My mother’s house just went on the market, which meant the asking price has gone public. As part of the probate process, the names of all of the heirs were publicly posted a while back. There are skeevy people who are tracking that kind of information, who instantly swoop in and contact the heirs, asking if they’d like a fast advance on their inheritance, for the price of a small, tiny, hardly even mentionable fee, so small that they don’t even mention it, and you won’t know about it until after the estate is settled.

It’s like a payday loan scam run by funeral-chasing ghouls. I think I’ve just learned about a whole ‘nother industry full of people I hate.

My whole family is about to get junkmail from these horrible people who promise painless advances on their inheritance, except for the big bite they take out of it (one company was going to skim off 20%) and the nuisance to the executor (me) and his lawyer. I’m just telling everyone to be patient, we’re making good progress on the estate, and I’m hoping we can get everything cleared up by Christmas, so I only have one complicated tax year.

(In good news, we’ve already had 3 people tour the house, so maybe it’ll go fast.)

My mother’s house is now officially on the market. Go buy it! The price is $435K, but if you want to round up to a half million, I won’t complain.

It’s now empty and shined up and ready to go. Look at this lovely kitchen!

That’s one of the last things my mother had redone on the house before her death. She was very proud of it. I wish my house had a kitchen that nice.

Charming 3-bedroom, 1.75-bathroom rambler with plenty of space and a cozy layout! Great opportunity to make this home your own. Home features a circular floor plan, opening to the living room, then flowing into the dining & kitchen area. Kitchen boasts natural cabinetry, large window above the sink & ample storage & countertop space. Back room has tons of potential, use as a 4th bedroom, second living space or even a play room! Outside, enjoy a large driveway with ample parking and a single-car garage for extra storage or workspace. Large backyard features cozy patio. Easy commute & convenience to everything! Quick access to Hwy 18 & very close to Game Farm Park with ball parks & picnic areas & Wilderness park for enjoying the White River.

Now I want to buy it and move in. Not mentioned is that on a clear day you can see Mt Rainier from the backyard, and that the convenient shed is full of spiders. I don’t know why they left that bit out, especially since it’s going on the market on Halloween.

I have lot of happy memories in that house, so it’s sad to see it empty. Go fill it up to cheer me up.

Here’s a Halloween thought for you: what Halloween/movie monster do you most closely identify with? Is it the tragic cursed werewolf, doomed to a life of mad animal viciousness whenever the moon is full? Are you a more modern rage monster, a Freddie or Jason slashing their way through the world? Or a blameless Frankenstein’s monster, hideous and hated? There are a thousand choices. Pick one now and explain your reasoning.

I was thinking of this yesterday while I was doing some drudgery in the lab. I had fed the spiders the other day, lots of big juicy mealworms. I raise mealworms at home, and I have a terrarium in the basement where I cultivate thousands of the little bugs. You throw in a big box of cornmeal every few months, and periodically toss in table scraps — the ends of carrots, a mushy tomato, a shriveled orange, and they thrive in there. I comb my fingers through the meal, which is steadily being converted to frass, and scoop up handfuls of wriggling larval beetles. I drop them one at a time in the adult spiders’ cages.

Here’s the catch: the spiders are adept at quickly killing and eating them, but the way they do it leaves behind a tube of cuticle filled with the soupy mix of digested guts and venom. It’s an amazing medium for bacteria — you would not believe the stench that a rotting mealworm can produce. They reek of death and decay, and I have to go through all the containers and clean them out.

The younger spiders need more delicate food, so I raise fruitflies in an incubator in the lab. Flies are also easy, but the bottles full of medium can get quite nasty, when they got old they get moldy and a bit slimy. So yesterday I was scrubbing out a month’s worth of fly bottles, filling up a sink with scum and floating bits of mold and insect parts, and thinking…hey, this is quite pleasant. Low stress, no demands, light work, I was quite enjoying myself. I could be quite content as a lab assistant, doing the dirty work behind the scenes as long as I didn’t have any more long-term demands on myself.

It’s obvious then. I’d want to be a lesser horror movie character, not a monster, not a mad scientist, I just want to be an Igor, a Fritz, a Karl, maybe occasionally aspiring to a Renfield.

Me and Dwight Frye, we’d be the bestest buddies.

Your turn. What’s your Halloween avatar?

We grandparents love to hear about the cute and adorable things our grandchildren are up to. Here’s the latest news about Iliana:

Tomorrow, she gets to wear pajamas to school because her class filled up a “good behaviour” jar. The final fill-up was because the class did really well during the lockdown drill today. She explained to us that a real lockdown is when a person with a weapon comes into the school to kill you. They hid for the drill and the principal acted as the threat person. She said if she gets outside she’s supposed to sprint away because they’ll be trying to kill her. She said that the teachers weren’t talking about killing, but the kids figured it out. She and her friends were playing a game called “lockdown drill” after this and acting it out again.

Wow. That sounds like such a fun game. We didn’t have games like that when I was a kid.

Here’s a map of average precipitation across the US.

I’m in the dry band that stretches from Texas to Minnesota, drawing a vertical line across the middle of the country. I grew up in the dark green to purple wet part of the country on the West coast, and my favorite part of the world is that dark purple blotch over the Olympic peninsula.

No wonder I’m thirsty. I need to get a drink of water and get to work now.

I’m back! Yesterday was a long day of travel — I got up a 5am to go to the airport, and what with the flight, then waiting to take a shuttle to the western part of the state, sitting on the shuttle, waiting for Mary to get off work and pick me up, and then the drive to Morris, it was 1am when I finally got home. I slept in until 9:30 this morning.

I think it’s going to be my last trip back to the homeland. My mother’s house is going on the market in a few weeks, after it’s stripped down to bare walls, and there won’t be anything to come home to anymore. That’s sad.

I’ve brought home a few mementoes, but it’s mainly a few pictures and selections from the vast collection of stuff Mom had filed away. She was a doting mother, so she kept everything related to her kids, most of which is going to be trashed this week. It all has to go! I plucked a few small things out of the pile to bring home.

I brought home a letter I wrote in 1979, because it immediately took me back to my first year of graduate school. It was a different world then. Remember: no internet, no computers, no cell phones, long distance phone calls would cost you a few dollars a minute, so you only used it for emergencies. That meant we had to write letters to keep in touch — and literally write by hand, because typewriters were the only alternative. I was writing a letter every week to my parents, writing to my grandparents every few weeks, and several times a week to my girlfriend. That was common in my generation.

Here it is. Do not mock my handwriting, treat it as a glimpse of the distant past.

OK, I’ll translate and give a little context.

3 August (1979)
Dear Mom + Dad + Tomi + Mike + Lisa + everybody,

That’s everyone who was still at home. My brother Jim and sister Caryn had moved out, too.

I had just completed my BS in Zoology at the University of Washington, was accepted into the University of Oregon, and had even been offered a research assistantship for the summer. No gap year for me! I went through commencement and immediately moved into a summer research program. I was living in a bare, nearly empty dorm dorm for the summer, which was not great — days spent in the lab were great, but then I’d go home to this empty, unfurnished room and stare at the walls until I fell asleep. I was writing because I was finally moving out to my own place.

I’ve got my new apartment today. It’s a small studio with a private bathroom, and I share the kitchen with the apartment next door, so it’s not very impressive physically, but it has a good price and I figure room+board won’t cost me much more than it would in the dorm. August rent is $120, + fall rent is $170 a month, with all utilities paid for. It’s very close to campus — it’s located right behind the 7-11, near about 3 bookstores (wrong–5 bookstores), 2 markets, + a couple of cafes. The manager is also a grad student who is involved with the biology dept., + arranged to get me the keys tonight, so I can start moving in tomorrow. I still have a week to go in the dorms, so I get one more week of food service, which will give me an easy transition into life on my own–I can just eat in the dorms until I figure out how to cook, + get set up to do it.
My new address:
735 E. 14th St., Apt 6A
Eugene, OR 97403

Look at that rent! Things have changed a bit.

Living in a reasonably sized college town was paradise. All those bookstores in walking distance! I spent so much money in the Smith Family Bookstore.

Work is coming along fairly well — for about a week now, I’ve been tangled up in about 3 projects, + I had to give a presentation of my research to a lab meeting today, so I’ve been pretty busy, what with finding an apartment on top of that. My little fish haven’t been behaving very well, either. They’ve been giving me cock-eyed results so this next week will be spent refining my set-up to get rid of some extraneous noise that has been fouling up my data. I’m also learning a little photography, since Dr. Kimmel wants me to start making a complete record of my experiments. It’s not high art, but I can take magnificent portraits of oscilloscope screens.

My first project was trying to reliably record extracellular action potentials from the zebrafish hindbrain. Electrophysiologists will know the feeling — carefully grounding everything, housing everything in a faraday cage, starting off every day making fresh sharp electrodes, etc. This is also the moment that Chuck Kimmel sent me spiralling down the photography game.

Because this was a poor student writing home, of course I had to talk about money.

Since I won’t have to be out on the 31st now, I’ll probably be staying down here a little longer, so don’t expect me home until 7 September at least.

P.S. Thanks a lot for the loan. I’ll pay it back as soon as I can, but it will be a few months until my bank account will be full enough to make me confident. If you need it, though, I can pay back one hundred any time, + maybe two or three hundred next month, + still get by.

It’s still true that moving into a new place required first and last month’s rent, and a security deposit, so even when the rent was that low it was a difficult financial decision to make the move. Fortunately, I had parents who could loan me a few hundred dollars to get set up. Yes, I paid them back over the next 6 months or so.

I salvaged a few letters like that, just because it was mind-blowing to remember what it was like to be 22 years old again.

Yesterday was a succession of meetings with lawyers and bankers. They were nice enough people, but I now have a clearer picture of what hell would be like. It’s forms, forms, forms, the clicking of computer keyboards, mysterious requests, and a lot of passive butt-sitting. I did close out several bank accounts and converted them to checks that I’ll deliver to another bank in Minnesota.

And then…my mother had a half dozen annuities, investments that we’re in the process of notifying the holding companies that she’s dead, which triggers them to send out forms to all of her heirs who then have to fill out pages and pages of information about themselves, provoking them to vomit forth checks. Progress was made.We have begun the process of untangling my mom from the grasp of capitalism.

Today, I have to deal with the DMV and realtors. Abandon all hope.

Everything.

I’m at my late mother’s house. My sisters have been working hard to sort out the years and years of stuff Mom had stashed away. They have dragged out boxes and boxes of stuff.

Would you believe she kept all of my report cards? Somehow she also got her hands on my university exams and put them in bags and boxes. Right now I’m looking at my exam from Genetics 453, The Genetics of the Evolutionary Process, from Winter quarter 1979 at the University of Washington. I got a 7.3 out of 8.0 on it, with a 3.8 grade for the term. I’m kind of flabbergasted. My mother should have been a CIA operative.

There’s so much more. I was the assistant editor of the O’Brien Elementary newsletter in 5th grade. Mom had a copy. It’s silly.

In 3rd grade, I almost died of acute appendicitis (I survived, don’t worry), and missed a couple of weeks of school. My classmates wrote me “get well soon” letters. Mom saved them, of course. Among them is a letter from one Mary Gjerness, who about 15 years later was going to become Mary Myers. Weird. She is mildly upset now that she made several misspellings.

Throughout college and grad school, I was regularly writing letters home — you know Mom filed them all away. The mindblowing thing to me was how neat and tidy and well laid out my handwriting was, all written with a fountain pen. Partway into grad school I got a home computer and a dot matrix printer, and that was the beginning of the end of my penmanship. I should probably go buy a fountain pen and start practicing again.

It’s not just me, either. My brothers and sisters are all archived in this vast collection of personal documents.

I thought I was going to see a few old photographs, but no, I’m now deluged with ancient artifacts from my past. I have to stop looking at these things, because I’ve got a week of banking and probate law to deal with.