How Was Monday this Week?

Mario, who lives behind us now that Papi got kicked out of the country for having pot, has one of those smiles where the teeth are eaten away, horizontally. He's maybe fifty-something with a big grey beard, and speaks broken English. We usually communicate in broken Spanish.

He wanted to borrow a ladder and we actually have a really old, wobbly wooden 8 foot ladder, which was kind of behind a bunch of shit in the closet that serves as an outdoor storage shed. Mostly it was behind these giant sheets of aluminum we use to cover the windows if there's a hurricane coming: gifts from some bureaucratic program many years ago.

Since the ladder was out, I decided this morning to sweep the leaves off the roof and perform the ritual wrist scraping act of gutter cleaning. Found a bullet-sized hole in the roof, above the eaves of the house, and it feels like the wood underneath is soft and rotten.

Might recall having a tube of some black shit meant for these type of repairs, but the indoor tool closet (not to be confused with the shed) is a mess.

So it turned out to be a day of opening up that can of worms. What to throw away. What to maybe list on some internet marketplaces (Facebook, Ebay, Craigslist). A bunch of little things waiting to be glued together.

Oh look, it's that ceiling fan balancing kit. Mom's ceiling fan has been wobbling around for a while now.

Ever fucked with balancing a ceiling fan? Fun stuff. First of all it's one of those cheap Home Depot or Lowes jammies, "Glacier Bay" brand, that happens to use only a specific really annoying type of light bulb. So that's a heart ached to be reminded of.

The process is you turn the fan off, wait for it to stop (I encourage it with my fingers), put this ceiling fan clip on one of the blades, turn it back on, see if the wobbling gets worse or better, try another blade, find the blade that's most effective, move the clip around on the blade, the whole time turning the fan on and off and trying to decide if it's more or less wobbly than the last time it was running. I think what I left it at is an improvement.

Over 500 people in New York City died of Coronavirus in the last two days.

We fixed a cheap old night light Rinah had that features a rotating panel of backlit sea creatures; glued a bunch of ceramic dishes back together, not for eating off of; glued the magnets back on something. I ordered a 28-parts small parts organizer for the tool closet. Put some old consumer-level battery powered tools, who's rechargeable battery had years ago died, out on the street.

We have like five old baby/pet gates that take up a lot of storage space. But we don't want to sell anything now because we don't want to see anyone and get or spread coronavirus.

The living room is full of crap from the tool closet. Will get to it.

Been importing some old song idea recordings from mini-discs, a format that became obsolete years ago and I had never replaced my stolen minidisc recorder. Finally borrowed one. Some of the ideas have promise. Much of it pretty humbling.

Rinah and Ashirah both recorded really fun songs with me yesterday: Girls Rule (which had been started months ago) and Everyone Is Awesome, In Their Own Way. That was super-fun. Now we're going to watch Lost in Space as a family.

Tomorrow morning I'll help mom and her piano teacher get their Zoom connection going, then perhaps fill that hold in the roof. Never found any tar-glue here, but David says he has some. Thank Goddess for friends.

31/03/2020