Mr. Watson, Something is Afoul!

Thursday night My Sweetie was very, very embarassed to ask me if I had gas. This may not seem like anything to some of you, but in our house, unless we need medical attention, we do not discuss bodily functions. Of any kind. So I looked at him like he was crazy and asked him why he would ask me that. He said he smelled something bad in the entryway by the coat closet. I went over there and couldn't smell anything. I've been getting over a slight cold so my sniffer wasn't up to snuff, but I said, "Maybe it's the trash." He took the trash out and that was the end of the whole thing. Well, the end of the whole thing for Thursday night. Friday after I got up and walked through the entryway, I almost gagged. My first thought was "Oh NO! Our sewer pies are leaking under the house!!" I bent down and sniffed near the floor and the smell was not as strong. I stood back up, lifted my head and sniffed and realized the smell was coming from above. Then I knew we had a dead animal in the attic. I called "my guy." My guy is the man that replaced my shower last year that I call for everything. I called him to get a referral for someone to put my mural behind my toilet and to get a plumber when I was replacing my faucets and the shut off valves started leaking. I can do faucets, but I'm not going to mess with a shut off valve. Anyway the poor guy was almost at a loss (and most likely wishing he had never given me his card) and mentioned several pest control companies. We have a contract with one because of our past termite problem. (And yes I could have linked to all of these stories but it would have been link city in here.) So I thanked him profusely like I always do and called my termite company. The girl that answered the phone referred me to a company that takes care of this type of thing. I called them. About three hours later, the guy showed up.


I was very lucky that it was a gorgeous day and I could open all the windows - otherwise I would not have been able to eat my lunch. Dead animals have a dead animal smell. The guy was very interesting. I told him, "You should be on that TV show." It's a show about nasty jobs and he told me they were in talks with the guy. They do all sorts of animals and as a matter of fact he had just come from a bee job and had been stung several times and his right eye was almost swollen shut. I should have done a close up of the truck so you could read the stuff on it. Well he went up in my attic and sure enough, there was dead Mrs. Brisby. She was about 8 inches (not counting the tail) long. Isn't she lovely?

I had seriously been hoping it was a dead squirrel up there because rats are just gross. Animal guy was trying to tell me that rats and squirrels are the same except "squirrels get better press" which is a very old joke. I've also heard that rats and squirrels only differ because squirrels have pretty bushy tails. I told animal guy: No. The difference is squirrels go around in the daytime doing their thing in public whereas rats sneak around and hide in the dark like they are up to something. Speaking of up to something, it cost $300. Rats! That price included some chemicals where Mrs. Brisby died and he did an inspection to see where she got in. He found a huge hole under the eaves by our front door. He told me to just put cardboard over it to see if it was still being used, so we did that this morning:

The good news is the smell is gone and we found the hole. But $300? I'll go up there myself if I ever smell a dead animal in the attic again. Oh, and that it wasn't sewage pipes. That would have cost a LOT more than $300. See? I always see the good side of things.