I See the Light (At the End of the Tunnel... Hopefully It's Not the Lynch-Mob's Torch)

Today was one of those trying family days.  With the sale of the house, there's a few things that I wanted to get settled while we had the proceeds and one of them was pre-paying my Dad's funeral.  I made an appointment for 10 a.m. this morning and went downstairs to get my jeans from the laundry room at 9:20 and my Dad was standing there by the door with his coat on.  I jokingly asked him if he was in a hurry to die and get buried since the funeral home is only 3 minutes from the house.  I'm not sure why old people always want to be so early... maybe they think that they'll need extra time... maybe they are so excited that they have something to do... or, as I have surmised (in the cases of my Dad and Aunt), they just have nothing else going on and need something to obsess about.  We got over there in plenty of time and went through all the arrangements, settling on a $2,000 modest casket and two viewing times on the first day and one the second morning followed by a religious service and then the customary Italian eating fest afterwards at the local American Legion Hall.  My Dad didn't want the pomp and circumstance of the funeral procession and service at the grave, which saved a ton of money, considering that the hearse rental for the trip 3 miles away is $600.  Total funeral cost was almost $10,000, still.  After that, we went to the bank to set up an irrevocable funeral trust in the form of a CD, which protects the money in case my Dad would have to go into a nursing facility and Medicare/Medicaid came after his assets.

The family crazy train didn't stop there though.  My Aunt, who always says she hates bothering me with her problems but doesn't try to work through them at all, then proceeds to call me several times a day over something that is less important than, well anything imaginable.  This time, with the daylight savings time, I had to go over there and adjust her timers on her Malibu landscaping lighting and... (wait for it)... her sambo jockey lantern statue.  I've talked about it before... how their generation thinks nothing of still calling black people 'colored'... and while I don't think they'd burn a cross in their yard and don a white hood, calling them 'black' or 'African-Americans' is surely not in their thought process.  That's what makes having a miniature black man dressed in a jockey uniform holding a lantern so your white guests can see walking down your sidewalk a bigger slap in the face than, probably, burning the cross.  Regardless of my civil rights views, I adjusted the timers.  That was yesterday.  For some reason, they did not come on (I suspect it was God punishing her for her blatant racism), so she called me again and I had to go over there and check it out.  The landscaping lights were easy, but Sambo needed a new bulb, so off to the store I went, since surely she couldn't handle that task.  Plus, it would have delayed fixing it and I would have still had that hanging over my head.  It seems that I can never get out from under someone elses punch list of things to do.

It's been raining and raining... I'm ready to build an ark.  I suppose it's good, but it's supposed to keep on raining for the next couple of days.