the new year is closing in fast. i'm mullling over the things i usually do this time of year, and there are a few, i haven't got to. it's cold and wet outside, good weather for staying in, reading a lot, doing a lot of marketing which i've done. writing is shelved for the moment but i have several projects. these are more personal things, lost in the dust caused by the upheaval at the new house.

the new house, in short, had to be cleaned out and prepared for boys to move into it. there are two boys here who virtually do nothing but gaming, the assumption being that that's all they're capable of, and i'm not totally on board with this though there is nothing especially i can do about it either. one is our own and, at eighteen, is in pretty bad shape. the other is his best friend and in pretty much the same boat. they will be moving to the new house.

the house had in it an enormous amount of things. i managed to save a lot of it and take it to the thrift store. a lot more of it ended up here in our garage where we are still sorting. but it is beginning to get strongly on my wife's nerves and it too will be going soon. it will be necessary for me to find a place for it if i want to save any of it. she accuses me of being a hoarder and she's partly right about that though i've gotten much better over the years. most of the hoarding around here these days is done by her but it's all the same, if it's sitting around and nobody is using it. the woman who lived in that house had saved every bill and christmas card for twenty or thirty years, and most of it went into the garbage. her brother had accumulated trophies and left them there - most of them were for motorbiking, as far as i could tell. lots of garbage went out on that curb.

what i neglected, back here, was a painstaking process of gathering family photos and linking to them deep within this very blog. my goal is to make my family accessible and understandable but only if you know what you're looking for. in other words, i don't want beautiful granddaughters labeled in a place where basically it's the free web and someone can find it, drool on it, or take it for their own purposes. it is the free web. but i only want people in there who know what they're looking at. some of my children have great reservations about putting anything of their children on the free web at all. i have to respect that.

so as you can tell, part of the problem is just mulling over what is acceptable and what is not. i figure if it's deep inside this blog it'll be relatively hard to find while at the same time being in plain sight; that's kind of what i'm after. but i still don't want to do it without their permission.

here are some new year traditions. exotic seafood, bizarre hoover-doovers, back to the future, taking down the christmas tree. so far i'm zero for four. but there are still a few days before the new year.

the one thing i don't have, that i wish i did, is ice skating. in the old days, and in cloudcroft, one could skate almost every day between christmas and new year. around here, this year, it hasn't been cold enough. it's been raining instead of snowing. whereas christmas used to be white (with snow) about half the time, we've now gone seven years without one, and though it snowed the other night, it didn't stick very well and i certainly wouldn't skate on any pond in the area at the moment. it may be something we've lost altogether in illinois, but most likely it will just fade with time and become a memory - and we'll say things like "it doesn't snow like it used to." darn right. it doesn't even pretend to snow.

but another year gets folded in, good for the books.

on the near west side, over by knox college, an old woman died. her house was full - every room full of various things, some of it wrapped, like boxes of wrapped glass china, books, papers, mail, everything imaginable. her children came to clean it out; i'm not sure how many people we're talking about here, maybe only a son. the full rooms were too much. whoever it was, gave up, after a little bit of packing. They'd rather knock a few thousand off the price than finish cleaning it up.

that's where we came in. a nice old house, small, a few thousand cheaper than it should be, needs a little work, basically functional in a good neighborhood. we bought it. my son is eighteen, needs to be out of the house, is not really capable of working or going to school, will probably get disability (soon we hope) and we'll put him in that house.

mounds and mounds of clothes, furniture, things to sort. in the basement, dozens of huge trophies, like motorbiking or something. lots of medical equipment: wheelchair, walker, oxygen. many old dressers and desks. no kitchen table, no chairs, but a few recliners and a brand new couch.

and then there are ornaments and dishes, all wrapped up in paper and put in a huge box, too unwieldy to carry. these i would guess we'll have to go through one at a time. my wife says, if you look at the newspaper stuff is wrapped in, you get some idea of when they wrapped it. well, maybe, unless she had that newspaper around for twenty years.

two things caught my eye immediately. one was "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" and one was "schizophrenia and the family" - two books, random books. out of only about a dozen books i've found so far, those were two of them. and there were several bibles.

it's a cold, snowy, rainy sunday - not a good day to be moving stuff out of the house, which is what we need to do. i'd like to get the trophies out onto the curb, for example. but i don't really want to slosh around in foot-deep mud. better to stay home with a blanket on my legs and feet, and a dog on my lap, doing my reading and writing.

although i must say, my new book harvardinates was kind of a flop. my entire publicity engine is virtually nothing. a few friends who like my books took to it and read it, but that's it. because more of my friends are in england these days, i'm having better luck in england than here, in terms of ratings, but i'm getting the strong feeling that more people would read it if they just knew about it. it hasn't gotten onto the search engines yet. i have no paid advertising yet. it's not a big hit on the author sites, where people like to read a quick fantasy in return for your reading their long one, or reading something. some people like history. most don't. almost none really care about the leveretts.

thinking about the house is a little overwhelming. upstairs, where the ceiling plaster has torn off and will be replaced, piles and piles of junk seem to collect moisture as the place has been unheated for a while. i'm not even sure that getting the furnace up and going will solve the problem. it will help though. and there's nothing to do but take it one piece at a time.