Oooh, that smell

It's been a day of cleanup here. Bright and early this morning we joined some neighbors and picked up trash along the road next to my house. This section was about a mile long and we managed to get at least five big bags of garbage, most of which was either food and beverage containers/wrappers, cigarette butts, or construction debris. It was fun and made us feel good, and it was great to be out with our friends on a warm spring day, but truly appalling that so many people (who evidently prefer light beer) use the sides of our roads as a wastebasket. I filled up most of our recycling bin with the bottles and cans we retrieved.

Cleanup then moved inside. We've had this funky smell in the kitchen the last few weeks, and I was hellbent on finding and eradicating it. I noticed it initially and thought maybe one of the kids had lost a chicken nugget somewhere. It was sharp and ripe. Then it went away for a week or so, and I thought one of the dogs had found and consumed whatever it was. Then a different odor arose, an almost cloying one. We just could not figure out where it was coming from, and over the past week I've been trying to find it.

First I thought maybe it was this new dishwasher detergent, because it seemed worse after we ran the dishwasher. I also cleaned out the garbage disposal and looked for leaks under the sink. No difference. We swept and mopped the floor in case the dogs had missed some dropped offering from the kids at the table. Still no change. I cleaned the cooktop, the counters, the table with Fantastik. No dice. Then we thought it was these onions we had sitting on the counter for awhile, and got rid of those. Nope. What was also weird was that the smell seemed to move around the room.

As we were all dressed up and about to head out for dinner tonight to celebrate my promotion, Chip had the bright and not-so-well-timed idea to look under the fridge with a flashlight. He saw eyes, a mouth, a nose...a dead mouse! It must have eaten the rodent poison in the cellar, crawled up to the first floor instead of outside like it was supposed to, and croaked under the fridge. When the fridge would run, the fan would waft the smell around the kitchen, which is why we had such trouble figuring out the source of the mystery odor.

However, extricating a juicily rotten mouse from under a large, full refrigerator took some doing. We tried to retrieve it with a long dowel without success. It did get moved closer to the front but the tray-like thingy under the fridge was in the way. We moved the fridge out and cleaned up the area where the mouse had been initially. When we went to move it back, the mouse had disappeared! We had to move the fridge back into place, and when I checked with the flashlight, it was now lodged inside the tray thingy.

Thus it was that I ended up lying flat across the kitchen floor in my good clothes, with my plastic-gloved hand scrunched into this tiny cavity, fishing out a rotten mouse carcass by the tail while Chip hovered above with a can of Lysol because "my hands are too big to fit under there."

Even better, Chip decided to regale his parents with this charming story over dinner at a steakhouse. Needless to say, it was a good thing I was about done eating. Also, with the amount of stink coming from that thing, even after being tied up in a plastic bag, I am already so sorry for the garbage guys when they open the garbage can lids come Thursday.

And now the kitchen still smells a little nasty with a heavy overtone of Lysol. We have the vent fan on and are staying out of there as much as possible. Other than dipping the entire base of the refrigerator in bleach, I'm not sure what else can be done.