We are not leaving for New Jersey tonight after all; there are a few reasons for this but the main one is Veterans Day. Government offices will all be closed, so we would have only tomorrow to get things done. Instead we plan to go up next week. A and I each get three days of bereavement leave from work, so I am thinking we will go up next Tuesday night and stay through Saturday morning (leaving earlier if we’re done earlier).

My father’s brother says the estate is worth $100,000 but I’m thinking it will be less than that. My father had $11,000 in a bank account, a heavily-modified (to hold ham equipment) Ford Escort that’s five or six years old, and his trailer. I did a little poking around and it seems trailers sell for between $8,000 and $30,000 - this one is apparently in bad condition so it will probably be at the lower end of that range. There is a bunch of electronics and ham equipment in the trailer too; no idea how much that’s all going to turn out to be worth. We don’t know who is the beneficiary on the life insurance, and we don’t know if my father had a safe deposit box, so I am thinking all of this will come to about $50,000 at most. (These numbers absolutely stupefy me, I’ve never had that much money.) $5,000 of that will be going to reimburse my father’s brother for the funeral (I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t found in time for that, and I think the delay might have been semi-intentional), and I also plan to give him a portion to thank him for doing the right thing and contacting me. The rest is going to be college money - I never finished, and I’m hoping there will be enough for me to cut work back to part-time and get a degree.