Best of luck, Hec! That place looks wonderful.

I do hope Tim and his brothers are managing after the funeral home visit. That is a rough meeting.

Tim called me about half an hour ago, and the 3 of them have just knocked so much stuff off the list! All the stars aligned (the most important one being whether his dad's favored priest is back from sabbatical, and he is), and they arranged the visitation for Thursday evening and the funeral Mass for Friday morning. Now they're at Tim's dad's house to pick out an outfit and go through pictures for the visitation.

I don't love there being a visitation when we're barely on the downswing of Omicron, which we all know by now is super easy to spread. I'm going to assume the funeral home will insist on masks, and beyond that, I dunno.

There won't be any kind of gathering after the funeral Mass and burial, but Tim and his brothers want to do an outdoor cookout-type shindig later in the year when it's warmer and hopefully safer to congregate outdoors. And their dad was a fanatic for cookouts, so that seems appropriate.

I offloaded all my work for Thursday and Friday, so we have everything pretty much taken care of. Need to check and see if Tim's suit needs to go to the cleaner.

The bonus is that Tim's company is giving everyone Monday (after the Super Bowl, because go Bengals!) off with pay, so after the funeral Friday, Tim can crash out for 3 days, which he is REALLY going to need.

Memorial cookout later in the year sounds nice. I'm glad Tim and his brothers have each other to help them all get through all the planning and arranging and no one of them has to do it all alone.

That sounds about as good as can be expected, Steph. I'm glad the brothers teamed up so well. Memorial cookout sounds perfect. It is pretty common for people to have memorials in the summer in the Adirondacks due to weather issues. Mom's was on her birthday in August when she passed the previous October.

Because of paying-for-nursing-home shenanigans, my parents pre-paid for their funerals, which means they made a lot of those decisions already, and I'm SO GLAD. All that stuff is hard.

Good luck, Hec and JZ!!

I am sad to report that the $10 puzzle mat is not magic, so it doesn't work great with a barely-done puzzle, but I think it will work out OK. Buddy was really wanting to get into those pieces, I tell you what.

Hec that is a lovely house. I hope y'all get it. I love the color of the kitchen and the attic bedroom is like a secret hideaway.

Exactly so! That attic bedroom is really isolated from the rest of the house, and has a pretty big space outside the bedroom itself. We also loved the colors she had painted, and would not be in a big hurry to repaint anything. It gets amazing light in that turret corner.

We just got off the phone with our financial advisor, mortgage broker and TJ, our brother in law (who used to work at Fidelity as a financial advisor and was a SVP at Citibank Mortgage. So our in-house finance expert.)

And we went over all the numbers and...we can make a bid on it. Even leaving a little room for an overbid.

Now I really want it.

I can already picture you cooking in that kitchen, Hec!

I can already picture you cooking in that kitchen, Hec!

It's a really good space!

Hec, I have absolutely 100% walked past this house multiple times in recent months and yet failed to notice the turret! Next time I will look up.

{{{Steph}}}

Because of paying-for-nursing-home shenanigans, my parents pre-paid for their funerals, which means they made a lot of those decisions already, and I'm SO GLAD. All that stuff is hard.

Tim said everything was pre-paid, but they still had to pick out the color of the casket, and what picture should go on the prayer card, and then they had to pick out all the readings and songs and such for Mass, so it was still a bit of work. (Tim's mom, on the other hand, had basically scripted her entire funeral Mass -- she had selected all the readings and songs and I think even the intercessions for the faithful -- so all we had to do was hand the information over to the admin at the church.)