Stardate: 4/4/2013
31st day of Lent
In which my beloved endures a difficult part of his day.
Earlier this month I visited my beloved husband at work, where he showed me the work he'd been doing building the set for an upcoming show. The set is composed mostly of a large, life size(ish) castle, and he elected to do the 'stone' walls out of insulation foam. This is the form of large pink sheets--yes the kind with the Pink Panther on it, FORMULAR, made of extruded polystyrene (also known as the infamous #6). I know this material as most easily molded by using some sort of ketone solvent to carve out 'natural' looking stones and rough facing. That's how we did it in my day, fumes aside, cause theatre techies are hard core, even as this method causes poison gas. So my beloved had wisely chosen to simply carve the foam with a wire wheel on a drill. Unfortunately, this also creates a quite generous amount dust.
Here begins our tale.
"I... had a lapse of judgement. It was five minutes before the end of Theatre practicum class, and we needed to clean up the mess of scenery construction before the next class.
We were vacuuming up a pile of saw and foam dust and discovered that the shop vac was full. My lapse of judgement came when I thought, "I know. I'll save a plastic bag and just dump the contents of the shop vac directly into the dumpster." So I rolled the shop vac to the dumpster, which was about half full, and proceeded to lift it off the ground to dump the contents inside.
But I lost control of the shop vac, and half of the contents spilled out on me: covering my shirt, filling my shoes and landing in a pile in the parking lot. Inexplicably, much of the dust had become wet--how I do not know--and stuck to me. Saw dust is tan. Foam dust is pink.
And then the wind came.
This is what made me realize my mistake; that when the dumpster gets dumped, the contents that I would have put into a plastic bag would instead simply be scattered to the four winds, causing more problems than if I'd just put it in the stupid plastic bag in the first place.
Furthermore, upon losing control of the shop vac, it fell in such a way that one of the wheels popped off.
It bounced, slowly and carefully, first along the rim and then from once piece of trash to the other, then gracefully rolling its way down into the furthest bottom corner of the at least half full dumpster--the contents of which included copious amounts of saw dust, foam dust, and fresh cafeteria waste. So five minutes before my 14 speech students arrive expecting a sparkling clean classroom and teacher, I am covered in pink fairy foam dust and considering diving into a dumpster for a single small wheel.
My first thought was, "Oh I'll just leave it. I'll be fine with a shop vac that never rolls quite right."
My second thought was, "No, I won't. I don't have the money to replace it, and I know that if it rolls funny, I'll want to replace it."
My third thought was, "Oh no. The wheel is plastic."
I'm going in.
I climbed into the dumpster, fished out the wheel, and put it back on. It is a minor miracle that I only stained my sleeve with something brown. I hope it comes out. I dusted off the sawdust, scooped up the pile in the parking lot, and put it back in the dumpster--knowing full well that everything would have gone a lot better if I'd just used a plastic bag.
Look. I still can't get it out of my socks."
Ah, my beloved. This is why we went with the poison gas, back in my day, back in Camelot.
Points to anyone who has known us long enough to get the reference!
May your discernment of plastics lead you to wise choices.
Peacefully,
Marie
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