Saturday Updates

 As I write this, burley garbage men are picking up washed out book cases and soggy carpet and manfully tossing them into a garbage truck. It's glorious. [Does Mrs. Stroock know about this?-Ed] Those are union jobs. That's time and a half at least.

What a week. We hauled our entire basement out to the curb. We are tired and sore and sleeping so deeply no amount of nudging from Mrs. Stroock stops our snoring. Our throat is dry and crackly. The dust and mold in the basement doesn't help. To put it another way, we're exhausted. And there's still work to do. 

These are not complaints. There are people in New Jersey who lost everything, including 27 dead, two from Bridgewater. From the moment we came home we felt we dodged a bullet. 

A contractor is coming on Tuesday to remediate flood damage. This entails removing drywall and insulation, drying out and bombing the basement with a disinfectant. From there we can talk drywall repair. 

Next step, carpet. Interesting question. Do we buy new bookcases or hire a carpenter to put new shelves in? 

We're not worried about further floods. In 16 years this was the first time we flooded.

Reader(s) will recall that we posted a photo of our Somerset Patriots' stadium under water after Ida. Last night:

It was a cool, crisp, beautiful night. Before the Fauci Flu the Fami de Stroock would catch half a dozen games a year. This was our first game back since the Beijing Bat Bug. Goddamn, but if we didn't get emotional sitting there thinking about it.

This season the Patriots became the Yankees AA affiliate. The quality of play was significantly better. We saw a lot of future major leaguers out there. 

World War 1990: The Weser is 60,000 words. Is it done? No. But it's almost done. We're declaring the summer sneak in project a success and moving on.

We did the last thing we had to do with The Great Nuclear War of 1975. This week we'll print out a physical copy and read it. Remember 75 and 76 come out back to back simultaneous like. We have no idea what we must needs do with 76.

This week we'll begin anew World War 1990: The Final Storm. The first step is reading everything we've written so far. Not the Roki Tunnel opener though. At the same time we'll begin work on the air strike scenes. We think we'll start with the Brits. Remember Darling and his Tornado squadron? Target: Yedrovo. And we'll let the Aussie F-111 strike percolate.