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SURGE of PANIC

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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….

 

HONK!!!

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Do some things put you into a rage, when you reflect upon them from the perspective of several years on?

The subject of today’s rage, such as it is, is the memory of my poor ex-husband’s unholy air-horn snoring…and of his S.O.B. doctor who patted me on my little head and said don’t worry, dearie, ALL middle-aged men’s wives complain about their snoring.

Right, Doc.

DXH lost a job with a major regional law firm because he could not stay awake all day to do his work. Presumably when he was (apparently) awake, he must not have been able to focus on the issues in front of him.

No kidding.

One day one of his partners came to me and complained: DXH actually fell asleep at his desk.

Uh huh.

I went to a doctor of my own and said the guy was snoring so violently it was impossible to sleep in the same room with him — or even  in a room down the linked hallway.

He patted me on my pretty little head and went There, there, dear. ALL middle-aged men’s wives complain about their snoring.

Yeah. No kidding: that is exactly what I was told. Honking the ceiling off was a normal manly trait.

Years have gone by since then.

We’ve been divorced for years — partly because, strangely enough, I did need to sleep, not a possibility during the nighttime hours in that house.

Would I blame the poor reckless, sexist doctor for the divorce?

Well, no.

But I’d venture that he sure as he!! didn’t help things. Maybe, just MAYBE if I’d been able to get a decent night’s sleep in that house, I might still be there.

Pisseth me off, unto this day.

Wow!

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Wow,  indeed! What a GORGEOUS evening!

The sun has settled into a turquoise and orange bed. The sky is dark enough for some stars to shine out, but the sunset irradiates the western sky. One star — no doubt Venus — hangs above us in the evening air. Incredibly beautiful!

Ruby and the Human: just back from circumambulating the neighborhood, duly awed.

Truly: I do not know that I’ve ever seen a more awesomely beautiful sunset.

The little brown dog trots along like a four-legged brown rocket, no doubt having a gay old canine time. We encounter no other doggy nuisances, and almost no other humans, except a family playing in a front yard with their toddler.

Turn off the TV, folks! Come outside and look around: a far better show awaits you.

<3

WHY do people do this?

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What if your bright and educated daughter showed up one day with a Certified Total Jerk and announced, “We’re in love! We’re getting married and moving to a dump in the middle of nowhere because — y’know! — he’s a mining engineer!”

What on earth WOULD you do?

That’s the story of my (former) mother-in-law. She married one of the Great Turkeys of the Western World — proving that love does go blind at the garden gate, or somewhere along the path.

He couldn’t hold a decent job — not for love nor money — because  he was such a jerk that he insulted just about everyone he met. At some point, someone in our tribe remarked that he never stayed on a job more than about six months. If he didn’t piss off the bosses enough to make them fire him, he’d quit on his own before things reached that point.

The particularly Looney-Toons aspect of this saga is that M-i-L was a very bright woman who, in a time when few women even thought about going to college, much less actually did it, had a four-year degree from a major university.

It always posed a kind of mystery to me…because she wasn’t an unattractive woman, and there was no reason she couldn’t have hooked up with a decent human being. Instead, she flang herself down the pit of a marriage to one of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever met.

They were divorced by the time their son and I married. Dear Dad had remarried by then. Crazy Mom never remarried, and indeed, after some years, came out openly as a lesbian.

At one point along the line, Dear (ex-)Father-in-law was visiting at our house. I asked him — truly mystified, I must say! — why on earth he married the woman.

“Because,” said he, “our parents disapproved.”

Well. That was the kind of fliply stupid thing he typically said.

No doubt the story was more complex than that. But it does beg another question: Why didn’t you wait for a year or so and see how things worked out?

If you were intent on scandalizing your small-town parents, you could have taken off on a prenuptial fake honeymoon: shacked up together for three months or so, just to drive the relatives crazy. This would have allowed you to see how that relationship would work out, and….

…yeah: And maybe have spared you 20 years of married misery.

Jeeemineee! I can’t even imagine what I would have done if I’d had a daughter who showed up with a jerk like that in tow. Nor what if I’d had a son who jumped into the marriage bed with a wacko like the character Chuck selected.

Nothing, I suppose. They were both of age. Their parents rightfully had no say about who they chose in the mate department.

Huh…. It puzzles me to this day: not only that they got married at all, but that they stayed together for some 20 years. It must have been 20 years in Hell!

Just one minute of peace…puhleeze, police?

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Argh!!! Cop helicopters buzzing all over to the northeast of us. NOW what?

They’re right over the canal, which suggests someone — very probably a kid — fell in. But…the area they’ve been covering — quite a few square blocks — suggests they’re after a perp.

LOL! Speaking of perps, WonderCleaningLady seems to have made off with my whiteboard pen. Now I’ve got to traipse to the store and buy another one.

My jaded point of view on life predisposes me to assume she stole it. That, of course, is BS. Most likely, she picked it up while dusting, dropped it in a pocket, and forgot about it. No: MOST likely is that I picked up, used it once, set it down, and now can’t remember where “down” was.

For me, though: the result is the same: gotta go buy another one. GRRRRRRR!!!

😀

The cops have retreated.

Whatever they were up to must have resolved itself fairly fast. Either that or the perp took off running fast enough to escape our boys.

WhatEVER. Close and lock the doors.

Ruby likes to roam in and out through the kitchen door. But sometimes that’s just not practical….

Clinging to Independence in Old Age

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What would be involved in duplicating an old-folkerie’s amenities in your home? Let’s think about that…

What did my father get at Orangewood, the “Life-Care Community” of his choice?

  • two meals a day
  • weekly housecleaning (probably emergency cleaning if needed)
  • 3 rooms: living/sitting, 2 bedrooms
  • 1 bathroom
  • public lawn outside living-room slider
  • place to park his car
  • hired help with his bookkeeping and probably other needs
  • 2 (bad) meals a day, served up out of cans and boxes
  • on-call availability of a doctor (not a very good one, that I could tell)
  • feeling of security/safety in the complex
  • sort of a social life

This cost him a sizable chunk of his savings. He used all of his net on sale of the Sun City house to get into the fine institutionalized amenities of Orangewood.

So….how could you provide those in your home?

* Two meals a day

  • Precooked meals from Sprouts, other grocers
  • Go out for at least one meal a day
  • Bring home takeout meals from restaurants

* Weekly housecleaning (probably emergency cleaning if needed)

  • Hire a cleaning lady. For what Orangewood cost, he could have had someone come in several times a week

3 rooms: living/sitting, 2 bedrooms

  • My house has 1 kitchen, dining, sitting room; 4 bedrooms (one for sleeping, one for guests/TV, one for storage, one as the office)

1 bathroom

  • Mine has 2 bathrooms

Public lawn outside living-room slider

  • Mine has a private back yard, a private side yard, and two public-facing front yards, plus a walled front courtyard

Place to park his car: in an open space under a roof

  • Mine has a private garage with a motorized door that opens and closes at a touch; a motion-sensitive light, and a locking side door.

Driving errands

  • Hire Uber or taxicabs to drive you around.

Hired help for his bookkeeping and probably other needs

  • Hire a bookkeeper or accountant to deal with that ditz.

2 (bad!) meals a day, served up out of cans and boxes

  • I cook like a five-star chef. When I don’t feel like cooking, both AJ’s and Sprouts serve up more than serviceable prepared to-go food. So do most of the restaurants around here.
  • Also, in these parts you can order out food and have it delivered to your door.

On-call availability of a doctor (not a very good one, that I could tell)

  • Young Dr. Kildare’s office is five minutes up the road. When his place is closed, a major regional hospital with a decent ER is also five minutes away. If it’s not all THAT urgent, the Mayo’s ER is about a ten-minute drive from here.

Feeling of security/safety in the complex

  • About that, I would hesitate to opine. No place in a large city is completely safe, unless (maybe) if you’re in a gated community. Since I’m not volunteering to put myself in jail, I take my chances.

Built-in social life

  • If you want to schmooze, what’s to stop you from going to church? Or from joining a hobby group or a traveling club?

My guess is, if you’re the sosh’ type, you already have a network of friends and acquaintances. If you’re a natural lone wolf, you don’t worry about that sort of thing.

So…how, really, would consigning yourself to Orangewood — in exchange for most of your life savings! — be better than using those savings to hire people to come to your established, comfortable home and help for you care for it, drive you around, see that decent food goes on your table, and keep you company?