Derek Semmler dot com - money, motorcycles and cars (with a little bit of everything else)

Tuesday night I arrived home from work around 8:00pm and spent a little bit of time with my kids before reading them their bedtime stories and wishing them pleasant dreams.

Around 9:30pm I headed downstairs with my stomach growling from not having any dinner yet and I opted to toss a French-bread pizza into the oven for a late dinner. After cooking for about 20 minutes, I pulled the pan out of the oven and there was a little bit of cheese that had melted onto the pan and the pizza was stuck to the pan.

As I scraped the pizza off and began eating my dinner, my wife ventured downstairs and asked if I had burned some cheese or something. I mentioned the mishap with the pan and proceeded to eat my dinner. Once I was done with my dinner, I sat in the family room watching the movie Hoodlum.

Every now and then I would smell that *burnt cheese* and I thought it was a bit odd that the smell was still that strong. As the movie progressed, I suddenly became very sleepy and basically passed out on the floor of the family room from what I thought was just exhaustion of a long day at work.

Around 3:00am I awoke on the couch and dragged myself upstairs to bed. The next morning I came downstairs with my oldest son to get him breakfast and still smelled the *burnt cheese* smell. I had left the pan on the top of the oven and tossed it in the sink to clean off the crusty cheese and then put it in the dishwasher. Yet I was still smelling the odd smell.

I opened the oven door to make sure the oven was off and there wasn’t anything in there and everything seemed okay. So I opened the kitchen window and then lit a candle in the kitchen to try and get a fresh smell in there. At this point, my wife came downstairs and said that it really smelled like gas.

I said that I had smelled inside the oven and didn’t notice anything but she smelled the top range and noticed that one of the burners was turned into the on position but was just shy of the ignition point. Doh!

Apparently, when I was scraping my French-bread pizza off of the pan, I must have nudged the knob on the range just enough to turn it on and have gas leaking out into the house. That *burnt cheese* smell was actually gas leaking from the burner below the pan on top of the range.

Looking back at it now, I think this explains why I suddenly became so tired that night and could not keep my eyes open and fell asleep. In addition, I am feeling very fortunate that we had windows open upstairs as I am sure that helped ventilate the house while we were sleeping all night long. Likewise, I am very lucky that when I lit the candle in the kitchen that it did not send the entire room up in flames with the gas leaking in the air for so long.

After this experience we went out and purchased new CO-detectors as we had no pre-warning that there may have been a problem in the house. We are all feeling very fortunate that the *burnt cheese* did not result in anything more serious as this could have very easily been a tragic situation.

I’ve tried to convince my wife that this scenario is a good reason why I should not be in the kitchen cooking anything but she isn’t buying it!