Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

One Good Thing!

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Well, here’s a little miracle: FaM let me in on the big desktop computer, a vast and aging Macintosh.

Normally I use a laptop. The desktop is very beautiful and wonderful, but these days it’s profoundly uncomfortable for me to sit in a wooden chair for hours (or minutes….) in front of an office desk. So I use a MacBook — a laptop — which allows me to play with the computer while laying in bed or loafing in an easy chair. The ancient desktop is working here…which is nice for Funny about Money, but not so great for the 87 gerjillion other password-protected sites. The MacBook’s keyboard has died. Hit a key or type a password, and nothing happens.

Plus the desktop isn’t accepting a bunch of my passwords. I can’t get into my bank account, for example. And no, I can’t get through to those folks on the phone. So I’ll have to drive about seven miles (one-way) to the west side to get to the credit union, stand in line stand in line stand in line and stand in line to get to a teller, explain the current fiasco, try to get them to reset my password…WITHOUT A COMPUTER.

Yes. My laptop — upon which I am almost totally dependent because of the current ailment — just died, here at 5 o’clock in the goddamn morning. The desktop is  not well — notice how it just decided it won’t type a single-end-quote? Lovely. It will enter an apostrophe: ‘  But not in a standard end-quote format.

Then I’ve got to come back here and drive another ten or twelve miles in the OTHER direction — through Phoenix’s cut-throat traffic — to arrive at the august Shemer Museum.

And what a fight awaits there!

I’d signed up, at a friend’s behest, for a pottery-making class. Sounds fun, eh?  Well…it would be…

But of late I’ve developed a new ailment: peripheral neuropathy.

This little horror causes your hands, your feet, your lower legs, your lips, your gums, and even your effin teeth to tingle like mad. Tingling like when a limb “goes to sleep” because you had it in some position that cut off circulation.

Welp… When we got to the pottery class, I discovered that it entails kneading and slapping at a ball of ceramic clay. And y’know what? THAT HURTS!!!

So I dropped the class and asked for my money back. They obliged…. Uh huh.

By depositing the refund in what they claimed was my PayPal account.

Uhhhmmmm….. WHAT Paypal account?

If I have a Paypal account, I’ve never used it. I have NO idea how to access any such thing, nor is there any way to reach a human at Paypal to find out WTF. Not that I can find, anyway.

How TF could they deposit money into a Paypal account that I don’t have?  As far as I know, Paypal doesn’t have my legal name: my parents gave me a bizarre name, guaranteed to make a little kid’s life miserable, and I don’t use it. Therefore there’s no way they could have sent me a refund through Paypal: Paypal would not know who I am if the Shemer sent money there under my legal name. And good luck trying to explain that to some functionary — probably a volunteer — at the Shemer’s front desk.

I’ve tried to call them, and I can’t reach a person there, either.  Trying to get them to call me is probably futile: because of the volume of nuisance phone calls I get, I’ve had to block most of the local area codes, plus many in other states. Phone solicitors have software that blocks their outgoing number and makes it look like they’re calling from a number in your area code. After you reach a certain age, you’re assumed to be a soft touch, so the ba*tards just blitz you with nuisance calls. Literally, until I blocked a series of area codes — many of them local — I’d get 10 or 12 nuisance calls a day! Yeah… I’m pretty sure the Schemer is in one of the blocked area codes, and therefore if they tried to reach me they couldn’t get through.

So now I have to get in my car, buy gas (wrestling with a pump handle HURTS), drive way to hell and gone to the east side — on the border with Scottsdale — barge in, demand to see a person, be told no one will see me (dontcha just know it?), leave my email, and beg the morons to get in touch with me that way. Then turn around and schlep all the way back into town to get to the Best Buy, bearing the laptop, and beg them to fix it.

The one minuscule bright point of light in this mess is that I do have a service contract with Best Buy. So…well…they MAY fix it for free. If they don’t, though, at least they will take it in and try to get it working.

MEANWHILE….

I’m clearly very ill. I need to move fast to be sure my end-of-life affairs are in order. But…but…but… My lawyer died. His partners scattered to the wind. I have no idea how to find someone to take his place. So I’m going to have to grovel to my ex-husband, begging him to find someone else to locate the missing will and/or write a new will. ASAP, so that my son will not face some unholy nightmare when I croak over.

I arranged for a burial niche for my ashes at the church, in their lovely, grassy courtyard that they call the Close. But I can’t see a sign that I paid for it. So now I’ve got to go back there, confess to my stupidity, and get the details or re-arrange that. Then go to a mortuary and arrange for my own cremation.

The prospect of trying to face down the Death Industry is just horrifying…and not something I feel safe in engaging just now. I tried to find out if I could retrieve my parents’ ashes from the shelf in the crypt at Sun City and move them to the Close. What a horror show!!!!!

My father had my mother shelved out there after she died hideously of cancer — not an ordeal I’d like to be reminded of and reminded of and reminded of and…

He arranged to have himself cremated and shelved next to her.

Then he moved himself into an old-folkerie.

There he met the Dragon Lady. She spotted him the instant he walked in the chow line’s door, and she went straight for the kill. Understand: my father was a very handsome man, though he apparently wasn’t aware of how attractive he was. He adored my mother and never looked in any other direction, far’s I know.

* *

Well, by the time he gets to Orangewood, his desired prison for old folks, he’s exhausted and he’s deeply depressed. When Dragon Lady flings herself at him, he is understandably flattered and cheered. Before long, she maneuvered him into a marriage that turned out to be truly depressing. It was just horrible.

He refused to divorce her, even though my then-husband could have gotten him unhitched free of lawyer’s bills, because (said he) “She’ll get all my money!!”

He tried to escape her, for short periods, by renting a room at another old-folkerie, where he would spend whole days in front of the TV. He would tell her he was taking the car to be worked on and was sitting in the Ford dealership’s waiting room all day while this work was allegedly happening. {Yes: she was so stupid she believed it!) But…  One of the inmates at the alternate old-folkerie  knew the Dragon Lady and tattled on him — in front of him, in a manner calculated to humiliate him.

So that was the end of that. Not of the horrid marriage, but of his only way to get a break from that horrid woman.

Well.

It turns out that after he died he had his ashes shelved next to my mother…and…and…lordie! Some time later I learned that, without asking me or saying anything at all, the Dragon Lady’s relatives arranged to have her ashes stashed next to my father’s and my mother’s. On the same goddamn shelf in Sun City.

Far as I can tell, there’s nothing I can do about it. The Sun City mortuary thieves CHARGE you to remove a person’s remains from their ash prison. So it would cost me THOUSANDS of dollars to spring my father and mother’s “cremains” from that place and bring them down to my church, where I want to be interred. Then it would cost some more to get the church to stash them there.

***

Well, the sun is up and I’d better get going: grab some chow, walk the dog, and hit the road. This is gonna be a day from Hell…I feel that in my bones. What a thrill — I can hardly wait to dive into it!

 

De-brrrrrr’ed….

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And now, two days later, it’s lovely and balmy on the back porch. The young people’s wonderful little kids are playing in their backyard, their beautiful kiddy voices wafting over here from their yard. Glorious afternoon! What could be better?

Just back from the Goodyear Tire shop, a couple blocks to the north of the Funny Farm. To my astonishment, I discovered that they have actual mechanics there…  Yeah: just like the beloved guys who used to work for Chuck, before he got decrepit and had to check himself into an old-folkerie.

That was an enormous loss: Chuck was a Godsend. But alas, none of us lives forever….and Chuck was a generation ahead of me.

By sheer luck, about the time we could see there was no substitute for Chuck at Chuck’s, I happened to stumble upon that Goodyear place. I’d assumed all they did was sell tires…that would be why it’s called “Goodyear Tires,” right?

Nay, verily! Turns out the place is full-service repair shop!

Wooo HOOO!

Not only that, but it’s within walking distance of my house!

No more sitting around the shop’s waiting room for three hours! Or putting up friends to drive me down to drop off the tank-mobile at Chuck’s, and then come get me and drive me back down there in the afternoon rush hour. Wa Hoooo!

Heh…. We learned an amazing factoid about Chuck’s:

When my family lived in lovely Saudi Arabia, my father got a three-month leave between each two-year contract. His idea of a “vacation,” gawd help us, was to fly home (a 24-hour flight across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic Ocean), buy a car in New York (that was his special treat to himself!), drive across the US as fast as he could go; stop in Texas for a week or two to visit his brother & family; then drive drive drive some more to reach Berkeley, California — there to visit my mother’s relatives — and then SHOOT back across the continent to New York, unload the car, jump on another plane, and fly back to Dhahran.

LOL! With vacations like this, who needs nightmares?

Turns out that during this period, Chuck’s was the only repair garage in Phoenix!

Yeah. Phoenix was a wide spot in the road at the time. And…whenever we hit Phoenix, my father would take his fancy new vehicle to a repair shop (a repair shop??? make that the repair shop) to be spiffed up so we could make it through the rest of the trip!

No kidding!

So over all those years, at one point or another we did business with Chuck.

And you couldn’t do business with a finer man. This world is much diminished without him.

You were a good man, Chuck!

And now here we are in the fuckin’ 21st century, no doubt surrounded by good men. But HOW, dear gawd, do we find them?

Well, despite my having dropped out of The Present, I think (hope) I’ve found a small tribe of them. We shall see, over time.

{ahem!}

If that much time remains to us…

Old Age: Live Free or Die???

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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.

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?

 

Moving: A Bad Idea

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So here I am: coveting the Old Neighborhood. Thinking how much I’d love to move back down into the historic mid-town Encanto neighborhood, where DXH and I spent the first 15 years or so of our marriage. Where M’ijito grew old enough to pass through the first several years of the tony private grade school where we sent him. Where I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation, got it accepted by a prestigious publisher, finished the degree, and thereby made myself unemployable.

Ahhhh, the good ole days!

Ruby and I traipsed all over the place this afternoon, from our old part of the district through the expensively tony Palmcroft neighborhood, into the park…round and round.

I loved our time in the Encanto/Palmcroft district, and greatly regretted feeling we needed to move out. Before we sold our beautiful historic home and moved up to the North Central area, DXH had told me we would put our son in the highly respected Madison schools, the best public school district in the state. I figured Cool! He could get a first-rate K-8 experience, meet and make friends with offspring of the prominent North Central set, and from there proceed with the other Richistani kids to attend the weighty and prestigious Brophy Catholic High School. Or, failing that, go through Central High School, without doubt the state’s best public high school.

Well. Uh…no.

Once we got moved, DXH refused to switch the kid into a public school. So there we were in Snobsville North, where I knew no one and no one felt any craving to make friends with white trash of my ilk.

(No, in case you haven’t figured it out: My parents were not professionals, they were not even college graduates, and they knew nothing about how to function as socialites…)

The marriage didn’t survive that fun period. I ended up  back south where the WT live, and then eventually skipped around to the far side of the tony North Central district, landed in some apartments on the north side, and extracted a full-time teaching job from Arizona State University.

At any rate, leaving the Encanto District to move up to North Central meant leaving behind beloved neighbors, beautiful historic houses, and a wonderful central location close to cultural and entertainment amenities. Eventually it also meant me leaving behind the marriage, the lawyer, and the trying social life…and the beloved neighbors, the beautiful historic houses, and the central city location with its proximity to cultural and entertainment amenities.

Ohhh well…

Since then, a lot of things have changed. A full-time job at the Great Desert University meant I could support myself. My parents’ dying, one at a time, meant I had no one to nag me to stay in the (highly advantageous) marriage. But their demise also left me with enough money to support me for the rest of my life. I bought into a decent neighborhood on the fringe of North Central, and here we are.

But I still miss the lovely Encanto district. Cruising the area, I wondered: would I like to sell my house here on the fringe of Sunnyslope and move back downtown?

The answer is mixed. A lot of things are improved up here on the north end of North Central, as compared to the picturesque historic Encanto district. But a lot of things are de-proved, as it were…

Why move?

  • Sunnyslope is kind of menacing. It is, after all, a high-crime area.
  • We therefore have lots of noise from cop helicopters.
  • Then there’s the noise from the annoying lightrail train.
  • The noise from  traffic and sirens on Conduit of Blight Blvd amplify the racket.
  • And we do have some interestingly sh!t-headed neighbors.

Why NOT move?

  • I could in theory walk to two markets & a drugstore from here. My spectacularly superannuated great-grandmother used to walk that far several times a week in Berkeley: straight uphill. Here, though, to get through the heat and dodge the panhandlers and thieves, you have to drive to the stores or use Uber.
  • M’hijito wants this house.
  • I don’t know anybody downtown anymore.
  • Young people who don’t like older people infest that place — Encanto is Encanto because of the young people who covet the beautiful historic homes. Discrimination against elders is a real thing, and it’s likely to be far worse there in Yuppieville than it is up here in a more diverse neighborhood.
  • It’s even noisier there than it is here (she says,. as a plane buzzes overhead…).
  • One wonders: why spend that kinda money for not much improvement in lifestyle?
  • The pool here is an expensive nuisance, but it could be drained and decked.
  • The Romanian Landlord’s tribe are shitheads, but WGAS? And what guarantees that you won’t have shitheads there?

Many more nuances come into play:

  • Care of elders: soon enough, I may have to hire someone to come in to care for me, or else move into a long-term care facility.
  • This house is paid for and in good condition. If I pass it to M’jito he could move in here and have a palatial little shack with a pool and about four times more space than he needs.
  • On the other hand, who wants to pay for and ride herd on four times more space than you need?
  • Unloading this place and moving into a care facility might greatly reduce my taxes.
  • This area is really not very safe.
  • But then, neither is the area where M’jito lives. Toss-up!

The truth is, I don’t know which way to jump because it probably doesn’t matter which way one jumps. Either way presents a set of pro’s and a set of con’s.

So…we’re cast back on that reliable old adage:

When in doubt, don ‘t.

Stop the World…

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i wanna get off!!!!!

This damn place — lovely uptown Phoenix — gets crazier and crazier with each passing day. Accumulated passing days have given us insane cross-streets and neighborhood roads: lunatic drivers, roads that go nowhere, a construction zone at every turn…what a horrible place!

Wait, wait… Whew! A miracle just happened: WordPress let me in to Funny about Money, a maneuver it’s been rejecting all morning.

I could not remember the secret codes…or much of anything else. Apparently the computer’s memory has not yet been consumed by senility: at length, it remembered SOMETHING and let me into FaM’s site.

So this morning I determined to buy a silly dood-dad that I’ve been coveting for some time. So it was off to the gigantic {supermarket} up on Dunlap Road.

They didn’t have it.

Ohhhkayyyyy….

Around the corner to the hardware store:

Noooo…not a chance in Hell.,

Ohhhhhkayyyyy,,,,

Across Main Drag Central, over to the westside shopping area, into another hardware store.

Nope.,

Into another supermarket.

Har har hardy-har har!

Over to the Safeway.

Not a chance in Hell.

Up to the Albertson’s. It may not be Hell, but it doesn’t have a chance of carrying the doo-dad, either.

Driving around & around. Ugh!

Truth to tell, I love to drive. But I am SO-O-O-O SICK of driving in L.A. East!!!!! Gawdlmighty, I hate the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Just a nasty, frustrating, crazy-making place to drive a car.

Driving around gets crazier with each day. People behave like they’re high on meth, wherever they go. Who knows? Maybe in my senilitude, I do the same thing. All I know is…GET OUTTA MY WAY, YA CRAZY FOOLS!

Seriously: that’s how it feels to drive here.

The more Phoenix resembles the L.A. area, the more I hate it.

Seriously: if my son didn’t live here, I would be sooooooooo long gone!

Where would I go?

Hm….

Here in Arizona?

* Sedona
* the Oro Valley area outside of Tucson
* Fountain Hills, an overpriced suburb of Scottsdale
* Prescott (probably not: too cold in the winter)

Uhmmmm…that’s about it.

In California:

* San Francisco
* Certain parts of San Diego
* Carmel/Monterey, if I had all the money in the world

In Nevada?

*Phbbhphttt!

In New Mexico?

* Santa Fe: again, if I had all the money in the world

****

Welp! Since “All the money in the world” doesn’t apply here. it looks like I’m stuck. And the more I live in Central Arizona, the less I like it.

****

Advice to the unwary: think one helluva lot more carefully than I did about where you’d like to spend your dotage!