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mold, sun, and other catastrophes
Monday, August 24 2009
I've been complaining about the mold in the basement, but it's hardly surprising given the unusually rainy weather conditions. The fact of the matter is that we neglect the basement, only venturing down there on rare occasions, usually just to play guitar (which Gretchen does in her library) or to take baths (which I do in the basement bathroom that has a tub). Other than that, it's mostly to clean up in preparation for houseguests. Because of this, we'd missed several square feet of black mold growing on the wall in the main guest bedroom where it's shielded from air currents by the bed. So the other day I'd used a bleach solution to eliminate that, and in so doing discovered just how moldy all the bedsheets and blankets are down there. We run a pretty active guest room operation, but the dirty secret is that we don't actually change the bedclothes all that often. For the most part we can get away with this because of how absurdly clean most of our guests are (in this respect they are very conventional Americans). It bears mentioning that we can't really say the same of ourselves, and I always feel a little sorry for Ray when we're away and he's house sitting and decides (on his own) to sleep in our upstairs bed instead of in one of the guest rooms. We change our sheets three or four times a year, and between our lack of bathing and all the animals sleeping and puking on that bed, we're not fooling anyone.
But the thing about periodic chores is that you can save a lot of time by not doing them and then, when you finally do them, it's almost as good as if you'd been doing them all along. Today I aimed to achieve this act of singular catch-up to the hygienic standards of most of first world civilization. So I went on something of a massive clothes-washing jihad, specializing in bed clothes. What I couldn't wash, I hung out in the sun to be baked by ultraviolet light. But I washed a lot, including the blue comforter that was my main blanket back when I was living in Los Angeles, a comforter that (as I recall) has origins in Oberlin back in the early 1990s. It's been through hell and back and no serves as a provider of warmth in our secondary basement guestroom. It was looking pretty bad, but I managed to shout and/or bleach out most of the stains.
There wasn't enough space for solar (out on the east deck) or electrical drying of all the things that needed it, so I ended up draping things over both of the cars. A car absorbs a lot of heat when it's baking in the sun, and that heat continues to provide evaporation once its covered by moist laundry and shielded from the sun.
Speaking of the sun, tonight I found myself reading in Wikipedia about the expected future of the Earth, as dictated by the life cycle of the sun. Then I came upon a piece of information that I found shocking. According to the article, the sun increases its output about 10% every 1.1 billion years, and at this rate the Earth will remain inhabitable for only another 500 million years. This is a lot less than the three-to-four billion more years I'd been reassured about in the past. Reading this new figure unnerved me in a way I wouldn't have been able to anticipate. Even though the human species probably won't be around to experience the end of life on Earth, learning that the Earth's future is about a sixth as long as I'd assumed was a little like finding out that I only have about seven years to live, not 40. It was eerie and depressing, though not as bad as getting hip to the reality of Peak Oil (a looming human catastrophe I'll actually have to deal with in my lifetime).
Speaking of catastrophes, tonight Gretchen's computer was attacked by some sort of trojan, the kind that acts as though it is a helpful virus scanner detecting all sorts of terrible infections (and providing a way for you to pay so as to have "them" "removed." It didn't take much work to remove this trojan (whose tentacles were mostly in C:\Documents and Settings and C:\Windows\Temp). The best technique when dealing with these sorts of things is going to the usual infection directories (particularly C:\Windows\System32) and sorting things by date modified to look for new .exes, although it would be helpful if the Task Manager had a way to take you directly to the location of every executable it knows to be running. I still don't know how Gretchen's computer ended up being infected; she doesn't run virus software, but she doesn't do anything stupid either. I suspect someone exploited a Firefox vulnerability, perhaps using spam sent to her Yahoo email box.
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