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.