Hitting the Wall:
This has been a terrible week, and I’m not in the greatest of moods (and exhausted to boot) so I’ll cut here and save y’all from the long version ‘less’n you’re curious.
NOTE: a lot of posts that I do that aren’t ‘timely’ are done when I have the time in fits and spurts, saved in the draft files and finally set to be published at intervals. That way, you get a slow stream of material from me, and I can get really productive when I have the time and not gag people to death with an avalanche of posts. So you may have seen posts earlier this week from me that were written a good deal earlier.
As noted before, I’ve been doing a crazy amount of work on the basement to meet a Memorial Day deadline; at one point, I had to stop everything and deal with some complex financial matters that arose and make sure they didn’t further bite us in the butt. (All those doctor visits and whatnot have generated a blizzard of paperwork, notices, bills and whatnot.) My big limitation has been that I can’t get up and down to the ground level very easily and I can’t lift stuff (especially heavy boxes) at all. This is a big drawback when you’re wrestling with tons of papers, books, and so on.
It is even more of a drawback when your basement gets hit with water during a storm, and you have to (1) save stuff from water damage and (2) clear off the carpet to be cleaned and dried.
My schedule consisted of nothing much more than work on the above unless I was eating, sleeping, going to a doctor’s visit or working at my day job. The hammer came when the water arrived - I had to re-set the damn sump pump by hand on and off all night, and relieve the water pressure on the slab. And try to do (1) and (2) by myself until I physically couldn’t do it any more.
I finally called up Rich Rostrom, begged for help, and he by-god got out to my house in record time as I was fading out, and he helped tons with the rest. Mere came down and (more curious than anything) helped take some stuff back upstairs, and Susan came down and helped move a couple of items and some bedding back upstairs.
On Wednesday morning, a team of steam cleaners came and did up the carpet, which was starting to smell like a wet old gym shoe, and Rich dragged me out (with my credit cards, etc) to get the rental equipment to dehumidify the room and turbo fans to dry the carpet and the pad. Took a whole day, and I think we got it. Certainly smells good again…
I managed to pull further open my foot wound, which had been killing me, and the docs saw me on Wednesday, prescribed new antibiotics, and gave me hell for overdoing and straining my foot and myself. As in dammit-don’t-you-want-this-to-get-fixed sort of thing. I’ll spare you the ickier elements on the foot…
Rich took off after returning the rental stuff and getting the furniture back in place, and I spent a lot of time on Wednesday and Thursday crashing from exhaustion.
Well, I beat the deadline of Memorial Day. By a week and a half. But the process just tore me up. I’ll be back at day-job work on Friday, I think. My office is also majorly cleared out, Rich got the donated books over to Goodwill, and helped on a lot of other odd areas that I haven’t had the time or strength to get at.
There are now three neatly stacked and closed boxes of papers on my cleared-off map table for toss-and/or scan purposes. There’s a box of 3 1/2″ diskettes, Syquest cartridges and zip disks under the map desk ready to be scanned over to the hard drive and tossed. There’s also a small, neat box of tapes on the map desk for digitization via Audacity and a tape player hooked up to the computer. And the turntable is on my desk, ready for setup to digitize my remaining 33 1/3 and 45 RPM records. In the closet under the stairs, there are a few more boxes - one with the last VCR tapes, one with cassette tapes, and one with 5 1/4 inch and 3 1/2 inch diskettes. As one box is emptied off the map desk, another will come out of the closet and replace it.
And so the rest of the process will continue. Just not at the same breakneck speed.