A room

One room actually done!  Lynne drove back with me from the wedding in Alabama and helped me paint this bedroom, and I can't say how much I wish I'd done that 12 years ago.  But there you have it: actual proof of actual progress.

Onward...

A crisis of motivation

My progress on the house since I got back from New York has been slow... very slow.  Down to a trickle.  I keep vowing to get lots of things done and keep getting small bits of things done: a couple more trips to storage, a major shredding, from an emotional standpoint: I got rid of the documents connected with Jerry's medical treatment, hospitalization and death, which I'd been saving out of fear that I'd need them for some reason, to prove something to someone, that Medicare and Blue Cross would come back and tell me they'd made a mistake and I had to pay everything back.  All that stuff had been accumulating in a large Belk shopping bag which had sat in the dining room, and this week I shredded it all, and threw out the shopping bag.  It's a huge relief not to have that here anymore.  But otherwise, except for an afternoon spent vacuuming up cobwebs in the basement, I keep almost getting started on the next big step, the Big Clean, and not doing it.  Yet.

In other news, Joakim Noah sprained his ankle yesterday as the Bulls lost their second playoff game in a row.  So unless something miraculous occurs, my Bulls are on their way out of the post-season.  Mariano Rivera, the Yankees' legendary closer, also tore an ACL the other day.  I'm thinking I should have chosen alcohol as my drug of choice instead of team sport fandom.

And I've become obsessed with Gotye's song "Somebody That I Used to Know," which I first heard, like so many songs I've come to like, on Glee (I may be the last person I know who still watches Glee).  I downloaded it from iTunes today, a departure from my usual way of buying music, which is still mostly on CD, still mostly second-hand CDs at that.  Anyway, there's no special meaning of the song for my life these days, except that I can relate, I'm ashamed to say, to the person he's accusing of cutting him off and pretending she doesn't know him: there are several guys from my long-ago past I did that to out of a complete emotional and psychological inability to deal with the relationships I was having with them and ineptitude in trying to extricate myself from them.  But I just find the song very compelling.  This is a version recorded at KCRW: the official video for the song is on YouTube, but the paint on Gotye in it freaks me out a bit, so I'm linking to this one instead.

So anyway, life goes on, in fits and starts and delays and setbacks and hiccups.  What would Jerry make of it all, I wonder?  What would he be doing now if I had been the one who'd died?  I wonder how he'd be getting on, if he'd be making better progress with his life than I am with mine.