Fangirl, Part 2

First of all, I was at the Bulls game yesterday.  I didn't see Derrick Rose fall - it wasn't until the guy sitting next to me started going "Oh no, oh no..." that I noticed there were only four Bulls standing and looked at each one and realized none of them was D-Rose and then saw he was lying on the floor.  Yes, I think the ACL tear that has ended his season is bad for the team's chances in the post-season, but that's not why I was one of the many people at the United Center who left that game feeling like it was the saddest, most awful victory a team could win.  It just was so painful to see Derrick injured again after all the other injuries this season, and so badly this time, with his near future, at least, such a question mark now.

A picture from before it happened:

(Luol Deng, Derrick Rose, Tom Thibodeau, Joakim Noah, Richard Hamilton)

Second from the right of the photo, behind the word "HOME": Bulls color commentator Stacey King, with Neil Funk, the play-by-play guy, to the right of him.  This is him today:

And me!  Talk about fangirly: I drove about 60 miles each way today to go meet Stacey, and when I walked up to the table, he looked at me and said "Karen, right?"  That took care of the remaining social anxiety that was making me nervous on the entire drive over.  I've been giddy ever since. (I follow him on Twitter and occasionally he'll respond to something I've tweeted to him, and he recognized me from that.)  He was very nice, asked questions about things I'd tweeted, talked about the game, asking if I'd been there - and it turned out I didn't have to wear the heels I wore after all, since he wasn't standing up: I thought heels might help if the photo had been taken with him standing, since he's almost a foot and a half taller than I am.  I was so excited (yes, I am 14 years old) that he knew who I was that I forgot to get his autograph and had to circle back around to the end of the line of people waiting to meet him to ask for it.

Other news: I was back in New York last week, looking at some apartments (nothing that worked), and going to my first show since Jerry died, the formerly off- and now on-Broadway adaptation of the movie Once.  I love the movie, and the show is very good too, more broad and less subtle but still nicely done.  Back here since Wednesday, and nothing has gotten done on the house since then: tomorrow I'll get back to it.  Painters were here while I was gone and did a nice job on de-molding the basement and touching up other things.  I'm feeling a bit more stressed about things now that I'm a bit farther along in the process. Natural, I guess.

But still grinning about today's latest fangirl episode.

Things I Am Not Allowed to Do Again, Ever

Buy shoes.  Or underwear.

On another note, Blogger, I am not liking the new interface. At all.

On another note, the guys from the charity came yesterday and hauled away furniture and a couple of big boxes of kitchen stuff, and I have more things to load into the car and drive up to the place myself.  The dumpster was hauled away yesterday as well.  Painters came through with a price for all the work they'll do, $700, which seems reasonable, given the amount of work (and so says Steve as well): not sure when they'll be here to start yet.

More clearing out still to do.  I took a break from it yesterday; today it's back to work.  I leave for my next trip to New York a week from yesterday.  Suspect the house won't actually be on the market by then, however.

I can die happy now.

Me and my boyfriend, Benny, at the United Center last night.  Bulls beat the NY Knicks 98-86, D-Rose sat (OF COURSE), but I've been giggling ever since at my meeting with Benny (or a very acrobatic and athletic young man in a large muppet suit, but I never seem to remember that's really what he is!).  Got his autograph, too:

Yes, believe it or not, I'm 49 years old.

The only part that irked me was when the crowd began chanting "New York sucks, New York sucks."  Not cool!  I told the woman next to me that I couldn't do that, I'm from New York, and she laughed and patted me on my back to comfort me.

Anyway...

Dumpster is full, painters have come and given an estimate to paint the outside corner of the house where water peeled off the paint and some water stains on the kitchen ceiling from before a dormer window was repaired, along with de-molding and painting the basement; guys from the local charity for homeless women and children will be here today to pick up furniture and kitchen stuff that I'm giving away.  More loads have been taken to storage (do I really, really need that stuff?  I told Steve I should live with just a mattress, a cup, a plate, a fork, knife and spoon, a TV and a computer).  Things are progressing, still.

But a man in a red furry suit has made me ridiculously giddy.  Thanks, Benny!

Progress Progress PROGRESS!!!!

Major leap forward yesterday with the delivery of the dumpster.  Steve, whom I should start calling Saint Steve, spent a couple of hours helping me haul stuff out of the basement and garage, including lifting stuff I couldn't begin to budge, like the bags that years ago started out containing powder for cementing tiles to floors and walls and have long since contained actual cement due to the humidity in the basement.  I kept working for maybe another hour after Steve left and now, as you see above, the dumpster is mostly full.  And I should have taken a "before" photo of the inside of the garage, because huge amounts of stuff came out of there, too: I had never looked too closely at the back of it, but it turned out that Jerry's packratitude was in full evidence there too: why my sweetie never recycled or threw out those little plastic pots that seedlings come in but instead piled them all in the back of the garage, for instance, I'll never know.  There was also a small pile of beer cans crushed up in a corner, and I told Steve that some previous resident must have left them there, because I can't imagine Jerry would have done that instead of recycling them - and then last night I was finishing up a can of soda and got up to put it in the box where I collect things for recycling, and as I was walking I crushed the can, and thought "Jerry always crushed cans before putting them in recycling," and my mind flashed back to the crushed cans in the corner... and I realized, No, previous residents would not have left a small pile of beer cans in the back of the garage!

Today's goal is to finish (FINISH!) clearing out the basement so it's ready for someone to come in and de-mold it.  On Wednesday a truck from that charity I mentioned will come get furniture and other things I'm not saving.  (On Tuesday I go see the Lin-less Knicks play the I VERY MUCH HOPE Rose-ful Bulls.)

Progress.

As mentioned previously

Time flies

Still moving forward: more stuff brought to storage, more stuff put in garbage bags in advance of a dumpster arriving, will call a local charity that serves homeless women and children on Monday when the guy there that deals with donations is back in his office to arrange pick-up of furniture and housewares I'm not keeping.  I'm not working as diligently or fast as I might be, but stuff is actually getting done in spite of it all.

I was at a lovely wedding in St. Louis last weekend, and with the frighteningly early spring weather we've been having (well, I find it frightening - nice, but wrong, and I fully expect whatever neighborhood I move to in NY to be under water soon after I arrive), there were cherry blossoms in bloom as I walked around and checked out what seems to be a nice city.  On the other hand, the wedding did make me feel old, as will the wedding of the groom's brother in May: when I first met them, they were closer to this age (although this video was shot about five or six years before I first saw them).  The smaller of the two got married last weekend:

(Reminder: that's Jerry on the left in the front seated row they're facing.  Six years before I met him, too.)

OK... back to sorting, tossing, packing.  I know I'm going to look back on all this in a few months and be amazed it got done.

The Most Important Product

Jerry liked to quote the old GE line "Progress is our most important product" (as always with Jerry, it was with a large dose of humor that he said it).  Well, more of the product was churned out yesterday.  Two trips over to the storage unit with more books, furniture, even the large Cerwin-Vega speakers I bought in 1986 (just in time to leave them behind for years at my parents' house as I moved first to Minnesota and then to the Soviet Union): I wasn't going to keep them, in this age of much more portable mini-speakers, but Steve convinced me they're "classic," and since they still work, I relented.  Steve is in the enviable, and probably also unenviable, position of having been friends and worked with Jerry: enviable because he was friends with Jerry and that was a fabulous thing to be, as I'm sure all his friends would say; unenviable because I probably talk even more about Jerry with people who knew him, and I'm sure people get tired of hearing all my Jerry stories.  But Steve has been and continues to be so incredibly kind in helping me with the house: I didn't actually know him except to say hi before Jerry died, but I hired him and his company to take care of house repairs and eventually he started doing favors - lots and lots of favors - and refusing to let me pay for most if not all of them, except for materials or if the work was done by an outside contractor.  So grateful, so thankful... so guilty-feeling, of course.

I've packed up a box of books I've sold online to Powell's and will bring it over to the post office today (if you have books you don't want, I recommend them: they pay postage for books they've accepted, and you get store credit with them in return - not a lot, of course, but it's easier and faster than dealing with eBay, for which I don't have the patience right now); other books I'll take to the library for their book sales.  Still lots and lots of stuff to go through.  This weekend I'm attending a wedding in St. Louis, but next week when I get back Steve will arrange to have a dumpster brought to the house, and a lot more will be cleared out.  He also told me that Habitat for Humanity recycles electronics, which I didn't know, so I'll see what needs to go there, too.

I realized something last night.  I was showing Steve the horizontal fir paneling in the bedroom as we were moving out a pine dresser that Jerry made... and I was telling him that the paneling was made from skids that had been piled in the shop, and that I had stained them with a pale white stain that just lightened them and also lacquered them... and it suddenly hit me that while I keep saying I'll be so sorry to leave behind all this gorgeous woodwork that Jerry did, it's also woodwork that I did.  He sprayed the dye stains on the maple paneling in the living room and the maple cabinetry in the living room and kitchen, but I did the power sanding before that and the lacquering and the hand sanding and the second coat of lacquer, I sanded and stained and lacquered the paneling in the bedroom, I sanded and lacquered the parts of the pine dresser.  I don't know why all of that hadn't entered my mind before, but the fact is, I can say with confidence that I'll never again live in a place where I've been involved in actually creating some of the furniture.  Well, I will: I've got pieces I'm taking with me that we - we - made.  But it's not just that it was Jerry's design and creativity and craftsmanship and talent: it was our collaboration, our work together.