sweat, glass fiber and mosquitos

my hands and arms are taking a real beating.. the combination of knurled wrenches, crushed PET, gooey grease, heated metal, harsh solvents and grit soap is giving me the calloused hands of a grizzled cowboy.. and the little nicks and cuts hurt like little electrical shocks

the weather has been incredibly inclement, the humidity and heat together make for a very hot and sweaty production floor.. a lot of the electrics on the machines are getting whacked, and it's a non-stop job trying to keep everything running at optimum speed yet cool enough so that pieces of circuitry are not melting off.. earlier this week the compressor room hit a record 165F (74C), it was difficult to do intricate stuff like rewiring a molten panel for longer than a minute at a time, not with that hot blast of air tinged with ammonia fumes making you dizzy

was reinstalling a heater blower motor for a shrink wrapper yesterday, and the ducting coming off it was wrapped in the insulation cladding.. this cladding was made of glass fiber, which has a nasty habit of sticking to skin, poking and prickling it like you're stroking a hedgehog.. the stuff does flake off and settles on any exposed skin, and all you wanna do is scratch scratch scratch like a dog in a flea forest

and then of course are the effing mosquitoes, who are a byproduct of the summer rains and countryside vegetation.. so any breaks outside the plant in the fetid night air is a slap-battle with a platoon of ravenous bloodsuckers. often you just give up and hope that only one or two will get you while you finish your smoke or fill your lungs with relatively fresher and cooler air before you have to head back to the production floor

this combo of sweat rashes, glass fibers and mosquito bites have left my arms a super-sensitive, red-blotched martian landscape.. only the calamine lotion is keeping me from scratching the death out of them!!