July 30, 2009

7:55 a.m.

A Little More B&E

It's the new Friday again. I love that about Thursdays.

Last night Marc and I took the truck to their old house and loaded an I-beam, a huge metal cabinet and a couple of other things to continue clearing out the shop. The floor in the shop is unique -- he relocated it from a historic building, maybe an old post office, and it's hard to describe but if you imagine short sections of 2x4s, cut and laid on end with the grain bits facing up, and then strips of these glued together into a floor, that's what it looks like. Anyway as we were humping this enormous cabinet out the door, one section of floor, which had been purposely built with a little arch so that water would go a certain way if there was flooding... the arch just split longways between two of these strips. It's been so rainy, humid, damp, wet... can I be more specific? Everything has swelled to twice its size because of this frustrating weather, the floor just couldn't hold its arch any more and cracked open. It's unfortunate... but no longer their problem, either.

Then we went to Rose's boss, Josh's house, for dinner and movies. He's a fantastic photographer and loves to make fun movies of the many places he travels. Our Indian friends were there, and Josh's son, so it was a real party, even though this family was very tired.

After THAT, Rose and I went to our favorite abandoned house and took out another piece of furniture. Apparently the town is creating a new law that says that abandoned properties are going to be razed. I don't know how it works and can only guess that the owners have to be contacted first, but the owner of this house lives in NY and it's been standing empty, and rotting, for years. Animals have torn holes in the ceiling and roof, crap is piled everywhere. Rose liberated a little lyreback, marble topped table a while back, and had her eye on this lovely tile topped piece. We were going to leave well enough alone until she heard about the ordinance, and then she determined that this cupboard was not going to end up in a landfill.

What we learned from asking around was that the couple were relatively young, had a few kids, loved theatre. There is theatre memorabelia all over the house. Then the wife died suddenly, and the husband fell apart and left town. He's never been back. He doesn't want to sell the property but he won't come do anything about it.

We snuck in quietly with lights off and released the cabinet, in two pieces, from its dark, dank prison.

And then I went home and went to bed.

And then I got up at five and got ready for work.

And then Marc came by and we loaded another load of trash to sneak into the dumpster at work before they emptied it, which they did about five minutes ago.

I'm tired.

Tomorrow, cleaning around the house, a couple of errands, and sleeping more.

Now I have to do something that resembles work, as I'm on the work computer and don't feel great about posting diary entries here! (There is a limit to my miscreancy, after all.)