Wednesday, May 25, 2011

What's That Smell?

I was listening to the Bob and Tom radio show yesterday, a radio show that I listen to in the mornings when I'm doing my oh so important work on the computer (reading blogs and looking at cute animal pictures) and yesterday they were talking about how Kristy Lee's garage smelled like an animal had crawled in there and died. Well, today, she said that it was not a dead animal but rather a sack of potatoes that had been slowly rotting in her garage since last Thanksgiving.

It reminded me of the time that we had dead animal smell coming from Joseph's room when he was a young teenager. I may have told this story before on this blog, but it's a good one so it does bear repeating. It also serves as a warning for parents of teens.

Now, most teenagers are slobs, myself included when I was a teenager so very many many years ago. I have yet to meet a teenager who was not a slob. Life is just too busy to clean your room when you are a teen. Either that or you are just too lazy.

Anyway, we started smelling that unmistakable dead animal smell coming from Joe's room one day, and were checking under the house to see if something had crawled under there and died, but nothing there, so we figured that a mouse or something must be dead somewhere in his room.

But, how to find it?

I was a single mom at the time and had to go to work each day, so every day I would come home and fix dinner and then we would go into Joe's room and start cleaning, sorting through everything, and throwing out piles and piles of junk (are teens natural hoarders you think?) slowly working our way around the room for an entire week.

No dead animals found and the smell was getting so bad in there that Joe was sleeping on the couch.

On the last day of cleaning, the room was sparkling and there were no piles of dirty clothes on the floor and everything was put away and organized and it still smelled.

And then I saw it. Joe had gone fishing a few weeks before and his closed tackle box was sitting there and I remembered the bait fish that he had bought to go fishing with and the light went on in my head and I said did you empty out the bait fish from your tackle box after you went fishing?

No, he hadn't emptied out the bait fish from his tackle box, they were sitting in there in their little plastic bag slowly rotting away and filling our house with the smell of dead fish.

I can't remember if we just threw the whole tackle box away or if we were brave enough to open it up and just dump out the fish. I think we may have just thrown the whole mess away and bought a new tackle box.

1 comment:

PussDaddy said...

Ok this odd too because we had a teen living with us once and he was a slob too and one day I was like what is that god awful smell and he had a tackle box that had 1 year old bait sitting out and I bagged the whole damn thing up and threw it in the trash.

PD