Feels like Monday

Even if it is Tuesday. Monday holidays do that to me.

You couldn't tell it by looking at me, but I'm pretty jazzed today. I'm back to working in my office for the first time in weeks. A couple of patches of carpet got soaked back in an early spring rain, and I didn't realize it because, hey, it's a floor; there's stuff on it. "Soaked" finally turned to mildewy, moldy, and stinky, and I finally went looking for the smell and found the mess. A dozen tries at cleaning didn't work -- and I'm usually only good for one or two tries -- and my allergies were killing me -- I'm allergic to mold, and just about everything else.

I learned pretty quickly that mold doesn't want to come off carpet. Neither does moldy smell. So I grabbed some carpet deodorizer from the house and sprayed it. Heavily. I bought this stuff back when we had carpet in the house, along with dogs who were occasionally having accidents in the house. (The peeing still happens, but it's never an accident anymore.)

Let me tell you: nothing my dogs ever did on the carpet ever smelled as awful as this Arm & Hammer Spring Rain carpet stuff. It was horrible. Made my nose run and my eyes water and gave me a terrible headache. No shit, I got sick just being in the room.

So I saturated the area with Febreze (after checking the scent first). And did it again a few days later. And again. When the Arm & Hammer fumes still lingered, along with big patches of mold, I went for the final solution: I grabbed my utility knife and cut out the two sections of carpet. Fortunately, they're both in corners; the part in my office is beneath a rolling cabinet, and the other is in the store room where we'd have to tear it up eventually to do some work.

Still the A&H stench drifted on the air. So I plugged in a million of those Plug-In air freshener things, closed up the office tight, and kept my distance for a week. Good news: no A&H stench. Bad news: citrus and blueberry Plug-Ins don't mix so well in a small space. First thing this morning, I unplugged all of them, and the air's starting to smell better.

Now, on top of all that, it's been raining off and on, so it's too wet to work in the yard and we're about a third of the way back to ugly jungle again. We've got a measurable chance of rain every day this week, according to the weather geeks, so who knows when I'll get back to the yard?

And as if that's not enough, as I write this, my foot is propped up with an ice pack that's so cold I can't feel parts of that extremity anymore. I have Achille's tendonitis -- again -- and I'm hoping ice will help. I never had much luck with icing sore joints until I went through physical therapy a year ago and Steve, my therapist, gave me the ABCs of icing: Cold, Burning, Aching. Then, when it gets numb, you remove the ice pack. Hmm, I always quit soon into the Cold phase. I followed his advice (really, what choice did I have when I was on his table in his clinic under his care?), and it works.

I would say how cool is that, but it seems a little too punny. Rachel10:02 AM