And Then We Found a Dead Body Under Our Garage

Well, part of dead body.

And probably not a human body… but other animals still have bodies and if you only find a part of it it’s still very clearly dead.

Matt pointed out that title is rather misleading, but that’s just how headlines work.  Sure, I could have said “And then we found part of a dead body under our garage.”  or “And then we found a bone fragment that was probably some dog’s chew toy under our garage.” But neither of those is very click-baity and my SEO app is already yelling at me about the length of my current tile (that thing is horribly judgemental).

Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

Our garage is… sad.  When we bought the house the inspector couldn’t even get the garage door open so for the past year we’ve basically had a giant storage shed that will fit anything that would fit through the smallish side door.  Awesome, right?

Also, the whole structure was leaning and wonky, and we weren’t even 100% sure that we would even be able to get a new garage door installed or if the entire thing would need to be torn down.  Yeah, it was just that good.

Recently we had a garage door company take a look at it, and thankfully they said they’d be able to add a functioning door.  Not only that, they even said they’ve worked with worse.  They came, they installed, and left us with a functioning garage that was still incredibly wonky.

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For the past couple weeks Matt’s been working on adding extra supports, sistering split or rotting studs, and digging out around the base to replace decaying boards.  I told you it was is pretty sad shape.

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On Saturday we dug a trench along the final side of the garage to expose all the rotting boards.  This wasn’t quite as bad as I anticipated, except for the tree roots that are clearly trying to eat our house.  And our garage.  And possibly us.  Hell, I think from now on I’ll just refer to the big tree in our backyard as Audrey II.

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About 10′ away from the tree there were still roots as big around as my wrist.  There were also TONS of the little spidery roots that had invaded everything.  As I pulled them out I also pulled up chunks of rotted wood that they had clearly eaten.  They were also starting to work their way up the side of the garage.  Awesome.

Also while digging out our trench we came across other assorted randomness.  A straw, tons of broken glass, plastic bags, rusted wire, and a coffee can lid.  Once I found the coffee can lid I was really hoping to find the rest of the can (filled with someone’s buried fortune of course), but it never turned up.  A short time later I exposed a strange, lumpy thing and was mildly taken aback.

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I thought it was a small vertebra but it ended up being the deformed top of a metal spike.  Bummer.

Me: No coffee cans filled with money, no dead bodies…. it’s like all those books I read when I was little lied to me.

Matt: Um, sure.

Me: I bet the Bobbsey twins were really the murderers/robbers/whatever just so they could set up crimes to “solve” and then cunningly frame other people.

Matt may have stopped talking to me at this point.

Later that afternoon I was standing by one of the dirt mounds, waiting to be useful, and I see something buried in the dirt.

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If you’re wondering if I can tell the difference between a stick and a bone in a random pile of crap the answer is apparently yes.  I have no clue what kind of bone because I’m not a boneologist…. er, wait, Latin… osteologist?  Maybe I should Google this…

…omg I was right!  I even spelled it right! (although spell check disagrees and suggests Meteorologist).  It’s like taking all those advanced Bio classes paid off… but only a little since I still can’t identify the stupid bone (but at least I’m still better at science than spell check).

Anyway, I found part of a bone buried under our garage which means I at least found part of a dead body.  Or the remains of a dog’s chew toy…. but dead body sounds much better.**  And just think, anytime you give your dogs pigs ears or beef bones to gnaw on you can refer to them as dead bodies.

“What’s Buster doing?  Oh, just burying a dead body in the backyard to save for later.”

“I had to get Fido a dead body so he’d stop eating my shoes.”

“Rufus hates being left home alone, but if you leave him with a dead body as a treat he does much better.”

Sadly, this is still not as exciting as the time I found a skull in Chicago.***

 

*Whether or not I can tell the difference between a bone and twisted piece of metal is an entirely different story.

** Or maybe it’s just me?

***True story!  And no, not a human skull.  It was probably a deer skull…. but it was just randomly in a locker in the train station.  For realz.  It was a little before Halloween and I was having  a party so I brought it back home with me.  I was maybe 12?   And possibly a bit different from other middle school girls….

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