How we figured out what the "funk" was coming from the guest room...

Eric's sister is coming to visit us next weekend, so we thought that we could try to figure out what smelled in the guest room every time the heat came on.  You might be asking yourself, what about the visitors that have been visiting us over the two years we've owned the house?  I don't have an answer for you.  Sorry.

Since we have a slab-on-grade house with no crawl space and old old ductwork, we decided to start with an old fashioned duct cleaning.  This was recommended to us by the lovely fellow who came out to inspect our furnace to make sure it wasn't going to burst into flames (a tradition they recommend annually... the "making sure your furnace isn't going to burst into flames and destroy all of your possessions check-up").  I asked him about "the funk" and he agreed it certainly smelled in there, and told me that you can hire someone to vacuum your ducts AND spray an anti-bacteria cocktail into the ducts to kill the little nasties that live down there.

So, we had two wonderful people come out on Friday morning from Air Stream Duct Cleaning (it happened to be Veterans Day, so Eric was home with me!) to clean out our ducts.  Their giant vacuum that lives in their huge truck required that we have the front door open the whole time they were cleaning the ducts, so they also brought in a propane heater.  I have to say, the propane heater fire ball in our living room made us briefly nervous about melting everything in its vicinity until we realized it was TOTALLY unnecessary to put on 5 extra layers and we were the only ones who nearly melted.  But, I digress...

Eric and I sat on the couch reading while they worked their mysterious voodoo magic on our duct work.  I find it awkward when strangers are wandering around in your house working on something.  I want to hover, but I don't want to stare.  I am not the kind of person who cannot "act natural" under these circumstances.  Anyway, burying our faces in books prevented us from watching too closely and deciding we could do it next time.  This is a service I am happy to pay for... especially NOW!


One of the duct cleaners came SPRINTING out of our guest room and gleefully yelled "You guys have GOT to see this!!!!!"  We immediately obeyed because you sort of expect that a duct cleaner has seen it all so getting THIS excited must be worthy of immediate movement on our part.  As we were moving to the guest room, he goes "it scared the SHIT out of us!!!"  I guess while they were vacuuming the duct it came shooting out.  Here it is:

This is the iguana in the duct

This is the iguana after the duct cleaner sniffed it and confirmed that this is the source of the funk.

Yup, there was a desiccated, mummified iguana in our guest room duct.  I found the subsequent hours confusing.  I have so many questions.  Are you, in fact, an iguana that was the pet of the previous owners of the house?  Do you explain the funk in the guest room?  Could you be the iguana that escaped the two-doors-down neighbors house last spring?  If so, why wasn't there a bigger smell during the early stages of your demise?  If you are the neighbors missing iguana, how did you get into the duct?  If you are the previous owners iguana, how did you get into the duct?  It's perfectly reasonable to imagine why an iguana would find our duct work so inviting, but it does not explain how the little guy ended up expiring in there.  

Anyway, I guess my questions will remain unanswered.  Come to think of it, if that iguana was still alive, I still wouldn't get my questions answered because, well, iguanas can't talk.