August 04, 2009

9:27 p.m.

HazMat

This is one of the free pieces of furniture I was given last week:

Comfy chair from 1929! Reupholstered in this century.

Tonight's task after work was to get rid of the poison ivy around the entryway. It's been dead for some weeks, so it's crisp. Yesterday I put the ladder up but thought I distinctly heard a hornet's nest in the little roof, so I came back down. I don't know what it was, but there was no noise tonight even though we banged on the roof. I must have been hearing hornet ghosts or something. Two other people heard it, too. Anyway there was no sign of such.

I donned protective clothing and rubber gloves, took the HazMat Cutters (they've already been used for this purpose) and a big bucket, and proceeded to clip several thousand sections of poison ivy stems and roots from in and around the clapboards and roof.

When I say "in," I do mean that some of it has grown inside the walls and we'll never get to it.

And when I say "roots," I do mean that I found the motherlode of poison ivy roots along the foundation and under the soil. Fat, hairy, and tentacled. I felt like Ripley finding the mother alien. That sucker had been developing for YEARS, unchallenged. It was alarming to say the least.

I dumped all the refuse into the poo pipe pit.

Then I carefully divested myself of contaminated clothing and scrubbed up to the elbows with Tecnu. Bathed, wrapped clothes carefully in a towel, had dinner, and now am at Rose's doing laundry in hot water and allegedly posting some upcoming gigs on our website.

The next couple of days will tell whether my precautions were effective.

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Sometimes the simplest of meals can be so satisfying. 7-grain pasta with Prego, and a mixed greens salad with cucumber, tomato, kidney beans and a sprinkling of sunflower seeds.

And now the laundry must be switched and I have to get going here, because it's already my bed time and I'm not even home yet.