September has been quite the up and down month.

In the first week of the month, I injured my Achilles tendon. I've done it before so I knew what I was in store for. About four weeks later now, I think I'm finally back to normal.

I did have to fly to Philadelphia for work when dealing with my ankle, but everything worked out.

I then had to fly back to sync up with friends who had been planning to visit Sedona for a while, and then the day after they left, I learned that my step-father passed away.

He'd been in poor health for a while. Routinely in and out of the hospital. And while we knew his time was near, most of us thought he'd last until the holidays. He felt the end coming, having called me up just the weekend prior to say bye. It didn't feel particularly off, since he'd called me a few weeks before and said bye then, too.

I knew my mom would need some help, and I didn't want her to be alone, so I bought a one-way ticket to the coastline of Texas outside of Corpus Christi, and here I am helping her sift through the records and situation he left her in.

Here are some things we found out in the past few days that we weren't expecting.

  • He made minimum payments on a few personal credit cards, which were close to their limit. They were connected to autopay for various things. So him being in the hospital meant he didn't stay on top of them, and they quickly did get maxed out and bills started not to get paid. We had to deal with that quickly.
  • A few years ago, he got a debt consolidation loan. He'd paid it half-way down, but still a bit of a balance.
  • And the biggest bombshell... He was getting scammed out of many thousands of dollars by Mexican scammers. He owns a timeshare down there he'd wanted to sell, both to have it not be a burden on us and to be able to have that money for my mom. The story I found when we accessed his email showed us a steady stream of money being wired to accounts in Mexico, along with documents and correspondence always asking for more and more funds. If he could only send another $1,500 to authorize the transfer, his total sell price for the timeshare would be in his account tomorrow. Stuff like that. Repeatedly.

Anyway... Maybe once I know more I may write up more of a story about it. They called the first business day after he died, and my mom told them that he passed away. They immediately started work on her. How much money did she think was lost? They recovered a lot of cash and just wanted to get all that money back into the hands of the people who lost it.

Right. We need to see who best to report this to.

Right now, I'm anticipating spending a big chunk of October helping my mom out. My mom's going to be fine. She's got her own money, but my step-dad did have a nice retirement account he really wanted her to have. He had withdrawn some money from it in what must have been some last-ditch effort in his belief in these scammers. Thankfully, it wasn't more.

As a transition to my list of movies for the month, here's a beetle my wife found outside our front door.

Movies

I wasn't going to list any films, but I saw a few and don't want to skip them.

  • Gods of Egypt (2016) was awful, but still a bit fun.
  • Fear Street: Prom Queen had super dumb characters, but somewhat okay to watch.
  • Death of a Unicorn felt like a film with a decent premise, but the filmmakers didn't quite know how to m.
  • Bad Indian - Hiding in Antelope Canyon was a pretty good documentary about some Native American history I'm sure most of us weren't aware of.
  • Fountain of Youth. Ugh.
  • The First Slam Dunk (2022) was the best film I saw all month. Amazing animation and a wonderful story.
  • K-Pop Demon Hunters. Okay, after hearing all the hype, I had to watch it. I enjoyed it, but not quite sure it's deserving of all the hype.
  • The Long Walk wasn't quite a horror film, but it did have some seat churning moments.
  • 28 Years Later had some decent scenes, but the boring parts were too long. Happy I saw this in a way I could fast forward.
  • One Battle After Another was good, especially a specific car chase sequence at the end of the movie that was quite impressive.
  • The Return of the Pink Panther (1975). With everything that happened with my step-dad, my mom and I watched this on TCM, and it took me back to being a 9-year-old seeing this for the first time, cracking up the entire time. It ended up being the perfect film for me to watch with my mom. Mindless, slapstick comedy that returned us to another time.
The Return of the Pink Panther