So far this morning
Today would've been my mother's 72nd birthday. Hard to imagine her at 72.
As usual, here's a link to some of my favorite photos of her. I had kinda intended to use her birthday as the occasion to launch a new series of photo posts featuring pictures of her childhood, but I haven't gotten organized enough to do that yet.
So far, this morning has been a little frustrating/stressful. I dropped Kavya off at day camp, but the location where the official info said to drop her off turned out to be wrong, and while we were looking for the right place, she tripped and fell face first on a church's concrete steps. Tore the top layer of skin off a patch on her leg, skinned her knee, hurt her hand. She seemed to be pretty much okay after a few minutes, but given my own recent knee injury, I sympathize a lot.
Then I came back to Mary Anne's, and Ellie (the dog) threw up on the carpet about four times in a row.
Then I spent a frustrating hour on the phone with Hartford Life Insurance; they contacted me recently to tell me that they need paperwork from me to complete my claim against Peter's life insurance. I don't know why this claim suddenly became active again ten years after I last heard from them. I think at the time I was too stressed to deal with the paperwork, but they stopped bugging me about it and I stopped thinking about it ten years ago. I guess it's now worth spending a little of my time to deal with, but (for example) they're requiring me to file a Small Estate Affidavit, which it turns out has to be notarized by a Washington State notary. Fortunately, I'm going to be in Washington State later this week (for Worldcon), so maybe I can get that done then. We'll see.
Anyway. Hartford is very disorganized, and everyone I talk with tells me something different, and they all require me to give them a bunch of information and then tell the whole story. They seem baffled and bewildered by the idea that someone who isn't the named insured would be calling them, and they don't seem to be able to look up anything without having a bunch of separate pieces of information. I would have thought that the policy number would be all they would need, but no, I need to give them (and spell) my name, Peter's name, the policy number, my Social Security number, etc, and even then half the time they can't find relevant info.
I suppose I could just walk away from it; that's what I did before. But it seems silly to have them send the money to the state's unclaimed property department when I could just claim it.
Anyway. Other than all that, things are going fine.
And now I'm going to put the computer down and pick up the other computer and try to get some day-job work done.