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Month: December 2022

Staying Safe in Your Dotage

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Gotta share this little essay I just posted at Quora. The prompt question was “How Can We Reduce the Number of Falls among Senior Citizens?”

Good question, eh? Here’s what I propose:

As an old bat who lives alone…this is my strategy, such as it is:
  1. Live in a place that has a minimal number of stairs. These are ridiculously easy to trip on.
  2. Where a step or more is unavoidable (for example, my house has a sunken family room, meaning that to get in or out of it, I have to step down or up), have a banister or countertop that you can hang onto whenever you have to navigate the steps. Train yourself to put a hand on this countertop or banister before taking the first step up or down, and hang on for the whole journey.
  3. Have several extensions (if you have a landline) or several cell phones that can be used to dial 911. Place these in strategic positions near the floor. For example, I have one in the bathroom (I set it within reach of the tub any time I take a bath or shower), one in the family room, one in each bedroom, one in the kitchen, and one in the dining room. DO NOT assume you will remember to carry a phone around everywhere you go when you’re at home: equip the home with many phones that can be reached from the floor and can dial 911. If these are cells, be sure they’re kept charged.
  4. Be sure each room has plenty of lighting. Make it easy to turn these on and off — at least one light in each room should turn on and off with a wall switch near an entry.
  5. Train dogs and cats to stay out from underfoot while their humans are walking around. This is easier said than done; you may need to hire a professional trainer for some pets.
  6. Do not(!!) have throw rugs laying around on the floors. Where you really need a throw rug — such as a bathroom rug next to the tub — be sure it has a latex backing or place a non-slip mat under it.
  7. Be sure your shoes and slippers have non-slide soles. Do not wear footwear that might slip on a tile, linoleum or wood floor.
  8. Do try to remember to carry a cheap, charged-up flip phone in a pocket at all times, except when you’re actually laying in bed or bathing in the tub or shower. Again, bear in mind: BY LAW ALL CELL PHONES HAVE TO BE ABLE TO REACH 911, no expensive connection required. This means that if you fall, you can use the phone to call the Fire Department or the Police, but you can’t call anyone else with it. I use these throw-away phones as an emergency SOS device when I walk the dog.
  9. Inspect sidewalks in the neighborhood. Look for places where the pavement is heaved and where the curb might not be easily visible at dusk or in the dark. Be sure to point these out carefully to the elder and remind them to watch their step in that area. If the sidewalk is heaved, call the city and ask them to come fix the paving.
  10. Suggest that the person carry a walking stick, whether or not they need it for mobility. I carry a hiking stick with me every time I walk the dog, not so much to avoid falls but as a shilelagh for self-defense — we have many drug-addled transients, prowlers, and coyotes in these parts. While I have indeed used it to chase off all comers (including Wile E. Coyote), it also works nicely as a support when stepping up and down curbs and around heaved pavement.
  11. Get plenty of exercise. I walk one to two miles a day, which I consider minimal. If that’s not practical, join a health club where you can exercise on their machines and swim in their pool. Use it or lose it!

And finally, if you have cleaning or yard care help coming in to do housework or outdoor maintenance, keep an eye on what they’re doing. They often don’t realize that some of your eccentricities — such as placing phone extensions on or near the floor — are there for a reason, so they’ll readjust things to fit their definition of sanity.

Electronic Run-arounds in the Wild New Year

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Well, if starters are any clue, it looks like 2023 is gonna be one helluva year. We have…

  • a monster blizzard blasting away at most of the country, which has…
  • blocked air traffic and no doubt much of the highway traffic nationwide…
  • Covid resurgent in China, which has obligingly reopened its borders(!)…
  • a major storm bearing down on Northern California, whose residents by and large do not know what is meant by the term “major storm”…
  • starving refugees from garden spots like Rohynga
  • a pair of tourists stroll out across a frozen lake in northern Arizona, fall through the ice, and drown (what is it about Arizona that reduces tourists to morons?)
  • a-n-n-n-d…on the micro-level: my jaw hurts, possibly dislocated

It’s supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow, with temps in the 50s — which here in the low desert is passing crisp.

Naturally, whenever you need to talk with a doctor, it’s ALWAYS a weekend or a holiday. Called the dentist’s office. Got a runaround. He was supposed to call me back. Nary a word…probably because he’s calling from a blocked area code. My phone is set to block calls from several of the area codes around Maricopa County, where I know no one and which are regularly spoofed by nuisance phone solicitors to disguise pestering phone calls.

So: electronic runarounds of the day #1 and #2: jump through hoop jump through hoop jump through hoop to finally get a human at the doctor’s office, and then get told he’ll call me back…which doesn’t happen, probably because I’ve had to disable part of my own phone system to block the nonstop barrage of phone solicitation.

Next: I need some more nose spray — the stuff that actually works, to wit: Afrin.

Big Brother wishing to protect us from ourselves, you can no longer buy Afrin in a sane size. You get half an ounce from any purveyor at Amazon. (Why? Because if you overdo the stuff, you just make your nose stuffier than it already was. Since you’re too stupid to grasp that concept, Big Brother must take it out of your sticky little hands…)

So any time now I do need to get off my duff and traipse over to the Albertson’s or the Walgreen’s and buy some more of the damn stuff. And…how can I count the ways I do NOT want to go out in the traffic, dodge fellow homicidal drivers, dodge stoned bums, dodge panhandlers for the privilege of buying enough nose spray to unclog my damn head???

This is likely to turn into another runaround, because you can be sure one or the other of those stores no longer carries the gunk at all. AND you can be sure that whichever store I enter first, that’s the store that doesn’t carry it anymore. Yep.

***

Woo HOO!

Wrongola! The journey down to the bum-infested corner was a success! Not only did the corner Walgreen’s NOT have any bums standing at the door (someone new bought the franchise and apparently decided to clean the place up a bit), but they DID have Afrin in a full one-fluid-ounce size!!!!

A miracle.

That’ll last me at least a year or two. I’m thinking maybe I’d better buy another bottle or two, because dontcha just KNOW this is the last we’ll see of that stuff…  Two more squirt bottles of that size would probably last me to the end of my life.

Hungry. The other day I (stupidleeee!) bought a microwaveable package of something billed as macaroni and cheese. Ohhhkayyy…

NOW, I figure, is the time to heat that stuff up. Num num, eh?

Well, no.

NEVER is the time to heat that stuff up.

😀

What on EARTH is the matter with Americans that we eat the sh!t you can buy off grocery shelves???

Ugh. Macaroni and cheese that was absolutely, positively devoid of flavor.

Who eats this stuff?

Why??????

After a few icky bites, I threw the whole thing out.

You — yeah, you, dear reader: you’re presumably American, right? Or more or less so?  Do YOU eat crap like that? WHY?

For less than the amount of time it took to drive to the grocery store, I could have condescended to make myself…you know…an actual sandwich. With real cheese on it. And a real tomato on the side. I could have fired up the barbecue and tossed on a slab of steak, a hamburger, or a chunk of chicken. And a fistful of asparagus spears, doused in olive oil and fresh lemon juice.

Why, really, do we sacrifice edibility for what we imagine to be convenience?

Cruising back into the’Hood… The homeless folks were resting in the bus stop’s covered bench. None of them seemed to be hitting up passers-by, probably because there were no passers-by — the locals having grown wise to the ecology in those parts. One of them had what looked like an iPhone, but it might have been a cheaper smartphone of some other brand.

Before we squawk YOW!! I CAN’T AFFORD ONE OF THOSE THINGS, in fact, they don’t afford them The local social services provide them, free, to the certifiably homeless. Yes, it would be significantly cheaper for the taxpayer to provide flip phones that could be used to dial around. But WTF. There must be better things to complain about. Somewhere.

Still. I do wish someone would pay my T-Mobile bill, so as to make using my cell phone free…

 

 

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

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Hope you all have a happy holiday!

Things are bustling right along here in the ‘Hood, very Christmasy. This quasi-historic neighborhood has filled up with young and ambitious new neighbors, full of civic pride and shenanigans. The neighborhood association is now run by young folks… This year they took it into their lively collective mind to promote displays of luminarias all up and down the streets.

The luminaria, in case you haven’t heard of it in your part of the country, is a Mexican tradition. You take paper bags and place candles in them, sunk in a bit of sand on the bottom of the bag, and then line your sidewalks with them.

They’re very pretty. And distinctively Southwestern. This year many of the neighbors have set them out along the sidewalks and drivewauys.

I don’t do it myself, because I think they’re a fire hazard. As Ruby and I made our mile-long perambulation this evening, I counted six of them that were totally, unmistakable fire risks: parked under shrubs and low-hanging tree branches. Personally. the chance of fire is more than I want to take on.

Plus it’s quite a project to fill dozens of paper bags with sand, park candles in them, and set them all out around your yard and driveway. To say nothing of having to pick them all up tomorrow morning! 😀

Next, as the night ambles on we’ll have the fireworks racket from the ethnic neighborhood to the north of us. This also is a popular tradition…and since fireworks are now sold legally here, we get banged and boomed all night for every possible occasion. Christmas, alas, is now one of the occasions. And New Year’s. And the Fourth of July. And Cinco de Mayo. And…whoever’s birthday it is…on and on and on. Some people’s dogs are very scared by the racket — and if they get out of your yard are likely to be GONE, never to return. Probably to get run over, in their panic, on Conduit of Blight or Gangbanger’s Way.

Ruby lives in the house — I let her out to do Her Thing, of course, but most of the time she loafs inside. Even then, she’s still scared of the noise. Takes up residence under the toilet, where she hides until such time as I go to bed, haul her out, and put her on the blankets with me.

Tomorrow it’s over to M’hijito’s house, where he intends to put on one of his feasts. That kid can cook!

As can a couple of his friends. When they were younger fellas, they seriously contemplated starting a catering business, cooking up fancy meals for customers. That never came to pass (they all went off to college and got — urk! — jobs, if you can imagine), but nevertheless around the holidays they still entertain the families.

Weather here remains steady: cool (in the crisp 60s, Hevvin help us!), classic Arizona climate. It looks like all He!! has broken loose across the country: “hundreds of thousands” without power as snow and storms swirl around them. Rarely is one really, really glad to live in Arizona. But this IS one of those times.

My mother spent part of her childhood in upstate New York, on what she described as a “dirt farm” owned by her paternal grandparents. They didn’t have the proverbial nickel or a dime, evidently: anything they ate, they had to raise themselves, and the house had no inside bathrooms — just an outhouse. One winter they had a monumental snowstorm, much like the one we’re seeing now. She said so much snow piled up, they couldn’t get out the doors at all: they had to climb out a second-story window. Her grandfather had to shovel a tunnel out front, so they could use the front door at all.

Sounds like what they have now is very much like that. Only at least they have vehicles that can navigate snow. And central heating (the only heat in her grandparents’ house was from an iron stove). Just imagine what it must have been like to live in those days!

Jeez. It’s only quarter to seven, and the nitwits are already out there banging away with their firecrackers. Why are people so…jerkish?

Ruby doesn’t seem unduly disturbed, though. Guess she’s grown accustomed to human foolishness. 😀Christmas tree

Food Prices: Brace for Impact!

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This just in from my friend La Maya, who, having escaped the Great Desert University, is living in retired splendor in Northern California:

As I recall you were not an egg-eater, but just a heads up on a situation that may make it to Arizona. Apparently, CA has been struck by the bird flu. I went to Trader Joe’s and the egg shelf was empty. Inquired with manager because while I’ve seen them get low on the eggs I have never seen a completely empty section. Well, he informed me that the bird flu has hit the chicken stock so they are no longer ordering from their distributor. Then the next day I get an email from my sister in the Imperial Valley, who was informing all of us sisters to be prepared if and when we can find eggs: her husband paid $8.79 for a dozen and a half of eggs. The flats of eggs were going for $75 to $80. Yikes! I eat eggs almost every day of my life….not a good situation….

Something to be aware of. But that’s not all. From FaM reader JestJack, a long-time frugalist who lives on the East Coast:

Aaaand here in the Free State ….where nothing is free…Eggs are going for $5 a dozen…And was chatting with a DF who is in the cattle business…He warns “ya ain’t seen  nothing yet” as far as beef prices…Looks like beef will be more of a “garnish” in the near future…I just scored some grass fed” NY Strips on a “whim” for $7.99 on discount…They were delicious…DW was tickled pink!

Hmmm…. Few things would drive me to Costco on the day before Christmas weekend. But this just may. La Maya’s right: I can’t eat unadulterated eggs (they make me baroquely sick unless mixed with other ingredients). But word of astronomical beef prices certainly could get me off my duff.

One package of Costco steaks lasts me for months, partly because I eat many things other than beef and partly because a Costco lifetime supply is just about that. When you cut a package of four steaks into single-serving sizes, you end up with enough meat for 12 to 16 meals.

Well then, I’d better get going: it’s already 8:30, Costco opens at 10, it’s a half-hour drive to the nearest store, and I’m not even dressed yet. And so, awayyyyyyy…..

Bah! El Humbugo! said she…

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Mexican Christmas Light

Every Christmas, the neighborhood gung-ho group — who are great, no question of it, and a real asset to the ‘Hood — flogs a busy communal display of luminarias. These are traditional Mexican Christmas decorations made with paper bags and candles. You pour a layer of sand into the bottom of a paper lunch bag; then insert a short candle into the sand. Line the driveway or sidewalk or porch wall with these light them, and voilà! Christmas cheer.

To say nothing of voilà! Fire hazard.

Being a crabby old lady, I do NOT want these things set up along my courtyard wall or driveway. Because yes, I do think they’re potential fire hazards, especially if a wind comes up — as winds are wont to do at this time of year.

In the past, enthusiastic neighbors have brought the things around and set them up along sidewalks and driveways, free of charge. This is very fun and cool…but it kinda puts us humbugs behind the eight-ball. If you don’t light the things, you out yourself as a Scrooge. 😀

This year, bless’em, they’ve decided residents should buy the things, and so they’ve set up a stand in the park where we can go pick them up and pay for them. And that is definitely Service Above and Beyond: it’s colder than billy-be-dammed out there, and threatening to rain.

Some Christmas season, add I to that. Grump!

Adding further: SDXB called an hour or two ago. Canceled our planned excursion, saying he’s come down with what he thinks is a cold. One can only hope that’s all it is! He sounded just awful…but whenever he gets a respiratory infection, he sounds like he’s pounding at death’s door.

He says he taken both the flu and the covid vaccines — and had three shots of covid. So…we’re looking at two possibilities: either whatever he has is neither of those bugs, or the vaccine he got for one or the other of them failed.

WhatEVER. Cold, flu, or vaccine-resistant covid, I don’t want it…so am grateful for his decision to stay home. Though sorry he’s sick…and hope he gets over it soon.

Meanwhile, in the Department of High-Risk Activities, I dropped out of choir soon after the plague began, choral singing indeed ranking among the highest-risk things you can do in time of contagion. This poses a problem of the First Water: I have nothing else to occupy my time and challenge what passes for my mind!

Tried volunteering for something else down at the Cult HQ. Ended up helping to staff the front desk and answer the phones one afternoon a week. All very nice, no doubt — sorta gives you a chance to meet the clergy and staff. Except they ARE busy and don’t have time to stand around socializing. So you sit there for four hours with not one damn thing to do!!!!! The phone, which is bizarrely complicated, may ring once during that time: nowhere near enough to allow you to learn how to operate it.

After the umpty-umpteenth week of brain-banging boredom, I quit.

Interestingly, the church’s accountant also quit at about the same time. She moved over to a church in the East Valley where our former pastor moved.

uh-HUH…

What is she tryin’ to say to me?

Tried rejoining the choir, but that was a lost cause. Because…I have no formal training in music. When it comes to voice, the best I can do is sing along (actually, I’m fairly good at that). BUT our new choir director (accountant was not the first to flee…) has a taste for music that is wonderfully sophisticated and so complex there’s truly no way I can learn it in the brief time the group has to introduce itself to a piece and practice it a few times. So: out that door.

The church has now completed its addition to the school — already one of the toniest schools in the state. This thing is a good three or four storeys high, as big as the high school I attended in Southern California…which had three thousand students.

UH–huh.

It looks suspiciously to me like our venerable, high-society church for lawyers, doctors, and society matrons is planning to go into direct competition with the Catholic schools just down the street: St. Francis (K-8); Brophy (boy’s high school); and Xavier (girl’s high school).  If that’s the case, the church will become basically an adjunct to the school operation. Which is all very nice, no doubt, but….??????

I could follow our perspicacious accountant out to the east side. But…how CAN I count the ways I don’t want to commute halfway to Payson a minimum of twice a week, once at night?

The local Episcopals have what they call a cathedral, smack in the middle of downtown. This is not an area where I would like to walk around at night, I must say. But….neither do I relish the prospect of melting away into a puddle of dead IQ points, which is where MayoDoc fears I’m headed. To survive, I’m going to have to find something to keep the brain functioning.

Which is worse: brained in a parking lot, or brainless in a nursing home?

Think I’ll try the parking lot, thank you.

Planned to go down there this morning, but I was simply too lazy to get up off my duff and fling myself around. Next week.

Meanwhile…what if they won’t let me onto their choir? Which, at this point in the season, they very justifiably may not?

We have two alternatives:

One is to take a course at Phoenix College, a nearby JC, in choral singing. Dunno what the status is now, but that school did have an excellent music and drama program, and one of our choir members/leaders taught there. Wonder-Accountant took a semester of choral singing there, and she was impressed.

Another is to go out to the Episcopal church on East Lincoln and try to weasel my way in there. Whaddaya bet some of our old choir members are already there, hm? It is halfway to Scottsdale, and truly I would rather not drive around this Godforsaken town that much. But hey…any port in a plague, eh?

A benefit to the second scheme is that one of the best Sprouts stores in the Valley resides approximately on the route between here and there. A high-test Safeway is just up the road from that place. So in theory, I could get most of my grocery shopping done on the way home on Sundays. That would be good. I guess.

WhatEVER. One way or the other, I’ve gotta find a way to get off my duff, plague or no plague. As the finest professor I ever met, Byrd Granger, used to say…

You must engage life!

Life in the Land of the Dumb and the Feckless

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Correct position behind steering wheel for driving on Phoenix roads.

So you say you’re bored? Life is too calm? People around you persist in behaving like normal, sane human beings?

Welp, there’s a way to get around that predicament. It’s easy: Come to Phoenix, get in a car, and start driving!

Gaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhh!!!!!

If Days from Hell are crazy in normal times, in the Christmas season they’re BATSH!T crazy!

So I make my way to the Best Buy at about Camelback and 20th Street, there to glom a gift card for my son, as something that will pass for a Christmas present. Wander around ogling the technological wonders. Finally lose interest and roam back to the car. Start driving toward the’Hood, westerly ever westerly, and….

Ohhhhh yah. Wouldn’tcha know it? Traffic jam, traffic jam…and traffic jam on Camelback, one of the biggest surface streets in the city.

Crawl westward. Crawl…crawl…cr…HOLEE sh!t they’ve got the whole dam road, east AND westbound shut down at 12th street.

Guy ahead of me, bless his heart, drives like an old-time Phoenician. He’s assertive (read “aggressive as a hyena”) and he knows where he’s going. I settle into his tailwind.

We jerk north on 12th Street and proceed ever northerly. North. North. North. Now we’re in a neighborhood that I’ve never passed through slowly enough to examine. Twelfth is bordered on both sides by aging single- and two-story apartment buildings (once rentals, no doubt, but now condos). Lookin’ around, I think holeee maquerel, THIS is where we should have put Tootsie (SDXB’s mother) when we were forced to move her out of her beloved little condo after the damn place went to Hell on a Handcart. Why on earth didn’t we look in this area?”

Why…why…why, indeed?

Well, to begin with, I did look for places like that, but everything in our part of town — i.e., the area I knew anything about — was way too expensive. These places look like they would have been in the general price range of her soon-to-be abandoned garden apartment…and since her daughter, who was in on the project, was married to THE premier cardiac anesthesiologist in the Pacific Northwest…well, yes: they certainly COULD have afforded to get her into one of them. None of these places looked any fancier than Tootsie’s place, except (ahem) for the location.

But noooooooooo.

Some friend/distant relative of hers had bought a trailer on the far west side, where they would decamp to escape Michigan’s lovely winter months. Nothing would do but what, forgodsake, we had to put her in a trailer.

CAN you spell “stupid”?

It’s spelled t-r-a-i-l-e-r p-a-r-k,

So we get her into this tin can.

You understand: temps in the summers here range up to 120 degrees. Her relatives went home to Michigan in the summertime, so were unable to advise about the power bills in the multiple hundreds of dollars. You cannot air-condition a trailer…BECAUSE it effectively has no insulation.

Meanwhile, nothing would do but what she had to buy a trailer way to Hell and gone on the west side: a good hour’s drive from where SDXB and I were living.

You have not heard bitching until you’ve heard SDXB bellyache about having to drive (and drive and drive and drive and…) through the hideous westside traffic to attend to his mother. Wow!

Can’t say I blame him. It was a horrid drive.

He had an ex-girlfriend who was a Realtor. He asked her to advise…and…what a joke! She came up with exactly nothing viable. I looked around, but i are not a Realtor i are a english major…. I knew of a few patio home developments not far from here, but they were too expensive…and I was completely ignorant of the places to the east of 7th Street, where we could easily have found something that would have worked.

Picked up a Best Buy gift card for my son’s Christmas present. Now all I have to do is not lose it between now and the 25th. Easier said than done.

Son’s dog was surged yesterday. Nothing serious, he says: the dog grows these strange cysts…probably fatty tumors, I imagine. Greta the Gershep had a couple, but she didn’t develop them until she was well into her dotage. Charley the Golden Retriever has had these things since he was an addled-escent pup. M’hijito recently acquired a new vet — our old bunch having gone out of business and scattered to the winds.

Poor dog apparently was suffering somewhat yesterday. That — me being the skeptic that I am — would raise some real concern if he were mine. Not that I wouldn’t want to treat something that might harm him or cause him discomfort. But these things are apparently benign. Not at all sure I would subject an 11-year-old dog — who probably has just another year or two before the end of his normal lifespan — to any kind of unnecessary surgery.

ooooh wellll… Stop the world…i wanna get off!