#669

I tried defragmenting again. This time I closed everything but Explorer. "Ctrl/Alt/Delete" says only Explorer was running when I started the defragment job. Twelve hours later, it was still only 10% complete. It kept restarting again, claiming that the disk contents had changed. I give up. ("It USED to work!", she whines....)
I don't understand.

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I was awakened this morning at 6:30 am by men stomping around on my roof. At about 6:50, an enormous truck arrived with the shingles. It used a crane to lift the pallets of shingles onto the roof, incidentally taking out a few tree branches and squashing driveway surface on the way.

The roofer had some bad news for me -- a tree branch was touching the roof in the back of the garage, and some carpenter ants had used it as a highway. They made a huge hole in the soffit. He said "I cleaned the nest out - got'em all I think." And he cut the branch down. Hmmmm. I think I'll talk to an exterminator pretty soon. Sigh. I really don't need more of this.

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I delivered four bags of bubble wrap to a woman in Kingston this morning, and stowed three more bags in the van to go to the Elmendorph Inn Resale Shop when they open on Wednesday. On the way back from the woman's house, I stopped at the Salvation Army store to find out when I can donate stuff such that I can get a receipt. Then this afternoon I made a list and packed up Jay's sports coats and shirts that had been stored in the basement in movers' wardrobe boxes, ever since he'd moved here from Texas, and put them in the van to donate tomorrow or Wednesday.

There are three sports coats - one ordinary, one raw silk with leather elbow patches, and one hand-woven, hand-tailored in England, genuine Harris Tweed. All three had never been worn, still had the tags on them. When Jay was with his ex-wife, he used a special deodorant that left waxy deposits under the arms of his shirts, so it was easy to tell which shirts had been worn, and which had never been worn. I discarded the shirts with deposits. That left more than 35 never-worn shirts, about 3/4 are dress shirts. Do you believe it? I also added four windbreakers, all in excellent, possibly never-worn, condition.

While sorting out the windbreakers, I found Jay's old fraternity jacket (Pi Kappa Alpha, Carnegie Mellon). That one will go into a container of Jay's things that I can't bring myself to get rid of. I checked the pockets. There was a Kleenex in one pocket, and a Mars bar wrapper in the other. I had to sit down for a moment. Kleenex and chocolate wrappers were so very characteristic of Jay. He left trails of them everywhere.

This evening I will cut the buttons off the 15 or so discard shirts. For me, that's fun.