BATS IN THE BELFRY

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr., I had a day off.  I, like many teachers in this fair country, would love to spend the day reflecting and such, but life being as it is, we are busy hitting all those appointments we can't take during the day 'cuz, well, we teach and stuff.

Thus was my day yesterday while I was running to an oil change appointment, paying bills, baking, cleaning the house, doing laundry, and welcoming Scott the Furnace Dude into my home to change my specialized furnace filter and do general maintenance on it -- it is 22 years old, Scott said yesterday.  He said it like I should be expecting impending doom. Like the world would end.  He said this right after he hollered up from the basement, "HEY MEGAN!  MEGAN!  COME HERE!  YOU ARE GONNA FREAK OUT!" 

I am here to tell you, people, nothing, I mean, NOTHING good comes from some one telling you, after having his head stuck in the bowels of your furnace, that I must see something that will freak me out.  I maintain, if it's going to freak me out, why are you showing me?  It's a basic human question in my mind's eye.

So, I drop what I was doing and meet Scott at the top of my basement stairs, wherein, he says excitedly, "Megan!  I've never seen in this ... ever!  I'm not even sure how he gotten in there."  It was then I looked down at his gloved hand which held a decidedly dead bat.  A bat.  A BAT, people.

All I could think of was:

1. How did he get in there?
2. How long has he been in there?
3. And I need a picture of this!

Scott, wasn't sure how he would have gotten in there, and to answer the question about how long he'd been in there, his reply was "Well, he doesn't stink any more."

Awesome!

Either, he'd not been there that long, or there is radon gas seeping up through my basement floor and is preserving all the dead carcasses of the animals that were once living and found their demise in my basement ... and there have been a lot.  

All I could think was that if that thing had some how found a way into my living space, I would have had to burn the entire place down!