Poisoned

I love the people at my voice-over school but the judgement of the landlord leaves a LOT to be desired. Apparently a class last week noticed an odor of rodent pee in the room. Shirley, the mother of our school's owner (and the one who makes the whole thing work) found signs the landlord couldn't find and poured bleach on it. When the odor returned, the landlord SPRAYED POISON to kill the rodent. This is in a classroom with very bad air circulation.

I was scheduled to engineer on Saturday from 9AM to 4PM and was in the following class as a student from 6:30PM to 9:30PM the same day, and from 9AM to 4PM on Sunday. The poison made us all feel ill. The instructor for both classes is a casting director from LA and she has asthma like I do. We couldn't heat the room because the poison is very strong in the air system. That's where they figured out the rodent was living so they sprayed it heavily. The one time it's so cold that we needed heat and we couldn't use it! We had to have the doors open and a fan going constantly to try to breathe. Two full days in that stinky room and my breathing passages were on fire and swelling. By the end of Sunday, my stomach was getting upset. I'm still not feeling well. People who were still able to smell things said there was an additional odor of dead animal in the mix.

Whatever happened to traps and enzyme cleaner? There are live capture traps so the critter can be transported to a wild area. I know. Those naked tails gross people out. I sit here petting my Braticus wishing there has been better steps taken there.

I left a note telling Shirley that the classes all agreed that a professional cleaning is the only way to remedy the problem.

In the note, I also had to report that I'd managed to blow a fuse or something on one of the microphones. The first class was Creating Characters for beginners. There's a lot of lecture people need to hear. So after I set people up in the booth, I cranked up the pots for the talk-back mic and the booth speakers. Once, I forgot to pot them back down before I turned on the students mics. A medium amount of feedback happened for the few seconds it took for my hand to wipe the pots down in reaction. When I brought them back up mic #1 was nonresponsive. eek! I hope it's just a fuse! People started making suggestions on things I could try to bring it back, but with the cost of that equipment I wasn't going to mess with ANYTHING. The instructor told me not to worry. The feedback wasn't that bad. There was some weak link in the system and she was sure it would be easily fixed.


bleech!

Silly quiz. It's so right!

You scored as Drama nerd. </td> Drama nerd 94% Loner 81% Geek 63% Prep/Jock/Cheerleader 44% Stoner 44% Punk/Rebel 38% Ghetto gangsta 38% Goth 19% What's Your High School Stereotype? created with QuizFarm.com

( here's a second quiz I don't think is quite accurate )

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

OK, it happened. The bathroom spider just scared me BIG Time. The last time I saw him he was at the edge of the web of a cellar spider over our bath towels, trying to twitch it to get the cellar spider to come into range for eating. When I took my shower today, I started drying myself off and suddenly he was clinging to my shin!!! I screamed a horrible scream and brushed him off. Luckily, I dry myself in the bathtub so he was trapped in the tub. I jumped out of the tub. He climbed as high as he could manage in one corner and stayed put. When I calmed down a little, I looked to see if I'd hurt him. He looked ok. So I got a sun tea jar and pushed him into it with a q-tip. I put a torn paper towel inside to give him someplace to hide, found some of Braticus' moth larvae for him to eat and put a rag over the top secured with a rubber band. He can't get out. Now we can watch him without him hiding in my bathtowel again! EEEEEEEK!

I was hoping the shower would help wake me up. Boy am I ever awake now!

I'm going to see if my sister is using the terrarium I got in case we caught the tarantula. If she isn't, I think I'll borrow it for this guy.

( A recent photo of him on our wallpaper near the ceiling of the bathroom. )

Too much excitement today.

We just got back from the emergency vet with Lee-Roy. He's ok aside from a very bad cat bite on his upper right "arm."

He was fine when I left for school at 5:50PM. When Eric got home at 8:30PM Lee-Roy didn't greet him or come for dinner, so Eric went in search. He didn't have to look far. Lee-Roy was on the bed, acting oddly sedated. He had scruffed up fur on his head and "arm" and hissed when Eric tried to examine him. Since he knew I'd be home any time, he waited for me to get my opinion on what do do. I stopped to grocery shop on my way home from school so I didn't get home for another hour. Eric greeted me with the question of where the nearest emergency vet was. Eric's description of the poor kitty was enough for me to say, "get the carrier while I put the frozen stuff away." I left most of the groceries in the trunk until we got back.

They x-rayed him and determined he hadn't been hit by a car. That was our first fear. Then since Eric had noticed him favoring his right front leg, they xrayed that. No broken bones. His surgery has healed great inside. The only clue we got was that there was some air under the skin of his right leg. They shaved the area to find a very bad cat bite. He has now had it cleaned, gotten a shot of antibiotics and has a week's worth of antibiotics to take. He has now cost us another $400. He's sure an expensive cat!

WHEW!

World's Fairs

Last week when mrblueberry's mom and I were touristing around, we visited the Palace of Fine Arts where the World's Fair happened in 1915. It's currently being restored (again) so we didn't get to see it looking like this:

( cut in consideration for those with dial-up )

(picture courtesy of Wikipedia)

Plus it was raining and dusk when we got there. On our walk around the pond, we were both wondering if World's Fairs were still going on. I haven't heard of any since the 1980s that I could remember. I said we should look it up on the internet to see. Naturally, life pushed that thought out of my head until tonight.

The history channel had a show about arches through history and naturally showed the Eiffel Tower. That triggered the memory about World's Fairs. I found a link listing all the World's Fairs. Guess what? They're still happening! I guess other issues are so demanding of our attention that Expos like that don't get mentioned. Too bad. I still want to go to one. Now I can! Well, maybe I can. I think I'll shoot for Spain in 2008.