I just had to capture that shot of Mom plugging her iron in!

This morning, Wendy picked me up and took me to IKEA. I haven’t been to one in years and I had forgotten how big they are! I think this might only be my second time in one. Wendy has a program on her phone that lets her know how far she’s gone, and when we got back out to the car, it said we had gone a mile and a half while we were there!

Wendy was looking for some storage boxes. I didn’t go with any preconceived ideas of what I wanted because I didn’t know what they had, but I ended up buying a pet hair remover for $2.99. Tucson gets hair all over everything, so we’ll see how this works.

When we had finished walking around the second floor, Wendy bought me lunch at the food court. I had plant balls, mashed potatoes, peas, and lingonberry sauce. It was almost like Thanksgiving! Wendy recently got off chemo for breast cancer and is now on another medication that makes her extremely fatigued and makes most foods taste bad to her. She got some soup and a scone and something else I can’t remember.

We had a good long talk. One of the things we talked about is the situation with Dad’s hearing aids. The receptionist at Miracle-Ear called while we were having lunch and I put Wendy on the phone with her to talk about having Jim write out a transfer of ownership if we sell Dad’s hearing aids online. She did that with her mother’s hearing aids when she sold them to a man in Ohio who couldn’t get his local Miracle-Ear office to set them up for him. With the transfer of ownership, the man was able to get it done.

Wendy got me back to Mom’s house in time for me to jump in the car and head over to Dad’s house. As soon as I walked in the door, Dad said, “I have a job for you!” He’s working on getting his taxes ready again. He said he’s getting close but he wanted help with writing all the tax-deductible expenses down in groups. For instance, he had bills from oncology every month so we needed to add up everything he spent for oncology and put it down on one line for his CPA. The only problem was, we couldn’t find his check register from 2023. I hunted high and low for it and it was not to be found. However, besides writing his expenses down in his check register, he also kept track of them in a book, so we were pretty much able to get the figures we needed from there.

Dad read to me what he thought was tax deductible and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. When we had gone all the way from January to December, I told Dad I wanted to look at his book to be sure I had gotten everything right. It’s a good thing I did because he had missed several entries.

While we were doing all this, Elaine was out running errands. By the way, their mail delivery person told them today that their mailbox is fixed from when it was broken into, so Elaine doesn’t have to go to the post office anymore to get their mail! Anyway, when she returned, I told her I needed to talk with her about something. I told her about the idea of selling Dad’s hearing aids online to get the money they need to pay off the loan. She said she doesn’t know how to do that, so I told her that I would see if Lauryn knows how. Turns out she doesn’t, but Mark does, so I’ll be taking the hearing aids back with me.

When I got home, Mom was eager to hear all about my day. I told her everything and then we played a game of Scrabble. I won handily. Mom was bummed at first, but I reminded her that I lost both games yesterday and she and Laura each won one, so she allowed me to have my win today.

Tomorrow is Mark’s birthday, so if you have greetings for him, send them to me and I’ll pass them along. This is the big 7-0!