Mid-November

I spent today (and yesterday) engaging in more work than a guy really ought on a weekend.  Between cleaning out the gutters, raking and mowing the yard, shuttling child back and forth to her play performance, attending the play performance, and assorted cooking and cleaning I think I missed a needed day of rest.  

Yet the end result is well worth it.  Clean house, good-looking yard, and a freezer full of half a hog.  (Processing locker was almost an hour's drive away.)  

Speaking of clean house my cleaning this weekend took a slightly different form.  For a number of days now when you sat in the easy chair in the big room every now and then you'd get a whiff of something not pleasant.  Almost like something dead.  

We speculated it might be a dead mouse, perhaps in the wall somewhere or (God forbid) in the vent.  

So, since Geogal was away this weekend functioning as a sponsor for a church youth retreat and Geoana was occupied with her play-related activities I decided to clean up our big room and determine the source of the odor.  

Those of you who remember the Froot Loops commercial from the late 1970's can hum along:

"Follow your nose (follow your nose), it always knows (it always knows)"

Didn't take me long to pinpoint that the source of the unpleasant smell was a basket behind the easy chair which contained accessories and power cords for our electronics.  And now also featured a dead mouse.  

Seems mousey got hung up in a velcro iPod nano holder and apparently assumed room temperature as a result.  

Put on the rubber gloves, get all this staff outside, and begin sorting out what needs to go and what we need to keep.  And I dispatch the mouse carcass to the creek area in the backyard (nature can take it from here).  

Garbage bag, bleach wipes, baking soda, and a blast of Lysol later, you'd never know there was anything gross in that big room.  In the interest of full disclosure this is not the first dead mouse I've ever found in this house but I tend to find them pretty early in the process of decay.  Plus since we are now in the season where everything insect and rodent tries to move inside due to the colder weather outside something like this happening isn't a huge surprise.  

But now we can sit and relax in the living room without that occasional nasty smell.  

I also earned major big husband points by taking care of this issue while wife was gone.  That right there is worth plenty.