![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Apr. 30th, 2024 09:01 amI had a post all ready to go -- two and a half weeks ago -- about life for us and extended family (i've appended it at the end of this post). And then it was subsumed by the news that D's dad ("Papa") has died. It was very sudden and unexpected.
( Papa, funeral, etc. )
-We saw our family's second eclipse! Stayed with my sister's family (my sister's husband is really a great guy who did not bat an eye at our coming and invading his house for a long weekend -- of course we tried to help out as much as we could, like babysitting so they could go on a date night, and I folded a lot of clothes -- and the kids had a great time playing with cousins and playing Xbox with cousins!) and drove south from St. Louis for three and a half hours that morning to get into totality range. (We picked south because of the marginally higher probability that it would be clear, though luckily for everyone, it turns out that all the skies around were pretty clear with just a bit of haze.) There was -- well, I would have said "a lot of traffic," but it seems like it wasn't actually a lot compared to what I hear from people on the East Coast -- it took maybe double the amount of time it would have taken if the roads had been clear. We did also run into something it looks like a lot of people ran into: Google Maps sending everyone to rural roads and then the traffic backing up a lot there (unlike a lot of other people's experiences, this was interestingly more pronounced on the way to the eclipse than back). Apple Maps seemed slightly better at figuring this out.
At about 1:10 (totality was scheduled at about 1:58), I started looking around for places to go, and found a recreational area near a creek that was about ten minutes away, so we went there, while the kids and I periodically looked through our eclipse glasses in the car when we could see the sun. When we got there -- and this was basically in the middle of nowhere in rural Missouri -- there were like 50 or so other people there who had had the same idea. It was neat to see it with other people -- it wasn't crowded, but it was reasonably full. Also, A. had running water to throw rocks into, which he was possibly more excited about than about the eclipse :) The interesting thing about having some clouds, even wispy hazy ones, is that my hind-brain stubbornly kept telling me as the skies darkened from the partial eclipse that the skies were darkening because of the clouds, even though I could see perfectly well that the clouds were not noticeably getting thicker (and in fact were, if anything, dissipating). After having experienced the eclipse in 2017, I now knew that it doesn't get fully pitch black like pictures can make it look, but that's actually really interesting because unlike sunset, it's darker (still not pitch black, but darker) in the middle of the sky but it looks like dawn all around the horizon. Where we got to was about 3 1/2 minutes of totality.
Afterwards we walked along the creek and a nice couple lent us their binoculars so we could see a bald eagle nesting in the tree, which was quite cool -- they said they'd been watching it all afternoon. (Not during the eclipse, I imagine!)
This happens to be the second time that we have majorly lucked out with the weather, when the day before it looked not so promising (D showed me the forecast showing a line of clouds lining up exactly with the line of totality) but then the actual day of the eclipse turned out clear. Really grateful we got to see it! E in particular thought it was amazing (she dimly remembers 2017, enough that she was excited for this one) and actually thanked us for bringing her to see it!
-D's sister ("S") was sufficiently worried by our Christmas adventures that she made D's dad ("Papa") go to the doctor and take a cognitive functioning test, the results of which were that if he'd got one less point on the test, he would have been diagnosed with mild dementia. So there's that. S then booked a flight for herself and one of her teenage daughters the first week of April to figure out what the terms of their parents' trust is, get power of attorney, hire a cleaner for him, and so on.
D's brother saw the house a week or two before she came out and said that it looked "worse than ever," which is rather alarming considering that it's only been a few months since we saw him (and it had had a couple of years to get into that state before we saw him). S concurred entirely with their brother's statement when she got out there. She also found that someone, not Papa, has been withdrawing money from his bank account. Anyway, long story short, she and D and Papa were eventually able to get all the financial stuff sorted and D now has power of attorney. But major warning: if your parents have a trust, if you don't have a copy of it, at least make sure you at least know the lawyer/firm who wrote the trust! (This took a while to figure out.)
At this point S. convinced Papa to live in a senior independent-living apartment which we are all SO relieved about. It turns out that his biggest concern was that he didn't like the permanence of it -- he worried that once he got there, if he didn't like it, he'd be trapped there forever. So they aren't making any permanent moves -- keeping his house for now, etc. But now he is in said apartment! As far as I can tell, the ENTIRE timeline from Papa agreeing to this to him being installed in the apartment was literally less than 36 hours. D told me about it Wednesday night, and by Thursday night S had sent out pics on their family group text with him installed in this apartment (apparently they had a single one left and she jumped on it). I do not know how S is a legit member of D's family, none of the other members of which can make a decision with more than literal years of lead time! But I hope that he is able to find this place less overwhelming and more sociable. I also hope that he does not move right back into his house now that S. has gone home.
-My dad is now officially diagnosed with "very mild" dementia (which he emphatically contests). Around this time (though I think it was a couple of weeks before the diagnosis was given) my parents thought it was an A-OK idea for my dad to fly to LA by himself, without mom, to see some long-lost relatives he had just found, on the weekend when our whole family was going to St. Louis TO SEE THEM. (Okay, to see the eclipse, but we did do things like schedule an extra day into the visit to make it longer, etc.) My dad's flight to LA was a direct flight (I don't think they would have done it if it wasn't) and cousins met him at the airport, and it DID actually all work out all right and he got back safely, but wow. We did actually see him briefly in the airport as we came in and he was about to leave! This worked out well because his gate had changed and I was able to walk him to the new gate. (He also told me as we were halfway to his new gate that he'd forgotten what the new gate was. He did once travel a lot for work, so I think he would have been able to figure it out, but I think it was also good that I was there.) Also, his flights from St. Louis to LA the Friday before the eclipse and LA to St. Louis after the eclipse was over were not very full, I suppose in retrospect totally not surprisingly.
( Papa, funeral, etc. )
The post I was going to post: A busy couple of weeks for us/extended family. Eclipse, father-in-law moved to independent living, dad traveled to LA
-We saw our family's second eclipse! Stayed with my sister's family (my sister's husband is really a great guy who did not bat an eye at our coming and invading his house for a long weekend -- of course we tried to help out as much as we could, like babysitting so they could go on a date night, and I folded a lot of clothes -- and the kids had a great time playing with cousins and playing Xbox with cousins!) and drove south from St. Louis for three and a half hours that morning to get into totality range. (We picked south because of the marginally higher probability that it would be clear, though luckily for everyone, it turns out that all the skies around were pretty clear with just a bit of haze.) There was -- well, I would have said "a lot of traffic," but it seems like it wasn't actually a lot compared to what I hear from people on the East Coast -- it took maybe double the amount of time it would have taken if the roads had been clear. We did also run into something it looks like a lot of people ran into: Google Maps sending everyone to rural roads and then the traffic backing up a lot there (unlike a lot of other people's experiences, this was interestingly more pronounced on the way to the eclipse than back). Apple Maps seemed slightly better at figuring this out.
At about 1:10 (totality was scheduled at about 1:58), I started looking around for places to go, and found a recreational area near a creek that was about ten minutes away, so we went there, while the kids and I periodically looked through our eclipse glasses in the car when we could see the sun. When we got there -- and this was basically in the middle of nowhere in rural Missouri -- there were like 50 or so other people there who had had the same idea. It was neat to see it with other people -- it wasn't crowded, but it was reasonably full. Also, A. had running water to throw rocks into, which he was possibly more excited about than about the eclipse :) The interesting thing about having some clouds, even wispy hazy ones, is that my hind-brain stubbornly kept telling me as the skies darkened from the partial eclipse that the skies were darkening because of the clouds, even though I could see perfectly well that the clouds were not noticeably getting thicker (and in fact were, if anything, dissipating). After having experienced the eclipse in 2017, I now knew that it doesn't get fully pitch black like pictures can make it look, but that's actually really interesting because unlike sunset, it's darker (still not pitch black, but darker) in the middle of the sky but it looks like dawn all around the horizon. Where we got to was about 3 1/2 minutes of totality.
Afterwards we walked along the creek and a nice couple lent us their binoculars so we could see a bald eagle nesting in the tree, which was quite cool -- they said they'd been watching it all afternoon. (Not during the eclipse, I imagine!)
This happens to be the second time that we have majorly lucked out with the weather, when the day before it looked not so promising (D showed me the forecast showing a line of clouds lining up exactly with the line of totality) but then the actual day of the eclipse turned out clear. Really grateful we got to see it! E in particular thought it was amazing (she dimly remembers 2017, enough that she was excited for this one) and actually thanked us for bringing her to see it!
-D's sister ("S") was sufficiently worried by our Christmas adventures that she made D's dad ("Papa") go to the doctor and take a cognitive functioning test, the results of which were that if he'd got one less point on the test, he would have been diagnosed with mild dementia. So there's that. S then booked a flight for herself and one of her teenage daughters the first week of April to figure out what the terms of their parents' trust is, get power of attorney, hire a cleaner for him, and so on.
D's brother saw the house a week or two before she came out and said that it looked "worse than ever," which is rather alarming considering that it's only been a few months since we saw him (and it had had a couple of years to get into that state before we saw him). S concurred entirely with their brother's statement when she got out there. She also found that someone, not Papa, has been withdrawing money from his bank account. Anyway, long story short, she and D and Papa were eventually able to get all the financial stuff sorted and D now has power of attorney. But major warning: if your parents have a trust, if you don't have a copy of it, at least make sure you at least know the lawyer/firm who wrote the trust! (This took a while to figure out.)
At this point S. convinced Papa to live in a senior independent-living apartment which we are all SO relieved about. It turns out that his biggest concern was that he didn't like the permanence of it -- he worried that once he got there, if he didn't like it, he'd be trapped there forever. So they aren't making any permanent moves -- keeping his house for now, etc. But now he is in said apartment! As far as I can tell, the ENTIRE timeline from Papa agreeing to this to him being installed in the apartment was literally less than 36 hours. D told me about it Wednesday night, and by Thursday night S had sent out pics on their family group text with him installed in this apartment (apparently they had a single one left and she jumped on it). I do not know how S is a legit member of D's family, none of the other members of which can make a decision with more than literal years of lead time! But I hope that he is able to find this place less overwhelming and more sociable. I also hope that he does not move right back into his house now that S. has gone home.
-My dad is now officially diagnosed with "very mild" dementia (which he emphatically contests). Around this time (though I think it was a couple of weeks before the diagnosis was given) my parents thought it was an A-OK idea for my dad to fly to LA by himself, without mom, to see some long-lost relatives he had just found, on the weekend when our whole family was going to St. Louis TO SEE THEM. (Okay, to see the eclipse, but we did do things like schedule an extra day into the visit to make it longer, etc.) My dad's flight to LA was a direct flight (I don't think they would have done it if it wasn't) and cousins met him at the airport, and it DID actually all work out all right and he got back safely, but wow. We did actually see him briefly in the airport as we came in and he was about to leave! This worked out well because his gate had changed and I was able to walk him to the new gate. (He also told me as we were halfway to his new gate that he'd forgotten what the new gate was. He did once travel a lot for work, so I think he would have been able to figure it out, but I think it was also good that I was there.) Also, his flights from St. Louis to LA the Friday before the eclipse and LA to St. Louis after the eclipse was over were not very full, I suppose in retrospect totally not surprisingly.
