me and continues to smoke outside for any length of time, if she even is at all right now, i'm still going to need to get somebody in to fix the cabinet. i had an easy solution that worked well, but we can go with a more expensive solution if the property owner would prefer. i don't expect this happens; i'll be surprised if she's not blazing all day tomorrow.

for right now, i'm going to have to suffer this, keeping in mind the following truth: if i can smell their stinky herbs, then they can smell my fresh citrus air fresheners, too. and, i can be pro-active in pushing nice smells down to ward off their evil ones.

i've got about 1/4 of the tape off, but in the process of everything happening over the last few days, i've aggravated an injury i suffered last week when i was cleaning up my bicycle. it's a small cut on my right thumb (the most important finger.....) that has reopened and that i'd like to close before i continue with the process of ripping up tape off of baseboards. so, i'm going to wait until monday before i get back to that.

i actually don't have anything planned this weekend; it seems to be quiet in detroit. i may change my mind at the last minute, but i'm expecting to stay in and type. i keep pointing out that december shouldn't take long, once i can sit down and do it. if the weekend goes through uneventfully, i guess i'll get to clearing off the tape on monday; if it doesn't, i guess i'll file the t2 on monday morning, and focus on looking for new apartments, then pull the rest of the tape off as i'm moving out.