12/31/09
I’m going to watch balancing point next. It’s a series of artistic rock-stacking vignettes in scenic mountain areas . . . played in reverse. Aw. The audio has been disabled because the video producer didn’t get authorization from WMG. Whoever that is. That's a pity because the effect was greatly enhanced by the music.
So I’ll turn on some Manheim Steamroller on iTunes. It’s nicely seasonal. I’m starting with Catching Snowflakes On Your Tongue. Segue into Masters In This Hall. There’s no authorization from the Steamroller listed in the YouTube part of that link, so I don't know how long it will stay up. The Amazon link might make up for it. Go Steamroller.
Aunt Dolores used to have flowers sent to Grandma L’s grave for her birthday and Mother’s Day. Possibly other days as well. I haven’t even sent flowers to Aunt D’s grave. She did some work setting me up to be her heir and caretaker. Not to the point of writing a will or visiting or anything. But when I visited at Christmas, she’d talk about me having her house because I was the one that needed it and the one that she depended on.
I wasn’t staying in touch because I thought there’d be a payoff. She had married for one thing. He was six years older than her and disabled. I'm sure she had assumed that he'd predecease her, but by August it was becoming obvious that he would probably wouldn't. So even if she'd written a will, there was no way I’d get the house, or want to. Not with a surviving spouse.
From September to December, I drove or bussed up to Redding to look after her and make arrangements. No one else from the family could make it up there, for various reasons. Uncle L, her brother, for instance, was in LA having a serious hernia operation, complicated by some possible heart trouble.
He came by when he could, and he gave me travel money, which made things easier. Nearly everyone else was out of state, with families and jobs and illnesses of their own.
Aunt D’s husband couldn’t make decisions about her illness and treatment. He was very hard of hearing and had been used to Aunt D taking care of him.
Neighbors tended to him while I did phoning and paperwork. Spouse was a veteran, so Aunt D qualified for burial in a veteran’s plot. So Grandma L is buried in Palos Verdes and Aunt D was cremated and buried in Redding. She had been hoping to be buried in the cemetery by the river, but Spouse didn’t really want to spend the money, and I don’t blame him, all things considered. He's going to need every bit of it for the next few years. The veteran’s plot is where he will go, too, unless his son has other ideas, later.
Aunt D really hated the idea of Spouse’s son getting the house. She instructed me to tell him that I was supposed to get it. But I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole. Not with anyone, and definitely not with a half-deaf man in a wheelchair. One who will need all the money in the house equity to get through the rest of his own life.
I’ll tell you sometime about her reasons for fixating on bequeathing the house. It will include old family stories about the wrong person getting the house, the property, the estate. Right now it’s New Year’s Eve. I’m going to watch balancing point again. It’s soothing. And I’m going to throw away a few more things on my desk.
[I've found out since then that there was probably some guilt to her urge to keep the house in the family. The down payment for the house had come from a house she sold that her mother had given to her. And her brother had been semi-supporting them, kicking in a few thousand here and there for taxes, for furniture, for the down payment on a car. So it had to feel like she had siphoned her family resources into Spouses family.
Still. Wills, people. If you want to leave someone something, write a bloody will. Don't imply that it's someone's family duty to fight for something that they're not legally entitled to, especially when you've set them up to be out of the legal loop.]
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Let's Update the List
When I started this blog, I was feeling very down (there will be an entry about feeling better later) and I think I kind of got a kick from starting a blog about feeling guilty and then not writing a second post for more than a year. Especially since one of the things I feel guilty about is not getting things done. And disappointing people. That's two things. No, I'm not going to go into a parody of the Spanish Inquisition Sketch.
For awhile, not updating the blog was actually comforting and self-confirming. I gave myself permission to fail in this one thing. It's easy to try to do too much, and to feel guilty not because you're not doing well or not doing enough, but because you can think of many more things to do than anyone could make time for. Not that I was necessarily doing enough, I'll leave that as a separate question and one that won't be addressed here. Here I will just say that for awhile this blog was my symbolic lowest priority. It let me prioritize other things to the low side of the to do list and to not worry that the bottom of the list wasn't getting done.
Right now, I feel like updating lists, and that includes this list. Adding things I feel guilty about currently. I'm giving myself permission to do badly at it. This will be a first draft. And I may not fix it later. It's going to rain this afternoon, and there are things I have to get put away in the garage before that happens. So if this takes too long, I'll cut it off suddenly. Sorry about that.
Let's try guilt categories. There's Family. There's the House (for some people, that's intrinsically tied to family, but not for me). There's Writing. There's Work. There's Pets. There's Exercise, which may be a subcategory of Health, which may be a subcategory of Me. There's Organizing, which feels like a category, but which may be a metacategory - something that I feel that I need to do to take care of all of the other categories.
Also under Me is Learning. I feel like I'm stagnating if I'm not learning things. And there are a couple of subjects that I have an interest in and that I've spent a chunk of time reading up on. Let's call these subjects Nodes. I'll get back to them. In fact, I think that all of the categories deserve their own posts.
So - Family - House - Writing - Work - Pets - Exercise - Health - Me - Learning- Nodes - Organization. Looking at the list, I have an urge to take Me out. Underneath it all, it's all about Me. It's My family and My house and My urge to write. I think I'm going to let Me and Organization be overcategories. Or maybe criteria for prioritizing. And Excercise is obviously a subcategory of Health.
Learning, Nodes, and Writing go together. Let's hit the thesaurus to see how they connect. That was interesting. Learning is linked to acquiring or collecting. Writing is, for me, a kind of sharing. The Nodes are subordinate to both - or a means to do both. Let's call that category Collect & Share.
That gives me: Family - House - Collect & Share - Work - Health. Five categories. One for each finger on one hand. (I decided to lump pets into family.) Now the question is, what category is my desk in, because it could sure use some organizing. Starting with a machete.
For awhile, not updating the blog was actually comforting and self-confirming. I gave myself permission to fail in this one thing. It's easy to try to do too much, and to feel guilty not because you're not doing well or not doing enough, but because you can think of many more things to do than anyone could make time for. Not that I was necessarily doing enough, I'll leave that as a separate question and one that won't be addressed here. Here I will just say that for awhile this blog was my symbolic lowest priority. It let me prioritize other things to the low side of the to do list and to not worry that the bottom of the list wasn't getting done.
Right now, I feel like updating lists, and that includes this list. Adding things I feel guilty about currently. I'm giving myself permission to do badly at it. This will be a first draft. And I may not fix it later. It's going to rain this afternoon, and there are things I have to get put away in the garage before that happens. So if this takes too long, I'll cut it off suddenly. Sorry about that.
Let's try guilt categories. There's Family. There's the House (for some people, that's intrinsically tied to family, but not for me). There's Writing. There's Work. There's Pets. There's Exercise, which may be a subcategory of Health, which may be a subcategory of Me. There's Organizing, which feels like a category, but which may be a metacategory - something that I feel that I need to do to take care of all of the other categories.
Also under Me is Learning. I feel like I'm stagnating if I'm not learning things. And there are a couple of subjects that I have an interest in and that I've spent a chunk of time reading up on. Let's call these subjects Nodes. I'll get back to them. In fact, I think that all of the categories deserve their own posts.
So - Family - House - Writing - Work - Pets - Exercise - Health - Me - Learning- Nodes - Organization. Looking at the list, I have an urge to take Me out. Underneath it all, it's all about Me. It's My family and My house and My urge to write. I think I'm going to let Me and Organization be overcategories. Or maybe criteria for prioritizing. And Excercise is obviously a subcategory of Health.
Learning, Nodes, and Writing go together. Let's hit the thesaurus to see how they connect. That was interesting. Learning is linked to acquiring or collecting. Writing is, for me, a kind of sharing. The Nodes are subordinate to both - or a means to do both. Let's call that category Collect & Share.
That gives me: Family - House - Collect & Share - Work - Health. Five categories. One for each finger on one hand. (I decided to lump pets into family.) Now the question is, what category is my desk in, because it could sure use some organizing. Starting with a machete.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
The Guilt Continued
Still posting from the cusp of 2010.
That clears a bit of the flotsam on my desk. It’s December 31, 2009 and now is a good time for clearing, even incomplete clearing. I’ve ended up with a fair bit of Grandma L’s stuff, as I mentioned last post. I inherited it from Aunt D when she died last December 18 (2008). I don’t think I’ll ever think of Christmas without thinking of Aunt D.
Aunt D had no children of her own and was always involved with her nieces and nephews. She always gave really good presents. Not only were the presents good, they were wrapped with fancy wrapping. No one else in the family used such fancy wrappings. We suspected that she paid to have them wrapped at Sears or maybe even a fancier store. There were metallic papers and intricate bows. There were plastic poinsettias and fat ribbons.
No two boxes were alike, unless it was done deliberately. Sometimes if she got, say, me and my two sisters a similar gift, the boxes might be wrapped identically. This was different from everyone else’s presents. Everyone else had a few rolls of flat paper wrapping and curling ribbon. So there was little variety in the wrapping, mostly.
There was one mitigating factor to that, though, and that was Aunt D. We always saved the paper, ribbons, and decorations from her boxes. They could be cut down to wrap smaller boxes in other years. So our plain wrappings were boosted by her hand-me-downs. Oh, and we saved the boxes, too.
Later, much, much later, I learned that she was a shopaholic and that her spending had been a burden on my Uncle L, her brother, and my Grandma L nearly all her adult life. My Dad, her other brother, had pulled away, giving her nothing but advice and criticism when she overspent.
Oh, look. Grandma L had for some reason tucked a newspaper clipping of the death of Phillipe Cousteau, Jacque Cousteau’s son, into the Christmas Story book. She’s hand dated it Fri. June 29-’79. My youngest son, Eric, would be born November of ’79. I have no idea why she thought I, or my sons, would need the clipping. It’s going into the recycling.
Grandma L used to send me and the boys CARE packages – boxes with ‘useful’ things in them. There were find-a-word books, which the boys enjoyed, and which could be bought for a quarter at the drug store. There were packets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, with a knife, spork, napkin, and wet-wipe in each one. I forget what else the boxes were stuffed with. Usually nothing to terribly useful. But she would collect the items and mail them and the kids did enjoy getting them.
I’m listening to Principles of economics, translated, by the Standup Economist on YouTube, to cheer myself up. My YouTube favorites are sort of like getting a box from Grandma L. Not too terribly useful, but very cheering.
That clears a bit of the flotsam on my desk. It’s December 31, 2009 and now is a good time for clearing, even incomplete clearing. I’ve ended up with a fair bit of Grandma L’s stuff, as I mentioned last post. I inherited it from Aunt D when she died last December 18 (2008). I don’t think I’ll ever think of Christmas without thinking of Aunt D.
Aunt D had no children of her own and was always involved with her nieces and nephews. She always gave really good presents. Not only were the presents good, they were wrapped with fancy wrapping. No one else in the family used such fancy wrappings. We suspected that she paid to have them wrapped at Sears or maybe even a fancier store. There were metallic papers and intricate bows. There were plastic poinsettias and fat ribbons.
No two boxes were alike, unless it was done deliberately. Sometimes if she got, say, me and my two sisters a similar gift, the boxes might be wrapped identically. This was different from everyone else’s presents. Everyone else had a few rolls of flat paper wrapping and curling ribbon. So there was little variety in the wrapping, mostly.
There was one mitigating factor to that, though, and that was Aunt D. We always saved the paper, ribbons, and decorations from her boxes. They could be cut down to wrap smaller boxes in other years. So our plain wrappings were boosted by her hand-me-downs. Oh, and we saved the boxes, too.
Later, much, much later, I learned that she was a shopaholic and that her spending had been a burden on my Uncle L, her brother, and my Grandma L nearly all her adult life. My Dad, her other brother, had pulled away, giving her nothing but advice and criticism when she overspent.
Oh, look. Grandma L had for some reason tucked a newspaper clipping of the death of Phillipe Cousteau, Jacque Cousteau’s son, into the Christmas Story book. She’s hand dated it Fri. June 29-’79. My youngest son, Eric, would be born November of ’79. I have no idea why she thought I, or my sons, would need the clipping. It’s going into the recycling.
Grandma L used to send me and the boys CARE packages – boxes with ‘useful’ things in them. There were find-a-word books, which the boys enjoyed, and which could be bought for a quarter at the drug store. There were packets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, with a knife, spork, napkin, and wet-wipe in each one. I forget what else the boxes were stuffed with. Usually nothing to terribly useful. But she would collect the items and mail them and the kids did enjoy getting them.
I’m listening to Principles of economics, translated, by the Standup Economist on YouTube, to cheer myself up. My YouTube favorites are sort of like getting a box from Grandma L. Not too terribly useful, but very cheering.
Friday, July 2, 2010
The Guilt Begins
I don't know about you, but I've got a lot of stuff that can be put into two categories: stuff I haven't done and stuff that I'm keeping around because I'd feel guilty about throwing it out or giving it away. I'll talk more about the first category later. For the second category, I've discovered that if I commemorate the item, I feel less guilty about getting it out of my house and giving myself a little more room. Thus, this list.
I started the list Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 10:22:11 PM PST. I can tell because I can got into Properties and get the document's creation date. I would never have remembered on my own, and I'm kind of surprised to see that it was created New Year's Eve. It was not done FOR New Year's Eve, but it's appropriate that it was done ON New Year's Eve. Reading it over, I was a bit chattier than I remember. I think I'll break it up and edit it. For now, I'll concentrate on the one thing I got rid of.
<<< I'm listening to the American Idol Loser Song on YouTube and feeling guilt. Why am I feeling guilt? I'm considering getting rid of a book that my Grandma L (deceased) gave me, called Once Upon a Christmas: Stories by James Dillet Freeman. She carefully taped a plastic book cover around it and inscribed it: "To My great grandsons! With much love. Grandma L." Meaning that it was given to me to give to my sons, long ago when they were small.
My sons have no interest in the book. They never did. And my youngest son is thirty now. It was published, not by a regular publisher, but by the Unity School of Christianity, in Missouri. Mr. Freeman burbled on for twelve pages of preface before the stories strted. He revisited his childhood, declared Christmas to be a fifth season of the year, talked about the Unity School and his involvement with its publishing, went over an old poem of his, talked a little about football. . . and that was all in the first three pages of the intro. I never could bring myself to read further.
I could also never get through more than half a page of any of the stories: a little pig at the nativity, an angel with a broken wing, that sort of thing. The writing was just too precious and self-indulgent to enjoy. I've carried it in boxes through possibly five moves. I've shoved it into Christmas storage boxes. Today I decided that no one is ever going to read it, ever, and I have chucked its bright red self into the trash. If it didn't have the inscription, I might have given it to Goodwill. >>>
I've ended up with a fair bit of Grandma L's stuff. Most of it is still in boxes. I'll talk more about that later.
I started the list Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 10:22:11 PM PST. I can tell because I can got into Properties and get the document's creation date. I would never have remembered on my own, and I'm kind of surprised to see that it was created New Year's Eve. It was not done FOR New Year's Eve, but it's appropriate that it was done ON New Year's Eve. Reading it over, I was a bit chattier than I remember. I think I'll break it up and edit it. For now, I'll concentrate on the one thing I got rid of.
<<< I'm listening to the American Idol Loser Song on YouTube and feeling guilt. Why am I feeling guilt? I'm considering getting rid of a book that my Grandma L (deceased) gave me, called Once Upon a Christmas: Stories by James Dillet Freeman. She carefully taped a plastic book cover around it and inscribed it: "To My great grandsons! With much love. Grandma L." Meaning that it was given to me to give to my sons, long ago when they were small.
My sons have no interest in the book. They never did. And my youngest son is thirty now. It was published, not by a regular publisher, but by the Unity School of Christianity, in Missouri. Mr. Freeman burbled on for twelve pages of preface before the stories strted. He revisited his childhood, declared Christmas to be a fifth season of the year, talked about the Unity School and his involvement with its publishing, went over an old poem of his, talked a little about football. . . and that was all in the first three pages of the intro. I never could bring myself to read further.
I could also never get through more than half a page of any of the stories: a little pig at the nativity, an angel with a broken wing, that sort of thing. The writing was just too precious and self-indulgent to enjoy. I've carried it in boxes through possibly five moves. I've shoved it into Christmas storage boxes. Today I decided that no one is ever going to read it, ever, and I have chucked its bright red self into the trash. If it didn't have the inscription, I might have given it to Goodwill. >>>
I've ended up with a fair bit of Grandma L's stuff. Most of it is still in boxes. I'll talk more about that later.
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