You know the whole "when it rains it pours" thing? Well do I have a story for you about that! In my case, it poured mostly disgusting things. A whole weekend of them... wonderful opportunities to try my hardest to celebrate all the shitty moments in life.

It all started on Thursday with a broken washing machine. I was quickly approaching an overflowing basket of dirty laundry that I had planned to do this weekend. Inconvenient, but manageable. But then Friday morning started with us noticing a slightly funky smell in the house. At first it just smelled like the garbage needed to go out or maybe something in the fridge had gone over. Brian spent the morning searching for the source but was unsuccessful. They mostly spent the day outside away from the smell. When I got home from work and stepped in the house, the smell was so bad I wanted to vomit. After lots of sniffing around I finally noticed it seemed to be coming from the air vent by the sliding glass door in the back. Not just the smell of garbage, but the smell of death. Something had died either under the house or in the air duct, we were sure of it. Of course it was after 5, so we could not get a hold of our property manager. I covered the vent to try and make it bearable and spent as little time downstairs as possible. Saturday morning Brian opened all the windows and setup a fan to try and blow the smell out, keeping it livable but still disgusting. Then he dressed himself up in this awesome outfit:

...and was brave enough to get down in the crawl space and look around. Sebastian insisted on going with him, fully covered and with a mask on. It wasn't until they crawled around for awhile that Brian realized there was rat piss and shit everywhere. So back up they came with word of the rat damage and not positive where the source was. There is a decent sized opening where the air conditioner duct goes under the house that even a very fat rat could easily squeeze into. So Brian dug around there looking for more evidence and found nothing. He also tried vacuuming out the air vent but also found nothing but dirt.

I spent all this time obsessively cleaning the house. I wasn't brave enough to go down with the rats, as my immune system is not very strong and I would likely be that one person to catch the hantavirus or the plague. So I cleaned everything I could. All this cleaning and rat hunting meant we weren't keeping a perfect eye on Oscar, who was running around naked like he enjoys. He pooped on the floor twice and peed all over the stairs. Yep, potty training is still two steps forward and one step back most days and Saturday was no exception.

Finally the property manager called us back but said he'd called around and couldn't find any pest control people that were available to come to the house that day. He would keep trying but we did not want to wait around for him to find someone. Brian suited up again, sans Sebastian this time, and went back down into the rat pit, this time armed with some old scissors so he could cut loose some of the insulation where he had a hunch the death smell was hiding. And right he was. He cut loose the insulation above the air duct right near the vent where we smelled it, and splat went a dead, maggoty rat. He also found several skeletons which means rats have been around for a lot longer than just this week. Lovely.

Pest control people should be coming out this week to assess the damage, lay some bait traps, and see what else we can do to prevent this. I requested no poison sprayed and thankfully they said they rarely do that anymore, so hopefully that will not be necessary. I am concerned about our compost pile which lives in the backyard as far away from the house as possible, but still awfully close even for a rat. Compost is the best way to make good fertilizer for your home garden, and reduce kitchen waste, so I do not want to get rid of it. I think instead I'll start looking into bins to keep it in and the rats out. Anyone else have ideas on rat prevention, let us know please!

With the house much cleaner and smelling 1000 times better, I escaped to dinner with one of my dearest friends, which saved my sanity! I headed into Sunday thinking it would be a good day. Which it was...well, it had it's ups and downs. We took Ginger to a Greyhound walk which she thoroughly enjoyed and the kids got to play at the park there. In the afternoon we planted some more in our garden and got some yard work done. In the process I found this beauty:

...because why wouldn't a big-ass, monster spider appear on this most lovely of weekends? Fine, whatever, it least it was outside. But it still wasn't done dumping nasty all over us. We had an empty bin in the backyard that we use to collect rainwater and use it to water the grass. It has a tendency to grow moss and mildew though so I went to dump it out before it got worse. As I dumped it. I got a whiff of another horrible, dead smell! WTF?!?! I hosed off the grass where I had dumped it right away and discovered a tiny little skeleton with a beak. I guess a bird died in there? No idea how but I'd had enough of nasty smells for one weekend so this was pretty revolting.

Then from inside the house I hear, "will you hose off this mat? Oscar stepped in dog poop. The other rug inside is even worse."

What's next?! Bring it, whatever it is, I doubt it will surprise me!
 

When I posted one of my last posts about priorities to Facebook, I tagged my beautiful friend Catterina and mentioned her #30daysofcelebration of #lifeasafestival movement that she's started. I've been meaning to write more about it since I'm guessing the rest of my friends can't see the wonderful things she's been posting about this. The purpose is to encourage people to celebrate life as a festival, meaning if your life was a festival, what would that look like? It's about getting out of your comfort zone and not being afraid to do whatever it is that feels good at that moment, whether it's singing, laughing, crying, or skipping. And probably most importantly, it's about celebrating every moment of your life, even the shitty ones.

Celebrating life when things aren't going the way you'd like is a challenge. I've spent the last several weeks extremely irritated with my body. I'm still doing physical therapy for my knee and working on trying to reintroduce all the foods from my elimination diet, and none of it is going well. I was feeling a lot better a few weeks ago. I'd gotten through all of the lower reactive foods on my list and physical therapy seemed to have really helped both my knee and my back. Then I started running a little bit and also started reintroducing the higher reactive foods on the list. One or both of those things has caused the pain in my knee to return full force. I stopped running of course and haven't had much success with any of the new foods I've tried, everything either gives me a stomach ache, headache, or sinus congestion. And now this week we've had GORGEOUS weather, which is awesome, but everything is covered in a nice layer of pollen so it's hard to know if my headaches and sinus congestion are from seasonal allergies or food. All I know is I only have 2 more things left on my food list to get through but now I feel like I have to stop and wait for everything to feel better before I continue.

I am so FUCKING frustrated! It's been almost a year since I've been able to run without pain. And it's been over 4 months of physical therapy and dieting. I feel like I'm doing everything natural that I can do to help my body get back to health but I'm confronted with a new challenge at every turn. Things feel good for awhile, and then horrible again, and I just can't take this roller coaster shit any more. On top of it all, or probably because of it all, my insomnia is back from hell again after only a short time of it having been gone. Life is hard enough with a full nights sleep, eating whatever food I want, and exercising as much as I want without pain. Trying to get through a day on shitty sleep, a severely restrictive diet, and no cardio is making me crazy.

It's a serious challenge for me to share my vulnerability with you, or anyone for that matter. Mostly I feel obligated to be strong, put on that fake mask that everything's ok. You know what I'm talking about. I watch friends do it all the time. Admit that life is stressing them out to no end, and in the next breath when someone asks how they're doing, they smile and say "really good!" We're all guilty of it. None of us wants to be vulnerable. Opening up and telling someone that we feel like we're sucking at life leaves us feeling exposed, with all of our truths and flaws out in the open for people to see. We're all too worried about appearing perfect. When the truth is there are few perfect moments in life. That's why we have to learn to celebrate all of the moments, especially the less than perfect ones.

Remembering to celebrate life really does help me get through the shittiest of moments. No matter what the shit is, there's always still so much good to celebrate. My body may not be doing what I want, but I still have so much. I can still pick up my kids and hold them tight. I can still kiss my amazing husband. I can still walk and pet my sweet dog. I still have my mind, with all it's intelligence and craziness, happiness and depression, love and hate. I still have the ability to love and care for my family. I still have this beautiful place that I live in to enjoy.  I can still write.

So I'm going to embrace this imperfect moment for everything it has to teach me. After all, who would we be without all the challenges in life that make us who we are?