it took me a few tries but i might be awake. what about the smell?

the sewage smell is perhaps slowly dissipating; it's hard to be sure of anything, but if it is actually fading then it's clear enough that i'm going to need to wait it out, and do some cleaning in here to really get rid of it. it's too early to tell if putting the cap on is a serious long term solution or not, but it seems to be having somewhat of an effect.

what that's doing, though, is separating out a component from what may in the end turn out to be a complex smell; if i were to identify the remaining odour, now that the sewage has been pulled out or otherwise minimized, i would suspect that i'm smelling american or german cockroaches. it's the saltier smell of the browner roaches, rather than the deep sewage smell of the darker ones.

...which is a little surprising, because i haven't actually seen any down here. i've seen (and heard) a couple of crickets, i've seen centipedes, i've seen spiders, i saw that one maple bug and i've seen an unusually large number of ants. i think that's it. i've yet to see a single roach...

why does it smell like roaches down here, then?

grargh.