Oy, a day for dealing with the blacksheep of the family. First, my uncle who has lived the last few years of his life tied to Nigerian e-mail scams. He was good for a while after my mom kicked him out after learning about it all. He was living in a senior apartment complex downtown, keeping clean, then ran into an old high school friend and ended up moving in with her. Well, it didn't last long as he fell into the scams again, not only sending most of his Social Security check each month to them (he was living rent-free, so had very minimal expenses), but then started asking his girlfriend, and her family and friends for money, too. On top of it all, she developed cancer, and he could never be bothered to even help her around the house, and demanded she drive him down to Western Union even when she was feeling like shit. So she finally kicked him out, and he moved back to Portland (on her dime no less). But he still had about a dozen boxes of his stuff in her garage, and STILL kept e-mailing her asking for money so "he could help her" with the money he'd get from some rich African prince. So my mom and I went to her place and hauled away his shit so she could make a clean break and get back to taking care of herself instead of him. Apologizing for the way he treated her never felt so inadequate.
Which brings me to part 2, my sister. The only available storage was my grandparents' old house, which was put into trust between my mother and her 4 brothers (one of whom has since died), and since the housing market in the area is still shit and nobody gets along, my sister lives there as a caretaker of sorts, using her disability payments to keep up on utilities and taxes. She also a drug addict/alcoholic, and is right out of those pictures that went around a bit ago about tracking the life of an addict through their mug shots. She's 44, and looks older than my mother, who's 70. So we get there, and while she's shown the tendencies before, this time going into parts of the house and the yard was like stepping into an episode of Hoarders. So much USELESS shit all over the place. She had about 14-15 large plastic storage containers stacked in the laundry room with clothes, a solid block 5x6 feet, and stacked nearly 4 feet high. In the backyard shed where we took my uncle's boxes, there were 4 inoperable weed-whackers, 7 or 8 bikes, and just broken power tools and... I dunno, strewn everywhere. We grew up with our grandparents in that house, and they always took such pride in how it looked, inside and out. It's heartbreaking to see how bad it all is now, and to feel... nothing... when I visit or look at it. It's not the home they made for us and themselves anymore. It's just lumber and drywall and plaster with a (leaky) roof over it.
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Topic: Blog Thread 4; Live Free or Blog Hard - 'cos we all like blogging (Read 562322 times)