Angst

…DO IT YOURSELF, dammit.

The problem with cleaning ladies is that when they don’t know what to do with something, they take it upon themselves to invent something to do with it. And that invention is rarely anything you or I would think of.

I like to hide a front door key outside, in a truly weird place, so that I can get into the house if I lose my regular keys. This has saved my tuchus twice in the years that I’ve lived here, and I have NO reason to want to change that.

Well, apparently Wonder-Cleaning Lady thinks that’s just silly. By this morning’s early light, I discovered she took the front door key out of its hiding place — inside a hummingbird feeder — filled up the feeder with sugar water, hung up the feeder, and put the key….WHERE??????

When I got home w/ the dog this a.m. I couldn’t find my key ring. So I went to look for the key in the bird feeder…and…NOPE

Holeee shee-ut!  Now I couldn’t get into the house, not for love nor money.

Eventually I did find a key. Not THE key, but at least one that works. Later on today, then, I’ll have to drag this key over to the hardware store and have a couple of copies made. Find new hidey-holes for them where the burglars and the delinquents across the street can’t find them. That’ll soak up half the day.

Why would you think a person would put something in a specific place unless the person WANTED the thing in that place?

This will form a nice little distraction from lunch with my son, as planned. Don’t know what time the hardware store opens on Sunday…probably not before noon: whatddaya bet? Maybe not at all, on a Sunday.

****

Next week’s Project from Hell will be to find out if I can get my parents’ “cremains” away from the mortuary in Sun City where the Evil New Wife’s relatives deposited them — without bothering to consult me.

These urns of ashes, I would like to move to the close in the church that I attend, where I wish to get myself deposited.

Turns out the rip-off artists in Sun City CHARGE YOU TO MOVE YOUR DECEASED PERSON’S ASHES out of their effing mortuary! It’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars just to get them out of there and move them down to the church.

I may be talking with a lawyer about that.

My father died of a stroke that turned him (briefly) into a vegetable. Between the time the stroke hit and the time he died, he had no consciousness of anyone around him.

Meanwhile, the hag that he’d married after my mother died was THE single nastiest person I have ever met. He was miserable with her. A number of tartly funny stories depend from those circumstances…among them his strategy of going out into the parking lot and sitting in the car all day long to get away from her, and his secret flight to another old-folkerie, where he contrived to rent a studio on a month-to-month basis, equip it with a TV set, and sit there all day in front of it.

He would tell the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be worked on. Day after day…. Incredibly, she was SO astonishingly stupid that she believed it!!!

Well.

She did...until some mutual friends came over for bridge one evening. As they sat there, the “friends” announced they had discovered THE MOST AMAZING COINCIDENCE!!!

They’d been over at the other old-folkerie to visit a friend, and while there had seen a list of residents’ names…that had my father’s name on it!

Ohhhh boy oh heee hee, wasn’t that the most AMAZING coincidence!

Pissed, my father growled that it was no coincidence: he had a place there.

😀

As you can imagine, this cast a bit of a pall over the bridge evening.

Incredibly, it did not bring an end to the miserable marriage. He was afraid to divorce her because, wailed he, she’ll get all my money!

Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to re-earn the $100,000 inheritance his own mother had squandered on spiritualists and on building a mansion in Ft. Worth. So…money was a bit of an obsession for him. So, incredibly, he was willing to spend the last years of his life in misery if that was what it took to hang onto the precious money.

She had inherited that amount from her father, who was a buffalo hunter, trading hides out of Oklahoma and Texas. Apparently a LOT of money was to be made in exterminating the native wildlife, especially when that wildlife’s hides could be turned into hats and coats. She herself was mostly Choctaw Indian…apparently one with no compunction about clearing the plains of her people’s livestock.

A hundred thousand dollars at the turn of the twentieth century would be like about a million dollars today.

Now….if I’d possessed even half a brain, I would have said to him, “Daddy, she’s NOT going to get your money. I’m married to a lawyer who’s with one of the most powerful law firms in the state — quite possibly in the Southwest. She will have no claim on an estate that you owned before you married her.”

But no. Of course not. Proof positive that I do NOT possess half a brain. It never entered my mind to ask the then-husband about this. It never entered my mind to ask him to assure my father that the Dragon Lady was not going to clean out his savings.

So, he stayed miserably married to her until a stroke carried him away. He managed to transfer most of his life savings to me, which is why I own my home outright and why I will have something to leave to my son.

Ugh. What a way to earn a living, eh?

😮

Ohhh well. When I talk with our priest next week, I’ll ask how I can extract their Cremains from the Sun City rip-off artists, and also arrange to have myself disposed of down at our church.

This is not very respectful to my father’s memory: he hated loathed and despised organized religion. But…he ain’t here, folks. I am. And I hated, loathed, and despised living in Sun City. I ain’t about to be disposed of out there. But since I have no other family but my son, I do want their remains with me.

It’s the principle of the thing.