Mercury

I did a stupid thing last night. Actually, it started out as a freak accident. I suppose I could blame it on the baby since it was she that got me up at 3:00 a.m. to go to the bathroom in the first place, but that really wouldn’t be fair. After waddling my way back to bed in the dark, I decided I needed a drink of water. As I put the glass back down on my bedside table, it got knocked over. In the process it broke a mercury thermometer that was also on my bedside table. Freak thing, right? Anyways, I always had heard that mercury is poisonous, but I did not realize just how bad that stuff is! I just thought it was bad if ingested, but I guess it is a LOT worse than that. I was still groggy with sleep and started sopping up the mess with kleenex when Greg all of a sudden awoke from his sleepy stupor and told me to stop. Thankfully Greg knew that mercury should not be messed with, so we drug ourselves into our computer room to see how we should clean up the now contaminated bedside table. The Environmental Protection Agency’s website soon told us what we needed to know and informed us just how dangerous mercury can be. It can become a vapor and disperse into the air and is especially dangerous for children and pregnant women. Great. So Greg spent a couple hours cleaning up the mercury that he could. We closed the door to our bedroom and the window has been open ever since. We are still deciding if we should cut out the piece of carpet next to the bed that may or may not have also been contaminated. The bedside table also still has traces of mercury on it that we cannot get rid of.

Anyways, we finally got back to bed at about 5:30 a.m., although we were displaced into our guest room. It is amazing how small our queen bed seems after getting used to our comfy king. The night also turned out to be extremely windy and blowing just the right direction to make the guest room extremely noisy. Needless to say, we didn’t get much sleep last night. Greg went to work late and I called in sick today. We will be spending tonight in our guest room as well as we continue to air out our bedroom. That isn’t too bad though; it is kinda fun staying in another room for a change. Now if only the dogs (who sleep with us) would share Greg’s side of the bed instead of mine.

Now that I know how dangerous mercury is, I will NEVER have another one of those types of thermometers in my house again. Ever.