By Dee Richard
Where has the summer gone? For all intents and purposes, it’s officially over. How was your summer and how did you spend it?
I don’t know about you, but I spent the summer packing and moving. Let me tell you: It wasn’t much fun. Of course, the great moving maneuver was a living testimonial to Murphy’s Law: Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.
The roof had sprung a leak and as the house was going to be torn down, it didn’t make much sense to try and repair the roof, especially since it’s a Spanish tile roof, which is expensive to repair.
Somewhere in time, the dining room ceiling had been replaced with plaster board and, due to the inordinate amount of rain this summer, the man-made material could not support the weight of the water and it came crashing down. This took time out from moving preparations.
Was that the end of the ceiling saga? No way! The plaster ceilings were not going to be outdone by the man-made material ones and they decided all that accumulation of water was also too much for them. You guessed it: Some of those ceilings came down in certain areas as well — only this time we, as well as everything in the house, became covered with at least three inches of plaster dust. The cleaning of all the ceiling messes required a Dumpster all its own to handle the debris.
A friend of mine in the construction business volunteered a few of his men to help us. It seemed there was a lull between jobs and he didn’t want to lose his men. Helping me would fill the void and keep them busy till he needed them.
They were told to use the basement bathroom for their personal needs. That bathroom had never seen that much action, so of course the john protested by acting up. One of the guys said he could fix it and took the porcelain top off the water tank, laid it on the floor and went to work on fixing the float. It wasn’t till much later that someone noticed the top was missing. It seems the guy whose job it was to clean out the basement saw the top on the floor, decided it was junk and threw it in the Dumpster.
Upon realizing this, he ran out to the Dumpster to retrieve it, but in the interim Di Sano came by, picked up the full container and left an empty one in its place. The tank top is in a landfill somewhere in New Jersey.
Then we had the falling tree. The tree roots apparently weren’t deep enough to survive all the mud caused by the rain and the tree fell over. The woman who bought my house said she wanted it removed, and we did, but upon her inspection she noted we had not removed the stump. The tree man came back again, at an extra charge, to grind the stump down, but there was a problem.
In the interim, the Dumpster man had put his new container in the driveway. When he left it in the street in front of the house, the neighborhood decided it was so nice of us to provide a free repository for all their junk. Overnight, they managed to fill my container up. Thanks, guys, for being so cheap. I paid for the Dumpster to get rid of my trash, not yours.
Of course, mother’s little helpers were demolition guys and there is nothing they enjoy more than busting everything up. Don’t ask what happened to a lot of my stuff. Only the things of value either sentimentally or monetarily were destroyed. The 99 cent store variety stuff was treated with the utmost respect and survived. Oh, well, what’s a mother to do? This is not the end of the moving saga, but it is the end of the space. To be continued next week.
The only political event we were able to get to this week was James Wu’s endorsement by U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner. Wu is running for City Councilman John Liu’s seat. The event was held in the Dong Yi Feng Seafood Restaurant in Flushing. I found Wu, who has been a community activist for years, to be an interesting young man. In addition, Wu joined the Marines and fought for our country in the first Gulf War. He was awarded a certificate for helping the NYPD and the FDNY on Sept. 11. Wu’s mother is Ethel Chen, a longtime community and political activist, so I guess it runs in the family. Good luck, James.
That’s it for this week.
I like hearing from you with information on people, parties and politics or gossip.
I look forward to receiving your voice mails at 718-767-6484, faxes at 718-746-0066 and e-mails at deerrichard@aol.com.
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Till next week, Dee.
