Library Time

Mold mitigation and remediation continues. Infused with insuperable inertia. I manage, after false starts and two trips to the hardware store, to rebuild the kitchen faucet, seat and stem and a new supply line. After hours, waiting for the crew, I spend some quality time in the library. The history of concrete: arch, vault, dome, those Romans. Then move on to a study of American realism. Not a bad way to kill time. I can't see my circumstance through other eyes. I know my house is a mess. What you save can never be the same as what's dying. Just a thought. Nothing prepares you. Tomorrow is supposed to be the last day of the clean-up, steam-cleaning all the floors in the basement. They have to stay until they're done, so I have to stay. Really want to go home. I miss my library and cookstove. Glass show comes down Saturday, so I can bring up the crates tomorrow. I dread carrying the largest piece down in the elevator. Brent said he never told exhibitors how to handle his pieces. They look so delicate that those of us who do this tend to be very careful. Brain-stormed with K and Stephanie (a volunteer) for a while after work. Actually, after beer, as I'd already gone over to the pub after closing time, for a Murphy's, and they were still at the museum when I got back. Demographics and such. They're both bright, and young, and their ideas are interesting. Palpable intelligence. Read a funny line in a new book by John Connolly (now there's a dark writer) about a central character, "that Dodo eggs had been laid more recently than him", spit whiskey on the screen. Polyvalency, in linguistic cant, is the the ability of a sign to mean more than one word, depending on context. Evidently making the translation of Sumerian a nightmare. The strange churrascaria of a trapped insect coming from somewhere, I can't track it down, and I can't concentrate. Driving me crazy. A cricket in the house and I become a recd-eyed killer with a fly-swatter in my hand. Finally find a logy fly, behind a painting, and pinch it's little head off. Of course I can't remember what I was thinking about before I was thinking about a trapped insect, I'd made a note, but it made no sense, but it made no sense, so maybe the signs meant other words, in that context. They were, all lower case, "small chicken", I think. My handwriting is no longer really legible. Also what I choose to note. I leave a post-it on Pegi's desk, and she finds me, wherever I am, to ask me what is says. No one ever writes me notes, because there's no place to put them. There wasn't a place, but now there is, the office, to which I had been assigned; that/which I actually, really, want to give to K so I can just hole-up in the kitchen and broom closet and not be bothered by all the notes. Interoffice communication and the attendant bullshit. Navigating upstream without an apparent means of locomotion.