You know how it goes. We walked in the door yesterday after a long clunkity-clunkity drive down the infamously clunkity Great Lake State stretch of the I75 SUV Speedway. Both the beach urchins were home when we walked in — a rarity — and the younger one almost immediately said something like, “Dad, I know you just got home, but there’s a dead rodent somewhere in the kitchen and will you please get rid of it?” Seemed like a simple task at the time, right? Not. “Somewhere” is the key word here. It was not in one of the rodent traps under the sink. Actually, the rodent traps under the sink were not *set* while I was on my vacation busman’s holiday for a week or thereabouts in the Great White North. The traps were not set during that time for *precisely* the reason that we did not want to crash land back on the Planet Ann Arbor to find decomposing rodents. So what was up? We looked under the sink. Nothing. We looked behind the microwave. Nothing. Pulled out the regurgitator. Nada. I nagged, “pull out the dishwasher, it smells like it’s underneath the dishwasher.” Not. Looked *under* under the sink. Found the Upper Peninsula but no dead rodent. Outside? No, unfortunately. Honestly, I think it is rotting up in the wall somewhere. Alas. Wherever it is, the smell is the absolute sheer utter worst right in the spot where I do probably 98% of the food preparation. What to do? I am *not* going to take the walls apart. I guess I will just have to wait until it decomposes a bit further. Honestly, after a day spent largely in the kitchen, I was starting to feel a bit nauseated and when I took my afternoon walk, the smell stayed in my nose just about the entire time. It’s okay, I’ll live. I’ll be at work (Star Trek?) all day tomorrow. Hopefully I won’t smell like dead rodent when I get there. Not sure if I do or not.

Summer Odyssey 2009 is now officially over. The older beach urchin texted upon landing in San Francisco. She has to work tomorrow too. And she moved into a new living situation (house with 20-somethings) just before traveling out here to Moom’s Best Vacation Spot so now she’ll maybe have some time to settle in.

Me, I need to get shish-ke-bab ready for the grill. I am not crazy about the tedious job of skewering things. Onward.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.