Old age sucks

Many years ago I used to do Aquarium Maintainence for a living. This involved cleaning coral for saltwater tanks. When I was just getting started in this business I used bleach and then chlorine removers to clean algea off the coral in the tanks I took care of.

Then I got a job with a company who did this and time became more of a commodity, I needed to do things quicker than when I was simply working for my self, no longer having the 1 to 2 hours needed to properly treat coral with bleach and then render it safe for tanks and their inhabitants.

As with many jobs, there are more than several ways to accomplish the same result. This company I went to work for like to use acid washes to clean the coral. This had two benefits for them. It not only cut a 1 to 2 hour job to about 15 minutes but everytime you acid wash coral it deteriorates the coral, necessitating the purchase of new coral.

There is one serious drawback to the acidwash method of which I was not made aware until the damage had been done. The fumes given off by hydrochloric acid interacting with calcium are severely detrimental to ones ability to detect smell, odour, and taste.

Sure, we tried to avoid the fumes, but what with wind and enclosed spaces it was not always possible and so my sense of smell is "challenged." I can smell things but not as well as most, as a rule.

This will be pertinant soon.

I live in a neighborhood that is rampant with woodrats. It is quite easy to distinguish these bigeared longtailed fatbellied brown rodents from my short eared multicoloured coneshaped feeders so there is no mistaking one for the other once a body is found.

Bodies, rotten decomposing bacteria infested corpses that do smell very very bad. Hold that thought.

I have a few snakes in the living room and when I feed they don't always eat all the rats I kill or thaw for them. I have a cleanup crew in the snake room. A VERY large Water Monitor who actually seems to prefer his food "seasoned" by being a day or two dead.

Last week I fed. Last week I had one left over rat that I put in a brown paper grocery bag to take to my monitor and then promptly forgot it was there.

That night a wild rat tripped one of the traps I have set in the house to discourage such forays by wildrats but did not have the decency, or so I thought, to die out in the open where I could easily find and dispose of his body. Always the trash, never as a feeder for the wild ones.

A couple of days go by and I start to smell that smell that is unmistakably that of a rat dead a couple of days and I'm thinking, "curses on that damn wood rat for not getting caught in the trap," while starting a search under furniture, behind furniture, hoping and hoping that he didn't get into the bookshelves or cupboards and rot there, where finding him would not only be very very difficult, but messy as well.

Today it's even worse, the smell is bad, very very bad. So, I do the search again, moving things, looking under things, hoping that he's not just under the floor or in the bookshelves or cupboards and just as I'm about to start the process of removing stuff from said cupboards I walk by the brown paper grocery sack that I had placed in that room a couple of days ago to hold the rat that was to be a snake for my monitor.

I had completely forgotten that I had put that rat in that sack and it took two days of fairly warm weather for the rat to rot sufficiently for me to find it.

I figure if I was younger and sharper I would have remembered, though not necessarily smelled, that rat in that sack sooner.

Now I chuckle. But it still stinks like two day dead rat.

I think that most men get better, in many ways, as they age.

Nice way to ring in the new year Wes.
As this is my month to get one year older, this is not something I want to think about, at least not in depth, that is when my mind can actually stay on track, but it did give a good smile to my face

That really stinks, Wes.