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.