Day 1: Walk in the door and smell a slight odor. Instruct a child to take the trash out.
Day 2: Walk in the door and smell a slightly stronger odor. Instruct all children to inspect the bottoms of their shoes for dog poo.
Day 3: Walk in the door and ask smell-deprived husband what in the world the smell could be.
Night 3: Lying in bed at 11:00, trying to fall asleep, convince yourself the smell permeating the entire house is a gas leak and this is the last day your family will spend on this earth. Make your husband get out of bed so the two of you can sniff out the leak. Smell- and sleep-deprived husband may claim to smell something in the basement just so he can say, "It's not a gas leak" and go back to bed.
Day 4: Walk in the door and get hit in the face with one of the nastiest odors you've ever smelled. Children walking in the door with you may fall over gagging and yelling, "Who pooped?" Decide an animal has died somewhere in the house.
Day 5: Husband sees this as a prime opportunity to get the basement cleaned in order to find the carcass. Kids grumble while cleaning, seeing as they don't have gas masks. No animal is found. Decision is made to live with it. Decomposition doesn't take that long.
Day 6: Say a little thank you prayer that no one has been scheduled to enter our house during decomposition week. Pray the stench doesn't resemble cigarette smoke, soaking into our clothes and leaving a wake of death smells everywhere we go.
Day 7: Realize the stench no longer reaches the far ends of the house.
Day 8: Make white chili in the crock pot to mask the smell all day.
Day 9: Walk in the door and realize the smell is almost gone.
Day 10: Walk in the door and smell the normal stink of an old farm house housing 6 kids. Happy to be back to normal, but scared of that day in the future when the skeleton is finally found. Pretty sure it will be someone here installing a new washing machine or cleaning out the vents or tuning up the furnace who will find it.
That will be a fun conversation.
Have a lovely day!
Bwahahahahahahaha. Well whatever it was it is gone. That's all that matters.
ReplyDeleteHave a fabulous day filled with lovely smells. ☺
Ain't that the truth! It's gone. Life can go back to normal.
DeleteThank you. :)
I once called in the gas company to eradicate what I thought was a leak and turned out to be a mouse carcass.... embarassment? YAH... It smells like the pits of hell.... glad its gone...
ReplyDeleteI learned my Buddhist lesson and now use have a heart traps and we relocate them to better neighborhoods.
DeleteHahahaha!!! Horrible, horrible smell. I once called the gas company thinking I had a leak. We had a leak, but it was the old septic tank leaking nastiness all over our backyard.
DeleteYou actually catch and release mice?? Huh.
My partner was a strict Buddhist... didnt want to think we could be taking down a relative in a swak trap or anything... One time he actually fell trying to avoid an anthill in the woods... me? I was ready to trudge all over that sucker! Now I trap moths in jars and let them go outside! go figure!
DeleteOh no! Now the animals are dying INSIDE your house!
ReplyDeleteI know! Apparently the ante had to be taken up a notch.
Delete(Makes sense to me!)
ReplyDeleteWe tried to kill mice with 'humane' poison bait things, (" the mice will find the bait, they will find it delicious and like it so much that they will invite all their little rodential friends to a potluck, the poison will get into their systems and they will decide to give up all mice activity and write a blog, swearing to do nothing else until they succeed. They starve to death" or so the Exterminator told Phyllis) The smell of decaying mice is not one you can easily forget and we too were praying for decomposition.
yeah, that doesn't sound humane in any way, shape, or form! For the mice or you! All that means is they die a slow death in a place you can't reach! Much better to put out the snap traps. Instant death and you know where to find them. Because that smell is horrendous!
DeleteTee hee hee!!! Day 5 is sooo true. There comes a point where you know you can't find or get to said dead thing, so you learn to deal with the smell until it doesn't stink anymore. We had a mouse-in-vent episode once. Stank to high heavens every time the air came on lol!! YUCK. Yay for having cats nowadays.
ReplyDeleteI would like to know how one tiny little mouse can smell bad enough to stink up an entire 3800 square foot house! Ridiculous.
DeleteWe won't have cats in the house, but once Roy the Wonderdog dies or gets to old to chase cats, we'll be getting some.
“Decomposition doesn't take that long.”
ReplyDeleteThat made me laugh out loud – and also made me wonder how you already knew this. Deal with dead bodies much?
Hahahaha!! I love new readers. I deal with dead bodies all the blasted time. Half the people who read regularly hit the follow button after reading the following post:
DeleteWell, crud. the link didn't work.
Deletehttp://a-fly-on-our-chicken-coop-wall.blogspot.com/2012/08/caution-graphic-photos-ahead.html
So....you're kind of, indirectly, a pig killer? You were right -- I'm now following you!
DeleteI assume all the pigs are accounted for. Have you checked the nest in the attic?
ReplyDeleteHa! The pigs are all in the freezer.
DeleteThe nest in the attic was removed before the odor started.
Lightbulb! (Said in Gru voice). Maybe it's the elusive bat from a few months ago?
ReplyDeleteChristine O:)
Ha! Fortunately, we did finally find it and catch it. Doesn't mean it's not another bat...
DeleteHahahahahahahahahahaha! I remember those days from living down south on an pig farm! Eventually you will find those skeletal remains and as long as they're not human, you're golden. Hahahahahahaha!
ReplyDeleteHa! Except that if it is something besides a mouse, I'm going to have nightmares about its friends coming in as a search party.
Deleteomg SO FUNNY. I can't believe you never found it?!?!
ReplyDeleteNever found it. There are lots of places for little critters to hide in this old house.
DeleteI wrote a long way back about "A Tale of the Smell that Came from Nothing." I came home and my apartment smelled of gas... everything is electric. The smell gets worse and the little voice in me say " ummm HELLO!!" so I knocked on my neighbors door. They could smell it too. We called our landlord who came along with some other people.... the smell was gone. They testing for a bunch of stuff and found nothing but boy did it smell like an egg had rolled under something and died (well they are already dead but you get the point), and I don't even eat eggs.
ReplyDeleteI almost didn't reply after the "I don't even eat eggs" part. ;)
DeleteIt only lasted that short amount of time?? How bizarre! And fortunate. I miss having a landlord to call when things go wrong.
lol! Only because I forget about them and they go bad. Give me a good over easy egg and I will eat it. =)
DeleteARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!!!!! You didn't find anything and you are good with that!!! I will eyeball a spider until G gets home to kill it before I will even leave the room! And no...there is no one else in the house to help. R will just look at it and walk right by...I just hope that he doesn't get bowled over by J2 running screaming out of the room. Yah...he takes after me. ;)
ReplyDeleteI NEVER KID!!!!!! :)
DeleteUm, it was dead. It's not like it could bite me.
How hard is it to put a shoe on and stomp on a spider? Of course, the thought of you standing on a chair, keeping an eye on a spider for hours while you wait for G makes me smile. :)
Ewwww. I betcha it was a mouse. I've smelled the mouse died in the wall smell. Yuck!!! There's a columnist I used to read, I can't think of his name - back in the day with Erma Bombeck. Anyway he wrote something funny along the lines of, "My wife can smell a grape rotting in the garbage disposal." I go sniffing around like a hound dog too and nobody smells the smell but me. And they seemed to get annoyed with my, "You don't smell that?""
ReplyDeleteYUCK! Glad it's gone--that's a terrible thought--something decomposing somewhere in your house!
ReplyDeleteIs this a good time to tell you how my grandparents' old farm house had civet cats living in the walls? And they would fight and do other things that sound like fighting but was probably civet cat love? And sometimes they would spray inside there? Oh, and die. They would die, too.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletewhen our daughter was two, she got into the low freezer and pulled out a box of broccoli. She then dropped it behind the sofa. For 6 months, we tried to find the smell. Finally moved all the furniture and found the moldy box. Disgusting. Kids create so many creative smells. :-)
ReplyDelete