On Wednesday night I smelled gas in the kitchen about an hour after dinner and noticed that one of the burners was still on but wasn’t lit. I turned it off and then quietly opened the windows so as to avoid setting off a spark that might send me flying through them. I whispered to Sarah not to panic but that the kitchen was filled with gas and we then proceeded to open windows throughout the apartment. We survived.

By Thursday morning when I went to take my shower the tub was already filled with enough water for a mock naval battle. Sarah’s shower hadn’t drained because the drain had clogged. I let it sit during the day filled with shampoo and soap and by evening it was empty again. Sarah and I discussed whether to go to the store for Drano but we found a large container of kitchen Drano under the sink. So I poured a few tablespoons into it. I read the container to learn that I was supposed to, according to the Drano folks, place a tablespoon of Drano into my drains once per week. A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down. Somewhere in the world there is a person who takes these labels seriously and spends every waking hour trying to fulfill their weekly duties placing Drano in drains, testing fire alarms, and opening and closing their blinds each day.

The drain should have been cleared in fifteen minutes but ten minutes after I rushed in through the noxious gases to turn the shower on the tub was filled with standing water with a blue tint to it. This clog wasn’t going down easily. I played around enough to determine that the sink was also connected to the clog. If I used the bathroom sink the water ended-up in the bathtub. So I tried clearing the sink with some more gas producing Drano. That didn’t do the trick either. Next I unraveled a coat hanger and tried fishing around for a clog but it never made it past a few inches because of the curves of the drain. So I grabbed a plunger and started plunging vigorously. That was satisfying but it dredged-up the all sorts of things that I couldn’t imagine were in my drain into the tub. Sarah suggested maybe a mouse had committed suicide in the drain but I didn’t see a skull. The detritus that looked like leaves that came out baffled me.

I awoke in the middle of the night for a second round. The water was still standing so I just poured more Drano down the pipe. I pulled out the augur that I had bought the last time the drain had clogged. I don’t really know how to use it and it didn’t seem to get any further than the wire. The water was still standing after I had read 50 pages of my book so I returned to sleep.

In the morning after I had awoken and Sarah was about to get ready for work I found that the drain had emptied slowly over the course of the evening. So I poured a good three tablespoons of the Drano into it, ignoring the warning on the bottle to call a plumber if it doesn’t clear after the second attempt to clear the drain. The stuff fizzed and buzzed and kicked-up a great storm of gas. That was to my liking because it suggested that the NaOH was working. Sarah unfortunately had to use the bathroom and the gas nearly dissolved her lungs. I returned a few minutes ago to check on my work.

The tub was filled with grime and the drain was empty. I turned on the tub in a moment of truth and … it was clearly still clogged. The water just filled up the drain and didn’t go back down. I’m leaving for Toronto in an hour. I guess I won’t get to take a shower.