[Elspode]

I keep forgetting to add (and I'm sure that at some point you people are going to think that I'm making all this up, but it is all too sadly true) that my wife's maternal Aunt Judy passed over on Saturday night, and so we will be driving down to South Central Missouri on Thursday morning for a funeral service, then turning around and driving back up to Belton (the town on the immediate Southern border of Grandview, where I live) for internment. I am to be a pallbearer.

While my wife talked from the waiting room to her mother, making our plans for the Thursday event, her mother informed her that her 90 year old paternal Aunt Cora was displaying severe symptoms of congestive heart failure, and might be on her last legs as well. She, too, lives down at the lake near the rest of my wife's core of family.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that we will be attending, participating in or otherwise facilitating three funerals within a week's time, all during the holidays.

You can't make this stuff up, people. You'd be a sick fuck if you did.