After the Flood

Things at Casa la Brilliant are begining to settle down into organized chaos, as opposed to OHMYGODWHEREDOISTART chaos. Yesterday Mr. Brilliant took the day off and spent the morning in performing carpetio destructo in the basement, while I wept at the tragedy of it all. I mean, after all, yes, the carpet WAS a 1970's rust-colored tweed, but it was also still in near-perfect condition and that lovely foam padding -- the padding that was the main culprit for the ever-worsening mildew odor, was SO nice and cushiony under the feet. Actually, I fib -- I wasn't weeping at all, because by that point all I wanted to do was get the stuff out of there. So now we have a patio full of moldy carpet and foam padding, and today we'll stuff as much of it as possible into plastic trash bags and take it over to the DPW yard. Hardly a "green" thing to do on a Saturday morning, but we don't have a whole lot of choice.

Then of course there's the matter of packing up the remaining four tons of books, DVDs, home-recorded VHS tapes, and half-empty liquor bottles from parties long forgotten that have been sitting behind the bar for between 10 and 20 years because we are not drinkers but it seems a shame to dump a perfectly good half-bottle of gin down the drain even if it is fifteen years old. Both Mr. B. and I tend towards packrattery, which gives me somewhat less moral authority when I try to say things like, "You haven't watched those few episodes of Alexei Sayles' STUFF since we moved in ten years ago, what makes you think you're going to ever watch it again?"

Then there's the what-to-do-with-the-vinyl-records problem. Obviously original monaural copies of Meet the Beatles must be kept for archival purposes, but we also have not one, not two, but THREE copies of Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him, and what about the vinyl copies of recordings we have since purchased on CDs? Do we keep them or toss them? The horror of vinyl records is that they tend to mean something to their owners, and while I dispensed with my copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue some time ago, because it was the album that most underscored what a wretchedly unhappy adolescent I was, Mr. Brilliant remembers his own youth far more fondly than I do, so his collection is a reminder of fun. And so these mass-produced mileposts of our lives either remain snugly ensconced in our house, to be picked through and discarded after our demise as if we were some kind of downmarket Charles Foster Kane.

And then there's the books. I used to work for a major book publisher, so I had a fairly large assortment of books I never wanted to read, and a few that I have to keep only because my name appears in the acknowledgments. And I have a very dear friend who buys books, reads them, and then passes them on to me. Her house, I might point out, is immaculate. I've discarded many books already, but it was definitely time to get rid of the kind of 1960's crap that we know we'll never read again -- books like The Greening of America and the collected works of Richard Brautigan. Still, this leaves a few hundred books to be packed up, because yes, I probably WILL read The Stand again at some point.

The rest is just sort of general household effluvia -- clothes waiting to be ironed, springform pans purchased at Dollar Days at the A&P, the extra Paint Stick I keep around for the next big painting job I do, old photographs of seventeen trips worth of Jamaican sunsets and the 1986 Mets tickertape parade, tools, and other assorted Stuff That I Might Yet Use.

But the carpet is mostly gone now, so the basement smells merely damp instead of like something rotting down there. Yesterday the new vanity for the upstairs bathroom was delivered in two manageable boxes as expected, rather than the 250 pound skid that UPS Overnight had told me it would be. And to further add to the day's productivity, the awesome shop-at-home flooring guy I'd found on Angie's List showed up right on time, and I ordered some lovely taupe tweed glue-down commercial carpet for a very fair price.

Today the sun is shining, and temperatures of 75 degrees are predicted, and the dryout continues.