I came across a dead fly on my living room floor and it reminded me of an incident which happened a couple months ago that I was meaning to blog about.

In late December, we had yet another pipe freezing incident. I thought I had sufficiently insulated the pipes in the crawl space this fall, but apparently, it was not good enough. The water eventually came back, but I decided that it was necessary to do some additional insulation down there. I got suited up and crawled through the hatch into the depths of my crawl space.

I knew the problem area from previous years, so I taped some plastic garbage bags over some drafty areas in the foundation. Looking towards the far end of the crawl space (an area which I rarely venture) I noticed some sunlight coming though a vent in the foundation. I always remembered that corner to be very dark, and now there was some light over there, which I thought was strange. I crawled on my stomach to that corner.

It appeared that the vent hole used to be stuffed with insulation, but now that chunk of insulation was now lying on the uneven dirt floor of my crawlspace. Upon closer inspection, there appeared to be some type of furry object amongst the insulation. Yes, it was a dead squirrel, covered in flies.

Luckily, I had one last garbage bag in my pocket, so I carfully scooped up the dead carcass into the bag and dragged it out of the crawlspace. I was baffled that the squirrel got in there, as there doesn't appear to be any opening that would be big enough for a squirrel to get through.

I was almost glad that the pipes froze when they did, or else I would have never found the carcass and it might have started to rot and stink up the house.

I closed up the crawlspace and, in true George Bush style, I proclaimed "Mission Accomplished!" However, we soon found out that the mission was far from accomplished.

The dead squirrel was gone, but the files were left behind. Without a carcass to munch on, they started working their way up through the vents. For the next month and a half we were killing 5-10 flies a day. It was unbelievable how many flies came from that damn squirrel carcass.

It did, however, give the cat something to chase after. I guess you gotta look at the positves.