Hell in a Handbasket

I have time, these days, to read the newspaper in depth. I have had such time for a few years now, but having others around, and being part of getting the children fed, dressed and out the door to school (even though I rarely ever took them to school myself), provided enough interruption that often I did little more than glance at the front page, read my favorite comic strip (Get Fuzzy) and then get on with my day.

I'm not sure it's a good thing, though, to read the paper in depth. Today's Oregonian headlined with news that a) the hydrological patterns of the Pacific Northwest aren't following climatologists' models, b) Yippee! the recession is over, but we're not getting out of it soon, and c) unemployment is going up and up and then stands to go up some more.

A. Mystifying scientists is the new data that -- while "climate change" is supposed to bring more heat to the Pacific Northwest, thus bringing us even more rain and less snow -- the fluctuations are already more extreme than predicted. That is, when we have a dry spell, as we have had for two years now, it is really really dry, drier than the dry spells we had 45 years ago. Less snow in the mountains means less melt-off, which means drier rivers. And apparently the land is sucking up more water than it used to, for not-entirely understood reasons (among the proposed causes is a suggestion that the old growth forests have been largely replaced with new, fast-growing -- which means, water hogging -- young forests). In future, as things heat up (literally and figuratively) even though the average amount of precipitation is supposed to stay the same, we'll have deeper droughts, more often -- leading to hard decisions about who is to get the meager water available: the farmers or the salmon.

In this state, in the middle of a recession? I wouldn't start counting my salmon eggs.

At least that means more work for people who make those decisions (government, usually), and thus, lawyers with specialties like The Family Woman. It's an ill wind and all.

B. This will have been in your papers, too: Ben Bernanke assures us that the Great Recession is over (well, probably). Oh yeah, and by the way, we are moving into a period of "jobless recovery". Is that akin to,

"Good news, Mr. Doe! Your broken leg is healing! You won't be able to walk for an indefinite period of time (in fact, as far into the future as we can see) but rest assured: you will soon be all healed.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention -- your insurance company is dropping your coverage."

C. Oregon's unemployment rate jumped to 12.2% in August -- that is, 235,000 Oregonians are currently out of work and looking for work. This number does not include those who are out of work but have given up looking for work (officially known as "discouraged" workers). Had they been included, the unemployment rate would be 14.8%. Nor does it include workers who would like to work full-time, but who have settled for part-time (which would rise the ranks of "unemployed or underemployed" to 23.3%. The national equivalent, for perspective, is 16.6%.

But wait, it gets better: when the Great Recession ends (see point B), currently discouraged people will become encouraged, and start to apply for jobs again -- which will drive up the unemployment rates (because they'll be counted as "unemployed" then, rather than "discouraged"). So the numbers will go up before they go down.

I suppose I have just re-joined the ranks of the unemployed after being discouraged between March and May, underemployed in May and June, and then discouraged again for July and August. I am looking for jobs now, but very few seem even remotely appropriate/possible/interesting, so my encouragement may not last very long. These seem good categorical distinctions, in theory, but for practical purposes, I'm not so sure.

Miniscule Marbles of Mercury

Last week, in an attempt to prove to Boy-Child that he was not so sick as to need to stay home from school as he suggested, we threw our most accurate thermometer in his mouth. The intention was to prove no fever, and hustle him off to school. First bell had already rung; he was already in his coat and backpack before he started his complaint.

We all stood in the dark front room, me blocking the doorway into the rest of the house, trying by sheer force of will to get the child out. Virtually every week since Christmas, one or the other child has claimed illness for at least one day; April was a month of serious colds, with sniffles and fevers, and the children have been reluctant to return to regular scheduling.

Boy-Child handed the thermometer to his father, but with the necessary lassitude of a child only well enough to lie on the couch, reading the novel he's currently obsessed with. The thermometer slipped from his fingers, and fell, the glass flashing in the gray morning light. There was a moment when I thought it would land safely on the rug, but it bounced, hit the hard wood floor and shattered.

I said, "That's not so good." Boy-Child screamed in hurt anger as if I had yelled at him (exhibiting the kind of quicksilver sensitivity that for him usually accompanies genuine illness), and raced upstairs to his room. In the urgency of the moment, he was let stay at home and HomoDommi took Girl-Child to school. I, in the meantime, quickly cleaned up the broken glass, trying to reassemble the thermometer to make sure I had located the bulb. 20 minutes later I looked online to find out what to do when you can't find all the thermometer bits, or any of the mercury.

Yes, it had been a now-impossible to purchase, 25-year-old mercury thermometer. We have several digital ones, but from measurement to measurement they can vary up to two degrees, so we use(d) the mercury one for Serious Claims: when the child is not obviously ill and there are conflicting motivations (such as a test at school, or a particularly exciting novel or computer game at home). I should make clear, we have never believed the children were lying about not feeling tip-top; but there is a level of personal discomfort that one learns to ignore when one is not contagious and when duty just ought to be done. And this past school year seems to be one in which the children are having to learn ignore-ance.

Anyway, back to the story. We all know that mercury is bad. I never liked chemistry, and while I have a vague memory of watching a video of mercury shimmying around on a plate, I hadn't paid much attention. Now I know more specifics: mercury is about the most toxic substance on earth, beaten, according to wikipedia, only by plutonium. The Mad Hatter got his name from the madness exhibited by hat-makers, in Victorian England, where mercury was used to felt wool, and people who made hats went genuinely crazy. Luckily, the toxicity builds up over time and exposures, so this one thermometer won't cause lasting harm -- but there are children and small pets in the house, so we wanted to remove as much as possible.

Mercury, the dull silvery self-cohesive solid/liquid, shies away from contact with anything, breaking into smaller cohesive balls if touched. So, the first rule is, Don't Sweep. When I efficiently swept the floor to collect all the pieces of the thermometer, I shattered the single bit of mercury into minute pellets, which bounced and ricocheted across the floor, settling into the grooves of the worn oak and deep into the dusty chasms between floor boards.

The second rule is, Don't Disturb Things any more than possible. The glass bulb, which HomoDommi found much later still containing some mercury, had remained on the carpet. When I thoughtfully rolled up the end of the rug to capture any shards, the bulb skipped over to the far end and split into more microscopic spheres, rolling out, fanning out, over and into the deeper gouges in the floor in front of the outside door on the opposite side of the room.

Most of the balls were small. Really small. HomoDommi inherited our father's amazing visual acuity -- standing, he could see likely specks; lying down with his face inches away, he could confirm them clearly. I, however, could not. Even when handed a needle with a mercury ball on the tip, I was at best able to make out a grayness, a shadow forming an edge of minuscule sphericity. (And that's with my reading glasses on.) Several of the balls that HomoDommi collected, he said, would have slid easily through the eye of a needle. (There's some comment to be made about heaven, rich men and mercury, but I can't seem to articulate it today.)

Touching mercury isn't the health danger -- breathing the fumes it emits is. Copious fumes twist off the stuff, looking under black light like smoke from a lit cigarette. Over two days, HomoDommi spent more than three hours lying on the floor, collecting near-invisible marbles with shaving cream dabbed on the end of a needle. He said, afterward, it would have been easier (and perhaps safer) for him to have licked the floor clean -- which as an added bonus, would have cured him of any rising syphilis, too.

We have the sense he was able to collect the lions-share of the mercury, but not all -- a couple bits had tucked down under the grot between floor boards. Following advice found online, we ended up sprinkling the whole room with garden grade sulphur (available at the better garden centers) -- mercury binds to sulphur and zinc in such a way that it stops fuming. Wet the sulphur dust and mop it up, and you've removed most of the mercury -- and the truly nanoscopic amount remaining down amongst those canyons of worn wood has at least been neutralized. (Sulphur is, itself, toxic in large dusty quantities, but the lesser of two evils.)

Every thing we used in the clean-up -- the broom and dustpan, the mophead, the needles, cotton swabs and three rolls of paper towels, the clothes we were wearing -- and sad to say, the carpet, which could not be salvaged -- had to be taken to the Hazardous Waste Dump.

So the lesson today is, even if you have a perfectly good mercury thermometer around, get rid of it (in some responsible fashion). The clean up is not worth the risk of having it around.

And, by the way, if you pay a little more, you can get a quite accurate digital thermometer. Our new one can prove a child well enough for school in eight seconds flat.

snow, Snow, SNOW!

It snowed, I mean, really snowed, two days ago. As much as 3-5 inches in our yard, with sheets of blowing snow, and minuscule drifts. And it has stayed cold since, so we still have snow. (That is, "cold", relatively speaking, with a nod toward Minnesota, where it is -1 F in St. Paul as I write.) Everything shut down on Sunday, with cars routinely sliding into poles. Retailers touting "10 shopping days until Christmas" in a frigid and sinking economy closed mid-afternoon. Schools had a Snow-Day on Monday; those west of the Willamette River (where there are more steep hills than here on the east) are closed again today. Another storm is due tomorrow, and the schools are expected to close again then. The weather folks are predicting this to be the longest-lasting stretch of below-freezing weather in decades.

Even so, we are likely not to have a white Christmas.

We get frustratingly little winter weather activity here in Portland. Sometimes (well, most of the time) that's a good thing -- I am thrilled not to have to shovel snow, slip on ice, and scrape the windshield daily from November to April, as those who live in the Northern Latitudes usually have to.

When I was a teenager, living in the rural mountains of Eastern Oregon, Portland would get 9-10 inches of snow a year. How we would sneer and joke when each 2-inch snowstorm would shut down the city entirely. Our mountain-embraced valley closed regularly from storms on the passes, locking us in with ourselves for weeks at a time. Two inches of snow was barely enough for our winter pastimes: snow-shoeing to school, spinning wheelies in the parking lots (for those wealthy enough to have a car, or those who worked on a ranch and so needed a pick-up simply to get in from the valley to school), and filling the Persecuted-Classmate-du-Jour's locker with hard-packed snow-balls from the bed of that pick-up. I have no idea what the grown-ups did in the weather -- certainly the school system, retail stores and the college up the hill didn't close.

(Hey, I was just a teenager at a rough rural high school, and frankly, I was not engaging in these activities, being myself just one step above PCdJ myself. In true nerd fashion, I was often at the end of the hall watching the intimidation from a distance, waving my fingers across my body as I recited, This is not the droid you seek -- I mean, geek that I was, I actually did that, didn't just joke about it.)

These days, thirty years later, Portland gets about 2-3 inches of snow a year, usually in dustings between ice storms. This is the first real snowstorm I've seen in the three years I've lived here. Thank you, global warming climate change.

Marquam Bridge, which is also I-5.

The real issue is ice. The temperatures are, well, temperate, rarely below freezing for much of the city (which is built on hills, so some of the more expensive real estate overlooking the rest of the city gets a few degrees cooler weather than the rest of us. But I'm talking about the rest of us). Usually, the copious precipitation remains near-liquid, and any snow melts into sleet as it falls. Portland has many lovely bridges, arcing high over the rivers; driving over them at 60 mph even in high, dry, summer, I have fretted about the long drop down to the water. I don't drive over them at all when it's slippery (although, to be fair, I haven't read of any tragedies in our current weather).

Fremont Bridge

So, as with so many life lessons, I have come full circle and understand from within, now, how a few inches of snow really can shut down a city unprepared for it. What a grace maturity is, giving us a comb after we've lost all our hair.

(Bridge photos by Mark C. Scherzinger, from http://en.structurae.de. Click on them to see them larger.)