Having a clean up.

After having been inside the past week I tried to get outside and of course ended up right back inside cleaning the basement. Well, I had to, after the flood.

So the first part of the day consisted of getting up at the un-Godly hour of 9am(middle of the night for us around here), and meeting Marcel, our Polish plumber at the scene of the crime. With no major difficulties and a relatively painless trip to the wallet, we spent an interesting hour with our plumber because he is one of the most interesting people I think we know. He is God fearing, but self governed ("Oh I'm bad, I'm a bad man...you don't want to be around me young lady..."), loves to hang out at the nude beach and spouts philosophy and physics, while cursing a blue streak (and apologizing to me every other word while he shakes my hand - 5 times in an hour today) while snaking the drain. We love it when he comes over, in spite of the wet reason that he is here.

Today he left us with: "Do you know why we always run hot water through the pipes at the end of it all? ~ Because it feels better on our hands than cold..", and this little ditty: "It's quiet when you die, but noisy till then."

The next part of the day consisted of cleaning out the basement. With various deaths and moves, we have three full housefuls of stuff under one not so huge roof, and I need to get it down to a more manageable one houseful of stuff. We did quite well, but more importantly I found my old backpack, and you know that game where you see what's in your purse? Well I thought it quite funny to see what was in my old pack. There was:

~ an article entitled The Great White Shirt from the Sept. 30th 2000 issue of Saturday Night (I'll be passing this along to Thomas)

~ a fairly smashed box of Curious George thank you cards, with envelopes

~ an Italian coursebook (Buona sera, signora Rossi)

~ a receipt for dental work in the amount of 60.$ from my dentist in Rarotonga (now that's a good story)

~ a bit of yellow scrap that reads: "You can't give away responsibility, only control" hmmm

~ a photo of me in younger years beside my garden (very long hair!)

~ the entire Section B of the Aug 5th, 2000, Vancouver Sun with the article about Drake's visit to the Province in 1579 (I was saving it to read and still haven't had time)

~ 4 postcards from PEI

~ a copy of "Micky and Goofy explore the Universe Of Energy" from Epcot Centre (I have no idea...)

~ the lyrics to Donovan's 'Try to Catch the Wind'

~ the instruction book for my sewing machine

~ a letter from the Taoiseach dated Jan 12th, 1994 including a copy of the Joint Declaration(of Dec 15th, 1993), in response to an article I wrote that was published in Irish papers in 1993 ('A Plea For Peace')

~ a book of English floral pattered wrapping paper (18th C designs by William Kilburn)

~ a certificate of course completion (Families in Crisis training from about a million years and another lifetime ago)

~ two taped conversations of a psychic I actually went to (I'll let you know if anything actually happened, I was so skeptical when I spoke with him)

~ and the best of all - my long lost picture of Dave. Sigh.


Now I'm back at it and as soon as C left for the gig I called Barry and got my interview - it's going to be big and I feel so fortunate to have gotten 'the scoop' as they say.

For the rest of the night I will be outlining the story, sending out invoices, and what the heck, studying Italian...