## 260107: Launch mode!

It could be that pushing back against that insane directive to GTFO in such a
short timeframe made the administration stop and think for a moment.  Even if
I'm not a contracted resident, I do have certain rights where my family is
concerned, and their own rules spell out the criteria for wrapping up after
a resident passes.  Bullying me wouldn't make the process any faster.  Without
any reply to what I'd sent yet, though, the morning of the 30th I was nervous
as a witch and barely able to think straight.  I tried to work through a few
financials, and felt a little better later in the day.  Another resident urged
me to go talk to the incoming not-yet-CEO, but as she's just the in-training
right arm of the guy in charge that probably wouldn't have done much good.
Besides, she was out sick for the rest of that week.  Later, after a bit more
back-and-forth and a reasonably adult conversation with the same person who'd
sent the original email, they gave me a "stay of execution" until the 12th
when I told them I could presumably talk to the lawyer and find out what-all
I needed to do.

The reason they're so eager to turn a home over and prepare it for a new
resident is fairly simple: ongoing rent payments aside, the *entry fee* for
new occupancy of a place like this is -- seriously -- close to half a million
dollars if not more by now, which far overshadows a couple months' worth of
rent.  And there's undoubtedly a wait-list for these places, so it's in the
facility's best interest to keep that turnover as brisk as they can.  It's
kind of crass, but a couple of weeks either way wouldn't really make much
difference in the long run.  I found an image of a seriously scary check that
Mom had written eight years ago in her contract papers, and things have only
ramped up since then.

In the meantime, I bent my efforts toward getting stuff out of the house.  It
was too late to hope for any more local residents to come by and take stuff,
so it was time to switch gears.  In looking around I realized that I could
deliver many of the items here up to the preferred donation place, called
Tidewell Treasures per its association with the Tidewell hospice organization
that had taken such good care of Mom for a few days.  I felt like I should
support them, and if what I could bring from her house would fetch them a bit
of coin, all to the good.  I started with Mom's big walk-in closet.

She had *so* many clothes and shoes. I loaded eight or nine big bags of clothing and shoes into the car, along with the 50+ hangers that must have been here. Some of the sneakers had the toe area cut out to accomodate the extra thickness of her leg brace, optimized for doing her daily walks, which the donation center obviously wouldn't take so those all got bundled up for disposal. Some of the hangers were seriously vintage padded ones, presumably for delicate dresses or dance leotards or something, most no longer in use. It all had to go, one way or the other.

However, the donation folks didn't want the hangers, so most of them came back to the house. *Sigh* Don't they need hangers to display clothes they are trying to sell, I thought?? Answer: no, they had lots of the clear plastic commercial ones we usually find in clothing stores. Mom insisted on hanging up just about everything including T-shirts, whereas I have neatly folded stacks on generic shelving at home which is far more space-efficient.

Since that run didn't take very long, I went back to the house and looked
around thinking "okay, what else is empty that could go?" and the answer was
some smaller cabinets or hutches, like night-tables and TV cabinets that I
could horse into the car myself.  Two more delivered loads later, those were
all in Tidewell's receiving area out back, and the remaining volume left in the
house was showing a hint of actually being more manageable.  Now it was down
to onesey-twosey small stuff, a more granular sorting-out process, but I still
had some grace of time to work on it.

But this was also New Years Eve, and now we were heading into that evening's
festivities and the day after when nothing would be open, so I had plenty
of time to select stuff for further donation loads.  In the meantime, there
was another pleasant dinner, and I had floated the idea of honoring the now
common idea of a "First Day" outing, usually a hike of some sort on January 1.
This is a big deal up north, but as I scanned the website for the local
big state park nearby I saw that *they* were doing a "First Day" hike too!
The person I offered to bring along had never been there at all, so instead of
slamming around the wilderness loop they were going to do, we decided to start
with the standard fare -- the bird walk, the alligator bridge, and the Canopy
walkway and tower.  The place was quite crowded today -- many other people
must have had the same idea, so it took a while to get up the tower stairway
and it all felt vaguely claustrophobic, but we got through it.

In between, we were trying to figure out why a bunch of folders on her newer
Mac had suddenly disappeared from the desktop after I helped her try to clear
out content on the older machine next to it.  Long painful story short, it
turned out that both of them were syncing to iCloud in the background, and the
deletions on one machine evidently tracked over to the other one behind the
scenes.  Like what the FUCK, Apple?!  In hindsight we should have signed the
old one OUT of iCloud and then shut off its wifi before proceeding, but I
hadn't done Mac stuff in long enough and my working environment in those days
had been very minimalist and studiously avoided storing anything in Apple's
cloud, so these nasty subtleties never occurred to me.  On top of that, her
"TimeMachine" backup disk had apparently stopped collecting updates a couple
of months ago and nobody had noticed, so those two months' of work in between
were essentially lost.  I felt terrible about it, and did what I could to
recover what was possible, and she shrugged and resignedly said "it is what
it is".  Some of my tech buds offered various tricks with the iCloud
infrastructure that might have some chance of getting the newer files back.
Not really in my wheelhouse.  If I want to put stuff "in the cloud" it's
through direct and purposeful action, not some privacy-violating background
sync bullshit that subtly fans out to affect multiple victim machines.

But we decided to try and forget about these difficulties for a while and
go out to Siesta Beach for the sunset, as the second adventure of the day.
The moon's disk on the landward side of the sky looked almost full, and I was
like "wow, has it been almost 28 days since that contemplative moonlight
outing with Mom?!"  It had gone by in a heartbeat, even though I knew I had
been quite the busy boy in between.  Meanwhile, my companion's Apple watch
started issuing messages like "you're walking differently, is everything
ok?" ...  because duh, we were walking on loose beach sand, which invariably
changes one's gait and provides a better walking workout along with.  Apple
can't figure that out from GPS coordinates and aggregated data from everyone
else who walked along here while subscribing to their ecosystem?!  That kind
of matrix-level complicity is the only reason AirTags work at all.

Meanwhile, somewhere in there the lawyer had sent email saying that she could
fit me into a phone discussion on Jan 2 instead of Jan 12, so the next day we
had a great conversation to slog through all my questions and offer reassurance
that in several areas, I was overthinking it.  That's what you get from
studying too many "checklists" on the internet, I guess.  Still, she reassured
me that in general, I was really on top of stuff and knew the basics of what
I needed to accomplish.  With so much in trust there would be hardly anything
left subject to probate, but I was still unclear whose taxpayer-ID was
appropriate for filing this or that or the other thing.  Death and taxes,
it's all interconnected.  But it was more important to find the original will
and file that with the county court, and eventually they did.  Turned out it
*was* in the law firm's vault in Punta Gorda, sitting there since 2014, so
they would eventually file that with the court clerk.

With things opening up again on Jan 2, it was time to continue constructing donation loads. This batch was very random, but composed of stuff Mom still had sitting around the house so everything that wasn't totally ratty still had to go. Deck chairs to footstools to floor lamps, all of it OUT.

In the process I had described several large wall-mounted mirrors that
were still available, and to my amazement the manager-guy handling my input
stream said "just bring 'em up here, we'll sort it out".  Such things, even
without any kind of frames, are *expensive* if you buy them new especially
with custom-cut dimensions.  While I didn't think that run could happen until
the next day, I got back "home" and looked at this collection and said "why
the fuck not" and set to constructing an appropriate rig to carry them safely
in the car.

I had a plan for these already: level the rear cargo area as much as possible, create a generous padded bed underneath the payload, and serpentine the many extra blankets kicking around between the layers of glass to protect them from each other during transit. And Tidewell could keep the mirrors *and* the blankets and towels and other stuff I grabbed and used as interstitial padding. It was fortunate that Mom still had a lot of such things kicking around. In total 14 large mirrors went out in this load, all arriving intact, and while I warned that this unload would be a bit tricky, it went swimmingly.

Now it was down to just "shoveling out the house".  I went around collecting
some leftover bits out of bedrooms and bathrooms, and of course it's always
more stuff than one expects.  Why did Mom need apocalypse-prep amounts of
toilet paper on hand??  And when my attention turned toward her office, I
was reminded just how internally organized and meticulous she was about her
research.  Now I had to make the painful decision to trash most of that,
because I'd have absolutely no use for it at home.  But I took some example
photos from those notebooks first, just to illustrate how much work had gone
into them.  That is [will be] broken out into a separate page,
because there was just so much to consider in more depth.  [Future]

Next was to determine the best way to dispose of various classes of other stuff. I'm sure the community trash-pickup guys already hated me for the Very Heavy Loads I'd already put out over recent weeks, and I didn't want to saddle them with grodey stuff. There's a hazmat disposal facility in Sarasota, way out at the end of Bee Ridge Road, so this was one of such loads for the next Monday when things were open again. Not that a bunch of old shampoo and hand lotion is especially "haz", but the bleach and various lubricants weren't something I just wanted in the normal trash or poured down the drain into the already-wheezing water table. So this stuff went there, a batch of leftover nonperishable food went to the local food pantry along with the toilet paper and paper-towels, and a box of books that weren't totally ratty went to the Goodwill Bookstore.

Then there was the problem of the old Selectric typewriter, something from
the heyday of when IBM had about 80% of the office-machines market.  These
were incredibly complex machines but nonetheless quite reliable, once tuned
up correctly.  It would be a giant shame to just landfill it, as it likely
still worked and there are definitely a few typewriter enthusiasts still out
there.  I contacted one that seemed to be called "sarasotavintagetypewriters",
and the woman who answered said they had just moved and had absolutely no room
for more, but recommended another local office-machines repair shop.  They
in turn had *also* just moved out of the building they were in,  but the guy
I talked to offered for me to just come to his home and drop it off.  We had
a great convo when I was there -- he had set up shop in his garage with
shelves lining both sides of it and stocked floor to ceiling with typewriters
in various stages of repair.  This would be his ongoing retirement hobby, and
he already felt busier on that than he had while working.  He knew what he was
doing on Selectrics as well, said Mom's was in pretty good shape other than
a bit of gummy old oil on various parts, and was happy to take it in.  What
a relief!

Other stops included the hospital to pick up Mom's imaging on a CD, and to
a convenient hotel to arrange for offsite sleeping arrangements I could stay
in once the house was empty and the beds were gone, but still be in the area.
But more importantly, I was able to see the lawyer far earlier than I
originally expected -- she managed to carve out an hour when I could go visit
and sign some stuff in person.  And we had a great catch-up, as it had been
years since I'd seen her.  She and another lawyer who had recently retired out
of the firm remembered Mom and me and all my questions back in the day with
some fondness, and even though I was still confused on several estate-handling
subtleties she made best efforts to set me straight and offer guidance on
sorting out the finances in an optimal way.  She confirmed that basically
there was nothing to probate, as what remained outside of trust was a couple
of minimal royalties per year and I was already informally working those
transitions to me with them.

What the lawyer did encourage was moving assets out of the trust to personal
accounts as soon as possible, because any income from trust assets since the
date of Mom's passing *would* be subject to having to file a 1041 estate
return, and the tax scales for estates are different from personal income tax
and likely to amount to more.  So as I got some breathing room I worked more
on that too.  It's nice that Fidelity, for example, has a local office that
I could just visit in person with all the paperwork and get that particular
process started.  The others, I'd have to upload images and do Docusign
bullshit or whatever, and possibly even need "medallion signature guarantees"
on paper forms if push came to shove and electronic means failed.

As I planned all these errands I added appropriate GPS waypoints to my tablet, and used the Open Streetmap implementation to navigate to all of those on the fly. By the time I was mostly done it was an absolute forest of markers all over the Sarasota area, allowing me to better plan my routing for any given day's worth of driving around. Sure, this looks nuts, but I certainly wasn't trying to do all of it at once. Still, without having this in front of me I would have been absolutely effed as far as finding places.

The *timing* and ordering logistics on all of this were really the overarching
headache, as there are various interdependencies across all of these aspects.
With Mom getting very little regular mail in the past several days, I decided
to go to the post office and forward her mail as "permanently" as possible
with a change-of-address form, pointing to my Boston-area home.  That would
hopefully make sure I'd get all her tax forms at the end of the month, and any
remaining medical bills and whatever else.  Seeing the light at the end of
the tunnel and a path toward finally heading home fairly soon, I figured that
would kick in about the right time to redirect anything important.