I headed down to my office this morning with a bounce in my step, thinking this was the first day in a month that I’d have a clear run at the manuscript. I had big plans, my friends — big plans — and then I opened the door.
Oh my fucking god, the smell that came out. I thought one of the cats had dragged another lizard in there, or maybe a cane toad, and left it rotting over the weekend.
So the next couple of hours were given over to cleaning the place out. First of all, I removed my trusty old cowhide rug and took it out to have a UV bath in the sun out the front. I really thought this might be the source of the problem, because it has been in the past. Lizards crawl underneath it to get away from the cats, they die in there, and you’re off to the races.
But it didn’t smell particularly bad this morning, and when I went back to the room, the stench was still there. So I began going into all the nooks and crannies, and yeah, I did find a number of dead lizards in there. Eventually removed them all. Still didn’t smell real good.
So I thought: time to get serious.
I filled up a bucket with boiling water, poured in a heap of disinfectant, and got to scrubbing the concrete floor from one end of the room to the other. I pulled forward my gym session because I figured it was the kind of thing I could do during my rest periods between my back squats. That worked pretty well: push out a set, go in and mop the floor for three minutes; push out a set, mop the floor for three minutes. This went on for about an hour or so.
At the end of it, I turned a big arse industrial fan on the wet concrete to dry it out and went upstairs to have my lunch. I was just about to go back and restart the day when Thomas turned up looking for a lift to an appointment because it was brutally hot outside.
I said yes — my day was already in tatters — and then I looked at the sky.
Oh my fucking god, again. Hell was coming. A giant wall of storm clouds to the south, where the bad storms normally come from.
I started doing calculations: could I get him to his appointment in time and find some undercover parking, or was I going to get caught by giant hailstones, which seem to be the only kind we get these days?
While I was standing there for a minute pondering it, the storm got bigger and blacker and meaner, and that was the end of that conundrum. We put the car back under the house. I unplugged all of my electrical equipment, and now I’m sitting in my office in the dark mid-afternoon, dictating this on my iPhone.