Pain, Lego, and Decomp'

Well now. Today. Today was an interesting day. Shortly after I rose, I was beset by a mystery abdominal pain. No fever, no nausea (or even general malaise), no bowel or urinary symptoms, no specific site of pain, no actual tenderness ... no nothing for me to go on. Just damn pain. Pain that wasn't sodding off. Too much in fact for me to go to work, so I curled up feeling sorry for myself while everybody else went off and did their school, gym, and crèche stuff.

Happily, into the afternoon it did ease and then go. Still unexplained, and thus annoying, but gone (or at least 99% so). So when the young master asked me to do some Lego car/truck building with him, I spent the rest of the afternoon down the back with him at the Lego table. It took the rest of the afternoon, in large part, because all the pieces are mixed in together, and he wanted to follow the instructions for two of his actual sets. It all worked out well (with a couple of substitutions for possibly vacuumed small bits), and he was most happy with the results. Here you see his intent focus on the truck we made, and its accompanying car.

Cick to enbrickenate.

Then...

Well...

We went out to take the compost down to the bin. Mine nasal wossnames were assaulted with the smell of decomposition. And what an assault. I put on gloves and shoes, and grabbed a long stake with which to prod, and set about tracking down the source of said olfactory assault. It was not where I thought it was emanating from, so I went up the garden path (as it were). That unmistakeable smell of death just got stronger and stronger. I got up almost to the side gate, and saw in the garden bed ... "Is that a pale stone? There wasn't a stone there, was there? Oh, hello ex-possum." Maaaaaaaaan. Ex-possum, oceans of (I think) scarabs, boatloads of skinny black beetle-things with bright red heads, and excuse the language, but a metric fuck-ton of maggots.

Weird, and un-reasoning thing: after I took it into the bush, and buried it with a large rock over the top, I came inside, and had to have a shower. I knew I hadn't touched it. I hadn't touched any part of anything that touched it. I was wearing gloves anyway. Didn't matter. Needed a shower. ;-) And kept smelling it, even though there was nothing to be smelling.

There had been a small possum (young, I would say) dead on the other side of the house mid-late last week. More recently dead, however, when we discovered it. My CSI skillz have not really sorted out when today's one died, but I suspect same time or even before the young one. It's a bit of a puzzle really.