Smackie the Frog

How many of you out there have intimate experience with coal dust? Raise your hands. None? Okay, well let me share a little story with you, then.

This weekend we (me, Phil, Mom) ripped the ceiling out of my dining room. It had to be done so that new drywall could be put up, and so that my ceiling fan could be moved to the proper center of the room as opposed to the improper center, also known as “not the center you dumbasses why put a ceiling fan there?”

Anyway, we started ripping down the 100 year old plaster, and you know what came with it? 100 year old coal dust. I’m guessing that when my house was built, it was kept warm via a coal burning furnace. Or there was a family of coal fairies living in the cracks and crevasses until very recently. So as we tore down, we were rained on by this nasty coal dust. It fell everywhere, and I mean everywhere. And it was so thick in the air that there were times you couldn’t see 2 feet in front of your face. No joke. And the three of us looked like some poor peasant coal miners out of some demented Charles Dickens world.

Even after hours of hauling out trash and vacuuming and wiping and scrubbing and cursing, my house is still covered in this crap. I honestly don’t think it will ever go away. It is so fine that it gets into the tiniest places, and no matter how many times you wipe and scrub, there is still more. At this point I’m thinking about just setting the whole place on fire.

So yeah. The house is going great.