Stink

Soooooooo we have a smell. A smell in the kitchen.  It started a few days ago when I would open the fridge...it was like sour milk or something rotten.
I immediately cleaned out the fridge.  Threw away anything that even had potential to someday smell.  Wiped down all the shelves with powerful cleansers.  Even as I finished cleaning, I knew the smell was still there.  So I open two boxes of soda and put them in the fridge.  Still stinky.
Except now the smell was not contained in the fridge...it was reeking in the whole kitchen.  When you would walk in the door, it would about knock you over. But it was mostly stinky when I opened the fridge. 
So I went through everything that was left in the fridge again and threw out some perfectly good food just because I didn't know what else to do.
While I was in Logan, Kelley pulled the fridge out to see if there was anything dead behind it.  nope...clean as a whistle.
So now we started have thoughts of something crawling under the house and dying.  It happens.  Do you remember orange kitty?  I still throw up a little when I think of Kelley fishing him out from under the pantry room floor ( via the opening in the wall of the garage).  This was after an exhausting search for a terrible stink back in that area.  We even took up the tile in the back bathroom to see if something had climbed down the heater vent and died.  We also had the air duct people come out and clean all of our pipes.  They found lots of other things that had fallen down the heat vent, but nothing stinky.
 Kelley was working out of town at the time, so I was about at my wits end.  When he came home, he went right out in the garage,  got a flashlight and looked in the crawl space under the  back room.  There in the back corner was orange kitty.  (very dead and decomposed)
Kelley gets his face mask on ( towel tied around head...he's very sensitive to bad smells....used to do this when changing diapers) gets a long pole and drags poor orange kitty out.  Problem solved.
Then there was the rat incident.  Oh it was so much more than an incident though!  This time the rotting smell was coming from the basement.  We searched every inch of the two rooms.  Nothing!  So then we checked the ceiling panels...the ones we could get at anyway.  Nothing!  Man we were getting desperate!  You couldn't even stand to go downstairs it was so stinky and it was wafting into the upstairs now too.  This was a few days before thanksgiving and we were planning to have all the family here so drastic measures needed to be taken.  Kelley got his sledge hammer and started bashing the walls in...I think he went a little bit crazy there for a while.  He had to make a hole in the lower part of the wall and the upper part because there was a board going around the middle that something could be laying there dead on.  Oh man, it was awful!  We had holes around in all the walls and still didn't find anything!  We had noticed though that when the furnace came on, the smell was worse, so we started tracing where the pipes went.  Up in the ceiling again, Kelley followed a pipe to the last piece of ceiling board we hadn't looked under.  It was hard to get at and I think Kelley thought he had checked well enough around that area.  So he takes the ceiling piece out and there back in a little empty space, was a big fat rat.  Sooooooo stinky!  He disposed of the rat, but now we were left with a basement that looked like it had been bombed. The rat definitely won that one. We just stood there looking at the mess and laughed...otherwise I think I would have cried.
So as we were trying to locate this latest stink, these horrible memories start creeping in. I really don't know where else to look, so I'm hoping what ever it is will just finish decomposing and go away.  ( It seems slightly less stinky today...or maybe I'm just wishing it to be)  I'll keep you posted.