At the beginning of the semester, I was pleased to see that I had no classes on Friday, and I looked forward to several months of 3 day weekends.
Hah.
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. I spent my day a) cleaning up the basement mealworm colony b) cooking, preparing meals to last a few days, c) opening up the fly lab and feeding the residents of the spider lab, d) taking care of probate stuff (I’m still bogged down in legal stuff), e) and then spent all afternoon composing genetics problems. I made the mistake of asking the students what they wanted and they told me they all wanted more practice problems, so now I spend a day each week putting together practice problems, which entails making an answer key with explanations. Oh boy.
This weekend I have to work on a couple of lectures. But I’m also planning to go out with my wife to the movies on Monday. I hope Paddington in Peru is good, because that’s our only choice.
I’m never trusting the promise of a day off ever again.
If it helps, I thought Paddington in Peru was pretty good, at least if you’re a Paddington fan (which the first two movies made me into after I watched them recently). I’d say it’s the weaker of the trilogy, but it’s still a solid and wholesome flick, just with maybe a few less laugh-out-loud gags.
I haven’t been in the mood for laughing lately, so that sounds perfect.
Ah, for youth. And nostalgia.
Maybe Paddington in Peru will visit Mount Pikachu!
Re “probate stuff”, it sounds like there were things your Mom didn’t do, which if she’d done them, would have made the burden on you and your sibs lighter. At some point I hope you will do a wrap-up on that, with the aim of giving us living elders a checklist of things we should do to show our wisdom and our respect and love for our survivors. (And maybe the things you are doing, or planning to do, as a result of this experience, to make things better for your own family.)
Nah, it’s not Mom’s fault. The latest hang up, now that most of her estate has been liquidated and is sitting in a checking account, is that I have to do a thorough breakdown of where all the income and expenses came from (dammit, jim, I’m a biologist, not an accountant!), and then that has to be reviewed and approved by our lawyer, and then the full breakdown has to be sent to each heir, and then the heirs have to approve of my handling of affairs, and then the state has to be assured that everything is above board, and then the money is disbursed. It’s a tremendous amount of paperwork to make sure that I, the executor, am not fattening my wallet from the deceased’s pockets.
There’s not much Mom could have done about this. She was conscientious about wanting to make sure all of her children and grandchildren were equitably taken care of.
I had this fantasy that once the house, her main asset, was sold off (which was done back in December), all the work was done and I could relax. It was only the midpoint of a long process.
One of my favourite memories of my grandmother is her reading to me from a Paddington book. She got to a story about Paddington visiting London, and coming across “Alf Price Tours,” a tour company run by Alf Price. Paddington misinterpreted that as discount tours, angering Alf. My proper English grandmother got the giggles at this one, and could hardly get through the story.
John Morales @ 3
I am just a bit too young for the original, most of us only know the David Bowie cover.
If PZ is in the mood for a Blueray or DVD, the 1980s “Night of the Creeps” is a perfectly good B horror with some comedy in it. Or the more recent “Grabbers”.