I’m back in Brooklyn for the weekend. Depending on my mood and inability to plan more than 24 hours in advance, I’ll likely be back in Chicago again next week for a couple days of estate stuff.

On the plus side we have a buyer for the house and I’m working through that process. On the minus side, I still can’t believe how much stuff is in the house after nearly six months of cleaning, donating, distributing, and throwing stuff away.

I found several more boxes of papers from 1997—1999 which I would like to just throw away but find that I have to go through because they occasionally have an important document or two.

My mom kept everything, every bill, every envelope from every bill, the filler that came with the bill, everything. Relatively neatly filed in folders for each company, organization, or correspondent. Sometimes annotated with the check number or some other correspondence.

It adds up to a lot of stuff to go through.

I have about 10 boxes of geneology records (mostly for my mom’s (Krips, Loftus, Ryan, and Barker) side of the family but also some from my dad’s family. There’s another six boxes of photos, slides, and 8mm movies, even some audio tapes from the late 1960s and early 1970s (not even sure that I can play them without destroying them).

I had an estate sales person come out to the house on Wednesday, no luck there: there’s not enough perceived value in the remaining items to be worth the time for the agent to set up and conduct a sale. I have another lead I’m going to try Tuesday but have already started on Plan B which will amount to a garage/yard sale over two weekends in late July and early August. If I can do that and line up a charity to take some of the other items, and a dumpster for whatever’s left, then I can close up the house and have it ready for an August or early September closing.

In other news...

My brother got a job at Genuine Games (he’d been laid off in April as part of the general LucasArts meltdown) and is moving to LA from Vallejo.

Frisket has spent most of the week on antibiotics and antihistamines. What we’ve thought was ear mites was instead an allergic reaction to something she gets in her ears (her ears which she tends to rub into the ground at frequent intervals). So she’s doped up and even more laconic than usual.

Lisa and I have been trying to find an airfare to Sydney for something under a billion dollars. I briefly tried to use the American Express Platinum Travel Service but their deal isn’t much of a deal. They tout the ability to get a companion ticket for free if you buy a full fare business class ticket, however their airline partners are extremely limited, and the companion ticket ends up having various restrictions placed on it Furthermore, it’s clear that they only get allocated a small number of seats they can sell and those are already gone on most of the trans-pac flights for the dates we want to travel.

So, now we are looking at a couple of options, one is a consolidator which claims to have a $6k fare, the other option is a round-the-world fare or an around-the-pacific-rim fare.