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Aug. 11th, 2017 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaLong post, mostly personal junk, behind the cut. TL;DR: We tried to fix someone's TV set yesterday and I got so many mosquito bites I had to take a Benadryl.
The Beloved's father died back in January. It wasn't sudden - the man had been in and out of the hospital for a chronic heart condition for years; this just happened to be the moment when his resilience wore out. However, he had been in the process of transitioning between an old version of his will and a more up-to-date one, which has resulted in the Beloved and his mother having to fill out a lot of paperwork. It's an order of magnitude better than what the Spouse went through when the MIL died with no legal will at all, not even a holographic one [seriously, if you live in a state where the probate court won't automatically toss a holographic will and you've never made a will at all, handwrite one and get it witnessed; it will still require time to go through probate but at least your loved ones won't have to deal with complete bullshit in probate court], but it's sucked up time and energy the Beloved doesn't really have to spare. His mother is a sweet old woman, but she was a bit technophobic and mathphobic when I met her 20 years ago, she has gotten worse about both in the intervening decades, and while she's okay with handling her own finances for the moment the legal end of the probate mess is something else.
The Beloved's father was also a hoarder. The house the Beloved grew up in is effectively no longer habitable; his parents had moved into an apartment down the street because, except for a few narrow paths from kitchen to living room to bedrooms, every square inch of floor space in the house is occupied by either furniture, boxes of random stuff, or stacks of books. The apartment, prior to the father's death, was pretty close to the same state; the Beloved has mentioned he couldn't take a shower there because there were lawn tools (not powered ones, thank goodness) stored in the bathtub, for instance. In the seven months since his death, they have done some work on the apartment, but not the house, and the mom, while not a hoarder herself, has some personality traits that allowed her to be married to one for fifty years; she is happy to sell the excess stuff, if even for a pittance, or even give it away to someone who can use it when she can't, but she doesn't like throwing it out if it might be useful to someone, even if that someone clearly isn't her.
Sometime in the year before he died, the dad purchased two very large flat-screen TVs, with the idea of putting one in the living room and one in the bedroom of the apartment, as soon as he'd cleared out enough space for them. As of his death, neither had been set up and it's unclear to me if they'd ever been unboxed.
A couple of months ago, we bought the larger one from the Beloved's mom for something like $20. The Spouse set it up where our old one was and hooked it up to the Apple TV box and the PS3 so we can watch YouTube Videos and DVDs on a screen big enough to show their flaws. Nu, whatever; I didn't think we needed it, but it let us unload something from the mom that she didn't want around anymore and the Spouse seems to like it.
About a month after that, the Beloved asked the Spouse if he could come over and help set up the smaller TV, since the Spouse now knew how to do so and the mom had not been able to figure it out on her own. The Beloved's reasoning was that it would be more efficient for the Spouse to do it a second time than for the Beloved to fumble around with it, which I agree is probably true.
I'm not sure why we didn't get around to actually doing it until yesterday, but we went over to the mom's apartment late in the afternoon. The Beloved and the Spouse went back into the bedroom to set up the TV, and I had a seat in the front room (which is still half full of junk, but at least it's down to half), intending to fool around on my iPad until they were done. There were two problems with this:
1) The Beloved's mom decided she needed to be a good host and keep me company in the front room. I appreciate the impulse, but she and I have almost no interests in common other than live music and her son. She's also going a little deaf, and my inside speaking voice is not very loud unless I'm lecturing, so this was a little awkward.
2) It was made even more awkward by her living room and kitchen being swarmed with mosquitoes. She thinks they're just getting in from outside; she's clearly wrong - the only way you could have that many mosquitoes indoors is for them to be breeding in there. I suspect she has a leak she doesn't know about in her kitchen somewhere. I stopped counting after two dozen separate bites, at which point the red areas started blending together on my lower legs and feet. About fifteen minutes after that, the Beloved realized I was actually in distress and took me outside, which was much better (we stayed out there for another half an hour and I only accumulated one or two additional bites). Apparently they weren't hitting anyone else nearly as hard, but the Beloved admitted he was trying to avoid spending time helping her clean up the living room for precisely that reason. If he'd bothered to warn me, I'd've brought some insect repellent.
Anyway, the mom offered to treat us to dinner for our help afterwards, so we went out for Chinese at a local dumpling house; then the Spouse and I dropped her back off at her apartment and the Beloved at his car, then got some ice cream and took over a couple of gyms in Pokemon Go, then went home. By the time I got back here, the swelling had gone down, but there were still red spots everywhere, so I took a Benadryl and went to bed.
My feet still itch today, but everything else is fine. Still, I haven't been bitten that bad since an ill-advised Galveston trip over a decade ago.
The Beloved's father died back in January. It wasn't sudden - the man had been in and out of the hospital for a chronic heart condition for years; this just happened to be the moment when his resilience wore out. However, he had been in the process of transitioning between an old version of his will and a more up-to-date one, which has resulted in the Beloved and his mother having to fill out a lot of paperwork. It's an order of magnitude better than what the Spouse went through when the MIL died with no legal will at all, not even a holographic one [seriously, if you live in a state where the probate court won't automatically toss a holographic will and you've never made a will at all, handwrite one and get it witnessed; it will still require time to go through probate but at least your loved ones won't have to deal with complete bullshit in probate court], but it's sucked up time and energy the Beloved doesn't really have to spare. His mother is a sweet old woman, but she was a bit technophobic and mathphobic when I met her 20 years ago, she has gotten worse about both in the intervening decades, and while she's okay with handling her own finances for the moment the legal end of the probate mess is something else.
The Beloved's father was also a hoarder. The house the Beloved grew up in is effectively no longer habitable; his parents had moved into an apartment down the street because, except for a few narrow paths from kitchen to living room to bedrooms, every square inch of floor space in the house is occupied by either furniture, boxes of random stuff, or stacks of books. The apartment, prior to the father's death, was pretty close to the same state; the Beloved has mentioned he couldn't take a shower there because there were lawn tools (not powered ones, thank goodness) stored in the bathtub, for instance. In the seven months since his death, they have done some work on the apartment, but not the house, and the mom, while not a hoarder herself, has some personality traits that allowed her to be married to one for fifty years; she is happy to sell the excess stuff, if even for a pittance, or even give it away to someone who can use it when she can't, but she doesn't like throwing it out if it might be useful to someone, even if that someone clearly isn't her.
Sometime in the year before he died, the dad purchased two very large flat-screen TVs, with the idea of putting one in the living room and one in the bedroom of the apartment, as soon as he'd cleared out enough space for them. As of his death, neither had been set up and it's unclear to me if they'd ever been unboxed.
A couple of months ago, we bought the larger one from the Beloved's mom for something like $20. The Spouse set it up where our old one was and hooked it up to the Apple TV box and the PS3 so we can watch YouTube Videos and DVDs on a screen big enough to show their flaws. Nu, whatever; I didn't think we needed it, but it let us unload something from the mom that she didn't want around anymore and the Spouse seems to like it.
About a month after that, the Beloved asked the Spouse if he could come over and help set up the smaller TV, since the Spouse now knew how to do so and the mom had not been able to figure it out on her own. The Beloved's reasoning was that it would be more efficient for the Spouse to do it a second time than for the Beloved to fumble around with it, which I agree is probably true.
I'm not sure why we didn't get around to actually doing it until yesterday, but we went over to the mom's apartment late in the afternoon. The Beloved and the Spouse went back into the bedroom to set up the TV, and I had a seat in the front room (which is still half full of junk, but at least it's down to half), intending to fool around on my iPad until they were done. There were two problems with this:
1) The Beloved's mom decided she needed to be a good host and keep me company in the front room. I appreciate the impulse, but she and I have almost no interests in common other than live music and her son. She's also going a little deaf, and my inside speaking voice is not very loud unless I'm lecturing, so this was a little awkward.
2) It was made even more awkward by her living room and kitchen being swarmed with mosquitoes. She thinks they're just getting in from outside; she's clearly wrong - the only way you could have that many mosquitoes indoors is for them to be breeding in there. I suspect she has a leak she doesn't know about in her kitchen somewhere. I stopped counting after two dozen separate bites, at which point the red areas started blending together on my lower legs and feet. About fifteen minutes after that, the Beloved realized I was actually in distress and took me outside, which was much better (we stayed out there for another half an hour and I only accumulated one or two additional bites). Apparently they weren't hitting anyone else nearly as hard, but the Beloved admitted he was trying to avoid spending time helping her clean up the living room for precisely that reason. If he'd bothered to warn me, I'd've brought some insect repellent.
Anyway, the mom offered to treat us to dinner for our help afterwards, so we went out for Chinese at a local dumpling house; then the Spouse and I dropped her back off at her apartment and the Beloved at his car, then got some ice cream and took over a couple of gyms in Pokemon Go, then went home. By the time I got back here, the swelling had gone down, but there were still red spots everywhere, so I took a Benadryl and went to bed.
My feet still itch today, but everything else is fine. Still, I haven't been bitten that bad since an ill-advised Galveston trip over a decade ago.
