What-Not-To-Do Wednesday: The Villainous Vent

You may recall that a few weeks ago we saw a mouse in our house. Marnell pulled out three mouse traps and set them, two close to the kitchen and one near his recliner in the front room. (I wouldn’t set a mouse trap unless I were threatened with prison time, and even then it might depend on the prison.)

Well, the trap snapped successfully on the neck of the mouse and after school I had Nick dispose of the offending creature. All was well.

For a few days, at least.

Our house has this thing where every now and then a terrible odor emerges, seemingly from the walls. It happened a few weeks ago and drove us crazy. I don’t know if there is an inner passageway in the walls where creatures can travel, and then die, but it sure smelled like it.

Well, not long after Nick disposed of the remains of the mouse, another smell started. Ugh! First I thought maybe it originated in the bathroom but I finally pinpointed the vent above the children’s art table. For good measure I checked, the second mousetrap that Marnell had put close to the kitchen. No, no mouse. We should just put these traps away, I thought. We hadn’t noticed any more mice in our living space, so why bother keeping them out?

“I think the smell is coming through that vent,” I told Marnell. “It must be something in the wall again.”

I lit a fall cornucopia candle (from Stony Ridge Candles) in a desperate attempt to overpower the stench. It worked, as along as I sat at my desk in the corner of the room with the candle between me and the vent. But as soon as I walked toward the vent in the wall, the stench came back.

And what do you about a dead mouse in the wall?

Last night, I came home from work and Marnell and Nick came back from robotics just in time for us to go to prayer meeting?

“You know what I did before I went to robotics today?” Marnell asked. He sounded enormously pleased with himself.

“Celebrated your birthday?” I asked. I was feeling badly, because it was his birthday, but I hadn’t taken any treats to him at work because I was working too.

“Nope,” he said. “I emptied the dead mouse out of the trap by my recliner.”

“WHAT??!!” I said.

There are four of us living in this house, and we all are–we thought–intelligent human beings capable of understanding cause and effect. It really doesn’t take that many brain cells to check a set mouse trap when there is a terrible stench in the house. Dracko was at his mom’s, but Marnell, Nick, and I all laughed with sheer pleasure at how painfully stupid we had all been.

“It was pretty old,” Marnell added.

I should have said something about him being old himself now that he’s 42, and that maybe this increased wisdom led him to check the trap. But that’s how witty people think, and I’m not witty. That’s what my friends on Laurel Street are for.

Also, I don’t know the exact details one looks for on a mouse carcass to evaluate it’s age, and frankly I don’t care. What really matters is that the house now smells perfectly fine.

Thank God for Marnell, and his birthday wisdom!

Stay tuned for Sugarcane Saturday. 😀