One thing ends, another begins
The hazard abatement step appears to be done. Well, maybe. The above photo shows the stuff they used to remove the mastic that contained asbestos. It’s called Bean-e-doo 500MR, and it’s a soybean oil compound that seems to work pretty well. It has an odour, but I looked up the MSDS (materials safety data sheet) on it, and it’s pretty much not a problem at all. It’s an oil, of course, so it is slightly flammable, it might cause some skin irritation, and they don’t want you drinking it or bathing in it, but overall it’s pretty inert for something that actually works.
The net results of the abatement? Pretty good, actually. Here’s a fish-eye view of the living & dining rooms:
The floor is pretty clean, and it turns out the slab is in surprisingly good shape. There are a few cracks, but nothing big enough to even be able to repair. That’s great for a 64-year-old house.
In any case, the abatement people were done after 4.5 days, and now the general contractors are back. As I type this, there are two people here. They’ve sealed off the upstairs and are dismantling the floor in the conservatory (aka the family room) where Anne had all her plants. That room is the most likely place for additional surprises, and they have found that the old concrete patio is damp. Wet in places, actually. We’ll have to figure out how to fix that once the demo is done.
So the work continues without much of a pause.
As for Tinkerbelle, she’s doing pretty well. At her vet visit last week, we learned her hematocrit was up to 38%, which is the highest we have seen since her illness was discovered. That’s good news: it means the cyclosporine is kicking in. We’re now in the middle of a two-week run with the same dose of cyclosporine and a somewhat reduced dose of prednisone. A week from today she goes back to the vet, and — if the numbers look good — we can reduce the prednisone even more.
An amusing note about Tink’s medications: prednisone is cheap, but the first round of cyclosporine cost us $530 for a 30-day supply. Ouch. Last Friday Anne ordered another round of cyclosporine, and the vet charged us the same amount, given we had just paid for the same dose of the same stuff a month before. But they called us two hours later to tell us that the price had dropped to $140 for a 30-day supply. That’s a $410 price decrease! We were surprised. Happy, but surprised.
In other news this week:
- On the depressing front: Sweden and Finland are preparing their citizens for war with Russia. And people are asking about Canada as well. Not good, even if it is unlikely.
- On the weird front: Thursday afternoon we got an automated phone call from an 831 area code number (that’s Santa Cruz, California, which is the county we lived in down there, for those that don’t know) telling us that a tsunami warning was cancelled. This was how we learned there had been a magnitude 7 earthquake off the California coast, and we were happy to be told there was no tsunami, but let’s digest that call for just a moment. How on earth did some public warning system in California get our Vancouver phone number? And even more important, if our old home — which was at about 1700' elevation — was at risk of a tsunami, I think that would be the least of anyone’s worries!
- In a technology note, I’ve started using an AI-based grammar and syntax checker. It helps with some things, but it seems to want a zillion commas. If my prose feels more stilted than normal this week, that is at least partly why.
And that ends this week’s update. In summary, Tink is doing reasonably well, the house is being slowly reduced to rubble in a controlled fashion, Putin is worrying everyone, we were not inundated by a tsunami in California, and AI is still iffy.
Cheers!