flattened

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I spent 7 hours today helping my friend write a rebuttal to pages and pages of absolute dreck, written about her by her sister, as they try and settle her father's Estate. We ended up with an 11 page document.

Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to go, paragraph by paragraph, through family history, some of it painful, and through lies and allegations, all of them despicable, for 7 hours? This was killing me, I cannot imagine the havoc it wreaked on my poor friend.

She held up pretty well, actually, mostly because I just wouldn't let her get to into any one thing. I tried to keep it moving -- she would start getting involved in a painful story, and I would cut her short and say, "That doesn't matter now, we have to answer this with facts -- " and I kept her busy finding letters and dates and names and addresses.

I feel that we did a good job of providing a lot of information and evidence to show that her sister is insane, psychotic, and not to be trusted, without ever actually using any of those terms. There was no character assassination, just-the-facts, ma'am. I hope her lawyer makes something of it and they make some progress in settling the Estate, because my friend has been dealing with this crap since her father died in July of 2002! It is way too stressful on her.

I do wish she would come here. She has a weight problem, too, and could really use a support system.

A word of thanks to my Mom, who didn't mind being stuck in the house again all day (or if she did, she didn't mention it to me), and who cooked a really nice dinner for us all. Fortunately for me, I'd thought ahead last night and took out a pork roast to defrost, so all the thinking about it was already done.

Back in my own life, I was grumpy with the kids all evening, and then shooed them off when my older brother called to gloat about the Patriots and decry the abject failure of the Eagles. Still, it was a pretty down day. You can't not be affected by doing work like that all day. I just hope that my friend can start moving on now that this huge task is behind her.