The sale of my mother’s house is imminent — closing is on 3 January. I have spent my afternoons since last week trying to cancel utilities and various services to the house, and it hasn’t been easy. I’ve sat on hold on the phone for an awful lot of time, because, as it turns out, most of these services are reluctant to lose a paying customer, even if she is dead. Much of what I’ve had to do is call, wait for an answer, get told an email address to send a death certificate and letters testamentary, and then wait for a verification phone call. And then discover that the electric company had misspelled her name, which was not an obstacle when billing her, but becomes a problem when telling them to stop billing her.

But finally, it’s all done! The house goes dead on Friday, only to come back to life with new owners.

Next step is to go through a long list of annuities and get them cashed out. Also, a minor thing, I have 21 silver dollars that were in her bank deposit box, I’ll have to get those appraised. I checked out a few of them on the web, and they were selling for somewhere between $10 and $50 each, but I have to wring every penny I can out of everything before I’m done.

I was running some simple errands this morning — I need a short bit of ethernet cat8 cable, something I figured I could pick up locally for $5-$10. I went downtown to what used to be the Radio Shack, that was my usual convenient place to get necessary bits of cheap tech. It was gone! The store had been cleared out and all the merchandise replaced with…Jesus crap. Well, I sure wasn’t going to get my printer connected with a prayer and some slogan praising Jesus silkscreened on it.

This is getting worrisome. A lot of the businesses around town have been gradually replaced with pious garbage that I will not shop at. This one, no, they’ll never get my business. Especially since the hours are 4-8pm on weekdays, longer on Saturdays, and of course never on Sundays. That doesn’t sound like a particularly good business plan to me, but what would I know? I’m not their market.

Anyway, if you’re in need some non-essential fluff and want to drive out to the middle of nowhere to pick it up, the place is called Kings Media & Merch. They sell nothing at all useful, and only at inconvenient hours.

I’ve noticed a trend. My childhood Christmases were raucus events, with my big extended family all cramming into our little houses, and we had two of them, one for each set of grandparents.

My adult Christmases were smaller but just as nice — me, my wife, the kids, and that was it. No grandparents because we’d moved a thousand miles away.

Now in my geezerhood, the parents and grandparents are all dead, my kids are scattered in a broad swathe from Tacoma to Kuwait, and my wife is pulling an early & long shift at work, so I’m home alone, no presents, no Xmas feast, no party of any kind.

I know! I’ll go to the lab and spend Christmas with the spiders!

This is all we’ve got.

Really, that’s it for Christmas here. We didn’t put up a tree, we didn’t decorate, we didn’t get presents, and no way in hell are we going to church. We’ve got a few trees in the yard with snow on them.

This house.

A notary just drove out to my house with a stack of documents from the lending company, and I signed them all, and now those documents get shipped back to Seattle for the buyers to sign, and if that all goes smoothly a bunch of money gets wired into the estate account, which I then have to divvy up to ten heirs. Wheee!

Unfortunately, mainly what I feel right now is memories of all the Christmases we had with Mom & Dad in that house. Never more.

May the new owners have many happy Christmases there in the future.

Minnesota, as a state, is happier than California?

I don’t quite trust these things. They always have to juggle a whole bunch of parameters to come up with a single composite score like “happiness,” and you can get any answer you want with the right weights. They mention a few inputs but don’t tell us how they manipulate them.

OK, they include weather, but it must be scaled way down for us to beat California.

True story: last week I checked the weather before I went on a walk, and the computer told me it was -3°. No problem, I thought, that was almost balmy. Unfortunately, the weather site was telling me the temperature in °F — my wife prefers Fahrenheit, while I think in Celsius — and that meant it was actually -20°C. I went on my walk, all bundled up, but 20 minutes later noticed that I couldn’t feel my toes.

But sure, Minnesota is much happier than California. At least we’re not in Lose-iana.

I hate to mention it again, but since I mentioned “The Final Experiment” before, I guess I should note that it has been concluded. On 14 December, observers in Antarctica watched the sun stay above the horizon for 24 hours, as predicted. Ho hum.

This was a stupid, attention-grubbing stunt. People have lived and worked in Antarctica for decades, so this phenomenon has been reported many times. It’s routine. The only novelty is that this evangelical pastor, Will Duffy, dredged up some of the dumbest people on the internet and spent a lot of money to get them to stand somewhere near the South Pole and look up. Some concede that what they saw doesn’t fit their expectations, while lots of others stayed home and closed their eyes. This “experiment” will accomplish nothing, other than to advertise an anti-abortion evangelical freak as somehow pro-science. Flat earth is being used as a tool for science-washing Christian nonsense.