What’s a few hundred becquerels per cubic metre among friends?

We’ve had a few things to deal with since my last: nothing we couldn’t manage, but they have required some managing, and it’s been adding up. The big one, the one that risks being an exception to the above, is discovering that our house requires radon mitigation. We picked up one of the hundred radon kits our town distributed last fall and tested over the winter; the results came in last month. Too high. Installing the mitigation is going to be a pain—not financially, but technically—because our house is weird: a split-level wood foundation with no concrete slab (just aggregate) and limited egress options for radon venting. The contractor came up to have a look this morning and spent most of his time expressing his exasperation at how this house was built 40 years ago. At this point we’re not looking at an ideal fix, just one that will do something to improve the situation. Not necessarily elegant, not guaranteed to reach the levels we want, but we’ll start here and deal with more…