Coffee heat rising

aging

Glorioski! Glorious Day, Glorious Future

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Wow! What a gorgeous morning. Intermittent overcast with big, fluffy, cottony clouds. Cool but not cold. The sky wants to rain, but can’t work itself up to that much effort.

Ruby and I frolicked through Upper Richistan, as usual admiring the big ole’ expensive houses and their big, expensive irrigated lawns. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Ours isn’t “gorgeous,” but it’s adequately pleasant. Mid-middle class homes on lots that put enough space between neighbors.

Ruby loved up some workmen…cuteness is like some kind of joy drug for most people. We went on our way eventually. Now we’re back at the house.

And the Human finds itself wondering what next? 

Despite the family track record for longevity, we can pretty safely bet that I don’t have all that much longer to go. Relatives who have lived into their dotage have uniformly been Christian Scientists…tee-totalers, that is.

I ain’t no tee-totaler and never have been. My first boyfriend introduced me to wine when I was about 17, and I’ve been lapping up the stuff ever since. As we know, anything alcoholic is a handy device for shortening your life span. So I think it’s safe to figure I’ve got maybe about 10 years left — at most. Probably a little less than that.

The best I can hope for, I think, is to drop dead…and thereby avoid ending up in some nursing home or prison for old folks. That’s not outside the realm of possibility — as I say, the forebears who dropped dead in their late 90s didn’t drink. I do (with élan!), and so it’s safe to assume I’ve probably cut a good 10 years off the inherited lifespan. But that still would leave me another 10 years. Ten years that I do NOT want to spend in an old-folkerie!!!!

And therein lies the challenge: How to stay out of one of those horrible places. 

They soak up your life savings…and I want my savings to go to my son. Not to a holding pen for old bats. But….

But I have yet to figure out how to protect those savings for him, especially if I live much longer. Even more especially if I live much longer and get sick. How to evade those eventualities, though, does escape me.

If I manage to stay healthy into my dotage, though, M’hijito should inherit enough to retire in comfort…forthwith. By then, it’ll be time for him to figure out how to evade life in the old-folkerie…  😀

Hup hup hup hup…

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Waiting for M’hijito to arrive, collect me, and haul me off to the physical therapist’s gym, there to spend the next two hours going hup hup hup hup hup….  

Wish I knew for sure that a brain-numbing evening of mindless exercises actually works to ease the peripheral neuropathy, or whether the fading of the numbness and the buzz was the result of  Time and the River Flowing. Blowing away three hours on hupping and bupping is NOT how I would choose to spend my time. Seriously!

Well. Either the exercises are working or time is doing its job: dunno which.

The neuropathy is slowly — VERY slowly — getting better, though. So I guess if there’s even an outside chance that the hup-hup-hup routine is helping, it’s worth killing yet another evening on it.

But how many MORE evenings to squish with this stuff are we looking at? It feels like such a painful waste of time… Well, not painful in the sense that it hurts (it does not) but in the sense that I hate boring myself stupid when I have many more interesting things to do.

What would I do tonight, instead of killing an hour in waving my arms around?

* Walk Ruby from one end of the neighborhood to the other.
* Write a post for Funny about Money (hmmmm….)
* Watch the idiot box for awhile
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet

ooohkayyy… So, yeah: I don’t have anything much to do that’s any better. But at least I’d be wasting my time on my choice of time-wasters, not theirs.

 

What NOT to Do in Old Age…

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Gorgeous, cool morning. Few people and fewer dogs out and about. Ruby and I have a great (and peaceful) doggywalk. As we stroll through a fog of boredom, I consider…horrors abundant:

* My father having to care for my mother in her last, agonizing days and weeks.

* She dies and he moves into an old-folkerie, a venue I regard with horror.

* But he likes it, because after a lifetime at sea, he’s accustomed to institutional living.

* What he isn’t accustomed to is Helen, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West.

* Marrying Helen botches up the rest of his life.

Seriously: the last years of his life were ruined, not just because of my mother’s illness and death but because he naively married the dragon-lady. Apparently he didn’t understand that there was no real substitute for my mother, the love of his life. Did he imagine that one woman would be much the same as the next?

What have I learned from my father’s late-life experiences?

* Stay out of institutions as you age, if at all possible. Doesn’t cost any more to hire someone to come into your home to clean and drive you to the grocer and whatnot than it does to live in one of those places.

* Do not imagine one spouse is a carbon copy of the next. Do not figure you can replace a late spouse with someone new.

He would have been OK if he hadn’t married Helen. He wouldn’t have been happy, but he would have been contented enough by himself in a pleasant apartment at Orangewood, the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died. And over time he would have adjusted to the loss of my mother.

* Find new things to do w/ your life. A new hobby? Travel? Raising poodles??? Something that’s different and reasonably fun, or at least interesting.

I want to say that marrying Helen wrecked his life. But no: My mother dying is what wrecked his life. And she died prematurely because of her smoking habit.

So: Don’t smoke! Don’t take a partner who smokes, either.

He did smoke, but he had quit well before the time my mother started to get sick from the cancer. Get rid of that habit NOW: don’t wait until it’s too late.

* But remarrying wasn’t a solution, either. I’d suggest you NOT remarry after you lose a spouse. Or, if you must, don’t do so until you’ve known the new partner at least a year. Give yourself an out, and keep that door unlocked for as long as possible.

* It made sense for him to move into Orangewood.
* It made sense for him to take up a friendship and then a romance with Helen.
* What didn’t make sense was to remarry. And if he’d waited, they might not have done so.
* Once they had entered their marriage, they were both legally trapped in an official agreement. Getting out of it would have cost each one a ton of money, and a whole lot of bad feelings.
* Staying independent — staying free from the git-go — would have given each of them and both of them the leeway to choose how they wanted to live. Once they’d married, they both felt stuck in the partnership: a partnership they each came to realize was a mistake.

Better to live in sin, my friends, than to live in misery. Seriously: they would have been so much better off if they’d never married, even if they had chosen to move in together.

Late October in the Desert

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Incredibly gorgeous morning! Clear, cool but not cold, not even crisp. People out pushing their baby strollers, walking their dogs. My mind wanders…

…to the horror of potential incarceration at the Beatitudes, a venerable Phoenix old-folkerie. Honestly: I’d rather be dead than locked up in an institution. Must figure out potential alternatives…

* Hire someone to come to the house and care for me? Apparently Luz (Cleaning Lady from Heaven) used to do this.

* Stay someplace overnight, but keep the house and return here during the day?

* Buy an apartment in someplace like The Terraces? (The Terraces is an old-folkerie.)

* Allow self to be forced to buy a place at the Beatitudes (an old-folkerie on the gawdawful level), but after the dust settles, go out and rent an apartment someplace else, keeping it secret?

* Buy a house in M’hijito’s neighborhood, so he feels better about being closer to me? Hire someone to help care for it?

Looks like #1 is probably the only truly viable choice. That or 1 & 5.

Right now, I don’t need #1. I have no problem caring for myself:

* Fixing meals
* Shopping for groceries
* Cooking gourmet(!) meals
* Bathing, grooming
* Tending the pool
* Riding herd on the hired help
* Caring for the dog

The big issue, really, is the purloined car: not being able to get from Point A to Point B without hiring a driver. But is that really a very big deal?

* A guy across the street drives for Uber and is usually available.
* Otherwise, Uber does its own roaring business in this neighborhood: no problem calling for a driver.
* When my son’s nose is not on the grindstone, he probably can schlep me to most routine destinations (grocery stores for example).
* But that may not be necessary: we have not one, not two, but three major grocery retailers and two drugstores within easy walking distance. And two computer stores. And a veterinarian. And a hair stylist. And a nail salon. And…hmmmm…Is anything NOT within walking distance???

My Aunt Gertrude was a very practical woman…so, my guess is that she moved from her sweet Berkeley bungalow into a fancy old-folkerie because her son forced her to move, not because she felt any urgency to do so. She could have gotten by in that house indefinitely, with hired help to come in and handle the cleaning, the shopping, and the errands/appointments. And what an asset to have handed down to her son: it’s now worth over $1.2 MILLION!

Such are the ravages of time, eh?

Truth to tell, I suspect that over the time left to me, this house’s value also will explode…right along the lines of Gertrude’s house. And how would I love to be able to pass along something over a million bucks to my son? Zowie!!

Beautiful Dog-&-Human Night

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Ruby the Corgi dragged her Human all over the north part of the neighborhood this evening. And what a beautiful evening it is! Really one of those incredible Arizona nights…just gorgeous.

We walked northward, past my old Arizona Highways colleague’s place: Jerry Jacka, one of the great landscape photographers of the Southwest. Then up past our now-absent friend Marge’s house.

She, we assume, must either have passed or have been consigned to The Beatitudes, a skin-crawling prison for the elderly. She appeared to be well into her 80s…maybe even older than that.

Her house — a classic Southern-California style 1970s ranch house — has been swarming with workmen. It’ll be interesting to see what transpires…

She told me she wanted to leave it to her son, who lives out of state. She wanted him to have it as an outpost to use when he’s here on business, which is apparently every now and then.

Our grown kids, though, usually do NOT have the same ideas about large and expensive investments as we do. My guess is, he’s cleaning it up and fancying it up so he can put it on the market.

It’s really not in an ideal location: only a block or two south of Main Drag North, one of the most hectic surface streets in the city. When you live next to a busy road like that, you get used to the racket from the traffic. But…whaddaya bet Sonny hasn’t done any such thing? He probably thinks it’s a zoo up there, and has no intention of hanging onto a piece of real estate pasted to the edge of that unholy road.

Ohhh well. Nothing stays the same, eh?

 

A Day Not QUITE from Hell…

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But close. Very close. 

Why?

Well…where on earth to start?

Let’s start in the neighborhood computer store.

My laptop crapped out; needed the attention of a computer tech.

My son has my car, so I can’t drive the computer across the city to the Best Buy, where I have a warranty that covers it.

Shee-ut. So I pick up the gadget and hike the six blocks to the neighborhood computer store, down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. Haul it in. Explain the problem. “Oh…” says the ninny at the service desk, “We don’t fix that issue.”

Wonnerful. I do have a warranty at Best Buy. But taking the machine to that august computer dealer entails a half-hour or forty-minute drive through nauseating traffic, plus a good 15 or 20 minutes of standing in line. “Know anyone nearby who can work on it?”

She sends me across the street to the electronics store over there.

Hike across six lanes of homicidal traffic. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand…

“I dunno what the problem might be. You need to take it down to the Best Buy.”

Yeah: the one I just passed over because I didn’t want to make the half-hour drive in each direction.

Hike back into the parking lot, mightily pi$$ed.  A military jet ROARS over, emitting a terrifying racket.

Reminds me of how much I hated living in Sun City, just down the road from Luke Air Force Base, which sent its ROARING jets over our homes every morning starting at about 6 a.m., and serenaded us for the rest of the day.

That reminded me of Sun City’s other horrors, not the least of which was its incompetent, misogynistic doctors. The bastards who made my mother’s final suffering ten times worse than it had to be.

Or maybe a hundred times worse. When does stupidity morph into outright evil, anyway?

By now, as you may have intuited, I was having a just LOVELY day.

Circled back to the Funny Farm. 

Here at the house, I stumbled across an ancient computer power cord. And LO! The damn thing fits in the laptop’s plugs!!!

We’re now attached to an outlet, and it looks like the critter is going to keep on working. Apparently the problem, such as it was, had to do with the present power cord, which must have broken or worn out.

Do miracles ever stop?

* The palms of the hands are still buzzing.
* The upper gums over the front teeth: still buzzing.
* The soles of the feet: still buzzing.
* The ears whistling at high volume, nonstop.

Somehow, none o’ that seems to matter much.

* Computer breakdown
* Idiots in computer store
* Roaring jet
* Sun City memories & horrors
* Persistent peripheral neuropathy

WHAT a wonnerful day!!!!