Showing posts with label chemicals and kids' attention spans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chemicals and kids' attention spans. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

What WAS I Thinking!????

This is not a big job, right? A small bathroom, 5.5 ft. X 8 ft. with old vinyl wallpaper....Just have to strip the old paper off without using chemical strippers, my personal preference.

The older I get, the more I think illnesses such as cancer, kids' short attention spans, impulsivity, and other health problems are due to overuse of plastics in cooking and bottling, preservatives, chemicals in the environment, fertilization of lawns, pesticides, pollution and breathing in all that stuff. I used to think I had very good genes from both my mom and dad for longevity, but they didn't use all the plastics we use today, microwave everything in plastic, cover it with plastic, and eat all the convenience foods that are so filled with chemicals and preservatives and genetically modified ingredients. They didn't breathe all the crap we breathe today. It's a wonder we aren't all succumbing to cancers and diseases, the human body is so overworked trying to cleanse itself.

I can't blame my ADD on chemicals, unless you count breathing in DDT in the fifties, when they use to come around and spray the Dutch elms in our neighborhood with the big tanker trucks and humongous hoses, shooting the chemicals up in the air towards the canopies of the trees, only to have the pesticide mist come raining down in our backyards on us, if we were unlucky enough to be outside when they came. We were warned to stay indoors when they came spraying, but not everybody would remember. My dad dutifully fertilized our lawn in hopes of having one of the greener, plusher lawns in the neighborhood. I remember filling the little Scott's spreader, and breathing in that stuff. I actually liked the smell of it at the time. Hm-m-m-m...maybe that's got something to do with my learning problems I had! I was a "huffer" and didn't know it! Add magic markers to the list. Liked the smell of those, too. However, I think I'm just one of those kids in the fifties born that way, who never knew why she couldn't focus and pay attention in class, why she bombed math class year after year, and why she has so much trouble finding her way around places. BUT--I'm quite creative and inventive and good at finding solutions to problems, working with my hand making cool stuff, so that's a nice foil to not being able to focus and pay attention for very long.

Back to the bathroom....little space, but a BIG, dirty job. The wallpaper is so old, that it was on the walls before they hung the big mirror and the medicine cabinet. I can't remove the mirror, but I did take out the medicine cabinet so I could get at the paper better.
There's gotta be a better way to strip vinyl wallpaper than how I'm doing it! Without commercial strippers, that is. I'm steaming the top vinyl layer after scoring it with a little blue wallpaper scoring tool I got at Lowe's for about 7.00. The scoring tool doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference whether I get the little holes in the paper or not, but I keep thinking it's supposed to help, so I'm using it first. Then I peel a little corner of the vinyl paper off, and sometimes it comes off in a nice wide strip of a piece, and sometimes it comes off in little shreds. Steam some more, peel some more. Steam and peel, steam and peel. Reminds me of a peeling sunburn and how we used to peel our burnt skin off in sheets as it healed when we were kids. Geesh! Some kind of weird fascination that was. What a memory!  (My mom wanted us to wear sunscreen, but back in those days, not too many people did, and we were out the door and headed to the beach before she could do anything about it.)

Once the brown paper is visible, I'm spraying it and saturating it thoroughly with water and then scraping it off with a putty knife. That part goes pretty quickly, thank goodness! What a gummy, gooey mess when it does come off. It's sticking to my shoes, it's sticking to the ladder, it's sticking to everything, so I see I'm going to have to wash my walls and get the gummy residue off before I paint.  Sigh......

Hope I can do about a wall a day....half way there.....

I need a break....Think I'll ride my bike for awhile and look at the pretty scenery in our neighborhood...Wish I knew the name of this beautiful deep rose pink shrub that's doing so well in this hot, hot broiling summer climate in this area. I need to visit a nursery soon and learn the names of some Florida plants. Landscaping plans are in the future for winter projects. Winter projects? There is no winter in Bradenton/Sarasota! Lows will be in the seventies then.....Can't wait!

Geez...Blogger makes it hard to make changes without being annoying! I lost my "followers" button somehow, and when I went to get it back by "adding a gadget", now you can only pick Google + Followers, which means anybody who wants to follow has to have a Google I.D.  Phooey! I find that really annoying, I'm not crazy about Google + and don't really want to have that as the only choice on my blog to annoy anybody else if they don't have a Google profile, so for now, guess I won't know who's following!  Darn Google and darn Blogger! Technology is starting to pass me by....