Hi, all.  Checking in again to let you all know what’s been going on.  Still haven’t heard back from the Detective in MD — two voice messages and one email message — but I’ll stay on that.   Today, I’m having my Mother sign a document stating unequivocally that she wishes to have her assets returned, and that my brother has not been paying for her upkeep, as their implied agreement with respect to his power of attorney called for.  More, I’m supposed to be getting a second call from a lawyer I spoke with on Friday about filing a constructive trust (thanks to long-time reader and estate attorney Randall for that advice).

I’m not going to sugar-coat things:  I’ve been disappointed thus far with the non-response from the Detective; and one attorney I left a message with still hasn’t ever called back.  So I feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle being here in Colorado, especially because it makes me easy to blow off, I guess.   Mother’s condition is, sad to say, fairly grave.  Not certain yet what the treatment protocol will be, but I guess I’ll find that out in the next few days or so.  Rumor is, my brother canceled her original life insurance policy back after my Father passed in 2010; too, he claims he just canceled a second policy he took out on her himself, which is rather stupid, considering he likely named himself beneficiary — but he isn’t a criminal mastermind, rather a spiteful, entitled, rather useless carbon footprint gliding lazily through life, and his reason for canceling it was to make sure the rest of the remaining family will have to pay for the inevitable expenses that come along with end of life care.  He even called my sister the other day to tell her he was on the beach, enjoying his day, “Goldie” doing that “Goldie” thang, bullshitting and squatting fatly in overlong shorts, his muffin-top baking to a ruddy brown.

With all this happening back in Maryland and Florida, I have things I’m dealing with on the home front.  My wife, as many of you know, travels rather regularly for business, so I can’t leave my boys to travel back to Baltimore with any consistency or regularity.  And today alone, I’m dealing with an appliance installer, who we’ve had to coordinate with a tiler through the warranty people, to have a range hood removed, some tiles repaired, and then the range re-installed (hoping I can raise the lawyer or the Detective while that’s happening).  Later, we have the Orkin guy coming by to try to identify an infestation of tiny, white-assed bugs that have overtaken our front porch.  After which, I would like him to murder them all and salt the earth where their corpses lay.  I also have to be here to sign for deliveries of some fans (a month late); and replacement glass for Satch’s desk, the first panes of glass having arrived in millions of pieces, a few of which end up in my hand when I opened the box. Then it’s on to moving some steel filing cabinets, stapling down garage door opener wiring and then taping it to the dry wall, taking possession of the pair of subwoofers the low-volt company never installed (I thought the systems we purchased with the house came with in-wall subwoofers, and that the wiring was at issue; instead, turns out we overspent for some mid-range stand-alones that we’ve been paying for for a couple of months but have never had).  Tomorrow, the electricians will be by to install two dedicated circuits where they were supposed to be installed initially, after which I suppose we’ll be setting up a time for the dry wall repair necessitated by all this.

Still haven’t gotten the dual 50-gallon water tanks running serially.  Still haven’t had the laundry room sink installed.  Still haven’t gotten the replacement sinks installed. And — thanks to a quick Craigslist sale — we are without any dining chairs at the moment.

— All of which is, I’m sure, fascinating to you.

At any rate, on the political front, I’ve been trying to keep up, at least locally.  And my experience is likely similar to the experiences of many of those who are in locales where competitive races are being fought.  Here in Colorado, Governor Hickenlooper is running on his staunch pro-business centrism, which of course is belied by his Bloomberg-pushed 180 on gun control, a move that forced Magpul out of Colorado; “Hick,” for all his posturing, has always been part of the ruling class donut hole — the Denver, Boulder welter of superficial liberal Democrats that rules the rubes who themselves locally elect representatives who, I’m proud to say, told Hickenlooper they wouldn’t be abiding any new gun laws he signed, based as they were on an embarrassing misunderstanding of firearms by bona fide idiots like Diana DeGette (who opened her mouth and removed all doubt, as they say), a surreal condescension toward college-aged women (notoriously, Colorado D House member Joe Salazar said women didn’t need guns when they could just piss on a rapist, or vomit, or just yell), and just overall legislative douchiness that led to the recall of the president of the Colorado Senate, John Morse, who has since become a kind of hero to the anti-gun, pro-tyranny left.  Ads against Hickenlooper’s opponent Bob Beauprez consist of glowering music over which women speak of his wanting to climb right up in their uteri and stitch them shut or some such — at least until it’s time to push out a baby, preferably a white one.  Also, he’s tied to “big corporations.”  And has often voted for things that enrich these sinister “big businesses” — which, while I’m no economist, seems to be the proper way to run capitalism, provided he was voting for free market principles and not engaging in cronyism like that of, say, the government throwing tons of money Tesla’s way, only to wind up with a nice-looking, overpriced, “eco-friendly” status vehicle that only rich Boulderites would be stupid enough to buy.

Senator Mark Udall is running on a similar platform:  vote for Cory Gardner and you’ll be forced to carry babies.  No birth control for you, women!  He’s going to take away your choice!  Disempower you and your vaginal muscles.  Hell, ole’ Cory may just come over and bang you himself, then write laws (somehow — because evidently none of this has ever been litigated and there are no Supreme Court rulings on abortion “rights” or protections for birth control, right?) to compel you to carry the babies to term, then put them into Christian schools and fill their heads with fundamentalist Biblethumping nonsense.

— Not only that, by Cory is a climate denier.  Who probably hates minorities and the elderly and the very children he demands be born. Think on that.  And shudder. 

The truth is, Gardner is one of these garden variety establishment types running on an appeal to common-sense bipartisanship.  He’s not my choice for anything, but he’s better than Udall, who doesn’t believe ISIS/L is a threat to the US and who voted with Obama 99% of the time.

So for yet another election cycle, the left is going back to its tired playbook:  run a series of ads featuring women pretending to be in fear for their birth control; try to tie Republicans to “big corporations” and “climate denial”; and then sprinkle in racial overtones while pandering to every identity group that wants something from other people’s tax monies.

It’s revolting.  It’s dishonest.  And it’s entirely predictable.

And yet we here in Colorado fell for it last time when Ken Buck — an actual conservative — was defeated by Michael Bennet — an actual moron.  The ads were all the same:  Buck would take away your “choice” and force you to spend time barefoot baking pies for your man, and women seem incapable in Colorado of understanding that Senators don’t have this power. (Buck, incidentally, is running for Gardner’s vacated House seat).

Too, Chuck Schumer is predicting the Democrats will hold the Senate despite polling info that gives and 11% edge to the GOP when the question asked is “who should run Congress.”  Leading me to believe he knows something, and that for instance the “calibration” problems affecting Republicans in Illinois may not happen all over the country.

That’s not paranoid conspiracy-mongering, either.  The ends justify the means to these people.  It’s right there in the handbook for tyrants.  Which is what makes it so truly frightening.

So.  Nice to catch up.  But the range hood guy is here, and I have to go try to contact a Detective, have an old neighbor check on the family home (we found an MLS sales number, but the deed has never been switched out of my mother’s name), as well as call my father’s old employer to find out about his pension.

I may be the first person whose cause of death is officially listed as “worried too much.”  In which case, I want my tombstone to read, “I knew I should have smoked more weed.”