Thanks, Everybody

As of last night, the money is raised.

You all will be getting personal thank you notes–emails I guess–in the coming days, unless you chose to remain anonymous, in which case, I hope this will do. And I will thank you all again when I see you in person. I know you’ll find this hard to believe, because I keep talking about it, but I find it really hard to talk about, really hard to understand, frankly. I want to grab everyone I know and say, “Everyone I know is so fucking awesome,” but that seems weirdly redundant.

I am in awe and so humbled and just… I don’t know. I guess if you read me, you know I don’t really believe in or understand how goodness can work on a large scale.

So, I guess I’m going to have to be revising that belief some. Ha ha ha.

The thing that I keep thinking, too, is that this has been such a hard summer for so many people. Hell, these have been some hard years–the economy tanking, the flood, people losing their jobs and not being able to find work, death and death and death–and I know it has been hard. And I have wondered how the hell we get through all this.

But you all already knew. You just do it. Together. People pitch in and it gets done.

Thank you, so much, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, especially to Kristin and Beth for being like “We know you. We know you need help. We know you will deny it if we ask you, so we’re not asking. We’re just doing.”

So, here’s what the money goes for. A small portion is eaten up in fees–both from Indigogo and from Paypal, for the Paypal donations. Of what comes to me, the majority of it goes to replacing the ceiling here in the living room. Then we have to cover clean-up costs and paint. I’d like to replace the rocking chair, but just looking online, I’m not finding one similar. And I may just hold off on that and let Mom and Dad hunt through garage sales for one.

Anything that’s left over will be going to the fund to replace the ceiling in what I call the den, what the listing agent called the third bedroom. Either way, it’s the room my nephews play video games in, the room everyone plays drums in. Guitars get played in there. People sit in there. And that ceiling is the worst of the remaining. If I can get that one done this year, I think it’s going to be more economical and wiser to save up and do the other three all at once. But if we have two rooms done (and the garage empty), doing the other three rooms at the same time will be less daunting. We’ll have safe places we can put everything.

Thank you all, once again.

Please, if you’re in town, come on out to the reading. I’d love to thank you in person.