Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Home Sweet Home

We were given a house. A whole house, a real house with three bedrooms and a bathroom and a kitchen and everything. Given, as in free, as in donated. Well, actually it was signed over to Kirk and his siblings by Kirk's father. (have I mentioned how amazingly lucky we are in terms of family? How fantastic our families are. Needs mentioning again)

That meant that my long-suffering parents were able to get us out of their house (for a while), and we had, for the only time in our marriage, a house of our (sort of) own.

There were a few drawbacks to it. The shower had a wall without any tile on - just bare cement board, a couple of windows were broken, the front door was in pretty bad shape, the front yard was blessed with a vigorous grove of bamboo (anyone with experience of this grass variant is sending me huge sympathy thoughts right now), and the last tenant had left a massive amount of debris piled up in the side yard.

She left her stove as well, but she said this proudly because she seemed to think it was an extremely generous move on her part.

'And,' she said, to clinch the deal 'the dead mouse smell is completely gone.'

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No real house would be complete without a dead mouse.

We had two who's little feet could be just barely be seen dangling from the sides of 2 light fixtures in the basement family room -- with no way to access or remove them.

Fortunately, they too had no odor.

But drat, we didn't get a free stove with them.

Megan said...

I'm a little sad that I only have one other mouse story.

I came into the hallway of a university building one morning to be met with an unmistakable, horribly sweet smell. On one of the vending machines was a neatly printed notice: 'Dead Mouse. Questions? Call X-XXXX'

I would love to know what questions they got. Mine would have been, 'how much for the dead mouse, and do you give exact change?'