Family

You can choose your friends. You can even choose your enemies, to some extent. But family... you can't even return the remains to get your deposit back. Some of them back in PA are being supreme asshats. They've known since January that Mom's having everything that's left at the farm auctioned off, and that they'll have to get their stuff moved. The auctioneer's tired of not being able to tell what he can put in the auction and what belongs to someone. But have they done anything? No, not a thing. It took Mom finally having to write a letter saying "You have 1 week to get your stuff off the property. Anything left after that will be taken and sold." to get them to finally clear things out. 4 months, and they're complaining about having gotten no warning.

Not that that's new. Case in point was some relatives down in Mill Hall ages ago. The whole bunch of them worked at the same paper mill. Mill isn't doing well, and finally tells everyone "We can't stay in business. We figure we can keep running for 9 more months, so come March of next year we'll be closing the doors.". Come January they told everyone "We've managed to stretch it a bit, we can keep you on until June but that's the final date.". And come June, those relatives to the last one were complaining about how the lay-offs were so sudden and they'd never expected anything like this to happen, and there's no jobs to be had now 'cause everybody else from the mill already took them. And they aren't unusual for back there, everybody has that kind of attitude.

You can see why I don't care to ever move back there.

Death in the family

I just got word that my grandfather has passed away. This isn't horribly unexpected. He was in his late 90s, he's required in-home care and been pretty weak since last January. The day before Christmas Eve he had what we think was a severe stroke, when I called him Christmas Day he just couldn't talk coherently and I'm not sure how much of what I said he actually understood. Death was apparently quick and painless. That's really about the best you can ask for in that situation. He wanted cremation, no fancy service, so handling the memorial can be done as the family's schedule permits. Everything's in theory taken care of, all the property's in a trust, there's no probate to deal with, the cremation and everything was arranged and paid for several years ago.

Time to look up Amtrak ticket prices and trip times and that sort of thing.