slow but measurable progress

I finally tolerate that 17th Century Suds chocolate-flavored lip balm a friend of mine gave me something like two years ago. (Yes, I saved it. I guess I'd know if lip balm went bad, right?) Also, I can't say I tolerate it in Joann Fabrics, but during my last trip there, I noticed that I didn't have to fight the urge to leave the entire time. So, progress.

why burgers will kill you

Today I learned that they really do feed cows moldy food, and that if you're making your cows sick, you should feed them less mold. Also, if you want to feed your cows leftovers from the ethanol distillation plant, distillation triples the mycotoxin content of resultant food substance, and, if you've been paying attention, you are well aware that excess toxic stuff like mycotoxins is stored in fat. It seems reasonable to assume that the storage of things like mycotoxins is probably why cow fat is bad for you.

I'd rather eat no cow at all, but this is why I won't eat conventional cow. Well, that and the fact that it doesn't taste like much unless you put an awful lot of salt on it, and then it just tastes like salt.

reversible brain damage

Recently I learned that I like reading graduate-level mathematical physics textbooks, and they're better with loud classical music in the background. So far I recognize lots of equations and things, but trying to do the problems at the end of the first chapter feels like touch typing on a keyboard where someone has moved only some of the keys. I'll be chugging along ok until I can't remember something really basic and have to move on to something else, and then two hours later I'll be chatting with the really, really sick lady, and she'll get to hear about it when the missing equation pops into my head. (She, like many people, really has no use for stray physics equations, but she's very nice about it.)

I had to start with math books because I tried starting on a signal processing book so riddled with errors that I spent all my time re-deriving things and then doubting my results, even though they at least had the right coefficients in them, as opposed to the ones in the book. (Note to Ashfaq A. Khan -- you had an editor, but you needed a nerdy editor who would call it when you used N and K interchangeably or had a's where you should have had b's, or had nothing at all. I'd help, but I understand no one budgets for nerdy editors.)

So it's been like learning to walk after five years of broken legs, and this person who's stumbling around appears to like playing the fiddle (also stumblingly), and classical music. I attribute this improvement in my health to two things: some new supplements, and something a friend passed along ("God doesn't want us to be sick"), which helped me let some things go, and the less anxious you are, the better you feel. The only downside here is that now I feel like I woke up with some amnesia after five years of some nice-enough imposter (also me) holding down the fort, and it's kind of upsetting.

real time, baby

My husband is right now talking to someone from craigslist trying to help the guy figure out what kind of car he has for sale. I'm betting it's hard to sell a generic 4-door car with instructions to 'cakk' for information.

But onward to what I learned recently:

• A serious wind storm can still mess me up, but it mostly just makes me tired.
• I forgot which kind of submarine (it starts with a 't') takes 40 minutes to turn around, but in 70 degree water, 40 minutes is long enough to develop a serious case of hypothermia, so they take their man-overboard drills pretty seriously.
• From what I'm hearing on the phone, the guy selling the generic car wants something like ten times what it is worth.

things to see

Today I learned that I forgot to check my blog email long enough that my account got deactivated. It's back under control now, and I guess even if you mostly get spam, it's at least good to look at.

Speaking of things to look at, here is a short video on how to launch an anvil 100 feet into the air.

pretty tired

Today I cleaned a new-to-us washing machine motor with hydrogen peroxide and a Q-tip. Yesterday I soaked new-to-a-friend seat belts in dilute vinegar, and the water turned all yellowish-brown. I am ready to not need to do these things.

Also I learned that I tolerate the paint that used to be Glidden 2000, but I can't remember the new name now. It's something like Duralast Somethingmaster 9300 -- something that sounds like a battery-powered exercycle.

voodoo

Today I learned that the placebo effect is getting stronger. Also, something invisible and odorless on the used washing machine motor we put in our older washing machine gives me major heart palpitations. That would have been a great example of the nocebo effect, except that no one told me to expect that a barely-used, eight-year-old washing machine motor would kill me. Also, I didn't eat it.

generalizations and exceptions

I'm used to dire-looking circumstances turning into months or years of horror, so I'm pleased to report that today I learned that some EIs can, with a little help, pull themselves out of some fairly dire-looking circumstances in just a matter of days. This time it took a reasonably experienced EI and people with a very similar injury to provide support, but the situation turned around nicely, and we made a friend. And I will add that despite the fact that my very best friends in the world right now are almost exactly the same age as my parents, it's nice to have some friends your own age.

Here's a gross generalization, as long as I'm thinking about it: almost all of the EIs I know who are my age got in trouble with mold, and most of them are men. I know a lot more people who are older than I, and of that mostly-female crowd, only one or two of them got sick from mold. They seem to be a pesticide/building materials/other stuff group.

chronic fatigue and car crap

Several days ago I learned that people with chronic fatigue tend test positive for a virus that researchers expect causes the illness, a finding which, even if the virus is a side-effect instead of the cause, makes the people who thought chronic fatigue was a mental problem look like a bunch of jerks.

In other news, you can power wash car seat cushions. All you have to do is remove the seats and carpet from the car and then spray the crap out of them. You have to make sure that the pressure washer is clean enough to use first, which can be a challenge if you bought one new. We had to run a bottle of dish soap through the soap container first, and if that voids the warranty, this is still a mostly anonymous blog, and I didn't buy it anyway.

perfume penetration of common building materials

Today I learned that spilled perfume can soak through wallboard and still be easily detectable on the far side more than five years later. I know this because it was time to make the master bedroom closet usable, and we tried painting over the previous occupant's mishap (six coats of various sealers and paint), and it didn't work. Taking out the shelf didn't work. Cutting out the perfumy section of the board supporting the shelf didn't work. Chiseling away a layer of wallboard didn't work. All that, plus cutting a square foot hole in the wall worked.

In other news, five+ years offgased perfume didn't give me heart palpitations or anything, but I didn't exactly spend a lot of time snorting it or wearing it on my clothes.

tolerating fabrics

Today I learned that I like new clothes, and it doesn't matter if the new clothes are $6 worth of socks from Target. They're generally far enough from my nose that I don't even have to decontaminate them too carefully.

I also learned that since I went away for a month (I never got around to mentioning that, but that's where the outlet shopping came in), I seem to tolerate the stuff I contaminated with smoke in the dryer last year. Apparently a year is about long enough to forget about something such that when you get it back, it seems new, despite various holes and tears and such. It's a quilt. Those are allowed to look well-loved, right?

holy cow

Froot Loops are 41% sugar by weight.

human interaction with various plants

Today I learned that biodiesel costs about $2 more per gallon than regular diesel, so only people with a serious commitment to the environment are likely to buy it right now. In completely unrelated news, you can keep berries in the fridge longer if you put them in scalding water first, which kills the mold.

it might not be the government

Today I learned that a fiberglass manufacturer near the Air Force base has been fined by the EPA for releasing too much styrene into the air over the course of several years, and inhaling styrene is supposed to make people sick. I am not at all surprised that inhaling styrene makes people sick since I can't even drink cold water from innocuous-looking clear styrene (#6) fast-food cups, but there was this EI a few years ago who was getting into trouble near the base, and the Air Force was denying everything. Since we expect the government to lie to us, it likely never occurred to anyone she discussed the problem with that they could be telling the truth, not that we have any way of knowing who caused what at this point.

went shopping

Today I learned that if I wear a mask to the outlets, I can be in there long enough to buy real clothes for ridiculously tiny amounts of money. In extremely related news:

• I now understand the art of changing shirts over a half-face respirator.
• I can't go shopping two days in a row, mask or no mask.
• Either the fashion world really moved on these last 4 1/2 years or I dressed really conservatively before I got sick. I recognize pretty much nothing blouse-wise that isn't just as boring as my solid-color t-shirts that I didn't have to try on.

So all I got was a bunch of bras. They are very much superior to the comparably-priced bras you can get at Target without trying them on.

killing your coworkers

Today I learned that 34 people had to go to the hospital after someone at the call center where they worked sprayed perfume. It started with two people feeling dizzy and short of breath, but since I guess they weren't sure at first what happened, they told everybody with any symptoms to leave the building and called the fire department. So either perfume makes a lot of people sick and they don't notice unless someone points it out (this is actually pretty common -- feeling crummy can make people incredibly clueless), or call center workers figured talking to EMTs was more fun than talking on call center phones.

I'm betting they wouldn't have actually gone to the hospital if they were just shirking. But I bet if they'd known it was perfume to start with, they'd have ignored the whole thing because everybody's pretty sure all those undisclosed ingredients in perfume are perfectly safe, and never mind that pregnant women aren't supposed to wear it.

latest round up

Today I learned that the news doesn't care if it tells the truth and could fire you as a newsperson if you wanted to not lie.

Yesterday I learned that if you decide to feed ants cornmeal in the hopes that they will leave your kitchen alone, they mine it. They don't have support timbers and line things with concrete like smugglers crossing the border, but they make little holes they can actually disappear into. And also in yesterday's news, if you work out really, really, really hard for five minutes, you can make your muscle damage look like you had worked out for something like four hours. Whatever kind of muscle damage is apparently how you measure endurance, so extreme interval training could be just as good for endurance training as going out for hours. I don't see the couch potato crowd leaping off the sofa for five minutes, plus warm-up and cool down and stuff like that, and working to the point of pain three times a week, but it might help those of us who like to exercise but get stuck in the house sometimes.

And since I haven't covered anything death-worthy lately, here's an article about how long various pesticides can linger in your house, thus killing you, your kids, and your pets. Also, the crying Native American guy on those '80s littering PSAs was Sicilian.

undergarments, anti-microbials, gout, and fire

Today I learned that Victoria's Secret bras will kill you, maybe with formaldehyde. At the end of the article, the Formaldehyde Council swears they didn't see anything and weren't even there, but it's possible it wasn't formaldehyde. Get an EI to sniff it, and then we'd have an answer. And in related news, Victoria's Secret thongs will take out your eye.

In other news of things that aren't there, antibiotics are the fungi-derived variety of antimicrobials, and organic meats only have to be antibiotic-free. The anti-microbials used are theoretically anti-parasite drugs, which I guess could theoretically include food-grade diatomaceous earth, which I wouldn't have a problem with, but the article doesn't say, and I don't have time to call all the companies involved. I tolerate whatever Whole Foods' suppliers are doing, so if the anti-microbials involved turn out to be just like the antibiotics we've been overusing, I'd probably just die anyway, but for the record, I wasn't there, and I didn't see anything. (What? Everybody else says it.)

And:

• Sufferers of gout can end up oozing white stuff, and apparently it can be due to genetics, not gluttony.
• I couldn't figure out why I got heart palpitations every time I went outside starting Friday morning until I read this article about a local wildfire. It started on Thursday and only recently became newsworthy.

how to decontaminate a dryer

If you're looking for how to simply get synthetic fragrance chemicals out of your dryer, this is going to be overkill. You can probably just scrub the drum, even the fins, and potentially soak any badly affected plastic (probably the lint screen) in vinegar, so cherry pick from the following:

Today we're going to document for posterity the appropriate way to decontaminate a tumble dryer that has had bad air (smoke, for example) sucked through it.

1. Order new drum seals because they typically take a few days to come in, and then you have to boil them about 4 times. Maybe 'seals' isn't their official name, but I'm talking about the felt padding that the drum rides on. If you have weak contamination, maybe you can boil the contaminant out of them, but it takes a lot less boiling to get the 'new' out of new ones than it does to get the crap out of old ones. Trying to save yourself $60 by boiling the old ones for a month is not at all worth it.
2. Take the case apart until you can take out the drum. With the drum out, take out the screws that hold the fin-thingies in place. Find something like a plastic storage tub where you can soak the fins in vinegar for at least 24 hours. 50:50 vinegar and water works fine.
3. Continue disassembling the case until you can reach every surface in the air stream. You don't have to worry as hard about the air stream after it leaves the drum, but those surfaces can ooze contamination backward when the dryer is off, so at least get the ones close to the lint filter.
4. Throw out the heating element. You can't scrub it with Bon Ami, and you can't soak it in vinegar. We can get new ones for our machine on Ebay for about $25, or if you're excited about having it right away, you can pay something like $70 for one at the local appliance place.
5. Commence scrubbing all the exposed surfaces with a Bon Ami paste if the contamination is really stubborn. You can get away with a scrubby sponge and less Bon Ami on less contaminated surfaces. If you have a tube you can't get your arm in, try a brush. We extended the handle on a toilet brush using plastic water pipe. We had to cut the brush's handle at the correct diameter to fit in the pipe (allow extra length so you can taper the brush handle), but wedged in there, it's pretty solid.

Theoretically when all the boiling, soaking, and scrubbing is done, you can just put the whole works back together. Here are some things that could slow you down:

• The bare metal sleeves around the heating element and on the way to the drum are some kind of metal that leaves a taste in my mouth, so you can't necessarily get those parts perfect.
• The seals on my dryer very likely have wool in them. I will probably never be able to sniff those without getting heart palpitations, but I can tell the difference between a wool reaction and a dryer contaminant.

And so you aren't left wondering what might kill you next, there's a giant DDT deposit off the coast of Los Angeles.

beasties, lunch, 'do no harm,' tent prep, and mental illness

Today I learned that:

• The javelina around here get fed by morons frequently enough that if they come upon you, and you have food, they expect some. They're a little scary to chase off on account of those tusks they have.
• Chipotle is one of the safer places to eat.
• The waiting rooms at various doctors' offices can vary greatly depending on the occupants. Today I had to take two showers to get the fumes off me, and I think I still made the really, really sick lady sick when I visited this evening, a total of three showers later. That doctor has a safer office farther away that only gets used three days a month, and I will be going there.
• You can cut nylon with a soldering iron.
• Getting your hormones straightened out using various supplements can cause shoe purchases. I don't understand it, but now I want high heels. It feels like a mental illness.
• You can get eyeliner that is just made of mica and various oxides. I'm not sure whether my current mental illness requires eyeliner or not, but it required at least looking it up.

odds and ends

Today I learned that you can download sewing patterns. I'm thinking of making a dress, so I'll have to look into that after I finish sewing a couple more dome tents, for which I never found a pattern. I somehow think a dress would be easier than a dome tent, but it's been a while.

In things that'll kill you, pesticides still give you Parkinson's, and pollution will give you liver disease. Hormones just make you weird instead of killing you.

a day in the life: be a grown-up and get a mammogram

Today I learned that the majority of the people at a radiology clinic are there for chest x-rays. I was wearing a mask the whole time I was exposed to them, but my husband reports that they reeked of smoke. They didn't sound so good, either.

The radiology clinic is something I learned about because I recently had the bad judgment to turn 40, and even if your hormones aren't all screwed up from a chemical injury, doctors like to start taking pictures around then. They may even glare disapprovingly when they find out you didn't get a practice mammogram back when you turned 35, despite the fact that at that age you may have been, as my grandmother says, too sick to die.

I also learned that if you bring your husband to keep an eye on you (and he definitely needed to keep an eye on me -- he had to cart me outside into fresh air in a hurry at one point), the tech will inform you that the mammography area is strictly off-limits to anyone of the male persuasion, and she will try to leave him in the waiting room. I went along with that for about 4 seconds, when I pointed out that he was my caregiver, and there should be some allowance for that. When I went as far as to suggest we preserve other patients' dignity by getting him a blindfold, she checked with her supervisor, who allowed him in. Problem solved.

We also have some new rules to go along with the obvious 'bring your own gown' and 'whatever else you may do, do not forget your mask':

• However cute your hair may be down, you should wear it up in buildings filled with synthetic fragrance and smokers unless you want to wear your mask after you leave until your hair offgases.
• Wear a button-up shirt to doctor visits. A t-shirt is hard to get off over a half-face respirator, and if you take the mask off, your first breath contains a bunch of carpet-cleaner chemicals.
• Do not, under any circumstances, remove your mask. Failure to observe this rule may result in a quick trip to the parking lot wearing not exactly what you'd hope to be wearing in a parking lot.

giant sponges, car parts, and a tv breakthrough

Today I learned that you can roll up the carpet from a 1998 Plymouth Neon and fit half of it into a standard-sized storage tub. The hard part is if the tub is filled with diluted ammonia, and then it's a b**** wrestling the soaking wet carpet onto the clothesline. In related news:

• If you completely take out the interior of a Neon with a mold problem so bad it smells like a swamp from 5 feet away with the doors and windows closed, and you spray whatever you couldn't take out with 20% hydrogen peroxide, the swamp smell goes away.
• Seat cushion foam parts are like giant sponges, but if you can't bend them so they're submerged in ammonia, it's hard to tell if you got the whole thing wet, thereby killing all the mold.
• Wet giant sponges are really heavy.
• 1998 and earlier Neons had inferior head gaskets, so we might need to learn how to change a head gasket.

We have a project on our hands, but the price was right, and if we can permanently banish the swamp smell, we will have beaten some mold. That kind of thing is very good for morale around here.

In other news, the really, really sick lady's husband got a hold of a used rear-projection tv which he then spent probabably six weeks decontaminating. The upshot is that when the really, really sick lady's sister's phone line conked out, she had something else to do besides talk on the phone for the first time in eight years.

Morale is up all over.

recipes must be followed to the letter

Today I learned how to make "salt rising bread." This is what the pioneer ladies used to make when they couldn't get yeast, and it has nothing to do with salt. According to the internet, the pioneer ladies liked to make a starter using cornmeal and maybe a potato or two in water, plus maybe a bunch of other stuff, and they kept their starters at exactly 110^o F (they apparently had super-accurate wood stove thermometers) for 8 to 10 hours. Then, if the starter worked, they could make some bread, but if it didn't, they threw it out and started over.

In the interests of not adding any more corn to my diet, I tried putting a starter made of only flour and water in a warm spot (the oven with the light on) for 8 to 10 hours and throwing it out when it didn't 'start.' Then I remembered that following directions when it comes to food was never my strong suit, and I made another starter that I set out on the counter until it started, dammit, and then I made bread.

Thus I will conclude that:

• Patience is a virtue;
• Having a high tolerance for junk on your counter can be a good thing;
• Following directions is only a useful skill if you are dealing with some aspects of government or attempting to get good grades in school.

In other news, the really, really sick lady watched five minutes of the Weather Channel today after not having a tolerable tv for 8 years. She seemed kind of unimpressed, but 5 minutes of tv is a huge step forward considering her usual entertainment is watching (a) the bugs outside her window, or (b) the ceiling. Also, the lady who has lived in her car for 25 years passed her driver's license eye test, so she's good to go for another 5 years, whether or not her car is.

It's been an exciting couple of days.

rear enders, tomatoes, and how to stay in shape

Today I learned that in Winnipeg, even as the cops were claiming that red-light cameras were improving driver behavior, accidents and resulting injuries went up about 60%. It appears that while the the cameras may have modified red-light running behavior, they don't do much about tailgater behavior.

In other news, by abusing tomatoes consistently for months, I finally got in trouble with them, at the height of this pollen season. I expect to get them back again by about August, just in time for mold season.

In yet other news, today I saw an ad on tv. It started out by mentioning how hard we all work to stay in shape, so I was expecting it to be for some kind of exercise equipment that made staying in shape easier. It was an ad for baked Lay's potato chips, so maybe bending your elbow is more strenuous than I thought.

fat, spam, and recycling

A few days ago I learned that the obesity epidemic can be blamed entirely on people eating too much. The model researchers used to predict the overall fatness of the US population based on national food consumption (and waste) predicted even more obesity, so people have apparently been exercising more. They found that to combat the extra calories, you'd have to walk an average adult an extra two hours per day and an average kid two and a half hours. The kids could instead lose one "fizzy drink" (350 calories) per day, but the grown-ups have to figure out how to ditch an extra 500 calories, which the article says is equivalent to a hamburger. (I think it must be a little hamburger.) (I don't know much about the caloric content of hamburgers.)

Then I got distracted, but somewhere in there I learned that Blogger's spam detector thinks this blog is a spam blog, so I am dutifully reporting it here just like all the other bloggers whose blogs have been 'detected.' Maybe I look like a pusher of non-shampoo hair cleaning products, but, honestly, I think the majority of the people who come to this blog are looking for some variant of 'shoplifting tools,' which I mentioned once in 2007.

In other illegal news, reusing a priority mail cardboard box is illegal even if you turn it inside out and no one will know except the recipient. I do not expect this information to generate much in the way of page visits.

things that'll kill me, personally

A couple of days ago, I went to the local EI doctor, where I learned that, having previously dealt with the life-and-death part of mycotoxicosis, now I should probably deal with a (relatively) minor mercury problem, and I should have kept taking various food-oil omega-3 supplements and vitamin E. (Apparently if you're an EI, vitamin E won't kill you, but it could help straighten out your hormones.) I also learned that there are some food-based supplements you can take for a case of candida, and this is where today's lesson comes in. If you have the ability to sniff foods to see if they'll make you sick, you should open up the freakin' supplement capsules and sniff the contents before you swallow them.

This has been another edition of Learning Things The Hard Way. Please visit our (totally imaginary) sponsor.

scoping out the drive-in options

Today I looked up the Wolverine movie on Rotten Tomatoes, where I learned that 5 out of 15 male reviewers liked it, but 3 out of 5 female reviewers liked it. From this unscientific sampling, I infer that Van Helsing would have gotten better reviews if Hugh Jackman had spent more time in it with his shirt off.

chemical burns, tvs, horror food, pit bull history, and masked hilarity

Today I learned that a bunch of sorority girls got chemical burns on a slip-and-slide lubricated with laundry detergent. Somehow this was supposed to raise money for firemen. Three things:

1. "He added, 'We're really fortunate that the women in Greek life on campus really made the event special.'"
2. When you've been out of college for a while and your only contact is articles like this, it makes you wonder how any college students survive long enough to graduate.
3. Laundry detergent will kill you, but not in a way I had considered.

Also,

• Old tvs are funny looking.
• A canned whole chicken could be used for a horror movie.
• Pit bulls as we know them today are not actually pit bulls. Real pit bulls, renamed Staffordshire terriers or American Staffordshire terriers around 1936, were medium-sized, perfectly good basic working dogs. The ones you hear about in the news today are essentially the puppy-mill products of a mixture of breeds, and I can expound for hours on the topic of badly-bred dogs. You can see them on the street if you look -- some of them, when they walk, look like they were assembled by Frankenstein, but without the bolts sticking out.

And now I have a good physical understanding of why dogs fuss at you when you crinkle paper around them, with an added hilarity bonus for those of us who have much too much experience wearing respirators.

things you can wash with

Today I learned that researchers have found that you should bleach your children if they have eczema because that kills the bacteria associated with the problem. Ok, they said to put a 1/2 cup of bleach in the kid's bath, but as an EI, that still sounds pretty lethal to me. Makes you wonder what lye soap did to eczema, back in the day.

In other bath news, I've been washing my hair with salt, baking soda, or this funky super-organic clay-based "wash" since whenever I got in trouble with that last shampoo. Salt is good for not-too-stinky hair, baking soda is pretty good for grocery-store hair and minor greasiness, and the clay stuff is really good for everything. So far my scalp smells better than it did when I used fragrance-free shampoos, I don't get little frizzies on top anymore when I blow-dry my hair, which isn't all flat and perfectly straight like it used to be, and it looks fantastic, assuming it isn't falling out of a braid. I would wear it down all the time, but having easier-to-work-with hair hasn't done anything for my hair-in-the-face tolerance.