I Smell a Rat

This photo appeared on a friend’s Facebook page. Apparently one of his favorite restaurants had to close because of a skunk under their building. As they say in poker “I’ll see your skunk and raise you a dozen…”

Stoker and I love our quiet home on Brumby Road, but living in the country poses a few challenges. Coyotes trot by, worrying Stoker and driving Luke crazy. Raccoons come into our yard looking for water from the birdbaths when things are dry, and threatening to eat Diane’s Koi for a late night snack.

One time we noticed a distinct but faint odor of skunk in our house. We started to see skunks wandering around our yard and discovered that they had taken up residence in the crawl space under our house.

We were kind of desperate and I took to the internet trying to find a pest control company to deal with the problem. This turned out to be quite difficult, but then a miracle occurred and I stumbled across a real life Daniel Boone type who could trap anything. And he had the required Silver Card, a state license for structural pest control, so he was legit. I know about these things because I myself had a Brown Card, the agricultural pest control equivalent.

He came to our house over the course of three weeks and caught 13 skunks, three possums and a raccoon. We paid him for each visit and when he finally had them all I added a generous tip to his bill.

I got to thinking about the skunks yesterday when I started to notice another scent common in the country: the smell of a decomposing rat that crawled into our wall to die after eating the rat poison I put under the house. There is nothing you can do about the stench except wait it out, unless you want to tear all the sheet rock off of the interior walls.

Usually the problem goes away in a day or two, but this one seemed to be lingering. I asked Stoker if she noticed anything, and she said no. Then the light bulb came on..

When I had the flap, one of the many joys was the rather putrid odor. Since the wound was so close to my nostrils, I got a good whiff.

After I was de-flapped I felt so much better that I didn’t realize that the healing had to continue. What I though was a decomposing rat turned out to be my healing post-flap wounds. I finally realized how similar the two smells are. It isn’t as intense as before but it is still there.

The stitches are supposed to come out February 9. That should put and end to the dead rat smell I’ve been living with since December 28. I’m cleared to start exercising on February 2, which means I have zero cycling miles in my legs instead of the 600+ I usually do to start the year. They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but I think my cardio has lost the thread of how to climb anything higher than a freeway overpass.