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| Big enough to swallow my car | |
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A "small" dumpster was stealthily dropped off sometime Friday morning while no one was home. Deja vu struck as I got home that evening. This thing was huge. I'm not sure how they got it in my driveway (it's a downward slope), but they were nice about putting it flush on one side of the driveway so my car could still fit.
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- Tyvek overalls - the same material they use to make envelopes, race bibs and house coverings. You can get them in any color, as long as it's white.
- Construction hat - clearance in the crawlspace is about a foot less than me. Then there are all those random pipes and boards. I'm so glad I had this because I'm sure I would have bonked myself unconscious.
- Respirator - necessary to avoid exposure to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (mice had previously been present) and chain letters
- Goggles - these were less useful because they kept fogging up and were uncomfortable with the respirator on.
- Pair of shoes that should have been retired a long time ago
- Gloves - for obvious reasons
The next task would be to inspect all of the insulation and pull out the strips that were, um, decorated. Thankfully, these rats were consistent. There were only fifteen strips that needed to be discarded. After that was done, I needed to start pulling up the vapor barrier, which is a fancy-sounding name for a thick plastic sheet covering the moist ground. The stuff present was placed when the house was originally built as sections were under the pillars. It went pretty fast when I hacked off chunks with a razor blade. I tried to work one direction and was careful to roll the old barrier one direction so the rat dookie and expired grass seed would be encased in a plastic sarcophagus that could startle an unexpecting archaeologist. The new "vapor barrier" consists of 50' sections of 6-mil plastic sheeting where I've placed strategic cuts for a more snug fit. (With their 1,001 uses, single-edge razor blades are the baking soda of the handyman's world.)I sprayed sealant foam in a couple of gaps where pipes poked through the floor. There was a 2" gap where the vent from the cooktop goes. I'm surprised I hadn't seen any critters working their way through there for a midnight snack. Once the foamy stuff set, I jammed strips of new insulation to fill in gaps. This went very quickly and I was done by 4pm.
Sunday I spent time excavating my study throwing nearly a thousand uncategorized software CDs. Can you believe that I've kept copies of tax, checkbook, operating system and office productivity software dating back to 1995? I also had several games that, as mind-boggling as this seems, fit on floppy disks, yet I have no disk reader to even check if they work. I also tossed several of my school yearbooks (I desperately need the bookshelf space), a baby seat (it's un-donatable) and boxes of circa-1988 computer equipment including a 9-track reel tape and a SCSI (the kind with the big Centronics-sized cable) shoebox that formerly housed a 100Mb hard disk used on my Commodore Amiga. I'm not even sure where one could read the tape to see what's on it. I haven't seen one of those drives since 1992. (This makes me a little nervous about my CD-ROM discs...)
I feel bad about tossing all the stuff out, and even worse for having hung onto it for so long. On the other hand, I've been trying hard to reduce the amount I accumulate.
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