Heatwave

It’s been a week around here! A heatwave descended and it was miserable for four days straight. Thank goodness cooler air arrived today, but unfortunately with it came thick smoke from wildfires nearby to the north.

What have we been doing? Sweating. Taking cold showers (three or four a day). Visiting the beach for the cooler breeze. Sitting in front of fans. Wearing ice packs on our shoulders, neck and heads. Standing under the garden hose. Running errands just to spend time in the car with air-conditioning. Taking naps in the hot part of the day and staying up late in the cooler part of the day. Complaining.

In the middle of that, we were assaulted with a terrible, horrible smell in our kitchen. It started Sunday with the onset of the worst of the heat, and I couldn’t figure out if it was stinky food that someone (Dr. Peds) had been cooking or possibly a mouse corpse decomposing. By Tuesday morning Mr. TOF were pretty sure it was definitely a mouse that had met his demise, and after some nauseating sniffing, we were also pretty certain the odor was emanating from behind the refrigerator. Since he has only one working arm and I had never moved the refrigerator before, we elected to wait for Dr. Peds to come home from work.

The smell was really, really terrible. The heat was so oppressive. It was a long day.

When Dr. Peds arrived, he went right to work moving the refrigerator, but unfortunately there was no carcass visible. The smell was so much stronger back there that we knew something was going on, though, so he started taking the back part of the fridge apart, and sure enough a mouse had crawled in and died on the condenser. Whenever the fridge needed to run, which was often since it was so very hot, the smell pushed right out with the air.

Behind the fridge is much cleaner now, and things do smell much better today.