Catchy Name Needed

I've had an ambien and I am hoping I will be able to go to sleep in a while, and then conceivably get my sleep back on schedule. Cross your fingers.

This may well be a sort of "bits and pieces" entry, since my mind is going off in a bunch of different directions, as usual.

I want to record something actually useful that I heard somebody say on CNN today. It was some expert talking about the evacuations in California because of the wildfires, but it would apply just as well to our kind of evacuations - it was what to grab if you have to evacuate in a hurry. They called it the "six P's" although there were really more than six. Luckily they said it a couple of times so I was able to get it all scribbled down:
-- people and pets
-- pills or prescriptions
-- papers, the important kind
-- plastic, as in credit cards, or money
-- your PC - I don't think they meant the whole thing, really, but your data burned to a disc
-- pictures

Also, I am watching "The Dresden Files" which I sort of like, although I don't quite understand why. It's not great, but it's oddly watchable. (I'm told that everybody does not agree with this opinion.)

Oh, and when I read back over what I wrote in the last entry, it reminded me that my 6-year-old cousin Laci really did not know what to make of the box of ashes yesterday. She has presumably been indoctrinated into some varation on evangelical christianity, and I know at least some of those types think that you have to preserve your body after death, because you'll get your same earthly body back when you go to heaven. (Which personally I think is a really appalling idea. Yuck.) Anyway, from the questions Laci was asking, it sounded like maybe she had been told some version of this story. Her mother had to explain to her that Aunt Billie Dell wasn't in that body anyway, she was in heaven and she had a whole new body which wasn't sick any more. Stephanie (the mom) also said later that she figured that my mom and my grandmother were up in heaven watching us and laughing. All I know is, if they were watching, she would be right. They would totally be laughing. Both my mother and grandmother had a fine sense of the ridiculous.

I don't want to go to work tomorrow. I want a day to recover from the weekend, dammit. But I guess I'd better go to bed, since I'm not getting it.

chanfaina, or anybody else who has any idea about this - what's a reasonable amount to pay for an estate lawyer? This should be a relatively simple thing - everything is divided equally between my sister and me. There is a townhouse, and a reasonable (but not huge) amount of money that I believe is mostly in CDs. (To tell you the truth, I haven't even gotten as far as having a good idea how much money there is. I'm planning to get into that this weekend.) I'm just looking for a ballpark figure about what I can expect to pay. I am more or less intending to use the lawyer who drew up my mother's will - it's a firm that specializes in this stuff - but I would like to have some clue so I can know if they are overcharging me!


Well, the funeral is over. It wasn't as wrenching as I thought it might be. Attendance was quite good, although nobody did a headcount that I know of. I'd say there were at least a hundred people there, maybe more. A whole lot of teachers from Alvin showed up, including some people I hadn't seen in years and years, and one well into her 90s. A lot of the quilt guild showed up, as expected, and a couple of car-loads from her hometown, which is considerably further away. The service was very nice. We draped several of her quilts over the altar-rail, and people really seemed to like that. I teared up a couple of times, but never completely broke down, and neither did my sister. (We both tend to cry pretty easily, so we were both fairly surprised about this.)

The "coffee and pastries" which the church provided after the service turned out to be a pretty substantial spread. We brought more food home than we can ever possibly eat. We also brought home a number of nice plants. We jammed a couple of the big flower arrangements into the car, and took them by the nursing home on the way out. Somebody also sent a gorgeous heart-shaped wreath of yellow flowers - sunflowers and roses and other stuff - that we left at the church because we couldn't figure out what else to do with it. (We couldn't even get it off of the stand so we couldn't see how we could put it into a car at all!)

We pulled all the cards off of the flowers, of course, but now I can't figure out how to word the thank-you notes if I don't know who sent which one. Can I say "thank you for the lovely arrangement" if it was a plant? Some of you smart people, help me out here.


Overall, it was really a pretty overwhelming day. It was almost like being the bride, in the sense that I was the person everybody wanted to talk to. Y'all remember that feeling? You can't sit down because you keep having to stop to talk to people? My sister came in for a lot of it, too, of course - but I got more because I knew more people than she did. Everybody loved my mother, they really did - and it was wonderful hearing all that, but ultimately also really, really exhausting. I told my boss (who was there, as were several of my coworkers and ex-coworkers) that I would probably come in tomorrow, but maybe not until after lunch. I need a rest.

My mother died this afternoon. I got there with about an hour to spare. Nobody had called me to say she was worse, and so I was "dawdling" around (i.e., eating lunch, calling the lawyer, etc.) and I would have felt terrible if I hadn't gotten there in time. It wasn't a pretty thing to watch, though.

I am exhausted. The funeral home guys (who turned out to be girls, as a matter of fact) got caught in an especially horrid traffic jam and took a couple of hours to get there. In the meantime I talked to everybody in the world on the phone - at least it seemed like it. Let's see, it was: Rob, my aunt, my sister (both of those two were loong conversations, too), my dad, my dad again, my nephew and my ex-brother-in-law. Oh, and the funeral negotiator and the lady from the church. And then at least two people came in to see my mom, not having heard yet that she was dead. That was sort of traumatic. I spent the afternoon veering wildly between calm, weeping, and cracking bad jokes. But oh well.

I'm going to be interested to see how I manage tomorrow. Right now I just feel tired and sort of numb. I just hope I don't have nightmares about watching my mother struggle to breathe. Tomorrow: more phone calls, meeting with the pastor about the funeral, etc. Rob took off work, for which I am profoundly grateful. He can be my chauffeur; I don't really trust my driving right now.


I guess somebody probably ought to post something on the two forums - TOG and TUS - and explain what's happened. Col or Falaria, can one of you take care of TOG? And I asked Anth to post something at TUS because she had PMd me today, but if she hasn't in the morning, will somebody take over that duty? I have been playing GW in a desultory way since I got home - I had to do something! - but I haven't spoken to a soul. I didn't have the heart.

I don't think that many people who read this are close enough to consider coming, but the services are tentatively set for Tuesday, at the Lutheran church in Nassau Bay, Texas. I will know more tomorrow.