New Year, New Post-Hurricane Updates

Updated on January 22, 2013

This photo shows some of the unsalvageable flood-damaged Ghostbusters-related items lying on the floor of my old house. Going from left to right, we see:

• Nearly 50 copies of IDW's Ghostbusters #9 comic book. You see the Winston covers, but the other covers got ruined, too.
  
  
• All four of the Titan Book TPB reprints of the old Marvel UK Real Ghostbusters comic books - "Who You Gonna Call?", "Which Witch Is Which", "This Ghost Is Toast", and "A Hard Days Fright".
  
  
• A factory-sealed copy of the original Steelbook edition of TimeLife's The Real Ghostbusters: Complete Collection DVD box set. You can see the top and bottom halves of the firehouse box, which is now falling apart. The still-sealed Steelbook volumes are in between the box halves.
  
  
• Ghostbusters: Ghost Busted (TokyoPop manga TPB).

Hiding there near the middle right side (just above the "A Hard Days Fright" book) is the back of a No Ghost logo t-shirt tag (black square with white circle on it). The shirt's fine, but the paper tag obviously isn't.

This isn't all of the unsalvageable damaged Ghostbusters stuff; it's just the stuff that the flood put near each other. The rest of the unsalvageable damaged Ghostbusters stuff is listed below. The partly-salvageable Ghostbusters stuff is documented in this blog post.

• Ghostbusters II Autographed Cast Photo - signed by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Sigourney Weaver. Bought from a dealer for $73 on 5/4/2006. (I had other Ghostbusters-related autographs that got destroyed, such as some just of Ernie Hudson, but since this is the most tragic loss, it'll be the only one I list here.)
  
  
• Polar Lights Ecto-1 plastic model. Pieces were broken off; the instructions were sopping wet (though easily driable); and the box was trashed.
  
  
• Every issue of Cereal:Geek magazine from issue #1 to the last one published, including the variant cover of #1

On the positive side, my old 1989 Ertl Ecto-1A model survived being in a swelled-shut dresser drawer. I guess I should be grateful that it was made out of plastic and was "sealed" in a plastic display case.

Oh, and it probably goes without saying, but the list above is a tiny fraction of everything that got destroyed. I only listed the Ghostbusters stuff. If I listed everything, I'd be typing on this little touch screen for the next several days straight. I don't think the autocorrect feature could handle that much overtime.

Let me put it this way, I had a very large box filled with books of which *nothing* inside could be salvaged. Besides Ghostbusters, wrestling is another interest of mine. I had all three of the Wrestlecrap books, and now they're gone. The same for all of the autobiographies that fellow Long Islander (and soon-to-be WWE Hall of Famer) Mick Foley wrote, the WWE Encyclopedia, the Lita autobiography from 10 years ago (book and book-on-CD), regular and autographed copies of Rowdy Roddy Piper's autobiography, and lots more that's too painful to try to remember.

One of the saddest book-related losses wasn't even wrestling-related. It was the souvenir program and pop-up storybook I got from when I saw the Radio City Christmas Spectacular a few years ago. I had won tickets from Newsday, so I took my parents to see the show. Now the only way to get those items again is to go see the show again, and that won't be very cheap.

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FYI: You can use the url below to easily link to all articles here on Spook Central about my family and Hurricane Sandy:
http://tinyurl.com/rudoff-hurricane-sandy

January 18, 2013:

Today was a very good day, but a sad one, too.

Robert Als and Alim Gafar came over and helped me get more stuff out of the old house. I'm proud to say we got out at least 95% of the stuff I wanted to get out. Hopefully we can get back and finish off the dining room and kitchen, thus bringing it to 100% completion. Then we'd get a nice trophy or achievement.

Thank you Robert and Alim for helping me today.

January 22, 2013:

Today my family and I went back to our old house in East Rockaway for the last time. We got out the little bit of stuff that was left after Friday's massive move. It cost us $50 for the cab round-trip ($20 going and $30 coming back). We were going to take the train to and from, but it was so bitter cold outside, that the cab was the better choice. Interestingly, it cost roughly the same for the cab as it did to rent the Uhaul cargo van on either of the two big moving days.

I did the calculations, and a total of 8 days were spent cleaning out the house between mid-November and mid-January. My family and I did two days in mid-November, right after the useless FEMA inspector came; while we were still living at the Red Cross emergency shelter. Alim Gafar helped me on 12/12, 12/20, and 1/4 (for 2 hours). Robert Als and Alim helped me on 12/14 and 1/18; these were the days on which I rented a Uhaul cargo van and we filled that thing up! We filled it up *twice* on the second day. Finally, my family and I spent 3 hours there on 1/22 to get the small amount of stuff that was left after Friday.

What is currently left in the house is lots of mold, broken furniture, trashed belongings, and thousands of damaged and undamaged home-recorded videocassettes. It just wasn't worth the time or effort to sort through them to see what's damaged and what isn't, and what has worthwhile programs recorded on them and what doesn't. I took a few dozen tapes that I knew we're undamaged and had worthwhile programs on them - such as the complete series of Extreme Ghostbusters and my high school graduation (professionally recorded) - and I left the rest.

Now I can officially say that my family has moved out of East Rockaway. We were there for 23 years, and it's a little sad, but now is the time to look forward and not to the past.