Sometimes hardship means...

...cooking dinner whilst enduring the nostril-raping odor of your dad's nearby feet. It smells like week-old salami left out in an Egyptian sewer. He hath devised a two-pronged attack so that when you first step through the front door, you pass directly over his abandoned shoes. Synthetic, non-breathing shoes + no socks = unprecedented & unnatural chemical compositions. Then, before you realize you should not be breathing anymore (coma imminent!), you must walk by the other half of the team: his actual bare feet, left out to air in the closed-window environs of the living room.

It is insidious. I am three rooms away, and I can still memory-smell it, like it has left airborne molecules in my nose.

And now I must go make tri-tip steak and baked potatoes, armed only with minced garlic and one lone Mackintosh Apple scented Yankee Candle. I shall put the candle at the edge of the counter closest to the living room, to ward off as much as I can...