our mystery smell December 8, 2007

…yuck…does the title scare you? It should!!! I have had an exciting night…well exciting for our standards

I rarely use our printer, so rarely that as I pulled it out of our closet to print Christmas letters on tonight I realized that the last time I used it was when I printed last years Christmas letters. Since this last use we have bought new computers and so my husband (the tech savvy one of the household) had to install the drivers, which was a lost cause since the printer was so old that the drivers weren’t compatible with Vista (oh, how I long for a mac). Any how as we sat in the bedroom trying to figure the printer out I start getting wiffs of a very nasty smell. My first response was to accuse my husband of farting, which I think is a very typical response. He denied it and since the cat was also sitting nearby, she became my next target. I assumed she had snuck some food off of one of our plates which had resulted in some gastrointestinal fireworks. But as we sat there I slowly realized that the smell was not going away, in fact it was getting worse. It was overwhelming us and we began to look for the culprit. I smelled everywhere. One quick wiff of the cats butt (yes, I smelled the cats butt, you would have too had you smelled this foul odor) and I was sure that it wasn’t her. I smelled the couch, the bed, the carpet, the blankets, the shirt on my husband back, myself. Soon my husband was joining in too and we seemed to get no closer to finding the culprit. On a whim, I lifted up the printer and the smell came rolling out from underneath it.

A little background here. When we first moved back to Montana from California we rented an old farmhouse for about a year before we bought our home. It was a nice place to live and I really enjoyed a lot about living in the country, but one of the things I did not like was the mice. We had to have mice traps set all year long, I couldn’t even look as my husband as he carried the little dead bodies outside to dispose of them. We also got a cat to try and help with the problem. She turned out to be a failure of a mouser as she would rather have played with them than killed them. All our food had to be kept in high cupboards, and I would occasionally find mouse dropping…yuck.

So it didn’t take us long to put two and two together and figure out that a mouse had made our printer his coffin. The printer was swiftly removed and placed in the trash can outside. I guess you never know where the bad smells are going to come from!!