This has been a year of a lot of discovery. Expensive discovery.
Been working from home since March last year. This has proven to work out better than I would have hoped. I’ve worked from home on and off at other jobs and it didn’t go so well. I got work done, but There was this weird guilt and worry. Turned out it was warranted with that job. With this job, none of that. So far the only down side has been that I now have a whole extra desk set up in my office. After thirteen and a half attempts at rearrangements, I finally have it functional.
Mostly.
Prior to COVID-19 and working from home I had started a major filing project. I’ve been digitizing decades of paperwork. I have three large boxes (from 3 long file drawers) for shredding, and six file boxes to scan to be up to date. The desk I had been using to sort and scan all this was unknowingly commandeered by my employer to be used as my work desk. At least it is now. Being someone who cannot leave my own well enough alone I suspect it will change again at some point. and indeed it was going to but a few things happened there as well.
Early this last summer, or late spring, I don’t remember exactly, I sprained/strained my arm/elbow. The only thing I know that I had been doing around that time was power washing some outdoor lumber that I had grown mossy. It was 20 minutes, maybe. Over the course of the next few weeks I noticed that my muscles would twitch like crazy when I laid down for bed. Eventually it began to get painful and then nearly impossible to type. After some PT, and slowly adjusting my desk settings it is finally starting to heal. I still have some work do do with my home desk set up, but work desk is good. Most things I do in the shop are now seeming to help it with the exception of awkward drilling or clamping type pressure. I can defiantly feel it in my elbow. Once I aggravate my elbow, then the forearm and triceps start feeling week and sore again. For about a month now I have also developed Bursitis in my knee and my sciatica is going nuts on that same leg, usually when laying down to read in bed. I’m fairly certain the regaining the weight I lost is not helping these things.
My walking routine was cut short by working from home. I was already beginning to have difficulties getting enough walking in due to exhaustion. My IBS had started to be acting up on a regular basis in 2019. Exercise being one of the things that help keep IBS in check this was causing a bit of a spiral downward. My depression is also directly linked with my IBS, it just takes longer because of the medications. Basically, IBS Makes everything come out too quickly and I don’t get the proper absorption of key nutritional items, mainly B12 & D3, at least these are the largest affecting vitamins. This makes it difficult to fall asleep because anxiety, and then very difficult to get up because no energy from IBS as well as depression. So you are too physically exhausted in the morning to exercise. Then you are too wiped out at the end of the day to exercise after work, physically and mentally. You eat because you know you need to, then really want to just go to bed. If you go to bed at 5:30 you just end up screwing up your sleep cycle so you stay up to at least 7:30 :-) Normally when this happens, I can realize it within a few weeks and prevent things getting too bad. This time, COVID-19 hit right around the time I would have noticed the behavioral changes and because there was already a lot of routines being changed, it wasn’t caught. Not until December.
To further complicate matters there was this weird allergy/sinus infection thing. For going on over a year I have had this strange sensation of smelling a smoldering cigarette at random times. They’ve not been able to see what is going on, or that anything was up in my nasal business. I’ve tried figuring out when it was happening to see if I could figure out a when and where and how. At first we thought it was the furnace, but it wasn’t happening every time. Though maybe it was from the wood working, but it didn’t happen every time then. The nasal spray generally helps, probably 90% of the time. This was however making it more difficult to track when and what etc. I was also becoming exhausted and winded much more easily.
In November I/we had finally caught the depression anxiety spiral. Finally realized just how often I had been ill (IBS). I discovered that the salads I was eating were causing the issue. Since I was eating a variety of salads, and they were all giving me intestinal troubles, I eliminated them rather than try to figure out which ingredient. Looking at it now, and looking at when I started burning through sick time, it is also when a lot of the FDA regulations were cut by the Trump administration. I probably got one of the E.coli bags at some point and then my body’s been just dumping/rejecting since. Who the fuck knows. So I’ve stopped eating salads and that helped a lot. Daily intestinal issues were dealt with within a week and now it’s just the occasional issue, and even then it isn’t an all day thing. I was still tired and out of breath and smelling the smoldering cigarettes a bit more often again.
I’ve been working on a lot of small projects recently in the shop. a lot of playing with lifts and devices to make my work desk more ego friendly, and then also a Bluetooth speaker (more on this a bit later). It really was seeming like I would get the burning smell sensation after being out in the shop at some point in the day, but it still wasn’t always happening, or at least right away. While working on the Bluetooth speaker I finally had enough things happen to put it all together. Purple heart was the key. While working with wood, I have a ShopVac system that collects dust from my saw, router, bandsaw, sanders etc. I also wear a dust mask. This is not enough. Especially since the furnace is also in the garage. See everything that you can get with a broom is easily caught with the vacuum and the filter. Makes it look like it’s doing a good job but in reality, the itty bitty particulates are still in the air, and hang out in the air a long time, they then get sucked into the furnace and blown through the house. Pretty much anything less than 1 micron. I hadn’t been able to pin point it actually being the woodworking causing the issue because I use the shopvac and mask. See I would cut up all my lumber and prep and things, then clean up. Usually while still wearing the dust mask. And when it’s warmer out, I would also many times have the garage door open as well. On these days, the breeze would carry a large majority of the tiny particles out of the shop and thus not be an issue. On days when I didn’t have the doors open, I wouldn’t necessarily have the issue because sometimes the furnace wouldn’t kick in, and/or I never went back out to the shop long enough without a mask, or before the fine dust had settled. Sometimes I just didn’t make enough fine dust. On days I did have the issue, it was usually hours later because the furnace kicked in blowing the particles through the house, or because I went back out to work on things that didn’t require masking up. This is wear the speaker comes in. It has a maple and purple heart laminated front panel. The purple heart itself is also laminated as I only had some turning sticks, and because of an error, I had to laminate them together to make a larger piece to thane cut a hole out of, so there was a lot of very fine purple dust. Not that you could see any. At least not until I sneezed really hard and blew my nose and saw purple snot.
So now we figured out that problem, now we needed to figure out how to fix it. But first we needed to verify my finding because the fix was going to be expensive and I really didn’t want to spend money. So I did some research and bought a particle meter. At this point I had intentionally not done any work in the garage for approximately two weeks. When the meter came in I ran it out there for a couple of days. The results were that at best, Fair air quality, averaging 60,000 particulates per 0.01 cubic foot all the way up to 700,000 particulate. anything over 300,000 is considered very poor. I then measured in the house, starting in the bedroom since my nasal passages would be swollen and irritated overnight. Here I was ranging 34,900 to 95,000. Again, these are just the particulates between .5 and 2 microns. The bedroom is as about a as far from the shop as you can get.
So the next step was to research air filters. After some research, the best course of action was to simply make an air filter. The idea being spending $300 – $400 on an air filter was still less expensive than a whole dust collection system. If the air filter didn’t work, there wasn’t mush point in the dust collection system. The added bonus was that if the air filtration system worked, it would also be good to assist when it’s fire season here in the Pacific Northwest because we know that isn’t going to calm down anytime soon. Built the filter and started running it. within an hour bedroom levels went down to 2,500 to 11,000. Excellent to just hitting poor, generally hovering around very good to good. This is before we even started deep cleaning and dusting. I then ran the filter through the house. This thing works so well that after it’s run, the house smells like fresh air. It will suck the cooking smells out of the air quickly.
So now it was time to deep clean. Best to start in the shop/garage so that I won’t be tracking the crap right back into the house. So I opened up the garage doors, and had a bunch of fans blowing out towards to open doors and the outside. I then used my air compressor and blower nozzle and started blowing everything off. This proved tedious and painful with my forearm. I then remembered that my shop vac can be taken apart and converted into a leaf blower. This worked a lot better. So much better that the fans were not able to keep up so I had to keep going over things as the larger dust would settle. Pretty much spent the majority of the morning and early afternoon just blowing dust in the garage. This is how I discovered that the furnace does not have a separate fresh air intake and has only been getting hair from the air returns, and the garage. See the furnace fan has much more power than the fans I was using to direct the dust outside. A lot of the dust I was blowing outward, was being pulled into the house. Levels were back up to very poor throughout. So I ran the filter through the house again. Yes, I’m breathing better, and now we know we need to have the dust collection system. We’re still working on getting the levels down to better average levels, but we’ve been interrupted with a new issue.
Rewind A few weekends ago I decided it would be a good idea to use my car to run the errands since it had been sitting for a bit. Primarily the car has only been used for a few appointments, or earlier this summer, I would drive it around the city to keep the battery charged. Since I bought the trickle charger, I don’t even do that now. Oddly, this lack of daily driving is how I noticed that the drivers side door speaker wasn’t making sound a few months ago. Previously, when I was going to work in the mornings I would just listen to NPR so I didn’t really notice that it wasn’t in stereo any longer. I decided to replace it with a standard car speaker set, rather than the custom set up I had designed for it years ago. It was also cheaper, and since I rarely drove anywhere in the car since we bought the Nissan, and since I’ll also be working from home until at least 06/2021, it seemed the better option. Having to replace the drivers side speaker left me with a single speaker to do something with as car speakers are sold in pairs. I realized that I already had a small Bluetooth amp, and a lot of lumber so I designed a Bluetooth ‘boombox’ for Melissa’s office as well as for when we are outside. Good thing too since this is how we figured out the whole dust/allergy thing. So going forward to Christmas weekend, I Went to Lowes, picked up the shelf brackets I needed to start getting the office set up so I could maybe get the scan project started again. At this point we have the direction on the dust control and are in a waiting pattern for the dust collector to arrive. I decided to stop at a local market to get salted rosemary bread, beer, garlic cheese curds, and other treats. When I I went to put the groceries into the back hatch I was hit with a sour smell and saw that the hatch area was completely covered in mildew and or mold. So groceries went into the front of the car and I drove home going FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK…
So now I had to move half of everything over to the other side of the garage so I could get the car in and dry it out and do remediation. Pulled everything out of the back of the car and cleaned everything up with vinegar. Hatch and cabin area. In the rear I pulled the panels and removed the spare tire. I found a large pool of water at the bottom of the spar tire well, and the noise pad was completely soaked. No idea how the water was getting in there, or how the mildew started in the first place as there was no mildew in the tire well area. at some point the panel area had gotten damp. Probably from all the driving rain we’ve gotten. Since I don’t drive the car anywhere, let alone with the windows down, it made a bit of a nice enclosed area for the mildew to breed. Since it wasn’t on any objects in the back and only the panels I suspect it was relatively recent. My car smells like vinegar. It’s been parked in the garage since last Sunday and still smells like vinegar. Now that it’s dried out, I’ll be closing it up and parking it back outside where the vinegar smell will be trapped inside awaiting the morning sun to heat the inside of the car and excite the vinegar molecules so that the next time I use the car I will be blasted to eye watering levels and smell like a pickle. Maybe I should sprinkle dill in the cabin area.
Two days ago I my wrist mysteriously decided to sprain itself while I was watching TV. Bracing seems to help, but this is really going to put a bit of a damper on how easily I can move the car out of the garage and move everything back where it goes, or at least to where it is going to be moved to. I have to rethink how the garage is set up for the dust collection. This is actually part of what I was working on when I discovered the mildew issue in the car. I was moving all the crap that doesn’t belong in the garage to the sheds. Less stuff now that I noticed it is really damp outside. Clearly I need to be able to have one half of the garage available for a vehicle when needed so this mean nothing can be permanently on the floor on that side of the garage. Conveniently this is also the side that has the furnace area so there is less wall space in general. Inconveniently, this means that the loud dust collection system will be closer to the living areas of the house and that means more noise inside.
So this is where I’m at. finally figuring out some things and getting back to a new normal. Trying to get things so that I can get healthy again, or rather breathe? Breathe easier? no idea. One thing is for certain, running the air filter has made it so that things are not covered in dust 5 minutes after dusting them, so I need to get at least that project moving again so we can finish the deep clean. Then I can worry about the fresh air feed for the furnace and sealing off the garage doors and running a new 240 line for the dust collection system and where that is going to go.