This is my life: Covering up the stench

The sweet, smokey fragrance of incense wafts through the house... The incense was bought this morning in a desperate attempt to cover up the stench of rats living (or are they already dead?) in our attic space.  I seem to be the one who smells that death-stench most often - it appears to be concentrated right above my side of the bed.  Of course.

 I'm not going to lie.  It's rank.  And because it is so rank, I am grumpy.  And I always feel somehow infected and creepy whenever I get a whiff of it - what is up with that?  It's just air, right?  Even if it is air that stinks.  It can't actually infect me with something can it?

Something had to be done.  I'm not going up there to remove the dead rat or the live ones if they are there... and I think they are because we hear them at night...shiver.  Sean is not going up there to remove the dead or alive rats or any combination thereof.  We can't bring ourselves to ask a friend to do that for us.  So, we're doing our best to cover up the smell.  Yes, rather than deal with the problem, we are covering it up.

  Photo from wildlife.pro

It's so bad that one night, I came to bed with a cloth napkin doused in perfume tied around my face with a string. No joke.  Some nights, it is just that bad, and that's probably why we've chosen to just cover up the problem for two more weeks rather than run the risk of discovering something worse than we are already imagining happening above our heads while we sleep (or try to) at night. Ignorance is bliss and all that.

Anyway, scented candles that actually have a good scent are hard to come by here.  And besides, this calls for a stronger scent than a candle can usually give off. We knew there had to be a place where we could buy some incense in town.  After asking lots of questions, Sean and I discovered this unique and fascinating little shop owned and operated by Chinese immigrants. Walking into that dark little store is like walking into a shop on some back alley in Shanghai thirty years ago...or so I imagine.  I've not yet been to China.  And I guess I won't ever have the pleasure of going there thirty years ago.  Too bad, I think it'd be pretty cool, if that store was any indication.

Small, unassuming store from the outside....I never would have guessed what a treasure trove was inside.

This is the front section of the store...the back section had the really cool stuff, but it was too dark in there to take a picture!  See all those candles?  Maybe we should have bought one to try out...but we did not. We were not looking for candles...because we did not believe that a candle would sufficiently mask rat-stank.  

Anyway, I gladly paid the equivalent of 50 cents for a package of incense that will likely last me the next ten years.  

Desperate situations call for desperate measures.

And so far it's working. There's no stinky, dead rat rotting above my head.  There's no stinky, dead rat rotting above my head.  There's no stinky, dead rat rotting above my head.  There's no stinky, dead rat rotting above my head....