Coffee heat rising

Old Age: Live Free or Die???

Is it possible to live independently in your dotage, right up until you die?

* Maybe, depending on how you define “independent.”
* Maybe, depending on how much cash you can fork over to an “independent living” outfit.
* Maybe, depending on how long “right up until you die” is.

Just heard from Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend, who (as you may recall) is living in Sun City, a depressing age-limited, race-limited (de facto) suburb on the west side of the Phoenix metropolitan area.

SDXB is pushing 85. He’s been in excellent health all his life and continues to take care of himself, in his own home all by himself.

New Girlfriend, we’re told, has sold her home out there and moved into an old-folkerie — these days, euphemistically called a “life-care community.” He sees the advantages, and as we speak is considering selling his nice little home in Sun City and imprisoning himself in one of those places, too.

And there are advantages. After my mother died, my father moved himself into one of those places, then called “Orangewood.” That probably was one of the best favors he could have done for himself…and for me.

For me? I didn’t have to take care of him!

  • He did not at any time live in my home.
  • He did as he pleased (more or less); I did as I pleased.
  • Our lifestyles remained independent, to the extent that we did not interfere with each other.
  • When he had his stroke (I was present at the time), medical people were right there, on the grounds, to care for him, and a medical clinic was right there to provide effective, experienced emergency care until an ambulance could carry him off to a hospital.

And that last one? It was HUGE. It meant there was no delay in obtaining experienced, knowledgeable medical care for him: right then and there.

So…is it time for me to start thinking along the Old-Folkerie lines?

Hm.

Well, quite frankly, nothing could strike me more as ANATHEMA.

No. I do not want to live in an institution. As a college student, I loathed living in the dorm. The elbow-to-elbow lifestyle just doesn’t make it for me.

So the question is…Is there a way to extend the time that I can keep living in my home until I’m totally bedridden or until I die?

In today’s America, it’s not at all clear that any such thing is possible. Unless they’re very wealthy, most young and middle-aged Americans have to work, and work full-time. That’s not an option.

This effectively limits care for the elderly either to institutional living or to hiring a full-time care-taker.

Neither of those is a very affordable option.

Nor, really, is it taking care of them yourself a desirable option. How well do you get along with your parents…seriously? How well do they get along with you? Even if you could afford to quit your job and stay h0me to care for an infirm elder (which you probably can’t…), how long do you think you could hang onto your marbles in that circumstance? Or as an old buzzard: how long do figure you can tolerate having your adult kids tell you what to do and when to do it?

Uh huh…you see what I mean, right?…

So I’ve been thinking how can I manage to take care of myself — without inflicting that care on my son — until I’m ready to make the Big Leap into the Other World?

Hmmmmm….

Let us try to explore this matter, in upcoming chapters of Funny about Money.

How Do We Love Hallowe’en?

Let us count the ways….

Seriously: I get SUCH a kick out of the annual Hallowe’en shindig! And I believe most of the neighbors do, too.

The WonderAccountants and I have made an Annual Custom of sitting out on their driveway and handing out candy. It is SUCH a hoot! The kiddies are as cute as can be, and the teenagers are as goofy as they can be.

😀

We have a low-income neighborhood to the north of us. The kiddies in those parts know that Riches are to be had in our parts. So they descend upon us in all their adorable masses.

Most of them are dressed up in goofy costumes, which are more fun than life to see. But even those who don’t gussy themselves up are having a great time, and THEIR fun is contagious to us driveway-sitters.

Meanwhile, the locals buy or make elaborate outfits for their kids, and those are a great deal of fun to eyeball, too.

In short, it’s our chance to enjoy the kids, which we all do with great delight.

Happy Hallowe’en!!!
NOW AND EVERMORE

A Balmy Afternoon in Lovely Phoenix

Speaking of garden spots where you duck for cover as the local F16’s blast by you (as we were this morning), jet planes have been roaring over the back yard half the afternoon.

Bored with that racket, I got in the car and went for a real-estate-ogling drive. Frankly, I didn’t see much that interested me — a few districts in North Central Phoenix are better than this one, but none of them outrank it significantly. Did find an area in the shadow of the North Mountain that I’d never noticed before. Drove around and around…kind of a nice spread.

But not so nice that I feel any interest in looking at the real estate offerings there. Certainly not to the tune of another hundred grand…

Like Southern California, North-Central  Phoenix is gifted with a monotonous sameness. The houses are much the same, the road layouts are much the same, the neighborhoods are much the same, the schools all look alike. Ugh.

* Berkeley, this place is not.
* San Berdoo, it is not.
* San Francisco, it is not.
* Hollywood, it is not.
* San Jose, it is not.
* Santa Barbara, it is not.

One could go on and on. Any city that is not like any other city: that’s a category into which Phoenix will never fit. The boredom factor is astonishing! 😀

By and large the whole place is monotonous, dull, middle-class, and boring.

It’s four in the afternoon, and jet airplanes are still roaring overhead. Most of these are now passenger planes, coming into or flying out of Sky Harbor Airport.

I’ve been home less than an hour and the phone has jangled three times, bearing exciting messages from phone solicitors. How can I say how sick and tired I am of jerks who call me on the phone trying to peddle stuff?

They must be able to sucker people in…otherwise, their employers wouldn’t waste money hiring them to dispense phone hustles.

Yes, the damn phone CAN be turned off or disconnected. But that means I’ll miss calls that matter — a call from my son or a friend, for example. How do I resent having to disconnect a service that I pay for to block the constant hustle? Lemme count the ways….

WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU…. HONK HONK HONK!!!

Another ambulance or cop car roaring up Conduit of Blight Blvd…on and on and weeeuuuing on and on…

What a place!

Duck! Cover! Or something….

Pour a cup of coffee; prepare to sit down on the back porch to take the morning air; and you get RRR-R-O-O-O-A-A-R-R-RRR!!!!

Cop copter charges over the house. Circles around the ‘Hood,. Roar roar roar….

Meanwhile, twenty miles away, out at Luke Air Force Base, a squadron of fighter jets practices take-off and landing: rrrRRR-O-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R-R-R!!!!!

My mother, who used to take her morning coffee on the back porch of their little Sun City house, professed to love the sound of fighter jets taking off and landing by Dawn’s Early Light. All very patriotic, no doubt…but definitely not my favorite symphony score.

The atmosphere has quieted down a bit now. Whenever it gets to be after 9:00 a.m. — at which hour I can turn left out of the ‘Hood — I’m headed to AJ’s, there to buy some more coffee. And melon. And bread. And dog treats… and… Argha!!!  The endless grocery list!

The Sprouts, which carries far more fake-gourmet items than the Albertson’s supermarket across the street, leaves enough to be desired to make the 20-minute trip to the overpriced AJ’s worth the journey. For one thing, I do NOT like being pounced and panhandled in the parking lot — pretty much inevitable at the neighborhood Sprouts. The Albertson’s has posted an armed, uniformed guard out front, which makes one feel safer there. Now…if only they’d carry a larger array of yuppified products, they’d never get rid of me. 😀

But they don’t. To get the fancy treats and overpriced dog food, I have to travel to the AJ’s. To get the rich black coffee: AJ’s. To get a piece of steak that’s worth the exorbitant prices most stores are now charging for beef: AJ’s.

****

SDXB on the phone. He and New Girlfriend live in Sun City, directly under the flight path of those Air Force jets. And like my mother, they regard the racket as “The Sound of Freedom.”

No doubt they’re right.

Too bad, though, that Freedom can’t turn down the volume a bit! 😀

SDXB loves living in Sun City, as my mother did when she was holding forth out there. It takes, I think, a certain mentality to like that lifestyle. Personally, I’ll take the sound of kids playing over the melody of F-16 engines blasting. But whatEVER: each to his/her own, eh?

Speaking of the which — sound, that is — the serenade of not one but TWO emergency vehicles wafts in through the screen door…. WTF d’you suppose is goin’ on out there now?

Looks like it was a good thing I dawdled over this blog post and killed time yakking with SDXB before I started out for the store. Fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, and I could’ve been in the middle of whatever that mess is.

***

And I would have missed the beloved Pool Dude, who just showed up at the door to collect his well-earned wages.

What a nice man! Probably a paroled murderer…but what the heck. He does a primo job of murdering pool algae.

Seriously: when a dear friend’s son got in trouble with the law (irrationally: not his fault!) and was thence thrown in the slam, we learned that one job regarded as “good” for paroled convicts is pool maintenance.

And considering what Pool Dude is earning — f’rgodsake, I just paid him $400!!! — if you worked at it and were even moderately competent at handling money and billing, you could in theory make a decent middle-class living at it.

Well, OK: part of the 400 smackers was for a large bucket of chlorine tabs. That stuff is expensive as hell, and if you’re buying a better quality product, it’s even more expensive than that. And the bucket the guy got — presumably from a pool product wholesaler — weighs more than I can pick up. So presumably it will be some months before we have to buy more chlorine.

Welp. I’d better get up and get outta here before the lunch crowd gets on the road.

And so, AWA-A-A-A-Y!

Adventures in Internet Life

Monday Evening…

All the Internet connections in the neighborhood are down. Down, down, downy-down-down.

This means I can’t use any of the phones in the house, all of which are fake land-lines. Right now the only way I have to call 911 or try to reach any other kind of help is through the accursed iPhone.

Problem with that thing is…well, make that problemS

 Main one: I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to use the dratted thing. It is SO arcane and so contrary and so effin accursed that I just can NOT make it work. Even dialing 911 is highly problematic.

Fortunately, Luz – the Cleaning Lady from Heaven – happened to be here. She was able to call the accursed phone company from her cell, so we got the outage reported. And she called the WonderAccountants, who live across the street: they confirmed that yes, their phones are out, too. And we were able to call my son, who expressed his annoyance at my stupidity.

And now I have no way to call for help if I need it …well, I guess I could run outside and scream HAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLPPP!!!!! at the top of my voice. But that’s about it.

Well. I do have an iPhone, but it’s so complicated I can’t figure out how to use it.

Nor can I get online in Firefox.

Ohhhhh well… tappity tap in Word. Maybe someday the computer will connect to the Internet, get me in to WordPress, and let me post to Funny about Money.

 This is the second time we’ve had a neighborhood-wide Internet outage. The last time, actually, it was district-wide. The only way I was able to get online, finally, was to drive down to AJ’s, several miles to the south of here. Buy a cup of coffee and park at one of their tables. Connect to the Web through their system.

Not inclined to do that this evening, because I have no urgent need to access the Internet or send an outgoing message. But it’s infuriating, considering what we pay for this alleged service.

It’s also nervous-making, since I’ve never really learned how to use the iPhone and very much doubt that during an emergency I would be able to reach help on the thing.

*****

Now it will let me in to Funny about Money’s web page, but won’t let me into the dashboard. So I can’t copy this squib out of Word and paste it into WordPress. Tomorrow morning I’ll have to traipse down to the computer store and get one of their guys to persuade this thing to work again.

Well…. At least the electric is on. That’s something, I guess. The streetlights are on – dunno whether the traffic signals are working…and am not about to go driving around to find out.

*****

And…and!!! YAYYYY! Funny’s site is back up! Let’s see if we can get this scribble online…

SURGE of PANIC

On the road. Exiting the Lowe’s, having failed to find the security door I coveted. But while walking around in there, I do discover… I’ve lost my metal card holder containing every ID and credit card to my name…

  • Not in any of my pockets.
  • Back into Lowe’s: Not turned in to lost & found.
  • Back to the HD departments I’d visited: noooo clue.
  • Could I possibly have brought my purse and just forgotten I was hauling it around? Apparently not.
  • Not in the car’s ashtrays (a favorite hide-hole)
  • Not under the driver’s seat.
  • Or under the passenger seat.
  • Or in the glove compartment.
  • Or stashed in the sunshade flap thing.
  • Or in the back of the car.
  • Found it: in the house. On the kitchen counter. Huh?

Ever notice that inanimate objects know when you’re panicking? Especially traffic lights! Traffic lights are highly attuned to human emotions.

That card-holder thing contains every card to my name: every ID card, every membership card, every gummint ID (driver’s license included) every credit card, every debit card…AUUUUUGHHHH!!!!!!!

*******

My neighbor to the west, who otherwise seems like a normal enough person, has stuck a freakin’ TRUMP sign in her front yard. So freaked was I that I very nearly jumped out of the car, charged over there, pulled the thing out of the grass, and dragged it to the garbage.

Oh well. Each to her own.

Disappointing, though. I thought Terry had a functioning brain. Each to her own, though. Yep yep yep!

*****

Found some stuff. Enough to hope Armageddon is not, after all, headed this way. Into the sack for a VERY frustrated snooze.

Future hassle: figure out WTF.

….if it’s figure-able at all….