Well, here is the new me, Bear-less and alone with two demented cats. The service on Saturday went well and I got lots of positive feedback on how it was organized. About 100 people showed up, mostly filling the hall, and about 60 came across the road for the wake. I saw many people I hadn't seen for years, and tried to do all the expected things while feeling like crawling under a rock and dying. I only blubbered at the end of my eulogy and I was very grateful for all the hugs and the support from most of the Bear's family, even his ex. The major disappointment was that his uncle, who used to be so close, said not a word to me and left to drive back to Sydney the minute the service was over. The other nightmare was trying to get the technical pieces in place. I was worried that a CD burned from iTunes format would not play on the church equipment (it did). Then I spent 2 days scanning photos for a slide show of the Bear's life. I found we had MS PowerPoint 2007 on the Big Computer and it happily accepted all the photos and made a simple but captioned presentation. Then I tried to save it to disc. Nope, wouldn't do it. Told me there was no disc in the drive (wrong). Then it saved it without the middle half. Then I tried to email it to myself from the Big Computer to my laptop and my ISP kept telling my mailbox was full when it was empty. Even their help desk was mystified. After many rude words I finally got it emailed and loaded and it played perfectly on the day but the stress of that on top of everything else was not what I needed the night before the service. The capper for the day was that I went out before the service to straighten the parking of the car and found it was dead. NRMA came quickly and diagnosed a dead battery (did the Bear forget that?) and arranged for someone to replace it, but told them that there was a service in the church at 2 PM. At 2.15 PM I got a call in the middle of my eulogy asking what service was at 2 PM and why was it scheduled for 3 PM. Our comedic moment for the day. J loyally negotiated the fix and his car was operational again. I found a home for his Civil War books (ADFA) and re-tightened the bonds with Brian's family. Once again I have managed to marry into a family that treats me better than my birth family did.