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A Few Blessings

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Sometimes one despairs of blessings, living in a right-wing flyover state on an income that the feds think of as “poverty” level (it’s not…but that’s another story), where the drivers are crazy and so are the politicians. Some days, though, you just think Thank God.

• Thank God for a fine son.

• Thank God for friends and online virtual friends.

• Thank God for good dogs, good food, and good wine.

• Thank God for the choir and the church that supports it.

• And thank God we don’t live on the East Coast today.

• Thank God for peace and quiet (when you can get it).

• Thank God for great coffee and a French press in which to brew it.

• Thank God for cacti, a whole swarm of whose new babies will soon be blooming.

Here on Christmas Day, M’hijito tripped over this cactus outside the front side-gate, which is much larger than it appears in that snapshot. He was overflowing with apology, but I assured him it was not a big deal. In fact, it was past time to have cut back that neglected plant.

Eventually I got around to wandering out and picking up the several cactus balls that broke off. This is how cacti reproduce: a chunk breaks off, falls on the ground, and sometime in this century takes root.

w00t! I planted four in the front patio. Can you imagine if they all grow and they all bloom at once? That place is gonna be amazing. Put another couple in the side yard. Planted one in a pot to take to M’hijito’s house. And in the back, I retrieved a pot that had made its way under the lemon tree, where lay an old cactus that I thought had died.

You can’t kill a cactus, you know. Though it had flopped over and broken off at the ground, the bottom was callused and the top part was…still green! No sign of rot. Hmmmm… I have no idea what color it is but suspect it’s one of the deep magenta Easter lily cacti that I brought over from the old house, 14 years ago. Planted it under the overgrown rose on the northwest side of the house, where it should get plenty of light but will have time to adjust to the change of micro-microclimate before the sun turns north and starts to bake that corner.

Yes. The East. They have civilization…we have decent weather. As we scribble, the pooches and I are loafing in the front courtyard. The neighbor’s boy is throwing hoops across the street. Cassie is eating green olives that have fallen out of the tree (the better to barf on the floor!), and Ruby is barking at any sign of a passing neighbor. Yesterday the inversion layer finally lifted and blew out most of the smog. The sky is cerulean blue again, and the trees are rustling softly in a barely moving breeze.

Last night our choir friend who lives in Michigan brought pictures of the snow back home, where she repaired for the holiday. The place was enjoying a serious White Christmas — very picturesque if you don’t have to shovel it. And…that was before the real storm was due to roll in. Fortunately she jumped on a plane back to the Valley of the We Do Mean Sun hours before said monster storm was expected to arrive.

• Thank God for Chinese mathematicians and assorted other academics. A fairly large new project is slated to fly in over the transom tomorrow afternoon, at which time I intend to be hiking in the desert. This is from a senior scholar, a lively fellow who seems to have had an interesting career…and is decidedly still kickin’. So I’m looking forward to working on that, the first major job of 2018.

Today is the only day this week I have to myself: SDXB is coming over tomorrow, a meeting on the far side of the West Valley beckons for Saturday, and of course half of Sunday will be consumed by singing. Every other day has been occupied by one activity or another. It’s almost noon and I have done nothing — unless you consider blogging to be something. This afternoon I want to prune that overgrown rose, which has run amok for years. Walk a mile and a half, preferably sans dragging dogs. Loaf some more. Maybe write some more. Download 2017 data from the bank and credit card issuers; organize that stuff for WonderAccountant’s convenience. And cook up a pot of food for the hounds.

And so, away…to another “busy” day of retirement. 😉

One of Those High Blood-Pressure Days

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Hugely one of those days, for Godsake.

This morning I had what I expected to be my LAST regular appointment with CardioDoc. The blood pressure has been well in the normal zone most of the time, except for a few moments of rage or drunkenness, despite the fact that I’ve gained 12 pounds since going off the Great Diet Plan and I only get off my duff when forced to it. Overall average for December was 132/83, despite several spikes attributable to a) dental pain and b) episodic stress.

Like, for example, today’s episodic stress.

You know how much I love sharing the roads with my fellow homicidal drivers. This morning, as per usual, all my pet morons sensed that I was climbing into my car and so leapt into theirs and swarmed onto the roads.

Dear God, where do You find these people?????

Notable winners:

Runner-up: The guy who decided to dawdle down Indian School Road. Traffic is moving OK, but this one thinks 35 mph (5 mph under the limit) is too fast and he’d better hold up the parade. He’s in the center lane. We come to the signal at Central. The light turns green and he…sits there. That might seem reasonable because the four or five cars ahead of him are also very slow off the mark: we all just sit there. I notice the adjacent traffic lane is empty, so glide into that…and find space for three or four cars between him and the car ahead of him, who is not moving, either. He has stopped for the light at least three car-lengths behind the guy ahead of him.

Grand Prize: Now I’m headed south and need to turn left off Seventh Street. The light is green and the northbound lanes are clear except for ONE guy, who, instead of moving through, STOPS in the fast, left-most traffic lane. I’m in the southbound left-turn lane waiting for him to get the fuck out of the way so I can make my turn. He stands there, in the traffic lane, and starts FLASHING HIS LIGHTS AT ME.

I think…Whaaa? Am I in the wrong lane? Am I standing in the oncoming lane??? Noooo. Close inspection reveals that I am indeed in the left-turn lane and he is not: the northbound left-turn lane is vacant, and he is in the fast northbound traffic lane. Sitting there. Flashing his lights.

What the FUCK? Finally the idiot swerves left in front of me, across four southbound lanes. Apparently he decided belatedly that he needed to turn west there, after he’d missed his chance to go into the left-turn lane; so, of course, instead of proceeding north a block where he could have turned left into the neighborhood and made his way right back to where he was supposed to be going, he went wackshit.

Meanwhile, in the Where’s Yore Sign competition, I make a wrong turn. Actually I make two wrong turns: one is just a normal wrong turn that sends me in the wrong direction; the other is a stupid decision. Second “wrong turn” is an effort to turn left onto 7th Street off the side street where I now find myself….you’d think I’d know better by now, wouldn’t you? Eventually I had to make an Arizona Turn: this maneuver involves turning right, then left, then right again so as to turn left across or onto a major thoroughfare. Or even a minor thoroughfare.

These exercises slow me down considerably, but I reach CardioDoc’s office in plenty of time. I’m clenching my teeth by the time I pull into his office.

My blood pressure is always higher than usual in any doctor’s office, so much do I love dealing with those places. Truly, I do hate doctors’ offices and hospitals as much as I hate and fear anything. But we’ve found that if I’m allowed to sit quietly in his waiting room focusing on something that doesn’t annoy me and doesn’t scare me, by the time I get in to see him and his army of sidekicks, the numbers are in the normal range. So yes, I’ve brought my computer so as to have something to amuse myself.

But no. First thing they do is shove a two-page form in my face: fill this out AGAIN — same form I’ve filled out four or five times. Then they demand insurance cards: I say nothing has changed. They say insurance companies require that they scan the cards once a year. I say look, give me an e-mail address and I’ll scan them and send you a PDF. She says she can’t do that. I’m irked. Go off to find some place to sit down and jump through these aggravating hoops. Again.

Before I can even fill in half of page 1, they’re calling me back there!

They do an EKG, requiring me to pull off my shirt in front of a man (yes, and a woman) and expose my exquisite scars. Then his tech takes my blood pressure. She does it wrong, allowing my arm to fall down by my side. This will jack up the blood pressure reading, even if you have, as advised, sat quietly for half an hour without any distraction or annoyance. Which (this latter) was decidedly not the case. I say to her, why don’t doctor’s offices follow the instructions put out by the makers of these devices and by the Mayo Clinic?

Huh?

You know, you’re supposed to have the person’s arm at about the level of the heart.

Okay, let’s try again.

Now she holds my arm at shoulder-joint height! Shit…I give up.

The doc surfaces forthwith. Of course, the result of this test is sky-high, after a half-hour on the road and the bullshit in the clinic and now this ignoramus. I’ve enjoyed a good 40 minutes of aggravation and hassle and haven’t even had a chance to take a deep breath.

He now decides he should put me on blood pressure medication. This is something to which I highly object and that I suspect can be avoided. I point out that my regular BP is not that high. Well, says he, nevertheless, better a few side effects (like swollen ankles and vertigo…) than a stroke.

Welp, I do not think I am in immediate danger of a stroke, although it must be admitted that less risk would apply if I never had to drive another frikkin automobile as long as I live. Nor am I about to put myself on a possibly unneeded drug after the circus I’ve just been through.

On the way home, I decide I will pick up the medication at the Walgreen’s; then set it on the kitchen counter for a week. During that time I will a) get back to exercising every day (have let that lapse with a vengeance!); stay completely off the sauce; and start working on shedding the ten pounds that I could do without.

When I point out to him that I drink a fair amount, for a little old lady, he says you can drink two glasses a day without affecting your blood pressure.

Oh yeah? That’s news to me. Apparently to the American Heart Association, too, which says women should drink no more than one (very small!) glass of wine a day. SDXB’s docs told him to stop drinking altogether, and the Mayo seems to favor that strategy, too.

I figure a week of brisk daily exercise — of better quality than being dragged forward by Ruby and backward by Cassie around a mile-long trace through Richistan — will start to have an effect, if an effect is to be had. Plus if I quit drinking and lay off the pasta and the sweets, in a week I’ll drop a pound or two, no problem.

Let us, I think, make a baseline measure after a half-hour or forty-five minutes of quiet this afternoon, and then compare it with a new set of measures after a week of this mild proposed routine. If there’s no change, then I’ll start swallowing pills. But if it’s back down into the normal range, I’ll call the Mayo itself and arrange an appointment to discuss the issue.

Right. A half-hour or forty-five minutes of quiet: NOT so much.

Run by the Walgreen’s to pick up the pills. Line is out the door. I stand and stand and stand and stand watching nothing happen…and finally think, oh screw it! This can wait for a day or for the proposed week.

Get home: Decide to make my first dog-free speed-walk of the day right now, hoping to run off some of the frustration and residual jaw-clenching stress. Fly around the park — that’s a mile and a half. When I get back, the phone is jangling with a recorded message to come pick up the effin’ pills. But meanwhile a lot of other Hell has broken loose. Gerardo, who was supposed to come over tomorrow to do a messy and much-needed job in back, has left word on the machine saying he wants to come today and will  be here around 2 p.m.  It is now after 1:00.

I need to do a bunch of stuff out back before they can get to the jungle vines that need to be hacked back. Race out there to do that; find some tarps to help keep the worst of the mess down. Haul around and thrash around.

SDXB gets on the phone and announces he wants to come over not on Thursday but on Friday, a typical swivel-hipped move. What is it about men — TWO of them in one day! — that they think women have nothing to do but sit around waiting with bated breath for them to show up? Hassle with the junk in back, hassle with an Excel spreadsheet, hear Gerardo’s truck pull up in front.

By the time he and his guys leave, it’s after 3 p.m. and I’ve been charging around since 10:30 in the morning.

Needless to say, I have not spent five minutes seated in a straight chair with my feet flat on the floor, trying to relax. 😀

Burglars Need Xmas Presents, Too

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Presumably when you’re a burglar, Santa leaves a chunk of coal under your tree. So you need to foray into the neighborhood wilds to catch your own Xmas presents, willy nilly. 😀

Hence…

My neighbors, WonderAccountant and Man of WonderAccountant, were just settling into their pew at church this morning when their cell phone jangled. Embarrassed, she was about to shut it off but noticed the call was coming in from ADT, their burglar alarm company. Someone — not them — had opened a back door.

Now they jump up and race back home, whilst ADT calls the cops.

During the 20 or 30 minutes it takes for the cops to show up after they arrive home, they ascertain that the would-be intruder has bent back a window screen in an apparent effort to enter there but has also opened the side door to the garage.

While these shenanigans are under way (unbeknownst to me), Ruby the Corgi goes absolutely freaking BATSH!T CRAZY.

Annoyed and bored (batsh!t is not an unusual state of mind for this damn dog), I get out a butcher knife and patrol the property. I do not bother digging out the pistol, perceiving this as something not worth that much trouble.

I don’t see anything around the Funny Farm’s Back Forty, but when I go out in front do spot Man of WonderAccountant stalking up the front sidewalk, trailed by WonderAccountant herself…who is not the type given to stalking.

M of WA explains the circumstances.

Time passes. We think the perps could be in the house, but the cops having been called and supposedly on their way, I refrain from exhuming my Ruger.

However, on reflection I do realize that Ruby’s frenzy has been to a large degree focused on my next-door neighbor’s house, not on the WAs’ house across the street. It occurs to me that the perp could have fled into Terri’s house or yard.

I now pick up the phone, call 911, and say we’re STILL WAITING for the cops to show up and we believe the perps to be in one of the houses that a frenzied dog is pointing out. Man of WA suggests I hide the saber, lest the cops show up unexpectedly and get scared. I stash it under the bougainvillea branches.

While we’re still trying to make the 911 operator understand WTF we’re talking about (she still hasn’t gotten the picture, despite our having said we believe the perps could be inside a residence), a pair of officers finally glide up the street.

Unperturbed, they walk into the house; ascertain that no, indeed, there are no perps inside there, and then go away.

Yeah. Just another day in lovely uptown Phoenix.

This is the second time that house has been hit since the WonderAccountants moved in there. First time, their son came home from high school one afternoon to find the front door hanging open and a stray dog reclining on the living room sofa.

He called his mom and said, “Did we get a dog?”

She said, “Huh?” and flew home.

The original windows installed in these 1971 houses are secured (not!) with rubbery weather-stripping. All you have to do is prize an end loose with a flat-head screwdriver, pull it off, and then gently lift out the pane of glass. Et voilà! You’re in: no fuss, no muss, no broken glass.

Their response was not to replace the windows and install security doors with hardened deadbolts (as I did after the garage invasion episode), but instead to install a burglar alarm system and sheets of plastic window covering that protect the glass from being broken easily.

The burglar alarm, apparently, worked. Although the burglars did open the back door, they evidently did not proceed into the house, or if they did, they left before the cops showed up.

They had plenty of time to clean out the place before our boys arrived, so that suggests the alarm scared them off before they could get down to work.

I figure they must have jumped the back wall into the yard. Our other neighbor’s son, Noah, was tossing a basketball around the front yard at the time the caper was coming down, so he would have seen them if they’d come in the front. The alleys make it easy to access any yard in the ‘hood — and that house is appealing because even though it’s on the corner, the alley curves around the back so that if you’re messing around behind the wall, you can’t be seen from the street. Anyone who’s snuffling around my back wall is visible from the street and sidewalk. To say nothing of audible to two very loud-mouthed little dogs.

😀

So you see why, every now and then, I revisit the possibility of taking another German shepherd as a room-mate. Sometimes it almost looks reasonable…

Retirement: The Cost of Living

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So, let us continue to mull over the splendid new device that I put on the pool: On reflection, I realized that because the thing will make it so much easier for me to care for the pool, it will delay the need to hire someone to do the pool maintenance for several years….or to give up living here and move into an old-folkerie. Possibly, if my health holds, for quite a few years: nothing that remains to be done is very strenuous. I would have to be seriously incapacitated to find myself unable to do the minor jobs that remain.

In other words… The $1250 I put into upgrading the pool equipment will put off the dread day that I have to move into a life-care community — possibly by a factor of years.

And every year that I do not move into one of those places saves me, in today’s dollars, the net on the sale of my house (about $300,000, the cost of buying into a life-care community) and living costs of something between $333 to $2,400 a month. In other words, every year I do not move into a warehouse for old folks, I keep the value of the house in my estate, hopefully to be passed along to my son, and I save a big chunk of dough every month.

How do I figure?

Welp, it goes like this:

Life-care communities — where you move in while you’re still ambulatory, live “independently” in a private apartment, and get a couple of meals a day plus, if desired, a limited amount of driving to doctors and shopping — are spectacularly expensive, and those expenses are spectacularly difficult to calculate. This is because there are several schemes for buying in. On the low end, you can effectively rent the place without a large buy-in. On the high end, you pay a six-figure buy-in fee plus a hefty monthly bill: basically you sell your house and give the outfit the proceeds of the sale.

Assuming your house is paid for, that is.

It’s also very difficult to get a handle on exactly what those costs are likely to be. Many of the figures posted online are several years out of date — they increase with inflation at about 4% a year, but you have no way of knowing exactly what a 2009 average figure would be in 2018.

In 2013, Marketwatch reported that the average buy-in fee for a life-care community was $280,618. That would be about what I would net if I sold my house today — maybe a little bit less. Now add 4% a year over the past five years, and you’re up around $341,400 — i.e., more than I could get for my house, after realtor’s fees.

A 2008-09 study by Metlife found monthly costs for these places ranged from $2470 to $3469. Again, if these figures have increased by 4% a year, today that could be as much as $3750 to $4748 per month!

These figures represent nationwide averages. Locally, in Scottsdale one of the few places — possibly the only place — that posts its prices online wants $243,200 to 283,200 to buy in to a one-bedroom apartment (remember: this is the equivalent of the net proceeds on the sale of a 4-bedroom home on a quarter-acre of xeriscaped land with a swimming pool, in a half-way decent centrally located neighborhood within walking distance of the lightrail) PLUS a monthly fee of $3260-$3600. That’s only for food, lodging, and minimal transportation. For one person. One. Not two. If one bedroom is too cramped for you, then you might consider one bedroom plus a den: entry fee, $297,400 to $411,000; monthly fee: $3700 to $3900.

Well. To live in my house, which is paid off and which has one hell of a lot more liebensraum than one measly bedroom in a people warren, costs me about $1,545 a month. Toss in groceries, a few unplanned expenses, and the cost of running the paid-off car, and you come up with something between  $1,600 and $1,767 a month.

That not only gives me all the very high-quality food I choose to eat, it also gives me a car that takes me any place I choose to go at any time of day I choose to travel. It covers the cost of yard and regular house maintenance, plus utilities, taxes, and insurance. In other words: it covers more than the palace in Scottsdale costs. By how much?

Subtract the monthly costs of running my house and my car plus my average grocery and utility bills from the monthly amount it will cost me to live in one of those places (assuming I’m unfortunate enough to live long enough to have to move into one of them), you get a difference — in my favor — that ranges from as little as $333 a month (for a low-end retirement home, where you really, really do NOT want to live) to as much as $2,400 a month (very nice, no doubt: but still…an institution).

What that boils down to:

Every month that I live in my house, I save approximately $1600 to $1767 a month over what it would cost to live in that Scottsdsale old-folkerie. In other words, every single month that $1250 filter stands out there in the backyard helps to make it possible for me to stay in this house is a savings of more than the filter cost.

And that doesn’t count the cash value of the house, which I would very much prefer to leave to my son.

Banner image: The Village at St. Barnabas. By Generic1139 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41879989

The Endless Dollar Drain

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Today’s dollar drain courtesy of the City of Phoenix: the new greased-gravel “paving” they’ve installed in the alley pretty clearly is not going to stand up to the force of water flowing out of a backwash hose. In theory, it’s against the law to backwash into an alley: if they catch you, it’s a $2,500 fine. This law is most honored in the breach. Presumably if you drained an entire pool into the alley — upwards of 10,000 gallons — someone would notice and the city would show up at your door. But most of the time, no one pays any attention.

However, you can be sure the Trash Cops certainly will notice if the fine new fake blacktop is dug up. Besides which, even if no one complains, the damn stuff is almost impermeable to water…and of course, they didn’t build drains alongside the crud. So that means every time it rains and every time someone backwashes onto it, we are going to have fine mosquito ponds.

For quite some time, I’ve been figuring that when the DE filter on the pool gives up the ghost, I’ll replace it with a cartridge filter, which doesn’t have to be backwashed. In theory, you only have to take it apart twice a year and clean out the cartridges. (We’ll believe that when we see it…) If this is so, it will represent a considerable savings both in terms of hassle and of service calls. The present filter has to be cleaned out three or four times a year…and the $1,250 tab for the thing is less than half the cost of a fine.

So the pool guy is out there. The difference in how efficiently this device runs, as compared to the ancient one, will make up $1,250 in my time — and in annoyance factor — within just a few months. Think of it: NEVER HAVING TO BACKWASH AGAIN!  Wooo hooo! And when you change out the pump pot basket, you don’t have to bleed off the air, another source of hassle and mess.

It does mean I will run out of money before next September, when I have to take the annual required minimum drawdown from savings. Fortunately the stock market is up, and fortunately I can charge this on a credit card, thereby deferring payment into 2018. That means I can move the tax hit into a year in which our tax bill supposedly will drop (har har hardy-har har!!!!). If the usual set of politicians’ lies turns out, for a change, not to be outrageously false, then maybe I can at least keep the tax hit down some.

Plus I expect the economy to tank after 2018 — probably in 2019 or 2020 — and I’d like to cover as many of these expensive house maintenance jobs as possible while the market is up and my investments will recover the losses in a month or two.

But my God, the backwash valve on the Money Bin has been running out of control now for months!

Paying off the car drained both personal and corporate bank accounts. I’ve had a thousand bucks worth of dental work so far and at the least am still looking at replacing two crowns. This predicament, naturally, developed after I took it into my pretty little noggin to paint the house, which probably wasn’t immediately necessary, but certainly will be if I decide to put the place on the market and move away from Bum Central and Meth, Inc.’s headquarters. I do love my house and my neighbors, but realistically, there are some drawbacks to living here. 😀

Among them, one could argue, is the cost of maintaining the Funny Farm…

Days of Our Lives, Dogs of Our Lives

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Cassie the Corgi is beginning to look a little grizzled. So it crossed my mind to wonder…how old is she?

Well, she was three years old when I nabbed her from the dog pound. I got her in June of 2008. So that makes her, God help us, about 12 years old!

Anna the GerShep was 12 — just — when she shuffled off this mortal coil. On the other hand, everything that could go wrong with a German shepherd went wrong with Anna. Cassie, on the other other hand, has been bizarrely healthy. Literally, between the time I got her and the recent dental abscess surgery, she almost never saw a vet. Not for any ailment whatsoever, that’s for sure.

She still marches right along on a doggy walk — a full mile is no problem, as long as the weather is cool. (She wilts, and always has wilted, in the heat.)

Still. Twelve years old. In doggy years, this critter is as old as I am. And, subjectively speaking, that is damn old!

She probably won’t live more than another two or three years.

Ruby, on the other hand, is only three years old, in the prime of her doggy life.

So…when, not if, Cassie shuffles off this mortal coil…then what?

At that doleful time, I think, there will be two choices:

  • Do nothing and let Ruby become the queen of the roost
  • Get another dog

Why would I get another dog? Because I don’t think these little corgis are much protection. All they can do for you, really, is make noise when someone comes around. And both of them make one hell of a lot of noise.

I’ve had dogs all my adult life. Most of them have been protection dogs — sometimes for good reason.

And despite the endless stream of vet bills…damn, I miss that German shepherd!

Plus the “good reason” is back. Imagine if Anna had been here when Matthew the Garage Invader had jumped over the back wall into the backyard! If he’d survived (highly questionable), he would have been mightily glad to be delivered into the hands of the cops who beat the bedoodles out of him. An angry cop is as nothing compared to an angry German shepherd. I’ve now seen both and will take the German shepherd, thank you, to hold vigil over my junkyard.

Thanks to the city’s misguided light-rail project, our neighborhood has become infested with drug-addicted transients. And thanks to an efflorescence of roof rats, the hood is also overrun with coyotes. Whereas a German shepherd or the late great greyhound could hold its own against a coyote (a creature that can ghost over a 6-foot wall with nooo problem), a 22-pound corgi hasn’t a chance.

Whatever occupies that backyard next needs to be something that can stand its ground against a coyote as well as a prowler. Both of which we have a-plenty these days.

But…

The next dog who comes to live with me, if another one does, presumably will be inherited by my son.

He is not thrilled by small dogs. He was willing to take the corgis when I was feeling in extremis, but he made it clear these were not to be room-mates for anyone’s life: mine, his, or theirs. He prefers large dogs. And of the larger varieties of dog, he prefers retrievers.

My experience of retrievers has been, pretty much uniformly, that they are exceptionally stupid. Not as stupid as some domestic canids, but not so bright that they do well at interpreting human behavior. And because so many humans admire retrievers, all but the most obscure varieties have been ruined by overbreeding.

Charley the Golden Retriever is really sweet, but he sure doesn’t have the sharp edge that a German shepherd has. And the car phobia: what to make of that? Really, there’s nothing you can make of it other than that he suffers from a neurosis induced by irresponsible breeding practices.

Much like, say the German shepherd.