The L-i-K-S, who was moving and really didn't need more stuff to pack and schlep, forwarded seven boxes full of Mom's stuff to me this week. For sorting, selling, storing, or whatever.
Included, scattered here and there, I found more bits of money. A few more coins, none of which I've had a chance to look at yet, and some really unusual paper money.
And a few other interesting items.
Behold, the rare "cut tag," offered here for your viewing convenience because lots of pictures follow.
So. As I may have mentioned a few hundred times, the R.C. and I have been occupying this same apartment space for the last two decades.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but most of them boil down to laziness. What with one thing and another, this place is almost always conveniently located just about halfway between our respective places of employment (when such things exist), and it's bigger than the newer apartment spaces they've been building, and it's cheap (because we've been such long-term tenants).
And, you know, we don't have to go through the pain and expense of moving.
Stuff wears out from time to time, of course. We've had to have new bathroom fixtures (shower and sink faucets). We wanted a new dishwasher once, but they fixed the old one :( and it's still chugging along. We have gotten a ceiling fan, a couple of new disposal units, vertical blinds in the living room, Venetians in the bedrooms, and a new fluorescent light fixture and then new tile on the floor in the kitchen.
Recently, the refrigerator has been acting up.
Today, the R.C. called the office and they promised to send someone over to fix it but warned that if we needed a new refrigerator, they ones they use are on backorder and we'd have to wait a while. Maintenance called back and said they'd come and take care of it.
We left. We came back. (Can't sit around here waiting on non-existent refrigerators all day.) We found a note from maintenance.
"Will be back after lunch with new refrigerator."
Ah, the excitement! Would they be back or would they not?
Are refrigerators available or on backorder?
Should we clean out the refrigerator or not?
(Does the universe have some kind of bell or something, that lets it whack your refrigerator with a big, ol' spoonfull of entropy the day after you visit the grocery store and stock up on cold things?)
They came back. With a new refrigerator.
"Refrigerators exist!" We squealed.
"Big 'uns do," they said. (The new refrigerator is a Beast. Bigger, by a considerable amount, than our old one.) "We were going to send this one back but your needs come first."
They stood, patiently, even making jokes, as the R.C. and I scrambled to unload the old appliance, stacking food on all the counters and in the sink. And then taking down the wall-hanging spice racks and potholders and other debris a kitchen accumulates. And removing the rugs. We hustled and finished in something under ten minutes.
They measured. Measured again. Debated. Listened as I promised that if everything had to go back into the old refrigerator, we'd be standing over them as they did it.
They measured a third time. Concluded that The Beast would, just barely, fit into the space.
They pulled out the old refrigerator, leaving a trail of oil as they went. I'd like to think it wasn't sitting there, leaking gunk for the last month or two, but who knows.
Such nice men. They tried hard to wipe up the trail they were leaving on our light-gray linoleum. They waited while we spread a carpet protector (one of those things you use in your office so that your desk chair will roll smoothly when you're playing Jedi Knights with your cubicle neighbor and two rulers) between the kitchen and the front door, both so they could roll their dolly more easily and to protect our light-beige carpet from the dirty black oil. Waited again as we cleaned the walls previously hidden behind the appliance and mopped the filthy linoleum previously hidden under the appliance.
Then they moved The Beast in and, yes, it barely fit. I estimate there's a clearance of, maybe, 1/4 inch between the top of it and the bottom of the cabinet above. (It seems clear that my days of cleaning the top of the refrigerator are at an end. I can't imagine how, short of taping a damp washrag to a yardstick, I can get a cleaning cloth into there.)
They assembled the shelves, declined my polite invitation to feel free to restow all of the food for us, and left.
The R.C. and I scrambled again, this time to get all the food back in before it all melted. (Fortunately, no raw meat or ice cream products were involved.)
We stood back for a few seconds to admire the spacious interior of the new machine before closing it up solidly and waiting for it to achieve coldness.
"It's frost-free," I said with glee. "No more defrosting!"
"What do you care," the R.C. said bitterly. "It's not like you ever defrosted it."
"No more defrosting," I repeated. "No more of the usable space getting smaller by the day as the ice pack accumulates on the walls! No more defrosting!"
"What difference does it make to you?" The R.C. repeated with even more bitterness. "Anyhow, it only needed to be defrosted two or three times a year."
I get no credit for my pain.
When it had been a while since the R.C. had defrosted the old refrigerator, sometimes I'd be hard-pressed to find enough space to keep my ice cream and frozen veggies.
Sometimes I would have to not buy any more freezer items because I didn't have enough space for them.
No credit.
______________________
P.S. Also? We don't move because of refrigerators.
When our refrigerator wore out, the apartment folks sent a couple of sturdy men over with a new one.
When you homeowners lose an appliance, you have to go and buy it and even if someone delivers, you have to uninstall your old one and reinstall your new one, or pay someone extra to do it. We stood around and made fun of the maintenance guy who almost got stuck behind The Beast after plugging it in.
Wow. I didn't actually intend to take a week-long break from blogging. It just sort of happened.
So, what's new in the "very little happening, very slowly" department?
One of my best friends had the misfortune of having her employer suddenly close their doors last week. No real notice--they just called everyone together and said, "we're shutting down, as of this second."
A shock when that happens, although a bit of severance pay and eligibility for unemployment help to soften the blow a bit. (At least, it did for me when Mr. Snow, my last "start-up" employer, suddenly went out of business.)
Still. It's good for me, you know! Someone to run around and play with sometimes! We had lunch last week and she found us a $2 yarn sale to visit this week. (I'm still restricted from buying any new yarn until I've used up all of my old yarn, but I figure for $2, I can be flexible if I find something really interesting.)
I was crowing about her availability in a different venue and another friend popped up to point out that her university position is very quiet this time of year, and she's always available for lunch and/or whatnot. So, double-good for me!
In other news, Pippi turned 18 this past weekend and in spite of repeated reminders from the R.C., I entirely spaced out calling her. I'm a bad aunt. Sigh. (Although, the girls have known me, or I should say, not known me, for 18 years now, and I think they expect me to have a weak brain....)
Still. Happy birthday, Pippi! ♥ ♥ ♥
And, yes, my new Potter book arrived Saturday. And, yes, I sat down immediately and read it cover-to-cover. Most of it twice.
Without offering any spoilers, let me say that I wasn't sure after the first reading how much I liked it. After the second reading, I decided I liked it very well, but maybe not for the reasons one might expect. And I was glad it wasn't as dark as, say, Book 5, because ick.
And, while we're on the subject of Potter and Book 5, I wasn't going to go see the new movie (I really haven't been seeing them in the theatres) but then the R.C. read in the paper that the current one is being shown at the IMAX 3-D theatre. The ad said the movie was 3D, which I find almost impossible to believe--don't you have to shoot a movie specially to be in 3D and doesn't it cost four times as much--but if that's true, it might be worth seeing.
And the IMAX theater is, of course, air-conditioned. Because, temperatures? Remain hot. We came close to cracking 100 yesterday. Today? 9:30 in the morning and if I move out from under the fan I have blowing directly at me, I start to sweat.
The R.C. and I went out "bashing around" (her term) yesterday and visited a couple of bookstores where, in spite of the Pottermania infesting the world of literature this week, I managed to find some completely unrelated books I wanted. I didn't buy them, what with being on a budget and all, but I'm making a list and when I get a job....
Garden-wise, I'm sad to report that the blight infesting one of my pots seems to be spreading. The collection of what had been my healthiest flowers is wilting fast. I don't know what's wrong with the stupid things. I give them water and don't walk on them or knock them over. What else do they need?
Employment-wise, nothing has really changed. The resumes go out. I get an occasional call asking for more information or something. No one hires me. Sigh.
Sitting around the house-wise, I'm stuck on that stupid GameBoy game and will remain so until I find an hour when I have the endless patience I'm going to need to kill this particular dungeon boss. (It's too hot to be patient.)
The L-i-K-S called and said she'd shipped the "collectibles" of Mom's to me. They should arrive this week, so I'll have to make some choices about the venues I'm researched for selling them. She also said she'd found some more coins, some that might be Civil War era, so I'm excited about getting to play with those!
(And, on a related topic, the nephew, Billy Jo's son, did actually make a payment on Mom's trailer this month, and he's working with the bank to get the loan transferred into his name, so that's one worry off our backs. We still need to figure out where the paperwork is on the third cemetary plot Mom and Dad owned, because we need to sell that, but I think we're getting down to the last of that kind of thing. The L-i-K-S has the filing for the life insurance under control, we all know we'll have to do a final tax filing, and I think that's it.)
I'm sorry my life isn't more interesting or more blog-worthy. I'll try to drum up a little excitement before I blog again.
We had the carpets cleaned this morning. This year's sponsored "treat" from the management company as a thank-you for renewing our lease for, like, the 20th year in a row or something.
This is good, because it's supposed to be 95 today and by opening the windows and doors and turning on a lot of fans, it means I'll be able to get the carpets mostly dried in 2-3 hours. (The R.C. bailed and went to the mountains with a friend for the day.)
This is bad because--doors and windows all open. It's hot. I can't turn on the a/c.
I'm probably using just about the same amount of electricity I'd be using with the a/c and no fans, but I tell myself I'm putting fewer chemicals into the air or something. (Aside from whatever dangers carpet-cleaning soap fumes might provide.) It's hard to be green when your carpets are wet.
The carpet-cleaners guys were pretty amusing, though. They came in claiming they'd put a specific order in with the apartment management people for me to have lunch ready and waiting for them.
I told them we'd just finished serving and that they'd missed their opportunity.
Mindful of my mother's oft-repeated warnings in my childhood about how walking on a freshly cleaned, still-wet carpet will destroy it forever, I'm not walking on the carpet if I can avoid it at all. Of course, like most USofA apartments these days, this place has wall-to-wall carpeting, so that means I'm unable to move out of my chair or, in a fit of real daring, more than the two steps it takes to get to the PC.
Speaking of computers, I took the laptop in yesterday. I'm proud to announce that a quick review by the Tech Boys revealed--wait for it--user error!
Turns out that a laptop's battery sometimes refuses to release, even when you plug it back in. If you get that weird red light right there where I had a weird red light, next to what might be a symbol representing a broken battery (although I thought it had something to do with the power cord because it looked more like +/- to me and that says electricity, not batteries, but obviously I'm stupid), what you do is you pull the battery out physically, then stick it back in. Problem solved.
A comprehensive warranty means never having to pay a stupidity fee.
Speaking of stupidity, I hear the multiple and conflicting copies of HP7 are already up on the internets. Some people need to get a grip. The actual book is coming out this weekend. They couldn't wait three days?
Yes, I have a copy on order. I have had for several months. However, I can't honestly say that I'm awaiting with bated breath the next developments in this increasingly dark and gloomy fictional universe. (As you might suspect from someone whose favorite author is P. G. Wodehouse, I'm not about "dark" in my fiction. There is no place in my psyche where torture, humiliation, and brutality are labeled "That's Entertainment!")
My teensy-weensy Knit-Lit group is finally gearing up to start. All three of us. We've selected Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck as our first Lit.
This will be interesting. I've never belonged to a "reading club" before. I do a lot of reading and occasionally I find someone else reading what I'm reading and we talk about it, but nothing organized. Our first meeting is in a couple of weeks, giving us all plenty of time to make it through all 136 pages. (I'll probably wait until the day before to read it, so it will be fresh in my head.)
I still dabble with my Knit, but I'll admit I'm doing a lot less these days. Summer, when it's 95 outside, is not the time to be sitting around with a lapful of hot wool.
That's pretty much it for excitement in the most recent five hours of my life.
I have a blemish. Upon my face.
Why has my face produced this unsightly protrusion? I don't know. I made it all the way through puberty with only three pimples*, so why, now, at this late date, has my face decided to develop oil?
It's appalling and I so object.
Can I file a complaint? What we need is a BBBB** I can file a complain with.
When the warranty runs out on your car, it develops a thing, a noise or something***, and you have to take it to the mechanic and it costs you $500 to fix it.
When the warranty runs out on your body, it develops a thing and while you're getting it to the doctor, the transmission starts to miss and the brakes get mushy and the carburetor gets sticky and by the time you're limping into the parking lot, pieces are threatening to fall off. And there's not enough money in the world to restore it to factory condition.****
I took on this body under the understanding that it was a lifetime warranty. I'm starting to suspect false advertising.
I mean, wouldn't you think that when Marvelous Medical Miracles started becoming commonplace and we all started living to be 90 instead of falling over when we were 45, wouldn't you assume that the warranty would automatically be extended and that we'd all enjoy perfect health for at least the first sixty or seventy decades?
I know I did.
Okay.
Laundry done. Coffee slurped. Bedroom tidied. Laptop packed up and ready to go to the computer store. Shower accomplished. Hair a ghastly mess. Breakfast finished.
I still need to vacuum and actually get into my car and drive the laptop the entire three miles to the store.
In short, I've accomplished pretty much everything I can accomplish***** without leaving the building. It's time to brave the Summer Inferno.
Footnotes To My Life would make a good book title. I probably wouldn't read it, it doesn't sound like my kind of thing, but it would be an interesting title.
_______________
* Could have been four.
** Better Body Business Bureau
***My mother used to call that, "a hitch in your gitalong." Never say this blog isn't educational.
**** Not that I'd want to. I mean, not if it meant going back and starting all over again. I wouldn't relive anything before my 30s, not on a bet. (Although I'd go back to when I was 18 and beat myself up until I promised never to start smoking....)
***** Pretty much. Short of vacuuming.
I feel a pressure to blog, in spite of my continuing deficit of brain.
It's supposed to be 98 here today. Forget the future of the planet and turn on the a/c! (Not that we haven't every day anyhow.)
My recent life:
Job-hunting - a few good ads, resumes submitted, thundering silence ensuing.
Gardening - staring at the plants, watering them twice-daily, otherwise losing interest in this game since, in the end, plants just sit there.
Laptop - owing to the aforementioned deficit of brain, I completely forgot that yesterday was Monday. I'm planning to take it in today, instead.
Travel - I need to book my last trip to KC for the first week of August. Kansas. In August. Be still my quivering (sweating, wilting) heart. I need to pack up great armloads of things, mostly fragile, to ship back here to Denver and then I need to figure out how to sell/dispose of them.
Head - I have definitely decided to cut my hair off. (Well, not me personally. I'll go to the stylist.) In spite of a lifelong distaste for my chin and my reluctance to wear my hair in any way that exposes it, I've just had it with all this hair. It's thick, heavy, and hot.
Excitement - Sadly lacking.
I have accomplished no amazing feats of house-cleaning or tidying up. I have started/finished no fantabulous new books (I'm not allowed to buy any new books while I'm unemployed) and have already talked too much about the "old" books I'm re-reading.
I have, essentially, been nowhere and done nothing.
This is partly the heat (I crouch indoors, snarling at the shimmering sunshine and crawling ever closer to the air conditioner) and partly a lack of imagination on my part. There's a whole, giant city out there but I can't seem to get interested in it.
I'm going to kick myself when I'm back in the 9-5 rut again. I know I am. I should do my daily job-hunting in the morning and then treat the rest of the day like an unexpected vacation. Sigh.
Maybe I'll do something exciting today? Besides cleaning house (the carpet cleaners come tomorrow, so I need to vacuum and tidy up) and taking the laptop in, I mean.
Actually, the R.C. and I went to the Worldwide Antique show at the Merchandise Mart last week. ("Worldwide" is a bit of an exaggeration. 90% of the booths seemed to be people from surrounding states.)
We saw many fabulous things, none of which I bought (not even the completely unused Sèvres dinner set for 12, for only $14,500) but many of which I coveted madly. Nor the pottery with the beautiful and unusual "Rose Tapestry" glaze that felt, to the fingers, like the glaze had been woven, not poured. I coveted those pieces very madly, but they were priced in the hundreds of dollars per piece.
We wandered around for a couple of hours, ooohing and aaahing and generally drooling on everything we got close to. We were eyeballed by no small number of vendors who feared that our enthusiasm might run away with us, to the extend of pocketing some attractive but expensive piece, but we also got to eavesdrop on some fascinating conversations as sellers educated buyers about the details of various bits and pieces of history.
Good times.
My "new" laptop has crashed again. For, like, the third time in a year!
And this time I can't even keep it up and running for long enough to try to start it in "safe" mode or something.
I sweartogod, I will never again buy a cheap laptop.
fuming
I'll take it back tomorrow and see what the experts can do. (Fortunately, I bought a warranty that's supposed to cover anything and everything short of sitting on it and breaking the monitor.)
And? Seriously? I have got to start backing things up. I mean, I do have copies (this time) of all my files on both the laptop and the PC, but I'm starting to have nightmares about the day when the PC crashes....
Posted by AnneZook at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)So, okay, I've worn the new pants (the Capris) out of the house twice now. Once to walk over to lunch, once to go to the complex management office to sign a new lease. ($34 rent increase!) I was--cringing. Both times.
I swore to myself if I bought them I'd wear them, but I don't know. I may be getting on toward geezerdom in years but I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the sight of myself dressed toward geezerdom.
Ah, well.
No interviews this week, except one phone interview from an agency.
Don't get me wrong--I take even a phone interview as encouraging. Especially when, as this place did, they call back for clarification on certain points. That means that they're at least really considering you, right? She called back because their client had some questions about my resume, which was very encouraging. (It's less encouraging that I haven't heard back from her since, though.)
As the R.C. points out, I'm getting three times the play on my resume submissions this time, which means I've finally got the resume tweaked correctly. Now all I need is someone willing to hire me even though I'm not 25 any more. (I don't get this age-discrimination in hiring thing. It's not like anyone signs on and becomes a life-long employee of most companies any more. People job-hop every couple of years. My resume shows I stay for an average of five years at most jobs, making me one of the most astonishingly stable employees you could have.)
What I really want is for someone to call up and say, "We'll hire you for as much money as you said you wanted and we want you to start in two weeks." That way I both have employment and I have a brief interval when I can finally relax and enjoy some of this time off. (After all, starting over means no vacation time for six months or more.)
Speaking of geezerdom, I need a haircut. I'm going to bypass the cheap-but-not-talented stylist I've been using to go back to Mr. One-Hour-Minimum-and-Mortgage-Your-House guy. I begrudge the time he needs to give me a cut (even when I'm unemployed and have all the time one could want) but he does a good job.
I'm squirming a bit though. I have to explain to him why I haven't been to see him for the last eight months, after seeing him regularly for eight years.
What else is new?
Well, I have friends I'm supposed to be contacting that I haven't been. I have housecleaning I told myself I needed to do that I haven't done.
The R.C., after months of debate and indecision, wandered out the other day and came home with a GameBoy DS and a new game or two. What with one thing and another, it reignited my own love for playing video games and we've been switching off machines and games ever since.
She's playing the new HP DS game. I'm working on that one but I'm also using the GB Advance to work my way through the Zelda Minish Cap game. She's had it forever, but I never got around to playing it.
Now that I am, I'm giving thanks once again for walkthroughs.
(I remember, back in the dark ages when GB was new, you had to call a phone number and pay by the minute to get help if you were stuck.* Then there was an official walkthrough book and life was good. Later, there were many more games, not all with official books, but by then there was the internet and Game Geeks rushing to be the first ones to finish a game so they could post walkthroughs online, and life was really good.)
I like to think that my fondness for the GameBoy suggests that I am not some kind of Luddite (in spite of still resisting the lure of Firefox and letting my html skills nearly atrophy) and that I am, as my resume claims, comfortable with technology.
Summer o'Gardening-wise, I will not be being replaced by a pod-person at any time in the near future. For some reason the budding pods (or whatever) on my bromeliad have wilted. The plant itself seems happy enough, though. One of my mixed planting pots on the porch has developed some weird kind of mange, though. And I whacked a pot full of marigolds against a shelf the other day and broke off half the plant.
"Green thumb" isn't the first thing I think of when I'm thinking of my own skill-set.
There was something else I meant to blog about, but I've forgotten what it was.
_________________
* At that point, when the phone tips failed us, I'd sneak the GB into my office and take it to the tech support department when no one was watching. There was always some Game Geek there who could figure out the tricks and get us past hard parts.
So. What else is new?
Well, the Summer of Gardening is going well, in spite of the near-100 daily temperatures that have forced me to move my fragile-and-unlikely-to-survive Forget-Me-Not seedlings indoors.
Marigolds thrive in the heat. I have blooms in four or five pots, which is pretty cool.
The R.C.'s dianthus also seems to like the hot.
Much prettier than anything I'm growing. All of these live outside, but on the shady side of the balcony. I'm not sure any of them would survive both this altitude and the incredible heat generated by a concrete balcony and a stone building.
The sunflowers, that grow like weeds in Kansas, are growing much more slowly than I'd anticipated.
The R.C. had eight or ten of those going, before I burnt them up with the A/C exhaust. She has about four surviving now.
My bromeliad, an indoor plant, seems to be producing some kind of extrusions. I fully expect that the R.C. and I will be replaced by pod people sometime in the next month.
Or, you know, it could be thinking about flowering.
Otherwise, I went completely mad yesterday. I blew $70 (!!) on new clothes.
Ever since the diet, I've been down to three pairs of grossly baggy shorts and four ratty tee shirts to wear in my time off. Those, with three rapidly decaying polo shirts and two pair of jeans that it's really too hot to wear, have been rotated in and out of the laundry for the past three months as I cope with being off work full-time in the heat of summer.
Yesterday I found a really decent sale and got five shirts, two pair of shorts, and a pair of capris. Now, even if I'm out of work for the rest of the summer, at least I have something to put on my body, something that was becoming a concern. (I had to throw one of my original four tee-shirts away last week--it got too dilapidated even to wear around the house.)
(Capris, though. When I was a kid, we thought of those as being "old lady pants." Now they're fashionable again and I've been scorning them for the past couple of years. But there are times when you need something that's not as casual as shorts, but not as hot and heavy as jeans, you know? So I bought a pair. Time will tell if I ever actually wear them out in public.)
I probably shouldn't have spent the money, but I tell myself that in the olden days, back when I worked for a living, I'd have spent that much in books in one afternoon, without a second thought.
And new clothes mean laundry. What with one thing and another, I did five loads yesterday. Ugh. (Do I need to add the $9 I spent on doing laundry to the total of yesterday's expenditures?)
Spending.... In the 3-1/2 months that I've been unemployed, I've bought seven books, a purse, and these clothes. Beyond a few minor expenditures at the craft/hobby store, that's been the extent of my non-essential shopping. For me, that's a lot of restraint. I guess I was bound to break out eventually.
Which reminds me that She called yesterday, looking for a file. Fourteen weeks she's been there, and she still hasn't figured out that documents to do with company business are on the P.C., in a file marked, "company"? In spite of the fact that I've told her so half a dozen times?
She and Bernie still want me to work for them this summer.
Short version--she's proven incapable of learning or even wanting to learn to use the software programs to code jobs for the company, and it's either me or they find & train someone else to do it (an impossibility since you have to know the software to train it, and neither of them do) and it seems to them to be ideal all the way around that I should make some money while I'm job-hunting and they should get their clients serviced.
Put like that, it does seem sensible. And, at $25/hour, I wouldn't object to making a little money.
Only my experience of Bernie and my knowledge that after promising contract employees the moon, he usually winds up serving them mud pies, makes me hesitate. Knowing, as I do, that he underbids the hours necessary to actually do jobs, I just don't feel like getting into the middle of a fight with him about what he wants to pay versus what it takes to actually do the work.
Bernie said in his last email that, as I suspected and warned him, She spends a fair amount of company time living Her personal life. Lots of personal phone calls and suchlike. (One hesitates to mention that those same hours would have been more usefully spent learning the software--when I was young, we were taught that work came first during the hours you were being paid. What happened to that work ethic? I mean, She is older than I am, so it's not like She's some dumb kid.)
Anyhow. I'll think about that later. (But not too much later, because I have an email from Bernie that I need to answer.)
Other than that, it's 9:30 on a Saturday morning, so I think I'll go pour myself more coffee and start thinking about breakfast. Have a good weekend!
Okay, technically, not. And not mine, although I've glommed onto them.
Among the other (minor) things I'm doing to help tidy up Mom's 'estate' is helping inspect and catalogue her coin collection. Some of these she inherited, some she collected.
Technically she left the entire collection to the R.C., but in fact I'm the one who likes old coins. With the R.C.'s permission, I've been amusing myself off and on with these over the last week or so. I bought a book! Two books, in fact! (But only for the coins. I haven't started investigating the paper money yet.)
There are the expected bits--"commemorative" coins sold to people who don't realize that the only ones that will appreciate in value are the ones actually issued by the U.S. Mint, a partial collection of the new commemorative quarters (if in true "mint" condition, some of these are worth $0.75 each), great handfuls of pennies from the 50s and 60s (none of which are worth more than a cent since they're all circulated and thoroughly worn), JFK half-dollars, etc. None of them worth more than face value, but many of them interesting to look at.
(hidden behind a cut because lots of little pictures)
Continue reading "Pieces of Eight!"I need to make yet another trip to Kansas. The L-i-K-S is holding several boxes of things of Mom's that I volunteered to take charge of and get sold or whatever. Also, there are papers that need to be gone through, of course. There are legal issues* unresolved.
While I understand Mom's desire to try and get her things in order as quickly as possible, there are items she owned that one or more of us would have liked to have had as mementos, things that I have no idea where they are now and that I suspect the nephew who bought the trailer has already disposed of by now. I'm more than happy to take the stained glass (the R.C. and I sent 95% of it to Mom as gifts over the last fifteen years) and to take charge of the Hummels (I haven't yet figured out how to sell those, but I will) and a few other things, but I'm starting to realize that the things that might have been most important to us aren't the things that were of monetary value. (Although I'd give a lot to know what happened to Mom's wedding ring....)
A certain delicacy prevents you from claiming your parents' belongings for yourself while they're alive, no matter how eager they are to dispose of things, but afterwards, when your emotions start to settle, that's when you begin to identify which items you'd like as "keepsakes." The indecent haste of Mom's nephew to move into her trailer (almost a month before he was legally entitled to do so) prevented any of us from having the opportunity to really go through the things she'd accumulated and make sane decisions about what to keep and what to dispose of. I'm a trifle annoyed about that.
Otherwise, I'm fine. The weather is far too hot.
I had an interview on Monday but I suspect I'm not actually in line for the job (all the more so since I see they're re-advertising it this morning), and, this being a holiday week, there aren't many good postings out there right now.
And, as usual, I desperately need to do laundry.
______________________
The biggest problem--her trailer house and the land it sits on.
I find myself a bit annoyed that the whole "sale of the house"* thing went through so quickly--before most of us kids had any idea it was happening.
At this point, the jury's still out on the legality of the sale and just who the property belongs to. Possible mortgage insurance, a deed saying "paid in full" when no money was paid, the bank's own claim to the property and their potential unwillingness to let the loan ride for the next 15 years, and other questions remain unanswered.