a death in the building

i know. i'm sorry. the dramatic potential of the blog title drew me in. after a phone call to the super and a sniff test, jed said this is worthy of a blog post.

so i obliged. about five days ago i started smelling a bit of an odor in our home, particularly in one specific corner of the bedroom. the next evening when we got home from work, we both smelled it at the front door. na-sty! at that point, though, it was nothing that a little lysol and a wall-flower from bath and body couldn't handle. that night we opened the radiator in our bedroom to see if it just needed to heat up and make the stench go away.

that worked well for the time, but the next morning it was back with a vengeance. since it was obviously coming from the floor in the corner of our bedroom where the radiator is, we decided to call the super in the building and let him know it smelled like dead junk in our apartment. he sniffed it out and felt the same way, needless to say. after checking the vacant apartment below us, he didn't find any corpses, so we're thinking it's in the ceiling/floor in between.

fortunately, i'm guessing it's a small corpse - maybe a small rat/mouse - judging by the lack of intensity in smell. whew!

but make no mistake, it smells bad. very bad. we taped off the openings in the floor, put down towels around the gaps in the radiator pipes, and stuffed dryer sheets around. our plan is to wait out the decomposition process since tearing out the floor isn't a good option.

this is one thing we didn't expect to have to deal with. maybe live bugs and rodents, but not rotting fur. last time i smelled death like this was in africa when a king lizard died in the crawl space above our house in the 110 degree heat. but anyways....i'm just trying not to think about where the stupid rodent was before he died. sick.

more later on whether or not we get the cops involved. i'm not sure how much longer my psycho nose can handle it.