6-19-06

Still working on the house, trying to finally bring it back to normal. Since most of the work is done by friends and relatives, it’s going pretty slow. Still, I am grateful to God that people are willing to come and help. My dad brought a friend who is good at - how do you cal it - drywall? What do you call the stuff that goes over the stones and under the paint? Anyway, they spent two days patching up two big holes in my ceiling, where the drywall or whatever you call it had fallen off and you could see the wooden beams and metal armature.

Then two of my mom’s hiking friends showed up. One brought cement and fixed the mess the plumber made, the other volunteered to help me take out the trash. I must say, this last task was quite a problem. My apartment is at 3rd floor, there is no elevator and the dumpster for our area is ½ block away. And the trash I had accumulated included an ancient washing machine that weights a ton, a broken toilet, an old TV and a water heater out of which we couldn’t dump all the water… There was some construction rubble, as well as bags and bags of your regular household stuff, all broken, rusty, torn or otherwise unusable. Together with my mom’s friend e took out most of the stuff. We couldn’t take the largest things out because they were too heavy even for the two of us, considering he had a heart attack only a couple years ago. I have no idea what’s gonna happen to all that. For now, it’s just sitting on the staircase, probably annoying the neighbors. Good thing they are so patient.