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.