You think I exaggerate when I whine that my life is over-run with morons? Consider last night’s adventure, not an uncommon one in these parts…
Many of the neighborhood lanes here in the ’hood have no sidewalks. That’s because when the tracts were built, the area was out in the country.
People wanted to feel they were living in semi-rural suburbs, and (more to the point) it was cheaper for developers to neglect building sidewalks. Nowadays, though, we live in the big city, not in some sleepy suburb of a sleepy small town. Alas, many of our honored citizens just cannot grasp that as fact.
So…last night I’m headed down to the church. As usual, I putter along the ’hood’s smaller lanes by way of avoiding the back-wrenching speed bumps our City Parents have installed, since I’m already in plenty of pain and would rather not be treated to more of it to get to a main drag.
It’s after dark. I turn off the sub-feeder street that runs along the east side of the park onto a pretty road that gives its name to Lower Richistan, so as to get to Main Drag East. Just as I make the turn I see this whitish thing floating in the air some yards in front of me. Whaaa????
It’s a big old dog’s off-white rear end.
I know this dog: he’s a Great Dane mix, very mellow. But it takes a second to figure out what the pale patch looming through the dark is.
Fortunately I stop the car while I ponder this through. Mr. Dane is accompanying his human, who is dressed completely, head-to-toe, in black or navy-blue. The human is INVISIBLE in the dark. Not only that, but s/he’s pushing a black stroller, which is similarly invisible.
The only way I spot them is that a car passes on Main Drag East, a block ahead, and its headlights backlight them.
A-N-N-N-N-N-D this genius is walking right up the MIDDLE of the right-hand lane of the road. If he hadn’t had that dog with him, I would’ve hit him and his baby.
I almost stopped to let him know he was invisible and suggest that maybe he might want to at least get out of the middle of the road. But then thought ya can’t fix stupid and went on my way.
The walker had on a pair of sneakers with tiny reflective patches on the heels, but they were so small as to be unnoticeable. This is NOT a safe thing to rely on whilst stumbling around in the dark.
Dunno about you, but I can remember being told in grade school — more than once — to always wear light-colored clothing when walking around outside after dark. An adult who’s old enough to spawn a child shouldn’t have to be told this. Wouldncha think?
Yes. We have a new Queen of the Universe. Ruby the Corgi assumed the late lamented Cassie’s crown without a blink.
It took her about a day and a half to register that she had fallen heir to the throne. Forthwith she began to issue new edicts and rearrange the realm to suit herself.
Seriously: Ruby has become a whole new dog. She must have been utterly buffaloed by the Queen. As each day passes, Ruby grows and blossoms in some new way.
Along about yesterday, after the rains stopped and temps warmed, it occurred to her that she could take up a reclining position on one of the flagstones off the back patio, where she can keep an eye on the doings in the kitchen (lest the human approach the treasured Treat Jar) and at the same time watch the backyard for birds, cats, and Ratty whilst keeping audio tabs on everything the neighbors and the passers-by get up to. Hence, she has moved out from under the toilet in the back bathroom, where she used to reside.
She has trained the human to play with tennis balls, a major accomplishment.
She has trained the human to deliver chicken jerky treats several times a day.
She has trained the human to go out for a walk twice a day.
She no longer feels it necessary, at night, to perch on the edge at the bottom of the bed, so as to be ready to leap off at the twitch of an ear.
Nor does she deem it necessary to accept as an offering one of Cassie’s favorite treats, a blueberry: these, she ptuis out onto the floor. Ditto a piece of apple. None of that, Human!
For the human, that lowly creature, the New Reign means quite a few improvements.
First, for reasons unknown, the new Queen deposits many fewer mounds than the previous monarch. Picking up the backyard is weirdly easy. At first the human thought maybe Her Majesty was suffering some problem. But that does not appear to be the case. She simply dumps about half as much as her predecessor did.
This means that a Doggy Walk does not require a bulging pocketful of blue bags.
It also means that picking up the backyard is
a) not much of a chore; and
b) not likely to produce enough obnoxious debris to contaminate incoming junkmail to a large enough degree to discourage garbage-scavenging identity thieves.
It looks like the identifiable junk mail will, like credit-card receipts, have to be soaked before discarding in the public trashcans…but in Clorox, not just ordinary water.
Both dogs ate the same amount of food per meal. But of course, in the absence of the late queen, the dog food bill (and cooking, and doling out) will be half of its former glory.
Next, we have decided the Human will be required to dole out a whole lot more doggy treats than under the previous queen regnant. Naturally, Costco has quit carrying the favored chicken jerky strips. Amazon has them…for…hang onto your hat…THIRTY BUCKS A BAG.
Gimme a break!
So we’ll be making chicken jerky on the barbecue. This is not difficult and the equivalent amount most certainly will not cost $30…but it’s another hassle. Oh well.
Ruby is easily up to a fast one-mile walk. Indeed, she’s up to much longer hikes than that. This afternoon we visited a cricket team at the park…that was fun. If I ever get off my duff this evening, we’ll rack up another mile.
Maybe. My back hurts and I’m exceptionally cranky.
A few days ago I busted a caster off the rolling clothes rack in the garage. This, I need to hold rags as they’re pulled out of the washer or the dryer. Propping that end of the rack up with a rock was less than ideal.
So I bought a nice new one at The Container Store.
Putting it together looked, however, like more than I wished to take on with a spavined back and a sprained wrist, so I asked my son to help. He was supposed to come over today for that challenge.
But, not surprisingly, he demurred.
Roundly annoyed, I now decide to try my hand at putting the new rack together. So I take all the parts out and organize them on the floor and pick up the instructions…and realize they’re SO complicated they might as well be written in Martian. It has 87 gerjillion little parts, each fitting on a left side or a right side or an up side or a down side. It would have taken half a day to put the damn thing together. Upon inspection, I thought no wonder the kid doesn’t want to spend half the weekend doing this. I wouldn’t have done it for my mother, either! So I returned it and got my money back. Went on over to Bed Bath & Beyond and discovered they had the same device: no improvement.
Okay, so when I drove up to the house after navigating the wacksh!t traffic, what should I see by Mr. WonderAccountant lurking amiably in his driveway, he and his son having just finished working on the family cars. So I asked him if he had a thought about fixing the wounded warrior.
What we figured out in short order was that the thing doesn’t really NEED casters. Duh! There’s no reason for it to roll around. To the extent you need to move it a few feet, it slides across the concrete just fine. So he applied the male muscle power to pulling out the surviving three casters, and now it just sits there peacefully and levelly on the garage floor.
Voilà! Problem solved, for free and with no hassle.
At any rate, now the old one is “fixed,” Red Green Show style. If it works, it works…
So here’s another little life lesson I learned from the Olde Folkes yesterday. Decided to present this in a separate post, because it is a VERY big effing deal. Y’ere ’tis:
Whenever you have a contractor of any kind working around your house, ALWAYS BE SURE THEY’RE INSURED!
That’s even if you think they’re the nicest folks to come along since God created the Angel Gabriel. Even if they seem honest as Abe. Even if they work as hard as a plow horse.
Got that? Don’t just ask if they’re insured. Demand to see the policy. You want proof positive that they have general liability insurance or that they’re licensed and bonded with your state registrar of contractors.
When J & L sold their home of 40 years and moved to the Beatitudes, a life-care community, they hired two women who are in the business of helping elders move into old-folkeries. There are a number of these places in the Valley, and the pair have registered themselves with a bunch of them. For J & L, who are in their nineties and were moving to an apartment that was — maybe — two-thirds the size of their home, only with no garage and no garage storage and a tiny kitchen and no room for L’s office, these two ladies were a godsend. They advised on what furniture could fit into the new digs and where it could be fit, they packed up as much as could be stuffed into the apartment and arranged for movers, they put stuff away in closets and cabinets, they even got someone to custom-build a way to hang the expensive draperies J wanted to take with them.
As part of the bargain, once the couple was moved out the moving helpers were to arrange and supervise an estate sale, to sell off the (many) possessions that simply could not fit into a tiny apartment on the fourth floor of an old-folks’ home.
I remember thinking, as the two women were telling me this, I don’t recall seeing any ads from your outfit in the estate-sale listings to which I subscribe in gay profusion. Are you trying to say “yard sale,” dears? If so, how’s about telling the client that? But I kept quiet. Maybe, after all, they did their estate-sale business under some other moniker.
Okay. So this gigantic project chugs along and eventually they get the folks moved. They tidy up the remaining goods, and now this estate sale is supposed to take place the following day.
That night, the house is broken into and everything of significant value is stolen. The women say the lost items were appraised (really??? Who are you kidding?) at $5,000.
The house is locked up behind mighty iron security gates, brain-banging deadbolts, and an expensive and efficient alarm system. Sooo…WTF, say I.
J says the two women “forgot” to turn on the burglar alarm when they left that evening. The perps, who magically knew the alarm company’s stickers on the window alluded to nothing, broke a window, climbed in, and made themselves to home.
“Forgot:” Yeah. R-i-i-i-g-h-t.
So now the women tell them that they — J & L — will have to make this claim on THEIR homeowner’s insurance!
Say what?
Can’t you just hear the insurance adjustor’s reaction? “Ohhh no. Not a chance in Hell. You had already moved out of the place and you had consigned the property to these people; therefore the consignee was responsible.”
I’ve done a lot of yard sales in my life. And neighbors who used to live across the street from me, a pair who became dear friends, were in the yard-sale business. And…well…y’know what? The entire contents of that house including all the stuff they moved into their new home were totally absolutely not worth $5,000. They had a few works of art that were worth something…but they took those with them.
So. IMHO we’re lookin’ at a scam here.
But that’s just IMHO, eh?
The point is, once the possessions had been handed over into the care of the assisted-moving business, they became the assisted-movers’ insurance company’s responsibility, not the homeowner’s.
Dollah to donuts, that is what my friends’ insuror will claim. And several dollahs to donuts, these women have no business insurance or anything vaguely resembling it.
At the risk of repeating myself…
Whenever you have a contractor of any kind working around your house, ALWAYS BE SURE THEY’RE INSURED!
Another week has blown past. The older you get, the faster time passes…remember when you were a little kid and an hour seemed like an eternity? Yeah…now it doesn’t even make it up to five seconds.
Finally managed to finish and post this week’s chapter of Ella’s Story. Slowing the post schedule for each bookoid — Ella, If You’d Asked Me, and The Complete Writer — from three a week to one a week was a good idea. That seems obvious in retrospect. But Asked and Writer are already written. And really, if I would get off the dime I could (in theory) write a chapter a week for Ella’s Story.
It’s just that, well…I’m not about to get off the dime. Too many distractions beckon, not the least of which is the doggy drama. One could say it’s not that I have too much to do but that I overly enjoy doing too little.
Right this minute, for example, the dryer buzzes angrily. Yesterday Cassie waddled over to the dog bed parked under the computer desk, dragged herself onto it, and…yeah. Squatted right there and pooped all over it. So much for writing. Get up, drag out the bed, clean up the mess, see that the dog is in a bad way, carry the dog outside to do its business, pick her up, carry her back inside…on and on it goes. Instead of doing this — right this minute — I should be dragging out the garbage, picking up the dog shit out of the back yard (again), cleaning the dog shit off my shoe from where I stepped in it this morning, taking down the leaking hummingbird feeder and power-washing the flagstone beneath it before the day gets warm enough to awaken the Ondt Queen’s hordes, drafting a kind of “g’day” email to send out to my missing clientele, returning to LinkedIn and rebuilding a presence there, starting to work more seriously on Drugging of America, putting a load of actual laundry in the washer, sneaking out with Ruby to squeeze in a mile’s walk, checking the pool chemicals, applying a coat of silicone lubricant to the rubber gasket on the pool’s pump basket, calling my friends to see how they’re settling into their new abode, downloading and entering data into Excel for the tax accountant…
Ugh! There’s the hangup: I hate hate HATE the job of entering day after day of income and expense data into a complicated spreadsheet. So, the chore becomes one of entering month after month of data… And, that, having been put off in a monthly fit of aversion, is going to take several long days of drudging away. I don’t want to do that, so…I don’t do anything. Because really, that should be the first priority (January being more than at hand…), and so of course I can’t do anything else before doing that. Can I?
Right…
I fail to see the point of recording every single goddamn transaction. Why can’t we enter tax-related transactions only? Income: sure. Medical-related expenses: yeah. Business expenses: of course. Property tax, state tax, and car registration: yep. Capital improvements on the house: yes. But come ON: every trip to Costco, Walmart, and Safeway? Every bottle of olive oil, loaf of bread, package of dog food? Seriously? Why is that necessary?
Obviously, for the business “tax-related” would mean every single transaction. But for the personal stuff, what is the point of entering dozens and even hundreds of transactions that are irrelevant for tax purposes? If all I recorded were income, medical and insurance expenses, charitable contributions, tax payments, capital improvements, investment income & expenses…wouldn’t that be quite enough? I mean, for godsake…we know what net worth is, and we know what net income/expense balance is: all we have to do is enter the bank balance at the beginning of the year, the bank balance at the end of the year, and figure the difference. Quickbooks downloads bank transactions and preserves them, in a clumsy way. Fidelity provides reports for all IRA and non-IRA investments. So…why are we doing this?
Add to the list of things to do today: Ask accountant why are we doing this.
Ruby just peed all over one of Cassie’s pee mats. Suspicions confirmed. Because Cassie has come un-house-trained, now Ruby figures she can forget that “outside” rubbish, too.
Cassie fell into a disturbing relapse yesterday. On her best days, she’s far from well. On a bad day? Well: disturbing.
She started having difficulty walking. The past few days, her chassis has just kind of given out: her hind legs either collapse or, on the slippery tiles, slide out from under her. Yesterday she was very weak, and by evening clearly was in pain. I dosed her with half a Benadryl and a baby aspirin at night, and by this morning she seems better.
Sometimes she becomes confused. A few minutes ago I found her standing in the office with her nose sticking into the bookcase. She seemed not to know how to disengage herself from this pose. More and more often, too, she goes outside, she looks around…and she appears mystified. Her expression and body language seem to say What is this place? Where am I and how did I get here?
So…that’s depressing. Yesterday I thought it was “Time,” but knowing she may spring back to at least a marginally acceptable state discourages me from whisking her off to the vet to be put down. And yea verily: this morning she’s not well, but she’s not in those desperate straits, either. Far as the human eye can discern.
I discovered that closing the doors to two of the bedrooms cuts down considerably on the excreta pick-up. Why? That is unclear. But without the freezer/crafts room floor and the spare bedroom floor to use as outposts of the doggy loo, they’re both more inclined to arf at the door when the mood beckons.
But Cassie really needs to be physically guided outside and reminded to do her business about once an hour. Sometimes, if she’s feeling feeble, this entails picking her up, carrying her out the door, toting her to the peeing ground, setting her down, and then picking her up and carrying her back inside. Besides the obvious joy entailed, this poses yet another problem:
SDXB is determined to get me to go on a day trip to Castle Hot Springs with him. So enthused is he about this expedition that he has engineered an entire party with his present girlfriend and one of his other ex-girlfriends., which he expects me to join. He now has this scheduled for early February.
The problem is…if Cassie doesn’t accommodate his plan by shuffling off this mortal coil before then, there’s no way I can go with them.
I can’t leave her with my son: he has a job. (Remember those?) I can’t leave her outdoors all day: for one thing, she’s always been an indoor dog, and for another, even if she were accustomed to spending hours out of doors, it’s too cold now for that.
So…uhm… I really don’t quite know what to say… “Sure, I’ll come along if my dog is dead by then”?
So my friends from church, J & L, have sold the manse and are moving into a life-care facility called The Beatitudes. J is thrilled at the idea (well, pleased, anyway), whilst L says it’s going to be like moving into a prison. Today they took me to lunch there, after we dropped off some loot at the new digs as part of the moving project.
The future of old age?
The Beatitudes has been around since long before “life-care communities” became a Thing. As long as I’ve lived here (and that has been a long time), it existed at its present site as a nursing home and warehouse for the elderly. As my generation has aged, we’ve become a gigantic communal cash cow, and so the present places are being massively upgraded as their management tries to keep up with newer resort-like living arrangements for the affluently agèd.
I’ve been interested in J & L’s experience, partly because sooner or later I’m going to have to figure out how to get myself cared for and partly because my two friends’ widely disparate views of the thing exactly reflect my conflicted thoughts on the matter.
As soon as my mother died, my father got himself into one of those places. This was in the mid-1970s. Run by the Baptist Church, it was called Orangewood; like other surviving first-generation independent living facilities, it has been massively remodeled — rebuilt would be the term — and now sports a new name. He was only 67.
Before my mother took ill, he proposed that they move to this Orangewood place, mostly because he preferred apartment living to having to take care of a house and yard. Life-care communities were a recent development at the time, and as soon as he learned about them, he thought it was a great idea. Horrified, she resisted. She died before that argument could go very far. So, off he went to Orangewood.
He apparently liked it. However, it’s important to note that having gone to sea all his adult life, he was well adapted to institutional living. (“Institutionalized” is the term that comes to mind…) He didn’t seem to care about regimentation or confining rules or living elbow-to-elbow with his fellow inmates. If anything, he seemed to relish it.
So okay, he moves into Orangewood. When my friend L says he thinks moving to the luxurious environs of The Beatitudes is going to be roughly the equivalent of moving into a prison, the Orangewood experience is where he’s coming from. In exchange for a great many amenities — some of which were true Godsends — Orangewood extracted obedience to some onerous conditions. For example…
Two meals were served each day: a light breakfast and a heavy mid-day meal. You were required to show up at one of them, so they could check on you to be sure you were still ambulating around. The food, we might add, was by and large dreadful.
For three rooms, one bathroom, and a nonfunctional kitchenette without even a full-size refrigerator, my father and Helen paid as much per month as my then-DH and I paid for 3000 square feet (five bedrooms, one of them converted into an entertainment room) on a third of an acre of prime North Central real estate.
You were supposed to use their doctor, an exploitive quack.
If you fell ill, you could be required to move (usually temporarily) into housing close to the on-campus nursing home, where you could be watched more carefully.
They, not you or your family, decided whether you would be moved into the on-campus nursing home.
But there were trade-offs that made these conditions not so onerous.
So… My father moves into a one-bedroom apartment that seems to suffice for him — bearing in mind that he had spent most of his adult life living in a ship’s cabin. It was certainly better than an SRO, an option he had more than half-seriously proposed. Shortly, Helen notices him and sets her sights on him. (Even in his late 60s, he was a handsome man.) Before the end of the year, they marry. They move together into a cramped two-bedroom apartment which to my taste would have been OK for one person. But that was what was made available to married couples. Since Helen clung to her worldly goods like a crab with prey in its claws, this place was, shall we say, cluttered.
But that was none of my business, even though it made my father crazy.
Every now and again, they would invite us to join them for the dinner-sized midday meal. I abominated this, because the food was truly awful: steam-table buffet gunk, most of it reconstituted from packages. I remember looking at it and wondering how can they justify feeding this stuff to elderly people with cardiac conditions? Every meal was high in starch and high in salt. Every dessert came out of a box. Equally wonder-making was how the inmates could bring themselves to eat it, day in and day out.
As far as I could tell, they apparently didn’t mind. I concluded that it was true people’s taste buds die in old age, and so they couldn’t tell the difference between industrial junk food and real food.
(In my own old age I have not found that to be true. Believe it or not, I can still taste food and I can still tell the difference between real food and fake food that comes out of a box or a can.)
But whatEVER: my father and Helen didn’t complain. Nor did they seem to be able to understand why we would always have something else to do when invited to dine with them.
To my mind, the place was dreadful: the apartment oppressive, the limited space cramped for one person and hideous for two, the food terrible, the Big-Brotherly oversight creepy, and the institutional conditions questionable. At one point a plague of food poisoning spread throughout the entire population — almost everyone was sick with severe diarrhea and vomiting. This, the inmates were assured, was a harmless and passing “stomach flu.” Which, I guess, was how the management spelled “someone in the kitchen failed to wash their hands.” Or worse.
The Beatitudes is much different — at least, the part I can see is. J & L’s high-ceilinged apartment, which is not exactly spacious but still is well laid out and has an astonishing view of the city and the Phoenix mountains, has two full bedrooms and bathrooms, and a full kitchen with plenty of cupboard space, a pantry closet, a full-size double-door refrigerator, a full-size stove and oven, a dishwasher.
You should see this place. It’s like moving into the freaking Ritz-Carlton!
My friends insist that no rule requires you to show up at any of the three eateries (two of which are pretty fancy). If you pleased, you could cook all of your own meals. We went to the informal joint for lunch — it’s a kind of bistro-like affair where you can get soups and salads and whatnot. Service is sit-down: food is delivered to your table. You do not bus your dishes.
Some of the food was pretty good. Not great, but reasonably good. I had a white bean chili that was edible enough. L had a sandwich of packaged cold cuts that looked revolting. J had a bowl of soup, about which she did not complain.
I think if I lived there I would fix most of my own meals in the apartment’s more than adequate kitchen. But those restaurants would always be there if you didn’t feel like being bothered.
Given that you can now order up groceries for delivery, you could stay pretty independent for a very long time in that place. If you were not required to eat in the restaurants (I think they may have to buy a certain number of meal tickets, but no rule says they have to use them) and if nobody was poking their nose into your business, it actually would be a reasonable way to address the vicissitudes of old age in a fragmented society.
It’s something to think about.
I do worry about what is going to happen if I live another 10 or 15 years. My friends are in their early to mid-90s. But even in your 80s, you certainly could find keeping up a big house and yard quite a challenge.
You could hire help…but…who’s to say what kind of help you’re going to find? My friends have a cleaning lady who comes in regularly. As the two contractors who are helping to move them to their new digs were hauling stuff out to their vehicle and mine today, we found most of the stuff we were picking up off the tables and cabinets hadn’t been dusted in weeks. This woman is apparently not dusting things like the lamps and the fake dieffenbachia and the pictures. If she’s not doing that, what else isn’t she doing?
An apartment is a lot less space to have to take care of than the Funny Farm. And quite the cottage industry is growing up around the aging of the Baby Boom. The institution down there on Glendale Avenue is only one manifestation: the other day I read about a woman who started a business driving elderly people around. She’s apparently doing quite well at it. And then we have the two women who are helping my friends pack up for the movers and organize where things should go in the new digs: helping elders move IS their business. They’ve made themselves known with a bunch of the old-folkeries like The Beatitudes — there are now quite a few of them in town — and they have as much work as they can handle. Sometimes more. Then there’s the guy who charges people to serve as a companion for exercise walks. Want someone to get you off your duff and into your walking shoes? Call this fella.
See what I mean? Given that this industry is developing, why not take advantage of it?
You may recall that when Costco dropped American Express and switched all its customers over to Citibank’s Visa card, I demurred — having enjoyed Citibank’s customer disservice in the past and had a bellyful. Instead, I decided to opt the wondrous benefits that attach to the Costco Visa card (which, it must be allowed, are considerable) and stick with a Visa card issued through my credit union.
This has worked OK. The CU’s Visa card even offers a few kickbacks, though of course nothing as generous as the Costco card provides.
But there have been a few problems. The biggest one has been getting the bills paid on time.
Item: When you use the credit union’s online bill-pay service — which should be transferring the payment electronically — the CU in fact pays Visa with a freaking paper check sent by snail-mail!!
This means it takes some ten days to arrive in Visa’s precincts. And then it takes another day or two for the check(!) to clear Visa’s bank. So if, say, the due date is April 10 and the check arrives there on April 10, payment is considered late!
The envelopes in which the CU-branded bills arrive are so discreet as to be practically incognito. It’s not obvious at first glance that a Visa statement (or any financial document) is inside. So it’s possible to simply miss an incoming statement, if you’re not paying attention.
I have paper statements sent as signals that it’s time to pony up some cash. This I favor over electronic statements, because a) my incoming email is a freaking NONSTOP tsunami, and sooner or later an electronic blat will get lost; and b) things computer make me tear my hair out. I do not want to deal with any more than I’ve already got, thank you.
So, if a statement doesn’t get here, chances are I will miss a payment.
This happened last month. The May statement seems to have been lost in the mail, and I never noticed that it hadn’t come and so hadn’t been paid.
This week, in comes a snarling wallop upside the head from Visa, saying they not only are gouging me $25 as a late payment penalty, they also are reporting me to all three credit bureaus as delinquent.
This morning I call and ask to get this reversed, which you usually can do if you don’t try it very often. WonderAccountant says most credit-card vendors will forgive one lapse a year.
Not so this outfit. The guy I reached, who sounded like a sweet enough young fella, said there was not a thing he could do about it. He pretended to absent himself long enough to make it look like he was talking to a boss, then came back on the line and said there was nothing they could do to reverse or undo the black blot with the credit bureau.
So I had to get in the car, traipse across the city to the credit union, and talk with the manager in person.
Forthwith, she got the late charge reversed and arranged to pay the bill in full. I said I wanted to close the account. She suggested not doing that. And yeah, I do know you really shouldn’t close a credit card account, because just closing it — whether or not a dispute is involved — will ding your credit rating. She did say that the credit ding was not slated to go through until the 22nd, and since we’re a long way from that date, there should be no report to the damned credit bureaus.
Okay. Well, that’s fine: I still have an active card. But there’s no way they can make me use it. It’s now in a file folder, hidden in a drawer.
In passing, I considered opening a Citibank Costco card, which after all would provide some rich kickbacks. But that is going to be a major hassle, with all the freezes on the three credit bureaus. When I talked with Citibank over the phone yesterday, their rep said they could not know which of the three credit bureaus they would use — apparently their software rotates among them at random. So this would mean I would have to apply; then sit by the phone till I got a call from Citibank; then call the specified credit bureau; then demand a temporary lift of the freeze.
Yeah. Right.
Well, to start with, I have only one phone number that reaches a human (or did, the last time I called), and that’s with Experian. Trying to get through to those people is a headache of migraine intensity; as for the others…don’t even ask.
So. That leaves me with a Visa debit card, which I decidedly do not want to use at Costco’s gas pumps (or anyone else’s) and would prefer not to use at all.
Hm.
I spend way too much money at Costco, AKA “Impulse Buy Hell.” Matter of fact, over the past six months, I’ve averaged $332 a month in store purchases and $36 a month in gasoline.
Really, that’s not all that terrible when you realize I buy most of my clothing there, most of my food (I don’t eat out, so this is significantly less than $10/day), ingredients for the dog’s spectacularly expensive DIY food, all my personal products, and most of my household goods. And a fair amount of the S-corp’s office supplies.
Still. I suspect that if I weren’t packing a credit card every time I shop there, I could cut the spending. A lot.
Sure don’t want to write checks, and I sure don’t want to have that much cash around.
So. I think what I’m going to do is this:
Figure out what would be a reasonable monthly budget for all those necessaries, absent the impulse buys. Let’s say about $275, maybe $300 at the outside. Add on enough to cover gasoline — around $40 just now, but rising fast. Then go into the store at the start of the month and buy a Costco cash card in the amount of, say, $340.
Be more careful about purchases…knowing there’s a palpable upper limit will help a lot with that. Use it till it’s gone, and then stop buying there until the next month. Or if push comes to shove, pay for any serious necessaries with the debit card.
I refuse to put a debit card into a gas pump, nor will I use one at a restaurant — there just aren’t enough consumer protections against theft. But the occasional restaurants I visit always accept AMEX, and if the tank runs dry after I run out of dollars on the cash card, I’ll just pay a couple bucks more to buy at a gas station that takes AMEX.
It’s really not that much hassle. If memory serves, the last time I bought a cash card I was able to get it at the regular checkout register, rather than having to stand in a different line. But even if you do have to buy from the customer service desk, so what? It’s not that big a deal.
Fortunately I stop the car while I ponder this through. Mr. Dane is accompanying his human, who is dressed completely, head-to-toe, in black or navy-blue. The human is INVISIBLE in the dark. Not only that, but s/he’s pushing a black stroller, which is similarly invisible. 
