La Bene Vita

Funerals

Today is the second funeral in less than a week. Luckily, they're not both mine.

Some of you know I sing professionally (at restaurants as well as funerals), own and operate a music school, direct a church praise band, and write freelance for a copy mill. And that's just what I do for a living. As hobbies, I also write fiction and design websites for churches and charities. So you can imagine I'm pretty busy.

It wasn't enough, apparently. I decided I needed a second music school, so I started looking at commercial real estate. Then I decided our church needed a youth praise band, so I formed one, picked music and started new rehearsals. All of this seemed like a good idea at the time, until I saw my mother-in-law's office this weekend.

OMG.

Her finances and the office are a mess. An absolute, stinking mess. She cannot keep up. She's incurring debt, getting late fees for forgetting payments, and simply not earning enough to pay the bills. A woman who worked her entire life, up until about ten years ago when she finally retired (she's 74), now does not have enough funds from a pension and a social security check to pay for a mortgage on an $80k house that she's lived he most of her adult life, the utilities on said house, a modest cable package, Medicare supplemental premiums, groceries and insurance. She doesn't even drive anywhere and *maybe* fills up her gas tank once a month.

It's pathetic that we allow our elderly to live like this.

And to make matters worse, she's losing her short-term memory, which is making it more and more difficult to keep up with the bills logistically, even if she had enough funds.

So I have another project on my hands. Because I needed another one. Stuff like this always happens right AFTER I decided I had enough time to expand my business and start a new music group at church.

Of the children and children-in-law, I'm the most financially savvy, so I'll be helping her clean up the office, figuring out what's in all the piles of paperwork, getting her taxes filed, and helping her make sure she doesn't get $35 late fees she can't afford. Perhaps she can afford her bills, and we just need to get her financial house in order, but Keith and I are taking it a step further. She's in fairly good health, but she's getting forgetful about things like whether she took her medication today. So we've offered to cohabitate. Since both our houses are tiny, we're house hunting.

Because I need yet another project.

Just to be clear, all of my projects - each and every single one, including helping my mother-in-law figure out her budget and looking at future music school locations and personal residences with streams and acreages and decks and walk-out basements - are all wicked fun. The kids in my new youth praise band are amazing, and I can't throw new songs a them fast enough. The clothing and furniture ministry loved their new website and tore up the training to maintain it.  I just can't find time to play video games, watch the actual movies that go with the Oscars I watched last night (it's all about the jokes and dresses, really),

...or keep up with it all. And that's the real bummer.

So, I prioritize, and things fall to the bottom of the list or off altogether. I let people down, which is the worst part. The pastor must have asked me a dozen times in the last three months how the church website revision is going, and I have to keep apologizing that it's not done, after how much I hyped it. I've written nothing but one Cramp entry and half a dozen blog posts since NaNo.

I need two of me. I'm taking volunteers for the second me. Seriously, just read back over that list again. You know you wanna do all that.