deathmtn

Let’s take a relaxed attitude toward post offices.

I enjoy this.

The guy with the 1E purple work is great.

That plant is so weird!

I think these chords are EmDim7+6, F#mDim7, G2, E4. But also it might not be worth naming them.

Here’s the garbage I picked up in my backyard in like ten minutes. I think it’s been a wasteland for years.

Got a little lazy about hiding treasure hunt coin, but also it’s good to find a big cache once in a while.

The evening was good. It was the guy’s birthday. He had an amazing cake, good presents, and Pikmin 2. And we saw animals in the yard.

But the day? The day was once again an unfortunate day.

This morning, I yanked a light back from the ceiling in the guy’s room to see if it was a wafer light or a can light. Some crud fell out of the ceiling and onto the floor. I asked the guy to back up, as it might be vermiculite, but I thought it probably wasn’t. I think it was just “ceiling crud”. I vacuumed it up from the floor and the bit that got on a Lego building.

I pulled the light back out a little bit to grab more of the crud from the light. I got it onto some cardboard, took a picture, then emailed it to the vermiculite abatement guy who had come by for an estimate the other day.

I drove the guy to camp, then looked at my email. The abatement guy said it was indeed vermiculite.

I got home and immediately re-vacuumed the room, then started cleaning every exposed surface with cleaning spray and paper towels. I let my job know I’d be dealing with this mess today. I called multiple vermiculite abatement services to ask what I should be doing.

Sam, the guy I emailed the picture to said that as long as I vacuumed it with a HEPA filter (which I did) and cleaned anything the vermiculite got on, we should be fine.

Another said something about doing air testing, though the air testing place they referred me to was booked for a week.

A third, Dave, asked how much had spilled (I agreed to an estimate of about a cup, though I thought of it more like a “palmful”) also said that I should be fine as long as I vacuumed with a HEPA filter and wiped the surfaces with an ammonia-based cleaner to settle the dust. (Unsure why it had to be ammonia-based.) I did need another quote on vermiculite removal, so I asked him for one. He sent over his sales guy, Marc.

Marc, after doing the attic vermiculite removal estimate (he mentioned a way of doing it that was way simpler than how Sam would do it), said that we should be fine in the guy’s room if I vacuumed the room with a HEPA filter, wiped down all of the surfaces, then ran an air purifier all day. He said that’s basically what they do while removing vermiculite — they run a powerful air purifier. If they fail an independent air test, the remedy is to run the air purifier some more.

Then, he mentioned that is actually hard to get cancer from asbestos (which some vermiculite contains). His grandfather was an electrician who worked among asbestos all the time and did get asbestos lung, but recovered from it.

I have read that
a lot of regular exposure, like years, is required to increase lung cancer risk. This was like five minutes of possible exposure.

Still, I felt I had to make sure I did everything reasonable, partly in case there was some hidden dust that got elsewhere in the room, and partly to exercise something in order to reduce paranoia. (I would feel very weird if I just said, logically, this is already take care of, so I’ll just do nothing.)

So, I cleaned very exposed surface in the room. Shelves, books, top surfaces of busy Lego sets, dressers, floors. I took two tubfulls of all the Legos that had been out on the floor plus whatever other toys were out to the backyard and soaked them in soapy water. I washed all the bedding and stuffed animals. I cleaned the ceiling vent even though that was really unlikely to have captured any invisible dust. I took pictures of things I cleaned so that I wouldn’t get paranoid and clean them again. I cleaned the floor again anyway.

Then, I shut the door and ran the existing air purifier and went out to get a new air purifier that had actually been well-reviewed.

On the way home after picking up the guys, I got a call from Dave about the estimate, in which he casually mentioned that to be safe, we should stay out of the area until they came in to remove the vermiculite, and then they’d do a HEPA and air cleaning in it.

What area? He was talking about the guy’s room. Well, it could be a month to start the vermiculite removal , if we even go with Dave as a contractor. And his sales guy, Marc said earlier that we could be reasonably safe going in after cleaning and running the purifier all day.

I tried to nail down what he meant, and I knew Dave probably had to be careful about what he said legally, but eventually we landed on running the purifiers for 24 hours (then throwing away the purifiers!) as a reasonable level of safety.

Then, he said that he could get his pro cleaners there Monday and quoted me $300 for that, *if* we contract with them for removal.

On one hand, I thought his company had a more sensible approach to removal than Sam did. On the other, he’s contradicting what his employer Marc said, and I wonder if he’s playing on fear to land the sale. Because I was feeling fear all day, and I’m sure he noticed.

We are having the guy sleep in another room and are running the purifiers for 24 hours. After that, though, I think we’re actually good and have gone far beyond what’s necessary for a palmful of vermiculite hitting the floor and a Lego building with possible attendant invisible dust.

The rebuttal to that, always, though, is: What if you’re wrong and are a bad parent?