In which I am getting even angrier at Sly and Doris for leaving their affairs in such disorder - if you love your children, get your act together and throw away your 40-year old papers so they do not have to spend weeks sorting through your junk. Don't be an asshole

Primo
I am planning the driving trip. Do you have anything going on November 17 or 18? I am not sure yet about exactly when to leave. It would be nice if you could drop me at the airport to pick up a car (in this case, cheaper than the Hertz place in [the place on your way to work]). I could take the bus there, but that would be a pain. In the worst case, I guess I could take the bus there, drive home and pack the car, and then leave. (I would not want to carry everything with me.)

Primo
I just talked to my mom's cousin about visiting her.

Primo
She asked whether you would be with me. I don't think my parents caused her to have a bad impression of you.

Primo
Hey!

Primo
Now is a good time for me to discuss plans for the trip.

Me
I could drop you at the place on my way to to work

Me
Tell your mom's cousin I am working and cannot take vacation - that my vacation is really limited

Primo
I know, sweetie.

Primo
[the place on your way to work] is much more expensive than the airport, oddly.

Me
OK - but how much inconvenience are we expected to endure

Primo
So maybe you could go out of your way on the way to work?

Me
to save the estate a few dollars?

Me
or maybe the estate could pay a little more so it's easier for us

Me
and for me

Primo
Picking up at the airport also benefits me because they have an area where I can choose a car (instead of just having to accept whatever they give me).

Me
then it will need to be after work

Primo
You couldn't go there on your way to work?

Me
it would mean leaving the house at the crack of dawn

Me
which you would not like

Me
I have 8 a.m meetings those days that I cannot miss

Primo
You couldn't get in to work just a bit later than usual? (20 minutes?)

Primo
Oh, every day?

Me
no - I cannot miss these meetings

Me
it is the quarterly reviews

Me
I have to be ther

Me
e

Me
Laverne is all lovey

Me
she sat on me and purred while I was watching tov

Primo
Every day at 8 for how long?

Primo
She loves you.

Me
and she followed me upstairs and is sitting by me rubbing her head on me

Me
17th for sure

Me
Sweetie

Me
we can go after work

Primo
And if you have an 8:00 meeting, you don't want to be walking into the building at 7:50.

Me
And I do not want to deal with you having to meet a scheduled

Me
schedule

Me
and the morning traffic

Primo
Because I don't do it right.

Me
I just don't want to do it, sweetie

Me
it is too hard on me

Primo
It is a hardship to have only one car.

Me
it is a hardship for you to be the executor of this estate

Me
it is a real hardship

Me
and you are suffering because of it

Primo
Maybe we can pick up the car on Tuesday, the 17th after you get home?

Me
OK

In which I tell Primo we have to get our affairs in order so that when we die, my sister is not stuck spending months dealing with our crap

Primo
I have been going through papers for months. I finally finished last night around 3:30. And some of them (a small percentage) were only partially sorted and will end up at home! My parents didn't do it right.

Me
nope

Me
we cannot leave that kind of mess for Jenny

Primo
I promise to go through anything that goes home with me quickly.

Me
good

Me
I will help

Primo
Jenny lives faster than you. She may die first.

Me
you are once again missing the point

Primo
If only we had kids so that we could burden someone with a job like this.

Primo
It would be different for a sibling.

Me
it is selfish not to have your affairs in order

Me
nobody should be burdened like this

Me
someone else could cut our grass and shovel snow, too

Me
if only

Primo
They were going to get around to it someday. Just not "today," whenever that was.

Me
yeah well look how that worked out

Primo
There was no deadline. Why act if there is no deadline?

Primo
What did you mean about our grass and snow?

Me
there was a dead line

Me
they were going to be dead someday

Me
and nobody knows the hour and the day

Me
a kid could cut our grass and shovel snow

In which Sly complains that the union is doing him wrong

Primo: I found all these old emails, which I have put in the recycling. My dad was angry that he had not advanced in his career. And he was angry that the union promoted people based on seniority and not competence.

Me: And how does one measure competence in academia? You have to define an objective measure. Look how much of a battle tenure is!

Primo: He thought it was unfair.

Me: You don't get to pick and choose when you are in a union.

Primo: He said academia was different from a factory floor and that incompetence should not be protected.

Me: Incompetence should not be protected anywhere, especially on a factory floor! And unions have no place in academia - it is not production work that can be easily measured.

Primo: My dad spent a lot of time on faculty development. He was really interested in the theory and the practice. They got this new department chair who assigned my dad to teach two sections of Shakespeare. My dad was upset about it.

Me: Why?

Primo: I guess he wanted to teach something else. So he wrote to the chair. The chair said he had looked at all the recent peer-reviewed journals and had not found anything my dad had written. And then he said maybe if my dad weren't so busy being Faculty Czar, he would have time for research.

Me: Ouch! Straight for the jugular!

Primo: But my dad was doing research!

Me: Yes, but he was doing organizational behavior research, not English literature research. You advance in academia by contributing to the field of knowledge in your field. Your dad's field was not org behavior.

In which we learn that Ted has been financially irresponsible for decades

Primo: I found a bunch of correspondence between my parents and Ted from 20 years ago.

Me: Why am I not surprised?

Primo: My dad was really angry.

Me: Why?

Primo: This was in a "Ted" folder - printed out emails.

Me: They moved that stuff to Florida?

Primo: They had a metal file box of all their check registers since the 70s.

Me: Oh good grief.

Primo: So my dad kept track of stuff with Ted. He had co-signed for a credit card for Ted after Ted lost his job.

Me: Why?

Primo: Because Ted had really bad credit.

Me: Oh man. I would never dream of asking my parents to co-sign on a credit card. But then, I would never have bad credit. If you are middle class and well educated with a decent job and health insurance, you have no reason to have bad credit except financial mismanagement. You are living beyond your means. Even if you lose your job, you should not be plunged into penury. You don't live at your means, ever - you save in case you lose your job.

Primo: So my dad co-signed and then Ted and Ted'sWife had like a six thousand dollar bill at Dean and Delucca.

Me: How did your dad know? Wait? They were broke and had bad credit and thought that shopping at at a gourmet food store was a good idea?

Primo: You know Ted. He deserves the good stuff. He got the bills.

Me: Was he paying the bills? Because even though he was the co-signer, it wasn't his business how Ted spends his money.

Primo: Somehow, Ted got the credit limit raised from a thousand or two to six thousand.

Me: Without your dad's agreement?

Primo: Yes.

Me: OK I am on your dad's side on this. And you know that's a big deal. Ted is a jerk.

Primo: And he has not changed. He still lives beyond his means. Even back then, he was complaining about having to sell his frequent flier miles. He was that broke, but he was shopping at Dean and Delucca?

In which Primo decides to take a long driving trip alone to visit Doris' aunt and drop Sly and Doris' ashes in the same cemetery where Nancy is buried

Which is a huge relief to me because I do not want Sly and Doris' ashes in my house.

It's creepy.

And he says he will have more time to sort out the papers, which means he is not bringing them back here tomorrow.

Still doesn't mean he won't be bringing them here at the end of the driving trip.

I have to come up with a plan.

In which Primo is talking about bringing boxes of Sly and Doris' junk home with him because he cannot bear to throw it away and I am shuddering at the idea of even more junk in my house

You know one of my biggest dislikes about Sly and Doris' house was that it was full of junk.

You know one of my biggest dislikes about Primo's and my house is that it is full of junk.

It is not full of my junk. I do not accumulate. I shed. I want to travel light. I don't want to have a lot of stuff.

Primo, on the other hand, is convinced that someday, we will need two boxes of souvenir glasses from the microbrewery tour.

Yes, he has been on that tour many times since he moved here and he takes out of town friends and keeps their souvenir glasses.

Those glasses, my friends, have resided in the basement, along with his older stepdaughter's college tuition receipts (she is in her mid 30s, married, with two children, and long graduated from college), his phone bills from 1997, his employee manual from when he worked at Apple in 1992 (when the stock was worth nothing), and Halloween masks he used in college.

I did convince him to get rid of his college textbooks before we moved into the house by using the arguments that

1. There were poor students in Africa who need calculus, physics, and chemistry textbooks and
2. Nothing has changed in calculus 101, physics 101, or chemistry 101 and if he really had to look something up, he could look it up online.

But Primo is a collector. He likes having stuff. His office is getting smaller and smaller because he keeps stacking up more stuff on the floor and against the walls.

He had finally - finally, after seven years in this house - pulled some boxes from the basement into the finished area of the basement so he could sort through them. This was something he had promised to do before we even moved into the house, but it is a promise he had not kept, which I think makes him perfect to be a politician because frankly I think most politicians are scummy liars (but I really don't want Primo to lie down with those dogs and get those fleas).

Anyhow, he was about to go through the boxes and start getting rid of stuff.

That was the weekend that Sly fell on Doris and broke her knees.

The boxes have not been touched.

(I have already gotten rid of a bunch of stuff and I did it without his permission, but I think I am on solid ground to throw away junk mail and coupons from before the turn of the century.)

So Primo is at Sly and Doris' cleaning out the last of the junk and he has found more boxes of papers he did not know about - his dad was thinking about applying for a grant to study African American perspectives on literary criticism or something like that (Sly's PhD was on secondary English poets of the 19th century) and his mom had all of Nancy's medical records and the correspondence with the docs and hospitals and authorities and the little I saw of that was truly heartbreaking.

And there are a ton of family photos.

Primo has a small album of family photos that is somewhere at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. He showed them to me once. They are not something he really treasures.

The family photos are in boxes, loose. Not organized, not in albums, not labeled.

There is piano sheet music and choral music.

Primo does not want to throw any of this stuff away.

I do not want any of it.

How do I keep that stuff out of our house?

In which Primo and I argue about where Sly and Doris' ashes are to reside because Lord knows I do not want them in my house

Primo: There are all these boxes of papers. And there are my mom and dad's ashes, of course.

Me: What?

Primo: I can't mail them - there are all kinds of rules. I don't know if they will fit into my checked bags.

Me: But - you're not going to bring them here, are you?

Primo: Why not?

Me: Because it's macabre.

Primo: Lots of people keep ashes in their homes.

Me: Not me. That is not what I would like.

Primo: Lots of people do it.

Me: Your parents moved from up north to Florida specifically to get away from the winter. Do you really think they want to spend winters in our house? It's freezing in here. Plus do you really think they want to be around me?

Primo: Don't you want to be around them? We can put them on the kitchen counter.

Me: Or in the bedroom!

Primo: On your side!

Me: A shrine. We can make a shrine with the ashes and a dildo.

Primo: And the naked photo. Too bad I've already shredded it.

Me: We have the photo they gave us for Christmas a few years ago. The one they gave us when they gave you the cast-iron cat. We could use that one.

In which I complain about something really petty so if you want to accuse me of being selfish and self centered, go ahead - you would be right

Primo had to change Sly and Doris' mailing address to our address. He couldn't just tell the PO to dump everything. There are still bills for the house and someone has to pay them and that someone is Primo, which is OK because that is part of the deal.

Have I ever told you how I feel about junk mail?

I hate it.

It took me a year to almost eliminate the junk mail we were getting once I married Primo. I never got that much because I have always been hyper vigilant and shut that stuff down right away. But Primo used to get a ton of it and I made it my mission to stop it. First, it's wasteful of paper and gas and postal office time and second, it's a stupid waste of time to sort through it.

Once Primo agreed that I could cut the junk mail off at the source - he is a super control freak and didn't like the idea of my making decisions about what mail we get and what mail we do not get so this took a few years of negotiating LORD HAVE MERCY YOU GUYS engineers make great husbands as far as fixing things around the house but trying to get them to change an existing process is almost IMPOSSIBLE. And for them to trust someone else to do something? Honestly.

It took me a year. A year of identifying the junk mail with Primo, then emailing the vendor (having to track down the source of the junk first) to say, "Take us off your list. No, really. No, we do not want your cheap nasty products. No, we do not want your nice products. If we do, we will find you, I promise."

And they would promise to take our names off the list but then they would send us more junk or something would happen to trigger a new Junk Mail event and it took for darn ever.

But today, we get hardly any junk mail.

Sly and Doris got a ton of junk mail. They got almost every catalog that existed. I guess the green pear people (bless Doris' heart for trying to send us pretty things) figured that anyone who would buy a green glass pear will buy just about anything and that's a mailing list name you can sell.

Their house always had piles of junk mail. Going through their mail was their morning activity.

I always thought that was an interesting approach - that two people who were so staunchly environmentalist who condemned waste in others were very happy to have pounds and pounds of wasteful mail coming to their house and were happy to run their A/C all the time instead of opening the windows.

But their house, their rules. Whatever.

But now. Now all their mail is coming to us.

All their mail.

Including their junk mail.

Again, they are reaching from the grave.

We are getting their junk mail and that is not even the worst part of it.

We are getting things like mailers from Crate and Barrel.

I like Crate and Barrel.

Did Sly and Doris actually get those catalogs? Did they order from Crate and Barrel?

How can it be that they had access to the Nice Things at Crate and Barrel that I would actually have liked -who can't use more cloth napkins? - but they sent us green glass pears instead?

I know I am a bitch.

But man. It wasn't even that they didn't know that there are nice things you can get for a person. They just didn't want to.

In which Primo clarifies for me what his parents meant by "Dump 3 liquor boxes for each Monday's trash pick-up"

Primo scanned and sent this list to me.

I think it is fabulous. I think it is great. Caring people who are planning for their death - because we all die - and trying to figure out how to make life easier for the ones they will leave behind.

Primo: Except they never did anything on the list. Not one single thing.

Me: Not one?

Primo: Nope. They had time. My dad had time to watch porn on his computer. If he had time for that, he sure had time to take care of these things.

Me: Oh man! Dump three boxes of booze bottles every Monday?

Primo: No. My mom meant three boxes - three booze boxes - of papers from the spare room.

Me: Oh. But they still had that many liquor boxes that they could do that?

Primo: Yes.

Me: When did they make this list? As in, did they leave me off the jewelry list on purpose? Or was I not around yet?

Primo: I don't know. It was on paper. Let me look on the Mac.

Me: Oh you don't have to. Just curious.

Primo: It's from 2010! You were around!

Me: They hated me.

Primo: Yep. Stephanie was mentioned. [They badmouthed Stephanie all the time.] The other really bad thing about the date of the list is that it was five years ago! They did none of those things in 4 1/2 years!

In which Primo shows me the stuff he has brought from his mom and dad's and at least it is not boxes of family photos (with, of course, no photos of me because I was not part of the family)

Primo is packing to go back to Florida for a few days (settling an estate is a long, pain in the neck process), which means he is finally unpacking the big suitcase of stuff he brought back from Florida on his last trip.

He brought back for us

• A giant container of ground black pepper, which shocked me because 1. I thought I had thrown away all the expired spices and 2. he is a super snob about pepper and has the fancy Magnum pepper grinder
• A Dyson vacuum cleaner attachment. He had bought a Dyson for his mom and dad and then bought one for us but his mom and dad's had attachments we lack, apparently. This is not something I have ever paid attention to.
• A silver cake server from his mom and dad's silver. He had wanted to keep the silver but I said I do not care if we have silver and if he does keep it, he will be the one polishing it. I had enough of that when I was a kid. I no longer polish silver. I would have liked it to sell, but whatever. So he sent most of the set to Ted and Ted'sWife in an attempt to get them to quit bitching about the Good Bracelet. So far, no luck - Ted wanted to know why Primo had sent silver. "Thank you I guess" he said. Jerk.

Primo: In the last two versions of my parents' will, there was a $25,000 bequest for each Ted and Jack.

Me: So?

Primo: But it's not in this will.

Me: Nope.

Primo: I feel bad for them.

Me: Yeah, but you are not the one who wrote the will.

Primo: Nope.

Me: And you cannot give them that money. You can't.

Primo: I know.

In which there is still still no response from Ted

"The longer it takes to hear from him, the worse I know he is going to be," Primo says.

Our hairdresser thinks we need to kick Ted to the curb.

In which Primo tells me about the Demise List and when I tell him I had not heard of it and would have blogged about it had I known, he promises to get it to me right away, which is one of the many reasons I love that man

Primo: Yeah, so I found the Demise List and my parents didn't--

Me: The WHAT?

Primo: The Demise List.

Me: What is that?

Primo: My parents had a list of things they wanted to deal with - things like update the will --

Me: They had a list?

Primo: I thought I had told you about it!

Me: NO! I would have blogged about it.

Primo: I will get it to you. They did not do one single thing on the list before they died. Not one.

In which there is still no response from Ted

"Looming!" Primo says.