Toby has been hearing crazing clawing sounds late at night.  She describes it as sounding like something is trying to pull the siding off our house.  I have heard it on occasion as well.  I thought that it was something that was attacking the metal rain gutter downspout.  I moved some things around and thought I had solved the problem because there was no more noise.

A few days ago Toby began looking for a dirty diaper or old food in the area of our back office because she said there was a rotten smell.  At that time I couldn’t smell anything but over the next few days I got some wiffs of something not right.

On Thursday we took advantage of the kids being gone (Max to Victory Ranch, and Lucy to Poppa & YaYa’s house) to go on a date.  As we returned home from dinner at Gianfranco’s (Toby’s favorite Carpinteria restaurant), I got a strong smell of rottenness at the back door.  I bent over and took a wiff at the vents under the office.  Yikes!!  Now I knew where the stink was coming from: under the house.

So I bought a respirator and some heavy duty cleaning gloves and crawled under the house.  I went under the office and found 2 dead animals.  One was very dried up and un-identifiable, but the other (hidden under some insulation) was a very large, recently dead opossum.  It’s tail was about as big around as my thumb at the base.

The respirator worked very well.  I couldn’t smell a thing while I was down there.  I don’t know if I would have been able to do the work if I had been gagging on the smell in the crawlspace.