Snot Quite What I Expected

Last week I finally decided to try and auction this Karcher Steam Cleaner on Yahoo Auction. We had originally paid about JPY 35,000 ($350) for it at the home center many years ago.

In the old house, using kerosene heat, the entire area would get a thin film of oily greasy dust that was never easy to clean off, and clung to everything. Add to that the mud walls, and you have the perfect conditions for greasy living.

I can't remember exactly when we purchased it, but it may have been a few years before we finally moved out of the old house into this one. We used it for one final steam cleaning of all of the floors, etc. cleaned it up, boxed it up, and never used it again.

We decided to let the auction begin at JPY 8,000. One week later we had amassed 631 people who had accessed it, 59 who put it on their watchlist, and finally sold it for JPY 21,500 (about $215)!  We sold it on the auction! Yaaay us!

Today we needed to take it to Lawson's Convenience Store to send it off using the Yahoo YuPack Postal network tie-up (very cool system). I wanted to wrap the box up so decided to use a few of the kimono paper wrapping bags that all of my most recent batch of kimono came in. I went upstairs to the spare room where all of the bags are sitting, grabbed two, and taped them nicely to the outside of the box.

My nose felt a bit runny from the musty smell of all the kimono, but I had kind of expected that. What I didn't expect, however, was that for the next 30 minutes a green, bubbly, frothy liquid kept dripping, and sloshing out of my left nostril! Every time I blew the tissue (*salivation has begun here...*) turned this bizarre yellow-green, and then all of a sudden it would pour ot of my nose!

Thirty minutes later I was finally able to stop the flow, but Mayu had to take the package to my car, and we drove with the windows open to Lawson's in order to get rid of it! And now, just from that 30 minutes of foamy green flow, my nose feels like it is burned as if I had been blowing it for days!

I need to back up a bit here and give you some history now....

***** SHIFT! Back to July *****

In July I got the shingles. I'm still struggling with scars on my face, and a tickling itchy sensation that runs through the nerves on my face, but I guess I can get used to that. However, as the information on shingles says, it can take often over six months to completely heal, and energy is often down, while the immune system is also often compromised for long periods of time.

I have seemingly had one cold after the next from August on. It got especially bad in September, October and November with my sinuses completely clogged, tons of coughing, phlegm and such. I assumed it was due to a compromised immune system. Then in November I started getting severe sinus pressure over the left eye in that sinus cavity, in and around that eye as well. It was so bad that several times I had to sleep because I couldn't do anything. I KNEW it was a sinusitis of sorts as I used to get it regularly as a child because I suffer from a deviated septum in the left nostril which is often the one that gets plugged and has caused me the most trouble through my life.

I wanted to go to the doctor and get antibiotics but that was just at the point where Mayu and I had our "human docking" medical tests and I didn't want to interfere with the testing. As soon as that was done, I went and got five days of antibiotics. It didn't seem to help and I was really wondering what was going on because the pressure in the sinus cavity and my eyeball was intense (left one only, nothing in the right cavity) every day, about the same time of the day (between 2-4pm).

One day while I was doing my ab exercises I noticed the huge amount of dust under the piano, and I thought, "Aha! That must be it!" So we spent a good half day pulling, pushing, rocking and rolling the piano just enough to clean out the dust. It didn't help.

Nearly every day about 3pm I would start to get the pressure headache over my left eye and wondered why. Normally I am here from morning until night, and then shut down about dinner time, and come and go after that. One night I was here reading until 2am and I found that about 1am I started to get the exact same pressure headache! So I knew it had something to do with this room...

To make a long story shorter, eventually it dawned on me that the piles of vintage, MUSTY kimono in the closet next to my computer were causing me to have an allergic reaction! So I took them all upstairs to the spare room, put them away in clear boxes, cleaned out the drawers in my closet, and all of the congestion, all of the headaches, all of the watering eyes, and phlegm, and coughing and general malaise of the past three months disappeared!

And life was good...

**** SHIFT! Back to this morning *****

Well, after having that green frothy, foamy, bubbly, pouring liquid attack coming out of my left nostril and soaking the front of my sweater... I decided to ask Mayu to throw away all those papers!

I soo wanted to use them in a recycled way and let them become my wrapping papers for ages to come. But after that attack... to hell with recycling!

Now it's time to see if I can start another auction to sell off one of our two industrial kerosene heaters that get the rooms so roaringly hot that we have never been able to use them in this house at all! These babies rock!

You may be wondering why we have two... well, one year in February, the coldest month of the year, our old beloved one kind of went on the fritz. And we had no heat exactly when we needed it. We could not live in our house with no heat in the coldest time of the year, for three weeks while they overhauled the components.

But that's life, I guess... Now we have two, and both of them sit in storage so it's time to try and sell them off!

I love you!

Cam