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...or, Always Wear Protection! Monday night I went to the garage to just poke at a fossil for a few minutes. I'd picked up a decent shell still mostly in matrix in the Selma Chalk of Alabama over the weekend. Though I only intended to take a few tentative swipes at it, I ended up spending over an hour on it, chipping away rock with my airscribe, then smoothing out the matrix with my Dremel. Anyone who has ever worked on this kind of material will see where this is going. The rock that comes from this deposit really is chalk. When dry, working on it with any tool, but especially a grinding tool, creates a lot of very fine dust. And since I hadn't really planned on working on it for more than a few minutes, like an idiot I didn't put on my dust mask. Later that night I woke up from a sound sleep to discover that my sinuses were a disaster. Running, stuffed up, and a bad raw burning sensation all the way into my throat. Since then I've had a couple of nights where I didn't sleep for more than two hours at a time, I've become very well acquainted with my Neti Pot, suffered several nose bleeds, have taken enough Sudafed to run a respectably-sized meth lab, and burned through more than one box of tissues. Finally, I think the worst is over. I'm down to merely frequent sneezing and nose blowing. Essentially, I believe I had the equivalent of bad road rash inside my sinuses, caused by the chalk dust irritant. What did I learn from this? Well, probably nothing. I'm kind of dense, apparently. But hopefully others will learn to wear a dust mask when working with this kind of material.