the mold paranoia continues

My landlord never showed up on Friday. Shocker! (Yes, I am rolling my eyes as I say that.) This isn’t the first time he said he would do something and then never did it. So all weekend long I ran my two fans constantly and my dehumidifier whenever I was home. It sucked a lot of moisture out of my apartment and the carpet now feels dry, but I’m still super-paranoid there is moisture in the walls that is going to turn to toxic mold. This was heightened by the conversation I had with my sister yesterday afternoon. She said that when her basement flooded a few years ago, moisture got into the walls and mold began growing, and specialists had to pull down drywall and everything. So I called my landlord yesterday and told him that I was concerned about the walls and he was like, “So you want me to come over and rip out part of the wall to look for mold?” and I said, “Well, no, when my sister had this problem, the guys who came over to handle the situation had a special device that detected where there was moisture and mold, so the walls didn’t have to be randomly ripped apart.” He said, “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” Which, in his parlance, means that I won’t hear back from him.

On my way to Mom’s house on Thursday I’m going to stop at Kristen’s house with boxes full of my most important stuff (journals, boxes of photos, travel scrapbooks, framed photos, travel souvenirs, etc.) and store everything in her basement or garage. That way, if a toxic mold infestation strikes before I can get the hell out of that apartment, my irreplaceable items will be safe. Because, you know, with toxic mold, the health authority insists on burning everything in the household—even things that have no mold on them. I would lose everything. I’ve got renters insurance and could use that to replace furniture and clothing and whatnot, but it sure wouldn’t replace the zillions of photos I’ve taken over the years, the journals I’ve kept for nearly 24 years, and things like the matryoshka dolls I bought in Russia.

On top of the flooding mess, I’ve got car repair woes. But I really don’t even want to get into that right now.

When I was packing up my journals for their journey to Kristen’s house, I casually flipped through them and found an entry from my freshman year of college that made me laugh. Coincidentally, it was written 14 years ago tomorrow:

22 November 1992

I spent the night (until 1am) in Kris and Emily’s room, watching TV, eating Zorba’s fries, and talking-talking-talking. I was woken up at 2am (actually, I wasn’t; MBS had already woken us up with another crisis of hers) when Missy and Suki called me from the callbox downstairs. They wanted me to go to a party with them. I resisted, then finally relented. The Late Night we were aiming for was cancelled, so I ended up walking around Scranton with them at 2:30 in the morning, wearing my pajamas and my retainer, with brown Clearasil streaks on my face and my hair sticking out everywhere. I got in at 3am.

Aw, god/dess bless 18-year-old me for thinking it was socially appropriate to go to a college party in my pajamas and retainer, with Clearasil all over my face. No wonder college hunks never beat down my door!



song heard most recently before posting: Open—The Cure