Got suspicious the downstairs closet was making us sick. Dug through it, threw out a bunch of stuff, discovered the air was making us itch and our eyes and lungs and fingers were burning. There's now an air cleaner parked in there on high - not for the first time, we did that when we first moved in too because the place was left perfumed and reeking stale cigarettes, which the obnoxiously strong air fresheners were hiding when we did our initial tour of the place - and after a day or two of that we're going to head in and wipe the walls down with isopropanol, then water, then dry them off, and then hire a local HVAC company to clean the dust out of our air ducts, and then maybe the increasingly severe medically unexplained symptoms Rakeela has been having will go away.

This isn't the first time accumulated dust seems to be the culprit of making Rakeela sick. A rolling cabinet thing full of a multi-year accumulation of computer cables and debris did that before; aggressive cleaning helped long-term but kicked up enough toxic dust Rakeela developed pneumonia; it accumulated dust _again_ and this time it was picked up by 1-800-Got-Junk because if we couldn't touch it, we clearly couldn't use it, so just getting it _out_ was the right thing to do.

So, in this area, accumulated dust can develop into something that is moderately toxic to me and highly toxic to Rakeela, and I'll take that as a warning that my habits of cluttering closets with excess junk that just kinda ferments there for years must be fought even more actively than I already have been. Hoarding disorder runs in my family and I see my own vulnerability to it and I refuse to allow it to develop; I just have even more reasons to have less stuff now.