LOSING STEAM, INTEREST, AND THE WILL TO LIVE

I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go home. I have spent the past 2 days going through 11 bankers boxes of fan mail (Peg's, not mine), going back to 1944. I have scanned about 300 letters out of, oh, 5,000? More maybe. I just couldn't let them go into the Archive without a smattering to have on record, should I ever need them. In the unlikely event I write my mother's biography and get past Page 2 before saying fuck this for a game of darts.

22 more NBC TV Ethel and Albert scripts to scan, 46 pages each--then done. And the final shipment can UPS it's way to U of Oregon, including, as of today, Peg's typewriter table. Hope it's as much fun to wrap as the typewriter itself was. Looks like it might be. Am so covered in packing tape half the time and so sick of filling boxes and stuffing in bubble wrap and newspaper to keep it all tight and non-rattly that it has occurred me, to raise my spirits, to pack something bizarre like a piece of ordinary kitchen equipment and tell the Oregon people it's Peg's "special colander".

Amazing Ken has been up a ladder all day, despite the rain. Not totally sure what he's been doing but all the foliage on the house i.e. ivy and euonymous and clematis is now free of dead brown stuff, plus he got rid of a bird's nest or possibly a mouse nest he said, though what a mouse nest is doing 10 feet up in a bunch of ivy, I don't know.

I found a dead mouse, a fat dead mouse just lying there on the stone steps in the sun yesterday, and was greatly upset. Not sure why. It's a mouse. But the Terminex man had put poison down last month and I reckon the thing gorged itself then...died. I couldn't touch it. David J had to come over and dispose of it with a paper towel. I cried for the mouse like I hadn't cried for Peg.

The decision has been made to remove the brown pipe-tobacco reeking grass 70s wallpaper from Odd's office. Outside Bob started on Monday, now Ken and I are finishing. I've had better times. Though, (Outside Bob Trick) did you know the best way to remove the wallpaper that still sticks to the wall is to take a dryer sheet (Bounce) and put it in a spray bottle of warm water, let it soak a bit, then spray the wall? Not that I will ever be doing this again, but it makes me happy to know about, for some reason.

Doesn't take much to make me happy these days. 

Still, there are the Title 5 men to look forward to tomorrow at 9 AM. The septic guys, who, along with someone who knows about these things from the Town Hall, will come to assess the septic system here and give me a pass or fail or conditional, whatever that means. If I "fail", I get to shell out $37,000 to get it fixed for the new buyers, that's all I know. State law.

Want to go home. Thank you, Peg and Odd for leaving all this to me to do.