Things Like This Don't Happen to Normal People (Part 2)

To (finally, hee) begin our story, Mr. Bill, our nearly feral cat, came home sick or injured or something on Sunday. He was crying desolately in the jungle backyard, the part which I fenced off last Monday (I'm good with a sledgehammer now, yo. Especially after it rains for 24 hours. That helps A LOT.) So I set up chairs and climbed over the fence in my clogs and picked him up and carried him back into the house. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with him - he had an appetite, nose was cold, eyes clear - but he was very very thin and weak. And affectionate, which is not like Mr. Bill at all. I was reminded of the time my insane cat Andy Warhol of blessed memory managed to break his pelvis during a short jump in the basement. After $300 of vet bills I was told to take him home & keep him quiet for 6 weeks. I do not at the moment have $300 so I decided to take a similar approach with Mr. Bill, especially keeping him away from the hellhound who is bound & determined to chase him. I set him up in the living room with a fancy new cat bed and a new litter box with high tech space age blue litter and a bowl of canned cat food. Mr. Bill, secure in his invalid status, has made known his disdain for kibble.

The smell of the catfood and the sound of Mr. Bill's piteous wails for more catfood sent Jackson over the edge and no combination of gates could keep him out of the living room. This had been a losing battle for some time: the hell hound naturally wanted to be there watching Buffy with us anyway. Yesterday, while I was at work, Jackson got through every gate and security device either I or M could devise. He won't listen to M at all - we've covered that before - so poor M was calling me every 10 minutes to tell me about something else awful that Jackson had done. He ate all the catfood (of course) and the turds out of the cat box, and spread the weird blue litter all over the floor. Then there was a huge thunderstorm, which scared all of them, including Mr. Bill, who was now trapped beneath the couch without canned cat food and didn't like it much. It was a rough day for M.

I got home and decided that rather than go to the grocery store, I would make a tuna casserole and watch more Buffy. I started sauteing vegetables and turned on the oven. The BOG OF ETERNAL STENCH, the HELLMOUTH OF ODOR opened in the kitchen and there was no turning back. It was unbearable, unbelievable: like nothing anyone has ever smelled before. Our eyes were watering. I turned off the oven and set up fans but we had to leave the kitchen. Not the hell hound. He got up on the stove and overturned the sauteing vegetables and ate my last remaining plastic spatula and generally wreaked more havoc. Meanwhile, M. soaked a washcloth in diluted toothpaste and held it over his nose. Being more organically minded, I went out in the garden and smoked a cigarette and shoved beebalm and artemisia up my nose. All was dismal and sad.

So we drove away. We sat in the car behind Pastabilities for a long time, laughing hysterically, trying to get hungry again. M voted for never returning or at least spending the night at Grandmas, but preferably just hitting the road and not looking back. Or burning the house down and moving into the yard. While I agreed with these solutions in theory, also proposing to take off and nuke the place from orbit, I knew we would have to go back. M made up a song about our fear of smell and the total horror of the stench, coupled with the horror of the hellhound. I wish I had recorded it because it was utterly brilliant and it made me have to pee really badly.

The rest is anticlimax. We ate dinner & went to Ingles & bought massive amounts of cleaning supplies, including two pairs of rubber gloves, a gleepy little air freshener with a battery operated fan and a humongous can of foaming bubbles. When we got home, the smell, although somewhat dissipated, was still there. So we pulled the stove away from the wall and cleaned out all the mouse nests & cleaned everything in the broiler pan and left that out in the rain full of foaming bubbles, and, while we were at it, we pulled everything out of the lower cabinets and cleaned up a completely disgusting and just wrong years worth of mouse shit & pee. Beyond, beyond gross.

So now, on top of everything that has been pulled down by Jackson, and all the plates that are now on the counters because everything on the counters had to be put in the cabinets where the plates used to go, all the canned food and liquor and bottles of vinegar and mysterious things like wasabi powder and evaporated milk are now in coolers and boxes and bins all around the kitchen and dining room and Jackson is having a field day chewing them up and taking off the lids and shredding them. Meanwhile, of my two mouse killers, Mr. Bill is incapacitated (and currently howling away in A's room, since she's at the beach, lucky girl, she always misses all the fun) and Barbieri is too busy clearing the garden of voles & shrews to be bothered with the kitchen. Which is probably why the mice have moved inside en masse like this.

And I still don't know what the source of the smell was, but I suspect that the mice have moved into the insulation of the oven, which means that the oven will have to be replaced, which I can't afford, and I can't call my landlord, because then he will come over and be witness to the hell which the hellhound hath wrought on my once lovely home and then he will kick me out and we will all have to go live in a cardboard box on the side of the road and even that won't work for very long, since the hellhound will promptly shred it around our ears.

See? These things DON'T happen to normal people. I swear I am moving to Sunnydale.