What's that smell

TMI alert.

Apparently one of the unfortunate neighborhood critters ended its life in an untimely fashion in the crawl space of my house.

I know, I know, I should be calling my local version of Billy the Exterminator (do not ever watch that show if you're at all disease-phobic. He's very, very good at hyperbolizing the disease risk of EVERYTHING). But I'm cheap that way and a few warm days will probably take care of it. And that which doesn't kill me, yada yada.

I'm quite sure that's what it is from the scent, and also from the sudden population explosion of flies. Ugh. (I hope it's one of the hispid cotton rats I've seen and not something larger like an opossum.)

But for now, it kind of smells like when you cook chicken, and you put the raw chicken packaging in the kitchen trash, and then forget to take it out overnight. And you wake up the next morning and are all "oh, ewwww" (or at least I am, but I have a hypersensitive nose). I'm spraying with a product that claims to kill airborne bacteria and eliminate the smell, but it's not permanent.

So I have most of the windows open, allergens be darned. And I'm disappointed to realize that even though this house was built in the era before air conditioning became common, it's very hard to get a cross-breeze through it.

It reminds me of my childhood summers a little bit - for one thing, it's warm here today and humid, and if you ignore the leaves on the ground or the slant of the sunlight, it feels a bit like a northeastern Ohio summer day. And my childhood summers were the main time I experienced open windows: we had no air conditioning and at any rate, it was generally cool enough out for it to be comfortable with just open windows. (And at night. At night it almost always cooled down enough that open windows made sleeping comfortable and cooled the house down for the next day. One of the great disappointments of last summer here was that it didn't cool down at all at night: there were many days when I awoke at 4:30 or 5 am to find it still 80 degrees outside. And I don't care where you live, that is just wrong.)

I'm thinking now of the childhood summers, of lying on the sofa in the living room with my big stack of library books and the windows open, with the street sounds coming in. (Another thing: my street as a kid was a lot quieter than where I live now.)

I got most of the grading done; only a dozen people showed up to take the ecology test. (Ye gads, am I down to a dozen active students now? I know I had 3 drop, and two more who quit coming, and two others whose attendance has been miserably spotty...)

It's strange, this warm weather. I know it won't last and yet every fall when we get this, I feel like somehow I've missed winter and we're going straight back into summer.

I think I need to hit the area next to the most-badly-affected wall with some Oust again...I'll be glad when decomposition has done its job.

(ETA: I decided to go out and replace the air filter/allergen remover I used to have. The one I had used for years gave up the ghost, and I also could no longer get the filters for it. I have a semi-pricey new one, courtesy of the Lowe's, but it has a carbon filter as well as the HEPA filter. So hopefully it will deal with the stink as well as any allergens. And it may help with cooking odors in the future; I know when I fry anything or cook onions I can smell it for hours afterwards)