Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house...

My wife made Xmas dinner yesterday -- turkey and trimmings, delicious.

During the process she mentioned that the oven had developed a nasty odor when she used it. It didn't come from INSIDE the oven, but whenever she baked anything, she could smell it.

Note: This oven design was clearly created by someone who didn't do much cooking, because the whole thing is full of little cracks and grooves and joints and crevices that collect food and are impossible to clean. Probably designed by some geek engineer who never cleaned a stovetop in his life, or perhaps an evil robot. I figured the smell was rancid grease or something that was un-cleanable from the top.

Anyway, after dinner I started taking the thing completely apart. When I got to the part where I took the control panel off the front, I reached behind the dials and got 115v thru the fingers of my right hand, at which point I turned off the breaker, because hey, I'm not stupid you know.

Eventually I discovered that some soup or something had boiled over and dripped down a crack into the control panel. That probably would have smelled bad enough, but it turns out that a mouse had made his home deep inside the oven, below the range and just on top of the actual oven. When we lost power for a few hours last week, he had crawled into the control panel and started eating the dried-up soup. When the power came back on, it zapped him. (There's one mouse who was not stirring this Xmas. Har.)

His little corpse sat there behind the panel, between the dials for Right Rear and Right Front. After I detached him from the metal and cleaned that up, I took off some more stuff and got down to where his nest was, cleaned everything as well as I could, put it all back together again.

The odor is no longer noticeable to the casual smeller, but if you know where to sniff, you can still faintly smell mouse pee. My male intuition says there's a new oven/range in our future.

And now we know why the cat had been hanging around in the kitchen staring at the stove for the last week...