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Holiday Greetings 2004-2005
Holiday Newsletter 2004-2005
The big news is that my mother died this past September-- September 11, to be exact. I won't have any trouble remembering that date.
The funeral was as expected. The usual collection of relatives showed up: people I only see at funerals. The standard things were said. It all went by the book.
We all saw it coming, for some months. My mother's mind had completely gone, and she was fading slowly over time. Honestly, I felt more a sense of relief when it happened than anything else.
Of course, once death comes, the lawyers start circling around to feast on the remains. My mother had quite a bit of money left (despite the nursing home's efforts to squeeze every penny out). So now the whole thing has to go through all sorts of legal wrangling.
Basically, I am told that if I want to keep getting SSI and Medicaid, a trust fund has to be set up. The rules of the trust fund can be summed up in this way: I can't get directly at the money-- and I can't buy anything useful with it. Stay at an expensive hotel? No problem. Pay rent with it? No can do. Eat at a restaurant every night? Go right ahead. Buy food with it? Nope. Buy a car? Sure. Use the car to go to sci fi conventions to sell stuff? Probably not.
The temptation to simply tell the lawyers to put the money in a pile and burn it is almost overwhelming.
Obviously, I won't be able to use my inheritance to get out of Nightmare World. I will have to get together enough money for a month's rent, and then move out. After a month, SSI will kick in, and I will have options.
Right now, it looks like moving back to Columbia, MO for a month is my best bet. I'm familiar with the place, and the rent is cheap.
On a positive front, I now have a computer: a Dell Latitude C600 laptop, donated to me by a friend on the B9 robot builder's club. I've managed to buy myself a thrift store printer, which works OK, as long as I set the resolution to 780 dpi.
I spend my days on the Internet. For my business (which consists of selling on ebay and messing around with HTML), I spend a couple of hours online. For fun-- I go online and look up various stuff.
I've found, for instance, that if you look hard enough, you can find any kind of software you want online, for free. And I'm not talking crippled software, or software with time limits.
I wrote up my experiences and submitted it onto an online fanzine: Surprising Stories. The URL is here.
It amazes me how so many people are willing to discard old computers. I am a big fan of thrift stores, and every time I go to one, I see good, still working computer equipment available for small amounts of money. I suspect that my next article for Surprising Stories will be called "Thrift Store Computing."
I've also gone back to other things I did on the web, such as collecting every LIS fan page out there. You can see my work on that project here. That website also has a bio of sorts for me here.
That address on the back of this card is one I use for important mail (mail gets stolen a lot here). I am still at the Big Bend Woods address. Hopefully, by my next update, I'll be out of here, and back to the land of the semi sane.
A lot of things get stolen here. But it's a peculiar kind of thievery. I have computer software all over the place in my room, but that never gets stolen. I have a box full of computer parts, including CD ROM drives-- and that stuff never gets touched. Books are left alone. But food-- that disappears all the time. It's not the rersidents doing the stealing: it's the staff.
And that's about it. By my next holiday mailing, I am sure that I will have some good news for everyone.
My PO Box address:
Flint Mitchell
PO Box 190401
St. Louis, MO 63119
Send E-Mail to: lisfanpress@hotmail.com
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