Mycology 101

I went out early enough this morning to need my lights, and was already eight or ten miles down the levee before running into Charlie D. who was coming the other way. I turned around and rode with him to the Jefferson Playground where the Saturday morning levee ride was supposed to be starting at 7 a.m. We hung around for a while waiting for a few of the guys to get their acts together and finally headed out with a nice-sized group. Since I was supposed to be meeting at my mom's rental house for 8:00, I couldn't ride with the group very long, and I turned around once again near the country club. As I headed home, I met up with Realdo, and rode with him for a while until I had to turn off of the levee and ride through Carrollton back to the house. Along the way, I rode down Maple St. to see if PJ's or Starbucks was open yet, but no luck.

Once we got to the house, we met my brother, his son, one of my sisters and my mom, and spent most of the morning hauling out the tenants' furniture, a refrigerator, the lower kitchen cabinets and other stuff. We spent some time on the phone with the tenants, letting them know what was going in the trash and what wasn't. Some of the stuff was completely ruined from the flooding and subsequent mold, and that all went into a huge pile in front of the house. The salvagable stuff went either in the upstairs apartment or, if it had gotten wet, under the shed in back of the house. It was easy to see which walls were sheetrock and which were plaster, because the sheetrock was covered with a thick and colorful growth of mold. The plaster had much less mold, and what was there was actually growing on the old painted-over wallpaper. One of the apartments was all sheetrock and the mold there was particularly heavy. We decided to leave that whole apartment for the professionals, since it was clear that all of the sheetrock in there was going to have to be torn out and replaced. As overwhelming as the whole thing seemed, I reminded myself that a lot of people had a far worse problem to deal with. We headed over to Cooter Brown's for lunch (a hamburger and a cold Turbodog), and then spent the afternoon ripping our sheetrock, wallpaper, kitchen cabinets, etc., finally ending the day by spraying fungicide throughout.

Tomorrow the weather should be great and I'm planning on heading out to see if I there will be Giro Ride. We have some more work to do at the rental house, and then we'll have to head back to Jackson. The car is acting up right now and I'm a little worried about it. The "Check Engine" light came on today and the temperature gauge shot way up into the overheated zone, but there was no sign of steam or anything, the coolant tank is full, and the temperature guage is acting really flaky, so I'm hoping it's a bad sensor or connector, or perhaps the thermostat. Whatever it is, it just proves that Rosanne Rosanadanna was correct when she said "it just goes to show you, if it ain't one thing, it's something else."