Coffee heat rising

Angst

Roaaaarrrrrrr!

by

Gosh, what a…classically Arizona winter day. How strange, how weird, how…funny.

Coming on to 10:30 of an early November morning. Ruby and I go out front to oversee The Property. Yeah: get Gerardo to fix this. Get him to trim that. Admire the other plant. Loaf, loaf, and loaf…

The sky is deep gray, coated in thick, non-raining clouds. This makes for a strangely beautiful morning, hard to understand why. But one supposes “why” doesn’t matter, eh?

Off in the distance, a steady RROAARRRR rumbles up toward the ‘Hood from the southeast side. It’s the song of the the commercial airlines taking off and landing at Sky Harbor Airport.

Living closer to that place — where my stepsister’s house was, for example — would be even more annoying than living in Sun City, where one is blasted from dawn to dusk by jet fighters roaring in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Purely by accident, I happened to stumble into my present neighborhood: staidly middle-class, centrally located in spades, and far enough from the local noise-makers to be relatively quiet.

Seriously: I am so pleased with this house that I absolutely positively do NOT move out of here when I reach a stage of such decrepitude that I need a baby sitter.

And really: considering how much it costs to live in an old-folkerie (the place where my father retired took all the proceeds from the sale of a very nice suburban house, and then pretty much cleaned out his savings accounts), it does seem to me that rather than move into a retirement “home” (snort!!), you might be better off to hire staff to come in and care for you in your present, paid-off manse. Especially if you manage to die in a timely way.

Seriously — sorry, I realize Americans are scared of talking about Death, but do get over it! ‘Cause we ain’t a-gunna get away from it!

Just as seriously, it strikes me that with the roof over your head paid for, you could be better served by your own hired folks than you would be living in one of those old-folks’ prisons.

Luz — Cleaning Lady from Heaven — remarked at one point that she’d had a job like that.

So I’m gonna ask her who she worked for, what she did, and how much she got paid. Learn who to hire and where to find them when you reach the point where you really can’t care for yourself, reliably and safely. Then start looking around, talking with employers, and figuring out how to get such a person on the private payroll.

***

Ahhh, what a nice little neighborhood, indeed. The WonderAccountants — who live straight across the street from the Funny Farm — just installed a new set of exterior windows. They apparently called the same guys who installed mine several years ago, and it looks like they selected the same model of windows, or one very much like mine.

They put up classy wrought-iron fake shutters on either side of each window, far more sophisticated than anything I could dream up… And now the front of their house REALLY looks nice. They should be amply pleased with the result.

They say that double-paned windows save you a bundle on AC and heating bills. Couldn’t prove it by me: I’d say the monthly power bills are about the same as they were before I replaced my single-panes.

Still, a double-paned window would be a bit more hassle to break into, so that would up your security level. And a perp would have to make a fair amount of noise to cut or break out such a window, thereby alerting you in plenty of time to dodge out a back door and run off down the street.

***

{sigh} I love this neighborhood. I love the neighbors. And I love my house. GOT to find ways to stay here until I croak over.

The prospect of being locked up in one of those holding pens for old folks fills me with horror. Honestly, I would rather be dead. (No: I’m not contemplating suicide anytime soon, so please don’t panic.)

But y’know….life is short. We only have around 70 or 80 years in this sylvan vale. So why spend any part of it in misery, just because you’re getting on toward the end of the road? Locking up a person in a holding pen to await the end is forcing that person to spend the last part of her or his life in misery.

How, really, is that the right thing to do?

Would it not be better…would it not be morally preferable…to hire someone to come in to your home and care for you until you totter over into the grave? Or at least until you fully and permanently lose consciousness?

That’s no easy job — caring, not tottering, that is. My father worked like an animal caring for my mother in the last dreadful weeks of her tobacco-poisoned life. But…well…he did her a magnificent service.

I watched him die in the old-folkerie where he banished himself….and to tell you the truth, his best friend there did himself a favor when he took a pistol and blew out his own brains.

My father found the guy’s corpse.

What a horror! But…why not make it possible for a person who knows Death is on its way and knows insurmountable suffering will accompany it…why not make it possible to choose your own exit door?

*** *** *** 

Darkness has fallen
Dog has frolicked
Human is pooped

*** *** *** 

And here we are, once again, loafing in an easy chair by the breeze of an electric fan and the light of an elegant old electric lamp.

😀

What a day!!! One depressing thought after another. One depressing predicament to cope with after another.

Ohhhhh well.

Tomorrow’s another day. Uhm… I hope…

Roar…Roar…Roaaaarrrr….

by

Argha! Another cop helicopter, whirling around over the neighborhood to the north of us. At least, for a change, this one is not hovering right over the house. /eyeroll/

The ‘Hood isn’t exactly Crime Central, but neither is it a place of sweetness and tranquility. We reside on the southern edge of a suburb called Sunnyslope, which is Crime Central, swarming with drug dealers, delinquents, burglars…and even the occasional murderer.

This fine circumstance brings us cops. And cops. And more cops. Many of them riding in noisy, buzzy helicopters. Dare to go to bed, dare to go to sleep, and you’ll bring on the serenade: BRRRRooooaaarrrrrrrr…

Reassuring in that it lets you know the policia are on the job. Un-reassuring in that it lets you know they’re chasing some sh!thead around your neighborhood.

Get up. Walk through the house. Check that all the doors are locked. Turn on the outside porch lights, the better for the cops to chase their prey.

These regularly recurring events lead me to regularly reconsider whether I want to stay here.

Do I want to move back out to Sun City?

Ugh, no!

Okayyy…. Do I want to move down into the neighborhood where M’hijito lives? 

Hm. Those houses are 20+ years older than these, poorly insulated, expensive to run. Right in the middle of everything, which is cool in some ways — you can walk to the spectacular AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store from his house. But at what cost?

> Noise
> More Noise
> Still More Noise
> Traffic
> Traffic
> Still More Traffic
> Astronomical utility bills
> Higher property taxes
> Insane water bills
> Bums sleeping in your yard…

Naaaahhhh…. Ain’t goin’ there!

The Valley does offer other suburbs and other neighborhoods that are a little less…active, shall we say. Fountain Hills, for example. Moon Valley. Sun City: inactive to the point of stasis. But is that really worth spending thousands of dollars on selling the shack, buying another one somewhere else, and moving?

I think not. 

No Longer Even Bother….

by

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

CALL FROM “V….[ETC ETC ETC]

Oh, hey!!!  Turns OUT

it’s from my pal VickyC!  She wants to go out for brunch…lunch…whatever it is!

Yahoo! Now I have less than an hour to get off my duff, wash up, and get dressed.

The heck with that noise: I’m drinkin’ the rest of this coffee, come what may! 😀  😀  😀

And how convenient: I need a new lawyer, my beloved guy having retired. And she DOES know a good one, I believe. I hope…she was hiring my guy, but I think she needed someone who had a slightly different specialty.

Well! We shall see in an hour or so.

Must review the piles of legalistic paper and be sure my will and other paperwork remain set up to cover my son, with the least possible degree of hassle, for when I croak over.

*****

Aaahhhhh SHEEE-UT! 

No, we won’t see any such thing. Turns out my son has made a goddamn appointment with the goddamn Mayo Clinic…on SUNDAY MORNING!!!!!!!

This is not the first time those idiots have done this.

It’s a hour’s drive out there, one-way.

That means if I have choir: cancel choir.

If I have anything else to do: cancel that.

Get in the car and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and…  Find a place to park in their maze of an underground parking lot. Ride upstairs and wait and wait and wait and…GODDAMMIT!

Just what I wanna do on a Sunday morning. Choir or no choir.

****

And now here we are in one of their draped rooms, waiting for…Gawd only knows what new torture. Presumably something entailing a generous jabbing of needles.

How do I hate this place? Let me count the ways.

One nice thing about it, I guess: if you croak over, you don’t regret it so uch…it would be a bit of a relief.

1:54 p.m.

“Morning,” eh? 

Well, it’s comin’ on to two in the afternoon. We’ve been here for HOURS. I’m still lashed up to a needle and fukkin’ tubes and…HOW can I say how much I hate this?

Yeah, I do recognize and understand how amazing our medical system is and how astonishing all the stuff we can do is and…boyoboyoboy…  And how much I hate this stuff.

Cruising the Internet. Come across a notice of my nephew’s demise. Poor guy. He never was…well…quite right. Short a few IQ points, from the git-go. Just…really sad.

This was the grandson of the woman who became my stepsister when my father married her mother…

2:15 in the fukkin’ afternoon…

Tied down to a couch in the Mayo with a damned needle in my arm for…how long? I’ve lost track of the time. Feels like fukkin’ hours, though. Son is yelling at me..I can’t open my mouth without pi$$ing him off.

One

Bitch

of a

Day

* * *

And now we’re on the way home. My poor son’s mood is not improved by our escape. He’s yelling at me. I just want to get home, get in the house, and shut the door!

And maybe, with any luck, find something to eat. Without having to hike to the grocery store.

You Want Me to Pay WHAAAT?????

by

Statements arrive in the mail, claiming to show what is not covered by Medicare. Alarming, because they don’t really say you have to pay the vendor…these outfits often generate a Medicare bill, send it off, and then refrain from charging the amounts Big Brother declines to pay.  Then the vendor drops the amount the statement says they’re charging, so you don’t really owe that. Quite.

But meanwhile, you also have private insurance, which may (or may not) cover all (or some) of the amounts Medicare declines to cover.

You can’t tell from a given statement what part of that is what! You just have to wait — weeks or months! — until the vendor gets around to generating its most recent coherent bill.

Even then, you’re likely to have to guess what’s owed and what’s covered.

Right now Medicare says it’s billing me $1,057 and $658…for services that I wouldn’t have used if I’d known they weren’t covered.

IF they’re not covered. They actually may be covered, but you can’t tell it from these statements.

Ducky!

Awww, jeez! Guys!!!!

by

Dare to sit down to breakfast, and ARF!!!!

Get up to see what the Hound is arfing at, and see Gerardo’s wondrous gang of yard dudes out front.

Dayum!!!

Get off duff. Trot around: pick up junk, put junk away; set up pool so guys can work around it; pick up more junk, put more junk away; pick up and discard mounds of dog sh!t… Finally get the place ready for the men.

Stumble back in the house. Look out front to see if they need me to go out there and unlock the side gate…

and…

and….

THEY’RE GONE!!!!!!!

WTF??????  Nary a sign of a yard dude! Or a yard dude’s truck!!

ohhhh…kayyyy…. So where’s the dog?????

Ruby!

RUBY!!

R-U-U-B-E-E-E-E!!!!!!

Nary a small fuzzy corgi!

Ohhhhh shee-ut! Did they open the gate and let her out?

Frantically search around and search around and call and call and search around and search around and call and call and…and…

Lo!
Here she is! 
Ambling out from underneath the toilet.

ggrrrrrr….  This is gonna be one of THOSE days, ain’t it?

Scam-a-Bat

by

My poor son was mightily peeved this morning when I interrupted his work by calling him to ask if some marvel of an offer that arrived in the mail was, as suspected, a scam.

Yes. Of course it’s a scam. Quit breaking into my workday with that stuff!

Uh  huh.

Well, what happens when you’re old is that it gets harder and harder for you to distinguish the Fake from the Real. That’s even when you know very well that about every third person you encounter wants to rip you off. 

Yes. Even when you know that 99% of what comes in the mail is a scam. Yes. Even now that virtually every phone call comes from a crook. I no longer even answer the phone. Leave me a message, and maybe I’ll call you back. If I know you personally…

Even ordinary adults in their working years get quite enough nuisance calls! Now add to that the calls for help from elder relatives who have been pestered by this, that, or the other scammer, and you get…overwhelming!

Today I got a snail-mail from what looked like a legitimate creditor telling me that I’d better pay up some late bill or it would be off to jail for me, by golly!

Uh huh.

Well, on some level I knew that was BS, because I don’t buy things on time. If  can’t afford to pay for it now, I don’t get it.

But that’s not 100%. Yes, of  course I do have some creditors. Don’t we all?

Well…yeah. That’s what the scammers are counting on.

My son was enraged when I broke into his work morning to ask if today’s telephoned demand for money was something real…or what. This made me feel like a sh!t, of course. But…what would I have felt like if I’d fallen for the caller’s scam?

Honestly. I think a person could make a living by hiring out to answer people’s phones and screen the incoming trash. No kidding: at this point, I would seriously consider hiring someone to answer my calls. MOST of the calls I get these days are hustles and scams. Hiring someone to screen incoming would relieve me of a fair amount of tooth-grinding!

Same with the mail. It’s getting to the point where I won’t open an envelope unless I recognize the sender’s name & address. ANY envelope. But that means that occasionally someone I do business with is not gonna be able to reach me by snail-mail. Or by phone. In other words: they can’t reach me at all. 

Probably the trick to that would be to insert some sort of code into your return address.

Jane 324 Doe, Esquire
1234 Erewhon Road
New York, N.Y. 23456

But these edited return addresses would, over time, be collected by the hustlers, so that eventually you would no longer be able to tell the difference between legit correspondence and hustles. And of course, to the extent that such a maneuver works, it will waste your time as you dork around with the coded addresses.

The older you get, the tiresomer it gets!