Gotta Get Out

Friday morning around 4:40am my mom and I were fighting over containers of Clif Electrolyte Drink and Base Amino in a rush to get to our respective 5am workouts. Normally this quality time with my mother has very little in the way of conversation (I try not to fully wake up until about 300 yards into my swim workout). This particular morning, however, there was an odd odor filling the downstairs of the house. I thought maybe the pound of Kale I had consumed Thursday night was the culprit, but the scent didn’t seem to be correlated with where I was or had been. We looked around for "gifts" from the dog and cat, but, finding none, decided we could search for odors when we got home. Last night the smell was still there, but again our search returned no indication of the source. I thought for sure it was some kind of propane leak, my mom thought perhaps an animal’s carcass was rotting in the air intake, and my dad looked around aimlessly for some explanation of why we would not shut up.

This morning we continued to search. My mom decided that whatever was dead or dying must be under the house. This, she explained, is why it’s only the first floor, and why it does not seem to have a traceable scent. I continued to change my mind about what type of gas was leaking – methane, propane, some kind of mixture. While my mother and I discussed the horrible smell my dad crawled under the house to find that an abandoned sewer pipe from the previous house had started leaking sewage, which is now about two inches deep under our house. All winter our neighbors have been struggling with sewage problems as a creak nearby kept flooding. We thought we had escaped the mess unaffected, but now it seems everyone else’s sewer problems are ours as well. I’m planning to spend as much time on my bike, running, at the pool, or sitting at a coffee shop as I can for the next few days. Talk about motivation to get out and train.

UPDATE

The plumber came out and fixed the pipe leak.  Stalwart Plumbing is awesome!!!