That's why I'm so messed up!!! Where I grew up one of my best friends lived across the street. We were in our early teens (11/12/13) and we basically lived in his Dad's garage almost everyday. The garage was old school dusty/dry dirt floor with wooden planks for the walls...but it was dry and a great place for us to build out plastic model airplanes (corsairs, B-52s, Bi-planes, etc) and military equipment (tanks, artillery weapons, etc). Either way, my friend's Dad had a large mayonnaise jar full mercury (probably 10 lbs). It weighed a ton for us young kids. It was a big jar filled to the top with a siquid metal. We would of course take some Mercury out of the jar and play with it in our hands for hours!! Every now and then we would lift the jar off the 2 X 4 shelf and gaze at the shimmery liquid that weighed much more than it should. One day I took the bottle off the shelf and it slipped out of my hands. It hit the dirt floor and shattered the bottle into a hundred pieces. The Mercury exploded all over the garage into thousands of tiny liquid balls. The floor was made of fine dry dusty dirt and the dirt seemed to absorb the Mercury. We knew we were in trouble so we did out best to collect as much of the Mercury as possible but it was a total waste of time. Mercury is not only heavy (making it sink in the dirt) but also liquid and it seemed to disappear into the fine dirt every time we tried to scoop it out with our hands. The more we dug the deeper the Mercury would go. Out of that really big jar of Mercury we managed to get maybe a spoon full back out of the dirt. Not knowing any better we forgot about the Mercury in the dirt and continued to play in the garage and build our airplanes and stuff. We played in there for years. Now I read on the internet that Mercury vapors are the worst thing to inhale!!!! Since I live in a very hot and humid climate I'm sure that garage was continuously full of Mercury vapors. I had a ton of fun growing up and I did many, many dangerous things.........I imagine that I still have some mercury in my blood.
