Professional document management and liaison services for Central Texas families navigating life’s transitions.
Austin, Texas
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
PSA: Your washing machine won't reliably kill ticks, but your dryer will.
A USDA entomologist figured this out after he found a live one crawling on his washer's agitator. So he bagged up tick nymphs and ran them through the laundry. Most survived the cold and warm cycles. 95% of the lone star ticks survived hot water.
What killed them is the dryer.
A CDC team later found that dry clothes tossed straight into the dryer on high heat killed the ticks in about 6 minutes. Washing first made it worse: the damp load took 50 minutes on high to do the same job. Ticks die by drying out, and wet clothes buy them time.
In a lot of the country, adult deer ticks get a second season in October and November, right when everyone's out raking leaves. They don't quit at the first frost. They're out on any day warm enough, even in winter.
When you come in from the yard or from a long hike this fall, put your clothes in the dryer on high for 10 minutes, then wash them. The ticks won't stand a chance.
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
I'm working on a new AI list for @Forbes, and I'm looking for surprising ways people are using AI agents. It could be a startup or an unusual way you're using AI to run your personal or work life. No coding agents; I'm looking for out-of-the-box use cases. Please reach out!
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Your can of pumpkin puree is squash. Libby's grows and cans a tan, oblong variety from the butternut family and labels it 100% pure pumpkin.
That's legal, and FDA has said so in writing since 1938. Their compliance guide tells canners the agency will not take action against the word pumpkin on anything made from golden fleshed, sweet squash. Pumpkin has no real botanical definition and it's a word for certain types of squash.
The variety is called Dickinson, the same species as butternut, and Libby's grows it by the thousands of acres around its cannery in Morton, Illinois.
Libby's makes about 85% of the canned pumpkin in the country and doesn't hide any of this. Nestle's own harvest release names the variety and says outright that pumpkin is a form of squash.
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
HEADS UP! 🌖🔴 This week a LUNAR ECLIPSE will be visible across the United States Thursday evening into early Friday morning! 96% of the Moon’s visible disk will slip into Earth’s shadow. So close to totality that most of it will have a red tint while only a thin bright sliver remains.
Peak Viewing Times
Eastern: 12:13 AM (Friday)
Central: 11:13 PM (Thursday)
Mountain: 10:13 PM (Thursday)
Pacific: 9:13 PM (Thursday)
Only wild card of course will be your local weather, hope for the best! This should be one of the best lunar eclipses visible from the Unites States until the next total lunar eclipse in December 2028. Enjoy and get those cameras ready!
- Matt Devitt Weather
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Thank you, Smiley, for allowing us to see what sometimes happens with estate sales. I’ve seen this scenario happen more than once, unfortunately.
The replies to this post are interesting and eye opening.
Selling off items from my dads estate has been eye opening, we have had 4 estate sales, the first three advertised like normal, the last we advertised everything as a dollar or free. The people the last one drew was interesting, they were the most entitled people, complaining about things that were not free and expecting to be given discounts on things already marked at $1. Never again, I’ll throw it all away before i do that again.
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Tip: Avoid this scenario. Donate or dispose those items. Strange people show up to these sales if it’s all $1/free items.
Selling off items from my dads estate has been eye opening, we have had 4 estate sales, the first three advertised like normal, the last we advertised everything as a dollar or free. The people the last one drew was interesting, they were the most entitled people, complaining about things that were not free and expecting to be given discounts on things already marked at $1. Never again, I’ll throw it all away before i do that again.
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Start conversations with elders in neutral settings, such as bookstores, coffeehouses, or supermarkets.
Elder women are more forgiving and patient than most people.
Better yet, when’s the last time you called your grandmother? 🙂
unironically I do think a lot of the “male loneliness epidemic” comes from struggling with these sort of basic interactions that are the basis of all socialization and I thought this was a great little video for yall!
bring back small talk ‼️‼️
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
Had a random thought:
I wonder about the person who is a bit of a recluse, doesn’t have much family or many close friends, lives alone, and perhaps lives in a home with significant clutter or hoarding.
What happens if they have a will, trust, or other important estate planning documents, but those documents are never found?
People sometimes assume there’s some national registry where you can search for someone’s estate-planning documents.
There isn’t.
Not to mention, most estate documents aren’t filed with the county either. Most states and counties don’t require it or even allow it, although there are a few exceptions.
So, yes, you can have a perfectly valid estate plan that essentially becomes a needle in a haystack if no one knows it exists or where to find it.
Anyway, that’s my random estate planning thought for the day. Kind of surprised I haven’t actually worked on a case like that. 🙃
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This is why I follow Louis Rossmann. His X presence isn't great, so follow him on YT:
Reading a letter from a caretaker of Multiple Sclerosis patient that was... piped.video/pdCFw2BjST0?si=N09e… via @YouTube
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
The next time I insulate any space it’s going to be US wool.
Sheep wool insulation batts from @HavelockWool ... amazing
Cool way to support wool, US manufacturing, and get a healthy home
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My dream job, but if I was a scientist, too. *sigh*
How do I hire a freelance bookworm to help me accumulate material science-related books?
I want to accumulate pre-AI era books as a reference for my company, and to preserve them.
Some will be limited-distribution and of very limited availability.
What do you call a person like this? Researcher? Archivist?
Where do you find them? How would you hire them?
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Why not?
I'm looking for the best creative storytellers on the planet! Click the link, enter your email, answer 3 questions. That's all you have to do to apply to work with me. We’re reviewing every application, let’s change the world :D
mrbeastjobs.com/creatives?v=…
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Instead of dreading this, I'm interested in this.
Sometimes, my clients want me to be a housekeeper on top of my organizing and coordinator duties.
If this comes to Austin, I'd love to offer this as a peripheral service to what I do.
This is incredible. I'm following you now.
Today, we’re launching Tau’s humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco at $30 per hour.
Access is initially invite-only as we scale operations. If you don’t have an invite yet, join the waitlist at tau-robotics.com.
All footage is shown at 1× speed. Each humanoid is jointly controlled by a human operator and AI.
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.
Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.
When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.
That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.
Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.
(I am open to being corrected.)
Full writeup: open.substack.com/pub/charli…
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
August is packed with opportunities to connect!
Oasis Senior Advisors Austin & Central Texas invites you to join us each Tuesday morning in July for SIS Just Networking—free, casual networking events where senior care professionals build relationships, share resources, and...
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Pam is a great source of information on all things concerning the household.
ANNOUNCING: Saturday Morning with Pam! 📣 | Weekly Community Q&A & News piped.video/shorts/V94JBT8Bq… via @YouTube
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I knew about this early in my career. Good to know!
Why would someone turn down a big ol' pile of money? 💰 A few specific circumstances might warrant it.
📖 Article by @WSJ
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Austin Organized: Managing Documents & Estates retweeted
do I have any followers who have a child (or an adult child) who requires constant supervision/care who have tried to find long term residential care for them? If so, would you be willing to talk to me about that experience?
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Too many books? Of course not.
However, the Professional Organizer in me reacted viscerally to these photos.
Medium sized boxes for books?
For the love of Mike, buy U-Haul Book Boxes.
Look at that crushed box at the bottom of the pile, YOU MONSTER
ahahahah
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