I park in an underground lot several blocks from the Space Station. It’s pretty secure, but it’s also quite possibly the smelliest place in the entire universe. Every day I have to go up and down a flight of stairs to buy my parking pass, then return to the car to place it on the dash (face up please, or it’s a $30 ticket for you .. not that I’d know anything about that). That in itself isn’t the issue, it’s the staircase: every night, a thousand hobos and a thousand hobo sons gather in this staircase to pee out their woe. The air in that staircase is thick with the smell of urine, almost as though people were purchasing jugs of wolf piss and going to town. I’ve been in outhouses that smelled more pleasant than the Staircase of Perpetual Human Waste – it is beyond foul. I’ve tried breathing through my mouth instead of my nose, but that just leads to situations I’m not mentally or physically prepared to deal with – smelling the urine of a thousand thousand hobos is bad; tasting it through mouth breathing is a horror I cannot face. The staircase is bad. Very, very bad.

It seems that someone actually took offence to the stench to the point of Doing Something About It, though – today as I prepared to hold my breath until I saw spots I noted a definite tang of bleach in the air. I cautiously took a small sniff and affirmed my nasal findings – bleach. The Staircase of Perpetual Human Waste had been hosed down with a pressure washer full of Ajax, and while it’ll never be somewhere I’d want to hold a romantic picnic, I can at least breathe a little easier every morning. Not too deeply, though. The last thing I need is to pass out and be subject to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by the (albeit very nice) morning parking lot guardian dude.

I slept very poorly last night – too much excitement before bed. We spent much of our evening down at Josh and Shan’s, checking out Wii Play and engaging in some XXXTreme Mario Kart 64 action. I won two races – never underestimate the quiet power of the Toadstool! It’s easy to take the lead when the boys are busy mauling each other. I’ve heard rumours that our very own Wii is within city limits, after only three months of searching. Josh sniped one online for us and offered up his credit card to secure it – just one more person to whom we owe money. The list is getting disturbingly long, but at least we’ll have a Wii. Wiis work in cardboard boxes, right?