Unexpected Productivity

Dearest Rachel –

Now, you know from experience that, when I get sick, I’m knocked out for the better part of a day, at the bare minimum. It’s not a week of feeling crummy like Daniel has, nor is it a month of mild malaise like you used to deal with. It’s generally a couple of days fairly solid coughing, sneezing, congested, can-barely-move-a-muscle-without-pain incapacitation. I get everything, everywhere, all at once, to borrow a phrase currently making the rounds (I think from last weekend’s Oscars ceremony, actually, which no, I didn’t watch). As a result, you wouldn’t expect me to accomplish much while I’m laid up.

Similarly, even when I’m healthy, staying at home has never been a good plan for me to get anything done. There’s just too much other stuff to do around here, little of it productive. Honestly, you would probably be able to agree simply from your own experience; while there may have been chores that needed to get done, there’s also too much fun stuff to really make you want to. Trust me, I get it; it’s why I made a point to set up an ‘office’ across town at the folks’ – if I was home all the time, I would just hang out with you two, and both get in your way and not make one of my own.

So, with these two things in mind, you wouldn’t expect anything to come of a Monday morning in which I elected to stay home, in part because I was still feeling less than a hundred percent (I might be able to tell that I was getting better, but clearly not all the way back yet), but also due to the fact that Dad was having a procedure done to close up his old feeding tube access port, and needed to quarantine himself beforehand. Technically, he was only required to keep six feet of distance from me (or, I guess, anyone else – I don’t know where Mom fit into this equation), but considering my recent, and ongoing, illness, why take chances?

By the way, the surgery apparently went well, and he was home before Sparks got started last night, so I’m glad of that, as well as that I likely made the right call in staying away. But doing so still meant that I was unlikely to get anything productive accomplished for the day, between my recovery and just that fact that I was home instead of at the ‘office,’ where I could focus on my ‘work’ – although given that I refer to both in quotes like that, you might ask whether it matters.

And yesterday morning, to be honest, it didn’t, because I was.

***

Even before your passing, we talked about setting Daniel up with a checking account so that he could begin to learn how to take care of what few bills he had in real life. Since then, it’s become that much more imperative, since your estate was to be split evenly between me and him. Now, he has income to deal with (although that makes it sound so much worse than it ought to – “oh, poor me, I’ve got all this money coming in, what am I going to do?”), so he needs to be able to check on it, move it around as necessary, and send it out to pay this bill or that.

Moreover, there are tax ramifications. And while I’m here at home this year to take care of things, that isn’t going to be the case next year, what with the extended nature of next spring’s cruise. Sure, most of it can be handled remotely, but there will be the odd piece of documentation coming in by way of actual mail, and Daniel will need to scan certain things in order for me to be aware of them.

So – since I’d just discovered how this scanner works to create .pdf files (seriously; I’d been converting .jpgs to .pdfs up until the beginning of this week – don’t I feel silly), and one last tax form had just arrived for him (as well as one for you, I should mention. Not the estate, you, personally… I don’t know how that happened, or what’s to be done about it, but I forwarded it on to our tax firm, in any event) – I decided I’d walk him through the process. I called him up to the office, and showed him the software and the scanner; what to click on, how to add pages, and how to complete the process. Fairly straightforward, as far as I was concerned, but I certainly hope he remembers by this time next year.

And before I let him go, I also told him to stick around while we set him up to access his bank account online. We’d tried several times and places before, but for whatever reason, we never could see the buttons to press to continue and complete the process. It may have had to do with the fact that we were on old computers with old operating systems, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, we could never get past the second of five steps until yesterday. But this time, everything worked perfectly; I even showed him how to go online and pay his credit card as well. So now that’s over and down with – at least, until next month.

Just think; this is something we’ve been meaning to do for months, now. And we got it all done before eleven, so he could go and take a bath for the rest of the day. Sure, the rest of the day was going to be a complete washout, but we got all this done in a couple of hours, and with me still recovering from… whatever it is I’m still dealing with. So I’m feeling pretty satisfied about it all.

Just… don’t ask me about today…

Anyway, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish us luck. We’re going to need it.