The Air that we Breathe

I just read my past blogs. ......Whatever....Thanks for hanging in there.


I got my stupid haircut mid January. Almost May now, and  finally showing the first signs of scruffiness ...which I like .At times I am so remarkably superficial. 

OK,  Here's the recent bomb....Asbestos..... Our house has it. We had a guy help us put in our wood stove. He was concerned about the insulation he encountered in the "attic" space. We had it checked and ...yup ....Asbestos.  Our Regional District ( if this was US think,"County") advises; in an older home, if it is isolated from the rest of the house, like an attic, just don't disturb it. It's the airborne fibers that are dangerous. ( microscopic, you breathe them in, they lodge in your lungs and in 10 to 30 years they manifest into an insidious form of lung cancer).  Well, we have disturbed it big time. We cut the house in two for starters, saved the funny looking insulation and reinstalled it after putting the two pieces back together. All this was done while the artist, homeowner was in LaLa Land, thanking the powers that be for his good fortune in finding  such a cool free cabin. 
Then the stove guy spilled the stuff all over the living area last week, and cleaned it up with a shop vac. Any web site you visit in regard to dealing with this stuff is pretty clear about NEVER using a standard vacuum. The people who make a living removing this stuff show up in haz-mat gear and charge you the price of a new car to "neutralize" the area. Deb and I are sitting here doing the math. I was pretty good at English and Art......but I digress,...so, um...we've already been exposed. If our lung problems start in 10 years ....that's still dying pretty young ....but 30 years....well.... Hallelujah !! 
The HUGE concern is having our dear granddaughter visit. She will in no way enter the' House of death'... unless it changes its name. This apparently can be done with money.....and a certificate of air quality. 


ASBESTOS: Apparently tons of "vermiculite" was mined and heated whereupon it expanded like popcorn and was used as a lightweight fireproof insulation for countless thousands of homes in Canada and the US , and later when it was discovered to contain trace amounts of asbestos, the health hazards were revealed. ( And a huge, billion dollar,  Eco-Removal industry was born.)  So it was shipped instead to the Third World because they hadn't tested it over there,  so it was ok. It may even still be OK over there. I'm going to pour myself another drink. ...OK. I'm back, where was I ?  Oh yeah. .. Between a rock and a hard place. I may have mentioned it before, but I think it bares...bears...(shit)...repeating..."Making the effort to live a more simple life is enormously complicated." Case in point: You find someone who is about to "Demo" a little house. You say", No, Wait I'll take that and move it to your property. This will be saving the environment all the land fill and so on...after all, it's an unwanted house.  You set it up and bite the bullet for the shocking price tag to move it 6 blocks. Get involved, and also pay to have the place functional and just when you think you are living the dream, you get slapped with the asbestos card!  Well, we've been here breathing it long enough to make us desirable candidates for the medical journals, but our focus presently is to find a way to make our home safe enough to get a visit from out dear granddaughter, Amirra . Tomorrow we start getting bids on the clean up. There are also instructions available for "do it yourself" one square foot at a time. We will be looking for haz-mat gear. Wish us luck.