This was not going to be my blog topic for today.  My blog was going to be about Valentine’s Day and good stuff for it but after my ride home, I had to switch gears…

Boys are weird ~ no doubt about it.

I don’t normally drive Zach’s Tuesday carpool.  Usually, that’s Stan’s job ~ I do the early morning stuff and Stan does the late night stuff.  I’m the early bird, he’s the night owl.  But tonight was different.  All of today and into tonight Stan has been in bed with a bad case of sciatica so it was up to me to get Zach and his team mate, Ryan, to practice.

Driving there was routine, if a bit boring.  Zach fell asleep within minutes of picking up Ryan, leaving me to not converse with him, lest I wake “Sleeping Beauty.”  It was the ride home that almost sent me over the edge…

Zach and Ryan piled into the car at precisely 9:48.  As soon as Zach closed the door, my olfactory senses went into overload…the smell emanating from these smelly boys was overwhelming and I told them so.  Both took offense saying they had showered.  I offered my apologies but stuck to my story that they stink, stank, stunk!  And then I figured out the source of the putrid odor wafting in the warmth of the heater ~ and NO it wasn’t the hockey gear, which would have been a good guess, by the way.  It was Zach’s shoes.  They smelled like rotten cat pee…not that cat pee ever smells good but these went beyond the malodorous stench by the umpteenth degree.  It took everything I had to not gag as Zach said, “Fine, then I’ll take them off.”  Yeah, like that’s gonna make it all better.  Thanks, Zach.

Both boys professed to not smell one cotton picking thing.  Both boys said they are immune to bad smells.  Both boys said they actually like the smell of a hockey locker room and when they are away from it too long they miss it.  Seriously???  How the hell can you miss the smell of funk mixed with sweat mixed with God only knows what else, but the smell of the locker room and the hockey gear resembles the stench from Zach’s shoes…rotten cat pee!  And how the HELL can they think that smells alright, even missing it sometimes??  That’s just weird no matter how you slice it!

As we were driving  home we came across a dead skunk in the road.  Mix that with the stench of the shoes and I thought my head was going to explode.  I don’t know which smell was worse…the shoes, the dead skunk or the combination thereof.  I have to say I nearly gagged and I did start coughing when the skunk smell mixed with the shoe smell.

By the time we got home I couldn’t wait to get the hell outta Dodge and into fresh air.  I threw the car in park, wrenched my door open and inhaled as deeply as I could ~ as many times as I could.  The night air was cool, clear, sweet and refreshing.  After the ride home with the stinky boys who thought nothing of the putrescence filling the car, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

So, tomorrow after Lacrosse conditioning I will take Zach shopping for shoes so we can pitch the ones that smell like something the dog wouldn’t even drag in and replace them with sweet smelling sunshine ~ for the love of my big boy who is just a little weird!  (But then again, so am I!)