I schlepped to AT&T to get the DirectTV canceled on Friday.

 I mostly lazed around today.   Sis got me hooked on Zen Word and then I got myself hooked on a tile match game.  I tried several games that looked fun in the ZW ads but weren't my cup of tea but the tile match is rather like the Mahjong solitaire game that was on my work computer decades ago that I really enjoyed.  

I'll have to quit wasting so much time playing the phone games but it was snowy and wet today and I decided getting the thank you cards done was enough.   I did a tiny bit of sorting cards and photos in the downstairs office.   I'm not ready to give all that stuff the BiL treatment.   The gun room does look nice now.   Hardly a gun room anymore now that he and sis took almost all of the  reloading equipment and guns.   I have a thought of offering the Bugle and hunting magazines to the neighborhood folks and blog's gun thread.   I would much rather give them to folks to read than just toss or burn them but I do want to get out from under all those shelf eating magazines.   I need to give away or toss my endurance magazines as well.  I did find I can skip some of the ads on Zen Word, thank goodness, as they have ads every couple of word games. 

I will have to figure out how to hook up the VCR, DVD etc to the TV and maybe buy a universal remote, the directTV one is not playing nicely with the DVD so far. 

Gaah, burning several magazines at once is always so smoky.

 I felt like I needed to burn before sis got here.  LOL,  I am not even burning the magazines that dad has 30 years of.  Just some misc ones.   But I will probably start burning the older ones too unless sis and B take them and they have no shelf space for them.  

More generally I am having to work to quash feelings that sibs and their spouses are being greedy snots.  It is a good thing that B wanted Dad's pickup.  I can probably buy it with a family discount if I need to replace my 350, and I certainly don't need to try to maintain two pickups plus two cars.   But pbbttt to sis thinking I needed to find the title and shit.  She can do that while she is here,  there is no reason I have to do ALL the grunt work for settling the estate after doing the grunt work of getting dad cared for for 18 months.  I PAID mom and dad and then dad a pretty decent rent living here all these years. 

p.s.   Wednesday, day after they left was a bad day for me.  Lots of ugly crying, I was having a mini meltdown, straw that started that was sis not finding a Thank-you card and addressing it to B's boss that sent flowers.  I was sooooo mad at him for not telling his boss to wait and send flowers for dad's memorial in ND,  or even the one we will do here.  What do I want with flowers when there is no gathering of folks to see them?!  But men are clueless, they are doing the best that they can.   

Mostly mad that of course I AM stuck with settling the estate, I know it only makes sense geographical wise but sis managed to dodge almost all of it.  She made ONE call to one insurance agency and sorted out that *I* have to just request it as the estate and send in mom's death certificate as well as dad's as mom was the primary beneficiary.   I knew dad spent plenty of time sorting out mom's insurance polices and retirement account but it all so full of legalese and time consuming to do. 

Going through some of the junk in the downstairs office

 I'm just gathering the low hanging fruit.  Throwing out a bunch of padded and large size envelopes where the labeling to send to us is large and might cause confusion if one tried to ship anything in them.  It's not like I am sending out pictures or glass or anything.  Also picking out old paper envelopes and some old handouts and whatnot of moms to burn when the wind quits.   The goal is to get to point of having the desk area available for doing paperwork.

The wind died down some so I burned a bunch of paper and some magazines.  It was smoking when I went to get Lady's sr pellets.  Stirring got to to burn again.  I'll probably have to keep stirring it a few times.   That is the problem with large amounts of paper, they squish together and don't all burn.

I wasn't hungry earlier but now feel like I need to grab some quick tuna salad before I go out and either ride or just do burn baby burn.  

I should to force myself to go get groceries and cash

 I don't absolutely need to do it today but its too cold and windy for any outside stuff so it would be good to get the shopping done so if it's nicer than expected tomorrow I won't have 'I should run to town' hanging over me at all.

I have to run to the Thornton AT&T on Monday to try and cancel direcTV, so maddening, I went Thursday and the guy at the local store said "you have to go to a corporate store, we are only retail and can't handle death certificates.  So stupid that I can't just cancel the service but I don't have the magic PIN for it and they won't cancel just based on the home address, ph # and SS#s of the parents.   So then I went to Verizon because they were just a block away and getting Verizon home phone service switched from dad to me so that bill won't hit his CC anymore was a two day process because I had a credit freeze.  I'm still like "why do you need to run a credit check?  I'm not financing a 1.5K smart phone I could give you my CC # for the monthly billing" but I suppose they just run the check for everyone.   So I am thinking that I will be way too frustrated on Monday to want to do any shopping after dealing with the TV cancellation even though I'll be driving right through town. 

Cuz I should also make multiple calls on Monday to banks and again to insurance agencies, GRRRRR on how hard it is to get them to send a check after they collected premiums all those years.  Blech,  I know I should be more proactive getting this shit settled but then again dad had no debts and I have no creditors hounding me.   If sis and bro want dough faster they can offer to help.    I want to cancel the TV service before sis arrives so she can't suck me into watching for hours.  I haven't had any desire to turn the TV on the last 2-3 weeks but if it is on past experience shows that I will start watching and get nothing done.   Of course I could fudge a bit and just disconnect the box and say I canceled it already but it will just be easier if I can honestly say I canceled it.  Maybe I should pull the boxes anyway and bring them with me just in case DirecTV wants them back.   

I know its paranoia but I feel like I'm out of the club

 The neighborhood ladies meeting apparently is not happening tonight.  I kind of figured they might skip with Easter having been just this Sunday but they didn't even send out a "we are skipping this month or shifting the meeting to another night or week"  Or if a text was sent at all it was by someone who didn't update their list since I was added or something.  

So I should make myself move and go buy horse feed and a few groceries tonight.  I am having difficulty convincing myself to get up and go.  I was chilled after catching and holding horses for their spring vaccinations but I'm not bad now after some hot tea. 

Or if I don't run the errands until tomorrow I should do work stuff but I feel very blah about it.  The autistic SE is whining about our repeat processing for the one PITB mission again.   I just have to ignore it, we have been doing this for a couple years now and neither the funding agency nor the vendor that provides the data will understand if we suddenly have higher latency or much lower percent of data processed because "we are only going to process a batch of data one time, data that comes in afterwards will be ignored, and we will increase the latency on all processing to try to catch a decent percent of the data"  

Dad's taxes are done, ready to mail the state ones

 I e-filed his fed return and set it as do an e-check to pay.   CO has an $800 credit for sales tax paid this year.   Wow.    I'm going to just donate dads rebate from this credit to the check off charities so I don't have to worry about the refund check when I want to close up his bank accounts.   I must remember to take this credit when I do my taxes.  

ND came out to zero owed.   I am surprised he owed $71 last year but I'm not going to worry about whether HR Block messed up for that small of an amount.   

Mar 31 p.s. 

I must read instructions for both ND and CO to see if I need to include copies of the 1040 form or anything else.   So much BS.   Geithner cheated on his taxes and was approved by the senate as SoT for Obama in 2009 but ordinary people have to worry about the IRS or state treasuries slapping a lien on them if they don't dot every i on the form.   Well not quite that bad.  I have made errors on my 1040 and the IRS just sent me a refund or a notice that I owed more.  No painful audit.  Since I don't itemize there would be little to audit.   They could audit dad's since the property taxes are a deduction but the counties have records of it so even if I lost the paperwork it would be OK.  

I just want to be a lump today but I don't want to get extra behind on things I need and want to get done.  

Lump status: partial.  I did haul out the remnants of my old sleep # type air mattress plus some trash from the feed room, the regular trash and my full bag of hay twine.  And got some tumbleweeds to the burn barrel.  Yesterday was a workout getting the new Tuft and Needle mattress unpacked and on the bed.   I am going to call 1-800 got junk or similar and have the dead freezer hauled away.  Siiigghhh a lot of wasted effort cleaning it up.  A bit of water is getting in there so I don't want to try to use it for feed storage since even a little water plus very little air flow would invite mold and the feed room roof leaks a bit.   Since I need to have the freezer hauled out, I could just get the sleeper sofa hauled out too and I spent a bunch of time yesterday cutting the memory foam topper from my bed to make that sofa comfy.   I'll be calling to have it hauled off sometime in the future when I sell this place and move but who knows when I'll get my ducks aligned to move could be a couple of years or maybe I'll even decide I'm just too old to set up a new place.  

Gaah, I can't focus today

 And I logged into T.Rowe to verify the change to sis as sole beneficiary that I made last year for dad and it DID NOT go through.  ##*#*#*@!  It still shows my dead for over 11 years mom as the primary beneficiary and then all 3 kids as secondary.   Sigh.  I suppose there was some extra step to "confirm you want to do this " that I missed.     

Well I guess since that didn't happen I can 'buy' the tractor and dad's pickup from the estate to give sis more money.   We will most likely have to include a death certificate for mom to get that IRA transferred.   Hmm,  maybe I can ask T.Rowe about ceding my share to sis?   I don't know what to do.   If I decide to move then maybe I don't want to keep 4 vehicles and if sis and B want to sell their half ton and take dad's pickup they can have it once I get the wiring fixed up on my Ford.   For however long I stay here I need a decent tractor,  and it would be most convenient for me to just keep princess Fergie rather than have to buy one.  I do intend to build in WY, possibly rent on an acreage first and expect I'll need a tractor there also.  

Caving an asking sis to change when she comes.  I think she is taking PTO days after her regular days off.  I was thinking to ask wouldn't she rather just skip this trip and not come down until whenever we do a memorial for dad.  But she wants to gather pictures and maybe some VHS tapes and get a service to make a slide show for the computer.    Of course she couldn't do that any of the times she has been down in the last 2 years.  Well I am glad she didn't take the pics from the photo album, dad enjoyed going over those with L.   

I hate that I resent her for not helping me more.  She will do stuff I ask her to do.  I've just remained in "big sis takes charge" mode instead of giving her a list of "could you do this for me" and she hasn't been all gung ho, wanting something to do when she's been here.  

Called SS office today.  Put the ph on speaker and did low focus needed disk cleanup for 30 minutes until connected.   I think the gal said Science Care had not called SS but me having called takes care of both the SS and medicare.   I probably have to contact his part C provider and cancel them separately though.  So many details.   I keep playing one of the senior life insurance commercials in my head where the sister comes in and asks daughter how she is doing "there's a lot to take care of"  Boy howdy aint that the truth, and thanks to the great lawyer in ND advising dad to do quit claims for the land to the sibs the estate is not so complicated.  But there is the fun hiccup of dad never taking care of changing the IRA from mom as beneficiary,  probably the checking accounts are that way as well, I don't think I ever pulled that up with the online banking apps.