2.09

I called Jerry lots of things - I always seemed to be coming up with a new nickname for him.  One of them was "Mr. Measure," because he loved to know measurements of things - a result of all the measuring he did in his daily life as a carpenter and then a cabinetmaker?  Or perhaps he always liked that kind of knowledge.  But anyway, one thing he liked a lot was the digital rain gauge he got, which sits on my desk and gets readouts from a cup out in the yard.  Right now it's reading 2.09 inches, which is presumably the amount of rain we've had since midnight last night, since the gauge is now showing the correct time (it hadn't been for a long time, and then the batteries ran out after Jerry died, so I put new rechargeables in and found the directions for resetting the clock).  He would have loved knowing that.

As the previous post shows, I finally figured out a way to upload video from a DVD.  I mentioned to Seamus today at the shop that I wanted to figure it out, and he showed me iMovie, which I hadn't even remembered was on the computer - I suspect there's lots of things the Mac can do that I know nothing about.  But there turned out to be more to it than just using iMovie, and it took downloading several different programs until I found a combination that worked (Mac the Ripper + iSkysoft + iMovie is what I ended up with - there might be a more streamlined way of doing it, but that's the first one I got to that actually worked).  I did it on Jerry's iMac, which is the first time I've sat in his chair, at his desk, and used his computer.  I'm back in a numb state at the moment, so I managed to do all of this without crying or feeling that sharp pain I'm now in total dread of.

I didn't even know we had DVDs from the 1999 Lookout Mountain Convention.  When I picked them up from the end table this evening, I thought they were the ones Nate and Norma had sent us from the 2009 Convention, and was very surprised when I put the first of the two disks in the computer and saw a younger me sitting in the front row, holding a 3-year-old Cheyenne in my lap!  So  I checked the label again and saw what year they were from.  Nate and Norma had sent Jerry a box of lots of DVDs earlier in the year (I've thanked them before, and I thank them again for their kindness and generosity), and either they were in that box or were ones the Greens had sent us previously.  But I loved the clip of Jerry leading 77t in this one, not that there's any clip of him that I don't love, but the humor in this one, the teasing back and forth with Miss Shelbie and the class, the easy-going feeling and the joy of it all come together to make the clip so perfect.

Tomorrow I'll see if I can upload the 2009 Lookout Mountain Convention version.  Hair grayer, everyone a decade older, joy undiminished.

Tomorrow I also have a haircut appointment.  I know it sounds weird to say this, since most couples don't organize their lives the way Jerry and I did, but this will be my first haircut in years on my own - usually we'd make appointments to stop by the salon together on our way home from the shop.  When I started letting my hair grow longer about a year and a half ago, I would have my hair cut every second time Jerry had his cut, but even then I'd go along with him when he had his cut - it just made sense.  Our last haircut appointments were on 2 April.  When Jerry was in the hospital, I kept saying I was going to ask Lindsey, who cuts our hair, if she'd come to the house when Jerry got home and give him a haircut at home, since obviously it was going to take him a while to get his strength back.  By the time he came home, his hair and beard were longer than he'd been wearing them in a long time, which, combined with the extreme weight loss, robbed him of his usual look and made him look very different - still Jerry, but in a lot of ways very unlike the "real" Jerry.  I can still see those hugely sunken cheeks and extremely prominent cheekbones, the longer hair swept back from his forehead.  While at the same time I'm surrounded by photos of my sweetie, with his rounder face, trimmed beard, shorter hair, the way he looked in real life.  I don't want to forget what he went through, not entirely, but I want it to be way, way in the background - I want the happy memories back again, I want those to be the ones that come to my mind.  A matter of more time, I guess.

Anyway.  Other plans for the weekend include cleaning the inside of the car, which has always been a slight disaster.  I've brought home a shop vac to help in that endeavor.  I also want to clear out the bathtub drain, which is slowing up again.  And there's always more stuff to go through.

And by the end of the weekend, it will be six weeks since the end of the world.  And I'm still here.

I miss my honey.