the unremoveable contaminant?

Today I may have learned how to get rid of the unremovable laundry contaminant. I got it into two small quilts I rely on, and my previous method for light contamination -- two washes with detergent, two with vinegar, and one with just water -- didn't work. It worked great on single layers of nylon, but cotton quilts are another thing. Anyway, I decided to go with Oxyclean, even though soaking badly contaminated pillow cases didn't do a whole lot.

So this is what worked (I think) on the quilts: two washes with detergent and Oxyclean, and then as many washes with vinegar as it takes to make the rinse water not foam. I think it was around five. Then after the quilts dried, I had to air-fluff them in the dryer for three hours to get the unrinsable residue out because that was making them stiff and icky, besides giving me heart palpitations. Ok, I can totally work with stiff and icky. It was the heart palpitations.

Tomorrow, assuming I don't get blown out of here by the wind combined with lots of recent dirt-moving at the road construction site, I should start this procedure on the pillow cases and maybe even the nightshirts, maybe with three or four washes with Oxyclean.

I guess this post was more record-keeping than interesting, but it could turn out to be fascinating to the right person down the road. Hopefully not me. Never mind, I hope nobody ever has this problem ever again, but I'm not holding my breath.

how to contaminate most of your bedding

Today I learned that you can, indeed, put coconut oil in your hair, and the sky won't fall immediately. I'll let you know how this experiment turns out, but for today, you can hear how this event came about.

This story starts with glutathione. I had heard years ago of EIs getting glutathione IVs and how they felt great afterwards. They tended to mention the cost at the same time (around $100/week), so I never looked into it very hard. A couple of years ago, my doctor told me to get some, and it was a total disaster -- I was supposed to try the nebulizable kind, and there was miscommunication, and next thing I knew I couldn't breathe and I was detoxing so hard I actually got that rash I'd heard you get when you detox nasty stuff out your pores. It itched.

Glutathione helps get the stored crap in your system out where you can detox it. If you aren't good at detoxing your particular crap, which is how I, for one, got sick in the first place, you just shake everything loose and make yourself really sick while the crap finds a new place to settle. The solution to this problem is to take "sequestrants," which are things like charcoal and bentonite clay, that adsorb the crap so you can, appropriately, poop it out.

So you get back on the glutathione, but in a different form because screw inhaling it, and you're taking your sequestrants, and everything seems to be going ok, but you feel lousy. If you're me, you blame it on the road construction and move on with your life until you stop tolerating all your nightshirts and some of the bedding. Pollen season plus road construction plus, when you go to the doctor, you learn the small amount of glutathione you thought you could handle was too much. You do a lot of laundry, give up on the nightshirts, and hope the next pollen season doesn't resurrect the laundry issue.

The laundry issue reared its ugly head a few weeks back. I upped my sequestrants -- I'm still not taking any glutathione -- and surprisingly, to me at least, felt better. Thus I have not irreversibly contaminated any sheets lately, but I'm still trying to get some new nightshirts tolerable. Nightshirts are cheap if you make them, but bedding is expensive, so this situation is asking for trouble without nightshirts to buffer the sheets, but the sheets are still ok. The fact that they've lived for two weeks without meeting the unremovable contaminant is a huge improvement.

The pillow cases, however, continued to die. Since I haven't used shampoo in years, I knew what the problem was. It was time to use something real on my hair. Instead of using salt water and having stunning hair (yes, I get compliments, but maybe it's not stunning), I switched to a bentonite clay "hair wash," which has predictably removed the contaminant, along with all the oil that made my hair work. Then I couldn't get a comb through it, and it was either cut it or oil it. Since you can cut it after you oil it, I figured I'd try that first.

The first hour has gone fine. Hopefully there is no huge downside like being eaten by whatever eats things that smell vaguely of coconut.

So that's enough of that; I'm off to make a hammock out of nylon, which seems to not hold the contaminant so hard, and then I'll have a place to sleep if I kill the sheets.

easily entertained

Today I learned that "Afternoon Delight" is grocery-store approved shopping music, which made my husband laugh all the way through the produce section and into the Asian food department. This after we heard "Talking in Your Sleep" at the auto parts place. My shopping run went from middle-school dance to, um, not middle-school dance, I guess.

In other news, during pollen season, sometimes it's a good idea to sit on the couch and inhale as little as possible. Then you need some kind of brainless activity because realistically, with that level of pollen difficulty, you're going to be an idiot. The kind of idiot who throws medication in the trash instead of tossing the packaging, but enough about yesterday.

But back to the brainless activity. I've been slowly working through the millions of seasons of NCIS. This is a show I've seen described in print as "something your father watches," but as much as it's a stupid procedural, sometimes the writers get turned loose, and they put something crazy in there. It's an interesting mixture of predictable -- which is fun if you can accurately guess what will happen -- and crazy, which I really enjoy.

Anyway, it's set around Washington, D.C., usually, but every time they go to an outdoor crime scene, there are coast live oaks there. The latest episode I saw, the camera panned right across the trunk of one, showing the distinctive lichens that grow in the same area as the oaks.

Those oaks live in California, and I think it's hilarious every time.

shrimp mashing -- not for the squeamish

Today I learned by clicking through a bunch of things that shrimp have such rudimentary nervous systems that people aren't sure whether or not they feel pain like we do. People have noticed because the way you get shrimp to reproduce in captivity is to squish this one gland they have that inhibits fertilization, and the shrimp don't seem to mind for more than a few minutes. Now I'm glad I pretty much gave up shrimp years ago.

In other news, Tucson is now one of Amazon's same-day delivery zones. Usually nothing particularly useful happens around here unless it's tourist-related, but it looks like Amazon twigged to the fact that Tucson is kind of a spread-out retail desert if you want something Target and Home Depot don't carry. We'll have to see if there is anything I actually need the same day, but it doesn't hurt to have the possibility.

getting back on track

I haven't learned anything today except that the landscaper the neighbors recommended could come over today and clean up my yard. I could have worried that he was available right away, but I chose not to because I figured he'd probably been working since sunrise, and it wasn't a million degrees out, so he could work past 11 am if he wanted to.

I hadn't cleaned up my yard myself because of the ongoing road construction that tends to be upwind of us. Being downwind of large quantities of moving dirt has proven to be a nasty problem for us mold-injured people, so we spend all our outdoor time somewhere else, on mountain bikes lately if we can help it, but we greatly enjoy the cafeteria patio at the Desert Museum. The result is that the yard got away from me, and I wasn't in a position to do anything about it, which would be torturing my do-it-yourself soul if I chose to let it.

So I did some choosing today, which is cool if it works. It didn't work yesterday unless I really, really wanted something, like a new bike helmet. The bike helmet store is not downwind of road construction, so that went pretty well. I got a new bike helmet, and it's orange! I sound like I'm ten.