Seven in the morning, and rswfire opened the recording with the day's hardest item already named: the roof, and the heights he does not like. He said it plainly — we got to do it, so that's what we're doing — and then set the roof down and turned to the enclosures, because the roof was not first in the sequence. Mele, then Mele again, the eyes and the marbled looking back at him from behind mesh. A cage that needed cleaning. And then Luna, awake early, not coming to him the way she had been, which he noted without explaining.
He warned the camera before he showed it. Her bed was full — she had gone where she slept, and the whole of it was a mess. He cleaned it out. He got her food. He got her medication, the medication she does not like, and he tried what the vet had told him: syrup on the lips. It worked. She took her medicine, good little girl. She needs weight, so he gave her as much as she would take, a quarter of it at a time, knowing she would not finish it at once but would come back to it. He cleaned her as much as he could and then stood back to wait for her to move before setting down the water.
It was over her cage that he stated the cost, both kinds. Six hundred, maybe eight hundred dollars invested; about a hundred eighty in donations, and he thanked the people who had sent it. He described the work as the worst thing he could imagine himself having to do, said that anyone who knew him would know how hard it was, and said in the same breath that you do it for that little girl. He had forgotten his gloves — took them off and didn't put them back on — and made a note that the showers were happening this morning, no question, because her things had come out of the cage and gone down on every surface. He watched her eat and said he was happy to see it, that the parasites were working their way out, that the mess was understandable, that he looked forward to the day she doesn't have to go through it — and that it must be harder on her than on him having to clean it up. Bailey, a little freaked out at the edge of the frame, got told twice that it would get better.
Then the dehumidifier. Full again, filled overnight, and he hadn't wanted to go empty it in the middle of the night. Three or four times a day now, and even with the big unit running, the humidity would not come down below fifty. He carried it out. The neighboring sites were empty — the neighbors come by season, mostly weekends, they'd told him. He set aside the items staged for the storage bay, holding to yesterday's plan: pull what's in the bay inside, then the outside things go out. The floor needed vacuuming. All of it waited on the roof.
He went to the ladder. He climbed partway, said I'm up high already, this feels very high for me, and peeked over the edge at the debris that has to come off before the rig moves anywhere — before the tanks, before the drive. He has been doing this several times a day, deliberately, calling it desensitizing himself. He has not made it up. He has made it to the edge. He said he knows he has to do it today.
At the rear tires he laid out the last blocked node. The tires are losing air. The shop that installed them needs to put extenders on the valve stems, and Monday is the last window to drive it down there, because after that he is somewhere else. He had found his portable compressor and discovered it couldn't reach the back tires; he looked for something to extend it, found nothing, and spent a hundred dollars on a second compressor that does reach. Then he spent thirty minutes trying to seat it on one valve and could not do it. He said he wonders what the first owner did, noted that one of the tires already has an extender, and said he doesn't think it's him. He judged the tires stable enough to move the rig to the dump station and down to the shop. Then he closed: more organizing inside, the storage swap, convincing himself to go up there, and figuring out how to safely manage Luna while he empties the tanks — or putting it off, which he stated he hopes he doesn't do, because he really needs to do it. Bailey. Hey, Bailey.