Roseyland

When writing a blog, it’s important to choose timely topics. Nobody wants to read about yesterday’s news. Today, I bring you a story from the recent summer of 2008. One day in June 2008, I came home and noticed that my condo smelled like a wet dog. To the best of my knowledge, I did not own a wet dog. I looked all over the condo and determined that the smell appeared to be coming from the hallway. I looked in the hall utility/laundry closet. Everything looked normal. I looked in the washing machine. Nothing there. I opened the dryer, and the smell almost knocked me over, but still, I didn’t see anything. Here is the cat investigating the situation. You can’t tell from the picture, but he really wanted to find the source of that smell.

The smell was definitely coming from the dryer, but it wasn’t in the dryer. So I went outside to look at the dryer vent. This is what I saw.

I had a closer shot of the dryer vent, but trust me, you don’t want to see it. That’s my dryer vent covered in bird poop. Did you know that bird poop isn’t just white? It also has a reddish component. At first I thought there had been some sort of bird slaughter inside my dryer vent. Then I noticed that a bird would fly into my dryer vent every couple of minutes. Here is a picture of the bird.

The bird kept carrying things into my dryer vent. It appeared that he was feeding something. Great. I had a bird nest in my dryer vent. I called the condo maintenance people to see what they could do. You are probably wondering why I didn’t just take care of this myself. One, I don’t deal with wild animals. They are wild and will peck an eye out without a second thought. Two, it would have required me to spend a decent amount of time on a ladder right in front of my female neighbor’s bedroom window. Nothing good can come from that.

The maintenance guy came out and said that he could remove the nest, but there was a live baby bird in it, and we would have to leave it on the ground to die. He didn’t want to do that, and well, neither did I. Sometimes I think I’m too empathetic for my own good. I mean don’t most baby birds die anyways? Still, I didn’t need that on my conscience. So, I lived with the wet dog smell for 6 more weeks and then had the vent cleaned and covered with wire mesh. I have no idea if the bird lived, but he wasn’t in the nest anymore, so let’s say he lived. I didn’t live in a swampy smelling condo for nothing.