If you’re old enough, you know what Chernobyl is. If you’re not old enough, click this link and it’ll fill you in.

The oldest Son, Interrupted is just a fountain of historical facts and one day he acquainted me with the concept of the Elephant Foot. It’s not, as you might surmise, an actual elephant’s foot. No, it’s a remnant of the Chernobyl disaster. If you want a full explanation, then click here, but this is an extract from Wikipedia:

“After six months of investigation, in December 1986, they discovered with the help of a remote camera an intensely radioactive mass in the basement of Unit Four, more than two metres wide and weighing hundreds of tons, which they called “the elephant’s foot” for its wrinkled appearance. The mass was composed of sand, glass and a large amount of nuclear fuel that had escaped from the reactor.”

Long-time readers have no doubt assumed that this is about to segue into a discussion of the Sons, Interrupted’s bathroom habits, and normally you’d be right.

Sadly, I must confess to the world that I have created my own Elephant’s Foot in my living room.

I’ve mentioned remodeling previously, and we are in full swing with six weeks to go. One of the fallouts of the renovation was that everything in my own bedroom and closet had to be re-homed, and of course we didn’t do that incrementally as the drop dead date approached.

No, that would have been sensible! All those Bessts I reported this spring? I made those happen while I whistled past the graveyard of twenty years of my junk stored in closet shelves and under sinks and in my nightstand.

And so it follows that there’s an Elephant’s Foot in my living room, glowing clutter radioactivity and sending messy electrons out into the environment. It’s contagious, too: the quail living in my front yard have started compulsively hoarding shoes.

I spent Thursday and Friday planning my assault on The Elephant’s Foot, and it was pretty much the best part of those days, which is a sad commentary on my life at the moment.

I’m gonna hit ‘publish’ and then I’m donning a hazmat suit and I’m going in. Wish me luck.

If I survive, then that’ll be the Besst for Today.

What is the Besst project? 

And why is it called Besst?

© E. Stocking Evans 2014