Birds nests and Basketball

Living with Dan in South Salem was a fun and carefree time. Towards the end of our stay there, we had both caught the basketball bug and played at least once a day at the Willamette courts. Dan and I had been living like kings, only paying $600/month in rent. Life was good.

Then it began. It started one night as a scratching noise in the wall above my bed. I immediately thought it was a mouse or a rat but I was too tired from the day's basketball games to do anything about it. The next day I went to work and forgot about the noise. This cycle continued for a about a week. One night while Dan and I were taking notes on a Pistol Pete's Ball Handling video, a strange odor wafted in from our air-conditioning duct. I still cannot describe the odor, but it was very musty and very foul. I immediately accused Dan of harboring the odor, but he adamantly denied it. I then sniffed my way around the house, expecting the odor to be emanating from our dirty basketball clothes, but I couldn't find the source. The next few days, the odor came and went, never lasting long enough for me to sniff out the source. It was especially nasty when the heat reached 90 degrees or hotter outside.

The scratching above my head continued for a couple of weeks. A few few days before we were to move out of the apartment, I heard not one set of claws, but 5 or 6 sets, all scratching away in my wall. It was then that I started to hear some chirping. Suddenly, I put it all together and raced outside with my 8 D-cell Mag-lite. I found what I was looking for, the air intake vent to our apartment. Sure enough, there was a enough bird guano and nesting material falling out of the vent to be considered a fire hazard. I tried to peer into the vent but the nest was too far back to do anything about it. I realized that every time we turned on the A/C, we were pumping the odor of the nest and all its messy inhabitants directly into our faces!

My mind started reeling. Had we been pumping bird flu into our awesome apartment for the last month? Would the smell of the nest ever come out of my clothes? Luckily for us, not for the next tennant, we moved out over the next few days, leaving a nice house warming gift in the vent. I think we did leave a note with the landlord telling him about the nest but I'm not sure. Bird flu is known to affect a person's memory.

Matt