Fun Times Pt3

The Fun Times series is dedicated to those little family crisises that get everybody all angry and frantic for a while, and just generally disrupt life. So far they have all had good outcomes, which is why I can ironically call them Fun Times™.

The very first "Fun Time" involved an intruder alarm that morphed from scaring away a burglar to chasing a flying squirrel out of the house with a spatula.

The second "Fun Time" was actually kind of scary - my mom was home alone and thought someone broke in, and my brother later performed his house-clearing duties admirably.

Last night was the third "Fun Time." I'm sitting downstairs, watching Deep Space Nine, when all of a sudden, thing seem...off...and not in any way that I can fully describe. The air has changed in some way. I ignore it and keep watching. After a few minutes, I'm sniffing the air...this is really weird...it smells like sulfur. Like really, badly rotten eggs. But just a hint of it.

Perplexed, I shut off DS9, and head for the stairs at the end of the long "family" room. WTH? It smells horrible over by the stairs. I run upstairs and tell my mom it smells awful downstairs. She heads down and just about chokes at the stench. We walk into the laundry room, and the smell is stronger, much stronger. We turn left into my brother's bedroom, and now the smell could knock a buzzard off a gut-wagon. This is, like, a panic situation. Something really bad's going down here.

My brother is not, ahem, the most...clean...person in the world, so the possibility of him leaving a meal under his bed and then having it decompose is not exactly an alien thought. We go back upstairs, and wake him up from where he's sleeping on the sofa.

And here is where the situation veers off into the absurd. Slightly peeved that one of her children may have just fumigated the house through carelessness, my mom tells my brother to open up the freezer and take a deep breath so he has a suitable control with which to appreciate the full awesomeness of the stench he is about to behold. Not in so many words though. "Stick your head in the freezer and breathe," is closer to the original wording.

He refuses, and asks what's going on. "Just stick your head in the freezer." This goes on a for a minute and we all finally troop downstairs. My brother can sniff this just as soon as he heads downstairs. Once in his room, we realize the smell has gotten exponentially worse. It is unholy on a thousand different levels. This is something that no decent human being should be exposed to.

Definitely not something of my brother's creation.We have an upright freezer in the basement, and my thought is maybe it came unplugged, the...meat...inside going rancid with time. But my musings on this are quickly derailed...my mom sends me to go get the carbon monoxide detector from upstairs. My protests that carbon monoxide is odorless fall on deaf ears, and I go get the thing and plug it in in my brother's room. It reads 0 to no ones surprise.

It is around this time that my dad ventures downstairs, just having noticed that there is A Fuss on under his roof, and he asks what the matter is. Very unflappable. My mom asks if he notices the smell, and he says yes, it's his bathroom.

Last summer we had a problem with plugged pipes. Varying brands of Drano wouldn't clear out the problem, wire pipe-snakes didn't do it...so my dad bought some industrial drain cleaner. Whereas most drain-cleaners are bases, this stuff was full-on sulphuric acid, diluted to the point where it didn't eat through the pipes (be very careful about not getting on the tub though, pour it straight down the drain). Half a bottle of that later, some very unpleasant odors started wafting out of the various drains in the house, as the sulphuric acid dissolved the biological growths that every household pipe system has. These odors were so strong that after opening all the windows, our house stood as the epicenter of a kind of funk that could be sniffed for dozens of yards in every direction.

Now let your mind wander, and grasp if it can, the full horror of unleashing such a pungent menace inside a house in the winter. With all the doors and windows closed.

YEAH.

My dad had poured some more of this industrial cleaner down his shower's drainpipe.By this time the stench has flooded the living area of the upstairs, and my mom's worried about our two pet rats and our two birds, one of which is a ten-year-old finch (finches are only supposed to live four to six years). They get hastily relocated to the bedrooms at the far end of the house, and we start turning on every fan in the house.

After fifteen minutes, the god-awful stench has not depreciated, and we start wondering what to do to render the air suitable for sleeping in. My brother sprays three cans of AXE in his room, lights a candle, and sets a fan to blow air out of his room - which results in mixing the heavy smell of AXE with the smell of rotten eggs.

We finally hit upon a solution - open all the doors and windows! I should comment that this is Wisconsin, and it is winter, and our median temps for the past few days have been 10 degrees in the sun. It is nine at night. It is damned cold outside. Soon it is damned cold inside. We watched Lost, made hot drinks, and wore hats and gloves.

Around ten we finally closed the house up. Despite cranking the heat to 90 to offset the cold air, the ambient temperature had dropped seven degrees. We ran a propane space heater for a couple of minutes to warm up the living room before going to bed.