Strange Odors

Christmas decorations have been distracting me. It takes a long time to put all of them up, but not really quite as long to take them down. Well, they are all down, but they are waiting in my hallway as a kind of holding area until my husband can help me put them in the attic. The Christmas tree lays forlornly in 4 pieces on the floor. It is a huge sucker! That has its own box in the garage. It is waaaaay too heave to put in the attic.

We have had a delay in getting the Christmas stuff in the attice. It's kind of a funny story though (sort of). Last Monday, we started to smell an odor in our master bathroom and master bedroom. At first, we just thought that it was somebody forgetting to spray air freshener...after all it is a bathroom. But then the next day the odor became stronger. My husband insisted that it was needing air freshener. The next day, it just plain stunk! The odor was worse. I started to panic because we had some plumbing problems in the summer and I was worried that we were about to have plumbing problems again. But something kept bothering me about that smell. It didn't really smell like sewage. Later in the day, after frequent comings and goings from the master suite, it hit me! This is not a dirty bathroom or plumbing problems. This is the smell of decomp! We have something in our walls that died! The smell was horrible!

We didn't quite know what to do. So we called our exterminator who told us he would come the next day to see if there was anything he could do. That night, I slept on the couch with a very happy cat because usually he is not allowed to sleep with us. My husband slept in the bottom bunk in my son's room. The exterminator came as promised. There is a second attic space above my son's room, with an access just inside his bedroom doorway. He went up there and checked it out. When he came down, he said, "Yep, that's rat smell." Apparently, he had put rat poison up there almost a year ago based on some activity that he saw. One of those little suckers probably ate it and then fell down in the wall and died. He said the odor would last 3-7 days. We are on day 5 of sleeping elsewhere.

I miss my bed.