grey goo

no- not the kind of grey goo in M. Crichton's (spelling?) book. This is grey goo we found in our back yard last night as we were preparing our upper terrace for planting.

I called it "ooeey-gooeey stuff", which might not be all that specific, but it is descriptive. This stuff sticks to your shovel, gloves. I think we got all of it out of our yard last night. We filled about 6 garbage bags half full b/c they were too heavy to carry if you filled them more than half full. I mean each garbage bag must have weighed 30 or 40 pounds.

We found it under about 2 inches of soil and grass. In some places, it went 8 inches deep, and it spread out over an area maybe 3 feet by 3 feet (I'm not good at dimensions, so keep that in mind).

I called household hazardous waste today and a guy is going to come by our house to check it out. Even though it isn't really 'household' haz. waste, this guy got kind of excited by a "mystery" material and wanted to come out and see if he could figure it out. Worst case we have to spend a couple hundred dollars getting heavy metal tests at a local lab, after which we have to spend another couple hundred "remediating". Best case is that we can just chuck it into the garbage. I hope it isn't toxic b/c it was in the area where I wanted to plant vegetables. I may not be planting vegetables at all, depending on what this stuff is.