Two months

Counting, counting, counting.  Two months since Jerry died, going by dates.  One week until I travel to Alabama without him for the first time since we started meeting up to go to singings down there in the fall of 1998.  Unknowable, uncountable: how long until I'm not aware every waking second of the incredible pain of his absence.

(I think the definition of the title to this blog - "what follows" - is "lots of repetition."  I guess I'll be repeating the same pain and sorrow until it eases, which I'm promised it will... someday.)

Very overcast and gloomy - I thought it was starting to rain, but now I'm not sure.  I wonder if it would help with the humidity or only make it worse.  Most of the time I don't use the air conditioner, but I had it on for a bit yesterday evening, and have just turned it on again to get some of the moisture out of the air.

Anyway.  Steve the contractor, a roofer also named Steve, and a concrete guy whose name I didn't get came to the house this morning and looked around.  Seems like the pouring of concrete in the "dirt room" (a room in the basement that was never walled in - as the name we gave it says, there's dirt foundation where walls should be) along with Jerry's tool room next door to it will cost the most - Steve said it's the most labor intensive.  We found a cache of roof tiles in the garage, which Steve the roofer will be able to use to work on a place by a dormer which he said wasn't originally done completely right, and is wicking up water, plus the place where the tiles had fallen off.  And when Steve the contractor comes back Monday afternoon with his gutter guy, they can see about putting new gutters on the house, which might solve the basement problem without the necessity of waterproofing it - as Jerry pointed out, and correctly too, it seems, when the gutters are clear, the basement doesn't leak.  We've had some huge downpours since I had the gutters cleaned, and the only time there's been any water on the basement floor has been when the water softener has run and the laundry tub has leaked. Not having to have the basement waterproofed would no doubt save me a bundle of money.

I went upstairs yesterday with a couple of wrenches and a book on basic plumbing that I found in the basement, all set to see what I could do with the upstairs tap that was leaking.  Turned the water to that tap back on... no leaking.  So my foray into plumbing will be put off for now.

Today I took two more large black garbage bags of (my) clothing to Goodwill.  Including, still, stuff I wore to work in offices in the 1990s and not since.

I watched the film A Single Man the other night - I was kind of hoping it would be cathartic, or at least give me plenty to identify with.  At the very beginning it seemed to - except for the distraction of George learning about Jim's death from Don Draper - but ultimately I found it surprisingly unmoving.  I don't know if it was Tom Ford's fussiness (the color thing, the focus on material things), or the comedic touches like George with the sleeping bag, or Julianne Moore's off-putting character in general, not to mention her English accent that kept making me cringe - the words "off" and "pouf" in particular stood out really badly - or what.  I was certainly ready to be weeping.  But nothing... Tara at the bar by herself in episode 2 of the current season of True Blood, which I'm catching up on thanks to tapes my parents are mailing me, was sadder in those few moments, even in something as over the top and silly as True Blood is.  I'm not sure if tearjerkers are in general a good idea or a bad one: I'm told the movie Up wouldn't be a smart move right now, though.