Blessed by the Potato

The CBC is reporting on a new traffic light timing scheme that will see pedestrians scramble across the road with traffic stopped in all directions. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. I remember in Kanazawa there was an intersection which a few times stopped all car traffic and let pedestrians cross (there were even separate diagonal crossing walk/don’t walk signals). It seemed really strange and bizarre at the time. For time when intersections can really build up with a backlog of people waiting to cross, I suppose it could help move the pedestrian traffic. It could also make crossing safer since cars won’t be able to turn during the scramble, which is where most close calls seem to come from. But I can’t really say if it would actually help the pedestrians as much as I would guess it would impede the car traffic…

We’ve got a bit of a mold problem in the house here. When we first moved in, we had a water leaking into the basement problem, which lead fairly directly to mold growing in the laundry room. Our landlord did a somewhat sloppy fix of the problem by spraying the leaking wall with blue expanding foam, but it did seem to keep 99% of the water out of the laundry room. However, the mold continues to grow there. It’s a little unsettling, and from what we’ve read on the internet, if mold continues to grow after being killed back by bleach and mold inhibitor a few times, it’s probably there to stay and we’ll need a professional.

It’s a bit of a pain, but the laundry room is at least a fairly localized, stable problem (and is much more livable after we got a UVC lamp to kill the spores and improve the smell).

The rest of the basement is unfinished, and smells terrible. It’s always had a bit of an unfinished-basement, confined-space, stale-mildewy smell to it, and we can smell that whenever the furnace or A/C first clicks on and blows skanky air around the rest of the house. However, that room has gotten much worse in the last few months. Somehow, water is getting in there, and it doesn’t make any damned sense. The interior brick wall (a wall between rooms, not one that faces the outside) is sweating/dripping with water and swelling. When the brick foundation swells and cracks like that, it starts making me a little nervous about the structural integrity of the house as a whole. The smell has gotten much worse as well, along with what looks to be some creeping mold (the mold in the laundry room is white/grey and quite fluffy, the mold in the furnace room doesn’t look nearly as fluffy, more of a scum).

We’ve been complaining to our landlord about it quite a bit, and she has been less than helpful. In fact, she’s been downright batty about the whole thing. She seems to firmly believe that opening windows will solve the problem (never mind that there are only two openable windows in the basement: one of which we were robbed via, and the other one opens half under the deck, and so doesn’t offer much in the way of bulk fresh air flow). Then she suggested that we get a fan, thinking that airflow would dry up the water and stop the mold. “Opening the door to the furnace room should also help,” she said “because before the renovations there was no door there.” We were not about to leave that door open full time, for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that there’s no reason why that would help clear the mold in that room (as opposed to spreading it through the rest of the house, as well as giving the cat a way in to roll in the mold and get herself disgusting). Then, to prompt us to use a fan, she came by and dropped one off (a very obviously used fan that was probably just sitting around her basement).

She’s been quite laissez-faire about the whole thing, saying things like “well, it’s and old house, and that’s just what happens to them.” Old houses might be susceptible to mold invasions, but that’s not an inevitable fate of older homes. There are many gorgeous century old homes in this neighbourhood, and with proper upkeep they’re quite habitable. When Wayfare pointed out that we both have mold allergies, she said something along the lines of “well, you hardly ever use the basement anyway, so can’t you just get like a surgical mask and wear that whenever you go down?” That was particularly not helpful.

A dehumidifier has been one good suggestion, and we tried that. There’s an old one hanging around in the furnace room that was purportedly used by the previous tenant to solve the water-coming-through-the-walls issue, but I didn’t trust it (I figured it was probably just full of mold waiting to be blown around), so I bought a new one. We ran it for two days and despite the fact that there were visible water droplets on the wall, it didn’t take any moisture out of the air — either high humidity is not the problem (and it doesn’t feel that humid in there), or the room is too cold for a dehumidifier to be effective. So we managed to return it, since it wasn’t helping. She bought us another one now anyway, but we have to go up to Sears and pick it up (if I thought it would actually do something, I wouldn’t mind…).

Then, Wayfare went by her office to drop off our rent cheque, and our landlord was all excited. She had bought something for the house:

A big thing of vinegar, and two boxes of baking soda. Yes, we will have a giant carbon dioxide volcano and that will fix our mold problems. She figures somehow that if bleach didn’t kill the mold, vinegar will (“it’s a handy household cleaner” — yeah, it is… for windows), and the baking soda will help remove the smell of death!

Me, I figure that combined with some red and green food colouring, we just got a cool Halloween prop. (Who wants to see the vampire bubble blood? Who wants to see the doll projectile volcano vomit?).

No word yet one when she’ll get someone who knows something about mold to take a look at the situation (her admittedly unreliable step son is supposed to come by some time before the end of the year to look at the problem and suggest further craziness). We’re starting to wonder if we should cut her out of the loop and start talking to her husband, who seems to have a clue but simply doesn’t care as much. My dad says that mold can be bad for the resale value of a house, and also for the health of its occupants, and if she’s dragging her feet like this then we should go over her head to a tenants’ protection association of some sort, or hire a mold specialist ourselves, without convincing her of the necessity first, and then just sending the bill to her.

It’s been a very busy couple of days here with a few all-nighters while I try to finish off a paper. Consequently, I was taking a nap at around four this afternoon when my landlord stopped by to finally survey the water/mould issues in the basement. She’s full of wacky ideas (I’ve got a whole separate rant in the works about her ideas to fix our problem, which unfortunately is going to have to come later), and relayed more to Wayfare today. I’ll leave it up to her to blog about on her own about the whole experience of the landlord dropping by, but I just had to post her tip of the day to try to prevent break-ins: popsicle sticks. Yes, her brilliant suggestion was that we should glue some popsicle sticks together and make it look like security bars on the window.

Yeah.

The bathroom here at the hospital has rather poor ventilation and tends to smell a little more strongly than your typical public washroom. Sometimes it smells strongly of cleaning products, whatever turns the toilet water blue, and disinfectant (especially at night, when it usually gets cleaned, and when I’m really the only one left around to use it; I, somewhat unfairly, have a near-total monopoly on the odd magic of turning that toilet water solution green). Other times, as one might expect, it smells foully of other people’s waste products.

Today, it smelled like fried chicken.

That kind of threw me for a loop when I first walked in there, because there really aren’t any cleaning products on the market that the caretaking staff could possibly have switched to that might smell like that (oranges, lemons, “springtime”, and bleach, yes, but I’ve yet to see “fried chicken scented Lysol”). And no matter how little one’s digestive system may be acting on food, there’s simply no way it could come back out (either end) still smelling so much like fried chicken. The mystery of the odd, out of place smell was enough to make me start to wonder if I might be having a stroke, though worrying about whether I’m having a stroke seems to be my default state these days, particularly when strange smells are involved. Eventually the logical explanation hit me: all around that washroom are labs where no one is allowed to eat. The people who work there usually have to eat out in the hallway, sitting on the floor (and even have to leave their food sitting out there unattended, like the wet snowboots of so many kindergarteners). So of course, if one is just a little bit crazy and wants something approximating a chair to sit on and eat lunch, there’s really only one seat in close proximity…

But if it were me, I’d try the cafeteria. They have tables there, too.

I believe (or used to believe) in a fundamental conservation of luck, or karma, or ka, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a belief that stems partly from my physicist nature: we have a conservation law for almost everything else, so why not luck? It also helped me get through tough times, by focusing on the good things that balance it all out (or to make myself sure that they must be coming soon).

It’s this irrational belief that leads me to do silly things like buy lottery tickets after a run of bad luck, or on exam day, in the hopes that either I’d do well on the exam or win enough money that it wouldn’t matter. So after my recent run of bad luck (culminating with the break-in), I bought a lottery ticket. Well, three, to be precise. And they’ve changed the way they used to work. There used to be a small code hidden beneath the scratch-off area that wasn’t part of the game, and that code would contain some symbols that would help you see if you won or lost fairly quickly. A losing ticket had, somewhere, two characters that looked like down-pointing arrows or triangles. Winning tickets had arrows pointing up, or A’s with accents, or other characters depending on how much you won. Now there are no such clues, so I’ve been relentlessly checking these tickets to see if I missed something, hoping that the lack of “down arrows” indicates that I did win and just missed scratching somewhere. Finally, I sent Wayfare off with the ticket to the store to have them check it with the barcode reader thingy just to be absolutely sure, and she confirmed that they’ve stopped printing them with those symbols.

Oh, and speaking of the break-in, the London Police sent us a victim’s package of some sort in the mail. I haven’t had time to fully read through it yet, but it consists of a few pamphlets and a large book on how to cope with the feelings of being violated, and how to secure our home to prevent future break-ins. It’s kind of a nice touch, though I don’t think anything in there is going to be new to me.