Run for your lives, there’s cheese in the fridge and it’s got mold on it!
By Dave Hamby
I was watching 20/20 the other night and they had a feature about this crisis of mold invading our homes. There was this Doctor/Scientist telling me that there was no evidence to connect mold poisoning with the numerous symptoms alleged by theses mold victims. After he stating there was no connection between mold and mental impairment, the program went on to a couple in Florida who had abandoned their $600,000 home because of mold infestation.
Excuse me! What better example of mold creating mental impairment could the good Doctor want than this couple who had abandoned their home? If there wasn’t any mental impairment, then why didn't they just fix the water leak and kill the mold with a little bleach. Clearly the mold has attacked their brains and fuzzed up their ability to think.
While the program went on to state that mold has been around a long time, it didn’t state the obvious, that mental impairment has been around a long time also.
Evidence suggests that things are getting worse. Examples abound. While shopping for a new car last month I had an eager salesman point out to me that his product now featured an "inside the trunk" lock release. Honestly, in thirty plus years of automobile ownership I cannot ever recall wishing that my car had this feature. Either the pervasiveness of this black mold has prompted folks to crawl inside the trunks of their autos and shut the lid, causing them to exclaim, “Dang, I wish this thing had a release inside the trunk,” or most likely there’s an automotive engineer who woke up one morning in his mold infested house and thought, “Gee, an inside the trunk lock release would be a great feature.”
I suspect a close inspection would find some mold in my own home. Just yesterday I went into my bathroom with the latest issue of Auto Roundup and noticed the commode seat was cracked. (I’m guessing one of my girls stood up on it to access the cabinets above the toilet.) Even though I noticed the crack and knew the possible consequences of such a crack, I sat down on it anyway.
Sure enough, sitting on it caused the crack to widen and open up. This prompted me to raise up which resulted in the crack closing again.
Problem was the crack had a big chunk of my butt in its grasp. Standing, or at least trying to, caused the seat to come up which caused the crack to tighten its grip on my tush and pull painfully down on this chunk of fat.
I had to sit down again, wipe the tears from my eyes, and grasp the defective seat with my hands while having my weight bear down on the crack before I was able to free myself from this vicious household defect.
My howling in pain caused my dog Hannah to join me on the commode. I released my grip on the seat when she jumped in my lap. Her extra 85 pounds caused the crack in the seat to open just that much wider, grasping just that much more fat. It was only after I yelled at her and she'd left the bathroom that I discovered I heeded her extra weight to get the crack open enough to free my pinched butt. It took a lot of coaxing and cajoling to get that mold infested mutt back in the bathroom. It took a trick of balance to hold down on the commode seat with two hands under my butt while balancing a Black Lab on my lap as I raised up enough to free my fat.
I’m blaming an attack of mold spores on my brain for my being mentally impaired enough to sit on that broken seat in the first place. When I told my wife what had happened she just fell down laughing so hard that tears went rolling down her cheeks. I’m thinking those same spores attacked her brain resulting in her nability to sympathize with me and my sore derriere.
I could cite numerous other examples of mold infestation and its correlation to stupidity, but right now I need to get my bleach and find that mold in my home.
Otherwise I might be compelled to sit on that toilet seat again.
This article originally appeared in the Round Rock Leader. It has since been modified and is available for your publication.