Born in Limerick, I hope she reaches 100 and doesn’t get a letter from the Queen (unlikely) or King (it’s a thing they have a secretary to for centenarians but not those born in Free Ireland).
So I recently wrote to my brother. The garage - I lived there for several years in the 2000’s - will need to be cleared out at some point. There’s bowling balls on the high shelf. Look out! 16 pounders! Small yet well traveled Celestron scope in a 47th street photo camera case. I haven’t flown with it since 2011 yet that aluminum tube and wires, eyepieces and solar filter. At least at the time you could see what the security guy sees and yet no problemo getting it through. Carry on too. Told my brother he could keep it. Just don’t look at the Moon with the Solar Filter on.
So what else - oh yeah a shipment of the ingredients to make GHB. Perfectly legal “sleep aid” at the time. After AG John Ashcroft warned us all to get duct tape and tarps to ward off Al-Qaeda’s next dastardly move he was onto date-rape drugs. Everyone knew “Rohypnol” or “roofies”. Never approved for use in the in USA, it was in the family of benzodiazepines like Valium (benzodiazapam). GBH - a fairly easy thing to make (although so extremely salty nobody would drink it unknowingly) was also a quite good sleep aid and unfairly banned as well. Oh well, Republican AG’s are always right so this stuff in my mom’s garage was DEA Schedule III.
The two main ingredients were medical-grade floor cleaner and NaOH (Sodium Hydroxide) or commonly known as drain cleaner. I told my brother: Clear stuff - clean the floor. White powder: clean the drains.
I used to have a couple Navy 1851 (or so?) pistols so had a canister of smokeless powder. I tried to make it clear that this stuff was safe & organic and could be diluted and sprinkled on the lawn. In one of my brother’s messages he mentioned he’d found the BLACK powder and I quickly messaged him not to tell LEO that he had some BLACK powder lying around else my mom’s house would be swarmed by the PD & FD. Smokeless powder. Safe.
My mom passed October of 2022. She had a nice little 1000 sq. ft. house. She was neet as a pin and very organized.
She had been slowly getting rid of her stuff.
Still it took 14 SUV loads to donation centers, and finally a box truck with two strong dudes to get the big stuff. That also was donated, but we had to pay them to pick it up. Wasn’t expensive.
We thought of other options. Estate sale (companies not interested), house/yard sale (I live 100 miles away).
None of us needed more stuff.
That’s when we decided to just donate everything. It would have made mom happy.
Sorry about your Mom. Dunno the square footage of this house yet I reckon it’s perhaps 2000 sq ft. My parents moved there in 1999 yet my dad passed in 2000 so - except for the times I lived there in the spare bedroom - it’s been a lot of house for my mom of 95. While I was there she fainted/collapse at least once and last year fell in the bathroom, broke her leg, didn’t have her medic alert bracelet on her and after three days a police check found her.
She’s got “carers” who come by twice a day. She certainly has a better life than her younger brother in Dublin who has Alzheimer’s yet she’s too stubborn to move out. She’s in New York, I’m in the UK and only one brother and his daughter are family. Oddly, the middle brother lives 100 yards away yet has no contact and that’s another story. My mom has a rather large collection of Waterford Crystal - the real stuff made in Waterford and that’ll be gone quick.
I opened this thread about stuff my (good) brother can take away now. Bowling balls on the top shelf (Ow!), worthy telescopes and a floor cleaner substance that was legal when I got it but DEA scheduled after. Oh, and that is safe smokeless powder - you can throw a match on it - and not “my youngest brothers bunch of black powder” which would have been reckless to leave behind and probably would have self-ignited and taken out the garage at least in the 10 years since I left.
She broke her hip on the NYC subway (we were there for daughter-in-law’s 50th), has heart fibrillation issues, she’s outlived her older brother and sister and may outlive me!
I bought her an emergency button, but she would not wear it. It hung on her walker. It may have weighed a half of an ounce. But too uncomfortable.
It was a bone of contention between us. Oh she would say she wore it when I was not visiting her. I knew that was complete horseshit.
I live 100 miles away. When a visiting nurse could not get her to answer the door, I got the phone call, and then I would call my cousin that was only 15 minutes away. That happened three times.