Christopher Stevens

Sorry to hear you have a leather item with historical or sentimental value that has mold growing on it. Sounds like you are aware of the dangers of disturbing mold. It's not just "black mold" that produces mycotoxins. All colors of mold engage in chemical warfare to establish and defend their territory from competing mold and from other attacks/disturbances. Different species produce different toxins that have various levels of ill effects on our health - from essentially no effect up to and including death.

Anne, I was alarmed to learn about your shoes that were constantly growing mold under your bed in Florida. It makes me wonder if the mattress, box spring, or carpet under the bed had mold present. Hopefully it all got left behind.

If someone has had prolonged exposure to mold toxins - which can leach from airborne spores into and contaminate pretty much everything they settle on except metal and glass - they will often become hypersensitive to mold. But they will also suffer from an enormous variety of seemingly unrelated symptoms, which can begin with the first exposure. The longer the exposure, the more severe the symptoms become.

We had to walk away from everything as a result of prolonged exposure to mold toxins that contaminated all our stuff. When I say everything, I mean even sentimentals. The only way I found to preserve paper or leather items that had mold was to put them in a bag in the freezer. This would halt the mold growth until maybe a better solution is discovered. The problem is that whenever they are removed from the freezer condensation will occur which will stimulate more mold growth. But they could possibly be put in the refrigerator to thaw out slowly?

John Pollard wrote:Seems like there's no one solution to fit all with the exception of some fairly expensive one. I've been using linux operating systems for several years now and finally settled on kubuntu/KDE because of the interoperability of the different apps. They're heavy on Personal Information Management. Everything from simple to do lists, more advanced to do lists, journal to email clients, contact management, calendars, office programs, note keeping, graphics programs, blogilo which will upload posts to most popular blogs. It allows you to work while not connected and upload when you are. Being linux based, it's open source so there's no costs. I don't use all KDE apps as I had already been using others that I prefer. I use CherryTree for a notekeeping app and it's available for windows and mac I think too. It's like a cross between an offline website(you can have links to the web, files or other pages within cherrytree) and a personal database. I like WordPress for site building as it's fairly simple compared to drupal and joomla. There's a lot you can do with some plugins for interacting with customers/clients.

To anyone using WordPress, there's a couple of must have plugins that will prevent a lot of misery. WordFence for overall security and wp-spamshield so that you can allow commenting without having to worry about comment spam.  

It's great to see another open source fan! That made me pay much closer attention to your recommendations. I found and installed WordFence for my WordPress site but I can't find wp-spamshield (I wonder if they changed the name?). I refuse to use google captcha.

I just bought a System76 linux laptop - an awesome tech tool. It's as powerful and easy to use as an apple or windows computer, but it's much more secure by default, it comes with a host of free software compatible with microsoft office, and an app store full of free open source software such as photoshop alternative GIMP.

I use open source SimpleNote (similar to EverNote) and it instantly syncs across devices. It's my most useful tool besides email and web browser.

Sure enough. Had an emergency come up that made me miss it. But I thought there would be a recording made available - like pretty much everyone else in the world does these days. How disappointing.

J Schtucker wrote:Any update on this? I’d like to move to Cochise County for the owner opt-out. Is it still in place? Is it likely to stay in place?

It is still in place.

I want a referral code.