Unpacking

Charlotte is a meticulous unpacker and record keeper. Excellent qualities. I help her through the morning, then she asks TR and I to clean the pedestal room. It was the dirtiest room in the building, and now that the pedestals are all out, we could clean it for the storage of ODC boxes and packing material. It was the job from hell, but we did a very good job. The concrete dust got everywhere in the building, during the remodel. The back hallway if full of bags of trash that I'll have to haul to the dumpster. A good days work, and a clean space to store 102 boxes. This is an artist packed show, and the packing is always interesting and often funny. C took a lot of pictures so that we'd know how to repack. Six more peds to repaint. Raindrops falling through dappled sunlight right at sunset are quite lovely. Banged myself up pretty good today, bleeding in a couple of places and hit my head against a completely unforgiving cast iron pipe. We had to come up several times, to breathe fresh air. TR is very good with logistics, and I just let him do it his way, concerned myself with a different corner of the room. I throw away four fifty-five gallon trash bags of stuff, and two elevator loads of junk. So tired I fell asleep while I was writing. Got to town early this morning, stopped at the Kroger Starbucks for a Cheese Danish and went below the floodwall. There was a muskrat nosing around in the floating debris that gathers downstream of what passes for a jetty; and a family of ground-hogs eating hard red immature blackberries. Squirrels eat them too. They don't taste very good, the sugars haven't converted, but it is going to be a bumper year, and I need to think about what I might do with a large harvest. More unpacking today, finished painting the new batch of peds, which were actually the oldest, beat-up and buried, but they look good now. Then C asked about smaller blocks and boxes she might use to build arrangements, so I brought up all of those I could find, patched, sanded and painted them. Mark painted today too, the last wall in the front entry area, and then several of the walls in the back entry space. The place is looking spiffy. Kate came over from the University, to talk about my talk and reading for the Chinese students at the end of the month, and I'm excited about that. She was thrilled that I wanted to extend my time with them into lunch at the pub. I think that Chinese students, training to teach English as a second language, should definitely have lunch at an Irish pub in Ohio. I want to get John Hogan, himself, there, to spin some yarns, maybe sing a song. We have this talk, in the back hallway, where Mark was painting, and I couldn't help but note that he saw the way various other educators deferred to me. Listen, I don't want any responsibility, but I can do certain things. You learn, you know, over time. The impossible. happens. Talk about a fixed language talking from the dead.