for the last week or so there has been a strange smell in the house…

usually smelled it in the kitchen and realized that a couple of potatoes had gone bad in the potato drawer…  Wednesday or Thursday I tossed them all out and washed and aired out the drawer…

problem solved, or so I thought…

when I got home on Saturday morning it still smelled a bit, but I opened all the cupboard doors and drawers again and walked all through the house and couldn’t pinpoint a smell so opened the potato drawer and left it ajar to see if that would help…

tonight I got home from work and opened the door to hundreds of flies roaring around the house, mainly in the kitchen… it was disgusting and once again I went through and couldn’t find anything… and I’ve been killing flies ever since…

Crystal stopped by a little while ago and she wandered around the house… couldn’t smell anything in the kitchen but I’d had the screen door open for hours so thought that might have gotten rid of the smell…

she checked out the basement and thought something smelled bad in the workroom… I had sensed a strange odor by the woodpile and wondered if some of the wood had been wet when the ServiceMaster people put it back, but it didn’t really smell damp…

Crystal walked out of the workroom and I looked down onto a little table beside the freezer and saw – something – in a plastic bag sitting there… it looked like a clear bag filled with dirty paper towels but it was a chicken that had been in the freezer and when we were putting things in after the party we must have taken it out and not put it back into the freezer… I put it into a plastic bag and took it right out to the garbage can…

then I got a wet cloth to wipe up the bit of dried blood that appeared underneath it when I slid it into the bag…

there were maggots on the table… thank goodness Crystal was able to carry the whole thing outside as we were both gagging…

now we know where the flies came from… I have put bleach down on the floor and will get Jeff to deal with the table tomorrow…

I didn’t want to wear those big girl pants today… that was disgusting, but I am glad the mysterious smell has been discovered…

focussing on sweet smelling roses…

roses the kids sent last year to remember our wedding anniversary…