Coffee heat rising

Angst

A…a…n…d furthermore….

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Here’s what was going on yesterday evening, while Ruby the Corgi and I were doggy-walking and dodging bullets.

{sigh}

Y’know, this stuff is gettin’ old. I’m beginning to think SDXB was right; time to move to Sun City, where you can enjoy the Silence of the Mausoleum, day in and night out.

Having lived in Sun City when my parents moved there, dragging me with them and dumping me at the University of Arizona, I really, really do not want to live there again. So, when SDXB announced he was headed west, I refused to go with him. But sweartagod, I’m beginning to think that may have been a mistake.

At the time SDXB moved out there, it was fairly calm here in North Phoenix, for a big-city neighborhood. But…that’s not so true anymore. It feels like every time you turn around, along comes some new shenanigan. You can’t take the dog for a walk around the block without carrying a pistol with you.

But…my problem with Sun City is that I don’t wanna live in a mausoleum. And that’s what the place feels like. The silence of the tomb reigns. Plus you have that generation’s 1950s-style hatred of minority: the place is Whiteyville with a vengeance.

One of my friends moved out there from the East Valley, delighted at the prospect of living in a place designed for retirees. Problem is, it’s a place designed for white retirees…and he ain’t one of those. The locals ganged up on the poor guy and hounded him until he moved out!

Guess I should have warned him. But as a practical matter, it’s been over 60 years since my parents moved to Sun City. And frankly, I assumed the locals would have come into the 21st century by now. Wrong!

That notwithstanding, I find it a dreary and depressing venue. Weirdly enough, I like the sound of children playing. And even of an occasional teenager blasting the car radio as they cruise up the street. That, plus it’s a 40-minute drive into central Phoenix, where my son lives. I’d never see the guy again!

Well. You don’t have to move to a ghetto for old folks to escape the constant whiz of flying bullets. Other areas of the city are reasonably quiet and safe.

Problem is, they’re a lot more expensive than this part of town. Plus they’re further from M’hijito’s house.

I kinda doubt that I could get enough for this house to buy another house in points east. Might be able to get into a fairly tony North Central high-rise apartment…but then what am I gonna do with Ruby?

Plus…truth to tell, I love this house. It’s a couple of bedrooms too large, but otherwise it’s perfect for me.

  • It’s in a moderately safe neighborhood.
  • It’s close to my preferred shopping venues.
  • It’s easy to keep clean.
  • It has a nice pool…one that, for an exorbitant price, responds with Pool Joy to the ministrations of a hired pool dude.
  • It has gorgeous mature trees. And desert landscaping.
  • It has adequately nice neighbors.

Why on earth would I want to move?

Lovely Uptown Phoenix

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rrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrr HONK HONK HONK RRRRRRRRRRR beep beep beep thwack thwack thwack thwhack…. Ahhh, the lovely melody of the ‘Hood! Major wrecky-poo to the west of us on Conduit of Blight, just as Ruby and I stepped out the front door for a doggy-walk.

So we head out in the opposite direction. An hour later, the cop copters are flying away and apparently most of the mayhem is cleaned up.

Hm. This might not have been a wreck. It may have been yet another moment of mayhem: apparently a shooting incident took place over there. Hmmmm… No, don’t think it’s the same episode. The shooting thing took place on or near the freeway itself. This afternoon’s moment of fun looked like it happened on a surface street. Probably.

Then we have this little bit of fun: Apparently the water in our parts is contaminated with lead from the pipes that the city has no intention of replacing. Guess Ruby and I should be drinking bottled water. $$$$

And this one from yesterday…

Starts to make Sun City look good, eh?

Holy Junkmail, Batman!

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Just happened to go into the email program’s “junkmail” folder, and…forgodsake!!!! Almost 550 junkmails have poured in since the first of the month! That’s in just two weeks!

DayUM, what a nuisance.

Nuisance because I’ve got to scroll through all that crap looking for any messages that are NOT junk, and nuisance because now I’ve got to delete it all, but can’t do so without checking to be sure I’m not accidentally trashing a message from someone who matters.

Yeah. That’s 548 messages in the junkmail folder, plus a sh!tload more that managed to slither into the in-box and will also have to be deleted.

Here’s one demanding payment for iCloud space. Hm. Senile though I am, I’m pretty sure I’d remember if I were paying for iCloud. And if I were, a monthly hit like that would be set up on auto-pay.

Man! These damn scammers come at you from all directions!

I’ve heard that for phone solicitors, there are lists of phone numbers organized by the marks’ ages. They figure older people are easier targets, so knowing that you’re, say, over 55 or 60 makes it easier to focus on a passel of potential suckers. Maybe they’ve got age-based junkmail pestering lists, too?

Wow! If all this crap were coming directly into my in-box, it would render my email unusable. There’s no way I could sift through hundreds of pestering messages.

Hmmm…. Here’s something about an “iCloud Plus” service. But I don’t think that’s what I have. My system is just the standard come-with iCloud, without any + sign after it. {but…see below for an update…}

Shee-ut. Today is Thursday: M’jito will be working from dawn to dusk, so he can’t tend to this. So I guess I’ll have to schlep this thing to Best Buy, where I have a service contract, and see if I can elicit any clarity there. That entails a trip through gawdawful traffic and a nice, long stand in line. Yay! /eyeroll/

***

Yea verily! It turns out there’s an iCloud Plus scam!  Damn these bastards!

I’ll have to traipse to Best Buy anyway, just to be sure it really is a scam and I don’t find my li’l computer empire knocked off the air.

Just how I wanted to kill half a day….

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!

 

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.

Duck! Cover! Or something….

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Pour a cup of coffee; prepare to sit down on the back porch to take the morning air; and you get RRR-R-O-O-O-A-A-R-R-RRR!!!!

Cop copter charges over the house. Circles around the ‘Hood,. Roar roar roar….

Meanwhile, twenty miles away, out at Luke Air Force Base, a squadron of fighter jets practices take-off and landing: rrrRRR-O-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R-R-R!!!!!

My mother, who used to take her morning coffee on the back porch of their little Sun City house, professed to love the sound of fighter jets taking off and landing by Dawn’s Early Light. All very patriotic, no doubt…but definitely not my favorite symphony score.

The atmosphere has quieted down a bit now. Whenever it gets to be after 9:00 a.m. — at which hour I can turn left out of the ‘Hood — I’m headed to AJ’s, there to buy some more coffee. And melon. And bread. And dog treats… and… Argha!!!  The endless grocery list!

The Sprouts, which carries far more fake-gourmet items than the Albertson’s supermarket across the street, leaves enough to be desired to make the 20-minute trip to the overpriced AJ’s worth the journey. For one thing, I do NOT like being pounced and panhandled in the parking lot — pretty much inevitable at the neighborhood Sprouts. The Albertson’s has posted an armed, uniformed guard out front, which makes one feel safer there. Now…if only they’d carry a larger array of yuppified products, they’d never get rid of me. 😀

But they don’t. To get the fancy treats and overpriced dog food, I have to travel to the AJ’s. To get the rich black coffee: AJ’s. To get a piece of steak that’s worth the exorbitant prices most stores are now charging for beef: AJ’s.

****

SDXB on the phone. He and New Girlfriend live in Sun City, directly under the flight path of those Air Force jets. And like my mother, they regard the racket as “The Sound of Freedom.”

No doubt they’re right.

Too bad, though, that Freedom can’t turn down the volume a bit! 😀

SDXB loves living in Sun City, as my mother did when she was holding forth out there. It takes, I think, a certain mentality to like that lifestyle. Personally, I’ll take the sound of kids playing over the melody of F-16 engines blasting. But whatEVER: each to his/her own, eh?

Speaking of the which — sound, that is — the serenade of not one but TWO emergency vehicles wafts in through the screen door…. WTF d’you suppose is goin’ on out there now?

Looks like it was a good thing I dawdled over this blog post and killed time yakking with SDXB before I started out for the store. Fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, and I could’ve been in the middle of whatever that mess is.

***

And I would have missed the beloved Pool Dude, who just showed up at the door to collect his well-earned wages.

What a nice man! Probably a paroled murderer…but what the heck. He does a primo job of murdering pool algae.

Seriously: when a dear friend’s son got in trouble with the law (irrationally: not his fault!) and was thence thrown in the slam, we learned that one job regarded as “good” for paroled convicts is pool maintenance.

And considering what Pool Dude is earning — f’rgodsake, I just paid him $400!!! — if you worked at it and were even moderately competent at handling money and billing, you could in theory make a decent middle-class living at it.

Well, OK: part of the 400 smackers was for a large bucket of chlorine tabs. That stuff is expensive as hell, and if you’re buying a better quality product, it’s even more expensive than that. And the bucket the guy got — presumably from a pool product wholesaler — weighs more than I can pick up. So presumably it will be some months before we have to buy more chlorine.

Welp. I’d better get up and get outta here before the lunch crowd gets on the road.

And so, AWA-A-A-A-Y!