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House & Yard

Soggy Doggy Glorious Day…

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WHAT a spectacular morning!

High clouds make for a glorious sunrise as Ruby the Corgi sets out to drag the Hu-mann around the neighborhood. Oh, my: it’s just gorgeous out there.

And damp. And sticky… Very humid: 31%.

What really, dear Wunderground, does that mean? Are you saying that 31% of the atmosphere we’re trudging through is water?

😀

Could be, I reckon. But Ruby doesn’t mind. She charges ahead, a little furry brown rocket. We fly through the ‘Hood, around Upper Richistan, up toward Gangbanger’s Way. Past Marge’s house, apparently unoccupied (????) but not for sale yet.

Marge was (is?) well into her 80s. She wishes, more than anything, to evade being stuck into the Beatitudes or Orangewood or any other such holding pen for the elderly. But there’s no sign she’s living in the house. So…I fear the worst.

She said she had willed the place to her son — meaning she willed him about half a million bucks worth of real estate. He doesn’t live here, so…as soon as title to the house passes to him, he presumably will put it on the market.

It’s a pleasant old 1970s ranch-style house. Not to my taste, and now needing a bunch of repairs and upgrades. But still…lots of people would fall all over themselves to get it.

I actually might be among them, if it weren’t so nerve-gratingly close to Gangbanger’s Way. The traffic racket there would be just unholy! It’s a drag strip for the local delinquents, so all night you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the brats. And it’s a main drag into town from the west side, so every rush hour you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the unholy mobs of commuters trudging to work. And let’s not forget the hospital up the road on Gangbanger’s, bringing you WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO from the ambulances racing toward the emergency room.

{sigh} I do miss Marge, who had become my morning walking buddy. I’m afraid she probably fell — or else had a heart attack or stroke — and ended up in one of those horrible prisons for old folks. She dreaded that fate even more than I do. Truly: I would so rather be dead. If she had passed on, surely her son would have sold her house by now (he lives in some other part of the country). She probably landed in an old folks’ slam and asked him to hang on to it lest she somehow manage to escape.

Oh well.

The spectacularity of the sunrise has now passed, and what we have are high, pale gray clouds. Not the rainy type…just the humid type.

What do I hafta do today?

* Pick up the office.

* Call Cox. Demand that they send paper bills. (They’re shifting to “paperless bills.” No, thank you!!)

*Figure out, come to think of it, whether Cox is auto-paid now, or whether I have to send the ba*tards an e-payment or check every month. I think the latter, because I don’t trust Cox.

* Make a grocery store run.

* Argue with my son over medical bullsh!t.

Hmm…. Actually, I could physically go to the credit union and have one of their staff check on the autopays for me. This, while it entails an annoying drive, would take me past THE best Sprouts store in the Valley. And that would allow me to stock up on a pile of outstanding foodoids.

***

Cleaning out the e-mail in-box. OVER 500 NUISANCE E-MAILS, just in August!

Can you imagine? Hope I’m not deleting anything important. I just don’t have the patience to check every goddamn one of those things — not even looking at the email but just checking the subject or sender line. So WHAM! They all get deleted.

But even that is a nuisance. After hitting mass-delete after mass-delete, there are still A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SIX junk-mail messages sitting there waiting to be sent to trash. And that doesn’t count all the real messages from outfits like Amazon and from my client whose work I’m not in the mood to do…

Crazy-making!

Gaaahhhh!

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One of the problems w/ being unemployed…uhmm, “retired”…is that your schedule (such as it is) is out out whack with everybody else’s.

11:30 a.m.

JUST ready to draw a bath, get dressed, and head out for errands. This, after loafing all morning playing computer games.

Arise from my leather throne. Stumble toward the back bathroom, reach for the tub faucet. And…

RRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

WHIRWHIRWHIRWHIRWHIR!!!

RRRR  RRRR RRRR!

oh holee sheeut!

Gerardo’s guys are out there cleaning up the unholy mess that is the yard.

Could he have told me they were coming today? Maybe even have let me know they were on the way?

Course not. What else does the Li’l Retired Woman have to do but sit around and twiddle her thumbs?

So now I can’t jump in the shower and get dressed.

Because as you know, the minute my clothes are off and my hair is sopping wet, it’ll be BING BONG!

Now I can’t prepare for the meeting I have with a client, because RRRR  RRRR RRRR! BLAST BLAST BLAST! THUMP WHUMP THUMP! is remarkably counterproductive to thinking through a problem.

Now I won’t have time to run by the store before the client gets here, because I’ll need to sit here and wait till the boys exit, stage left.

Now I’ll have to think through the stuff Client and I need to discuss…to the symphonic roar of weed whackers and leaf blowers.

Now I won’t have time, on the way to the grocer’s, to go by the office complex where the dermatologist’s office supposedly resides and try to find his place. (Yesterday’s expedition was a FAIL!)

LOL!

Isn’t it wacky that all it takes is ONE thing like that to dork up your entire damn day? At least half the things I needed to do this afternoon are not gonna get done.

😮  huh  o-:

Y’know, it doesn’t seem to me that, when I was younger, I used to have this problem. Yes, I would be annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of something I’d planned to do. Yes, it would (or at least could) dork up my schedule. But it didn’t bother me all that much.

It didn’t leave me feeling inconvenienced and pi$$ed.

Strange that I’d feel that much different about it, now that I’m old.

😮

Ohhhhhh sheeeUT! They had to replace a strip of piping: $120!

And, trotting around and inspecting, I see they had to replace a bunch of smaller stuff, too. Ugh!

That whole irrigation system needs to be rebuilt. I had it installed when I moved in here…what? Ten years ago? More than that???? And now, it all being plastic, it’s pretty well shot.

Question is: is it worth having the system dug up and replaced? That will be a several-thousand-dollar job.

And…well…y’know… I’m probably not gonna be here that long. Surely not long enough to recoup the cost of digging up and rebuilding the whole system.

One of three things is gonna happen:

  • I’m gonna drop dead (if I’m lucky).
  • I’ll survive a stroke or a heart attack and end up rotting away in some care home.
  • Or decrepitude will force me to sell the house and move into an old-folkerie.

Arrrrghhhh! What a golden, shining future!

Seriously…

If I were certain my son would move into this house when I’m gone, I’d have that system replaced right now. Then it would be a gift to him (of sorts…paid out of his future inheritance…). It would keep the yard running smoothly, and that would be one fewer headache he’d have to attend to when he moves in here.

Or sells it. If you know the irrigation system is cattywampus, you’re pretty well gonna have to get it fixed before you put the house on the market.

But…the future. Ahhhh the future. How DO you plan for something you can’t really know?

If I dropped dead tomorrow, my son could figure these things out at his leisure, and pretty easily. He being one of the brighter pennies in the Coin Collection of Humanity.

But dontcha just know that ain’t a-gonna happen? Women in my family who haven’t fu*ked themselves to death or smoked themselves to death have lived well into their 90s…with no medical care! They were Christian Scientists! Since I don’t smoke and I don’t frolic with strange men, the chances that I’ll last well into my dotage are pretty good.

Better yet: my Berkeley relatives stayed in their homes right up until the end.

Well, no; that’s not correct: my  great-aunt allowed her son to persuade her to move to an apartment in downtown Berkeley. Smart move, that: the cute little Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff house she lived in was infested with termites. Even though the neighborhood was still a galloping fine investment, it was one that would cost homeowners more and more as those houses aged, aged, and aged some more.

But…but…ahem! About those termites….

WHY DIDN’T GREAT-AUNT OR COUSIN KNOW ABOUT THEM?????

Possibilities:

* Good cousin told his mother to have the place inspected, and she blew him off with a fib to the effect that she had the job done and no termites were found.

* He clued her, but she blew him off with “yes, dear.”

* She had it inspected and got a “no bugs” report.

* She had it inspected, was told it needed an exterminator, and blew it off.

* Neither one of them thought of having the place inspected.

See what I mean about “GAAAH”?

Just stop the damn world so we can get off.

Seriously: I don’t want to leave conundrums like this to M’jihito. Not even one just conundrum.

Retiring to the Life of Riley?

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Gettin’ old…gettin’ old. 

My son is beginning to fret, far more vocally than before, about my staying here alone in my middle-class four-bedroom house. Quite reasonable is his fear that I’ll trip (AGAIN!) and fall (AGAIN!!), but this time inflict some much more serious harm (breaking a shoulder was quite enough…) or even kill myself.

So he’s begun lobbying for me to sell this place and move into one of those horrid holding pens for old folks, like the one my father went into.

Now…my father went to sea all his life. He ran away from home at the age of 17, lied about his age, joined the Navy, and never looked back. And it was a good life: he earned a good living without a college degree (in fact, I don’t think he even graduated from high school). He saw the world — big time — there are not many countries outside the Soviet Union that he didn’t visit. And he landed a harbor pilot’s job in Saudi Arabia that, thanks to the hideous living conditions, paid enough for him to retire at the age of 50.

He did, eventually, have to go back to sea — he didn’t understand about inflation and so found himself short of enough to support himself and my mother for the rest of their lives. But it was only for a year or so.

After my mother died, he immediately moved into an old-folkerie — uhm, “life-care community” — where he lived out the rest of his life in brain-banging misery. No, not because of the institution, called Orangewood, which treated him well — after 30 years on tankers, he was used to crowded living conditions and bad food. But because he stupidly remarried and ended up stuck with with a harridan. He probably figured he could rebuild his former life by replacing my mother with another old gal. But…oh, my….

So my view of old-folkeries is tainted by his remarkably unpleasant experience…which admittedly was tainted not by the old-folkery itself but by the bitch he married.

Let’s suppose I were to give up on staying in my own place and succumb to my son’s demands that I move into an institutional setting…

What would you need to know about a place to live in your dotage?

  • What services and physical amenities would be needed for one to live on one’s own?
    • Meals (served in a student union-like setting)
    • Cleaning services
    • Repair services
    • Chauffeuring (in a limited way)
    • Power bills
  • Could you provide them for yourself?
    • I’m already doing that, except for the chauffeuring…and we do have plenty of those services hereabouts
  • How much would providing them cost?
    • Certainly not as much as your entire net worth, which you pay to get entry to one of those places

What attracted my father to the whole idea of Orangewood, at the outset?

  • He didn’t want to deal with the work of maintaining a house, i.e.,
    • yard work
    • repairs
  • Utility bills were probably included as part of the monthly Orangewood bill
  • Meals were provided
    • He didn’t have to make regular or large grocery-store runs
    • He didn’t mind institutional cooking
  • Orangewood staff would drive inmates to doctors & other destinations
    • In fact, I think they had a bus service that would tote the inmates to grocery stores. Yea verily…I do remember he and Helen ended up sitting for hours in some doctor’s waiting room until the OW bus showed up to drive them home. Hardly ideal!!!
  • He was used to living in an institutional setting, and did not mind cramped, noisy quarters

The fact is, he probably would have been fine there if he had not become involved with Helen. This hints that trying to replicate what made you happy in your previous life is not a good idea.

  • There was no way another woman could replace or duplicate my mother
  • The apartment quarters were too cramped for a couple to live in comfortably unless they were hardly ever home.

If this observation is accurate, then it would seem you have two choices:

  • Don’t remarry or otherwise try to rebuild your prior lifestyle. Engage the new life and do as much as possible in new ways and different ways.
  • If you just must remarry, do not imagine the new married life will be anything like your prior lifestyle. ENGAGE CHANGE and build an entirely new outlook and lifestyle in the new married life.

Why did my mother not want to move to Orangewood?

  • She loved that house in Sun City. She repeatedly told me how much she loved the house and liked living there.
  • She had dear friends out there.
  • She had no desire to leave those friends or build a new social circle
  • After a lifetime of major moves, she probably had figured the move from Long Beach to Sun City would be the last household move she would have to make, and she didn’t want to do it again.

Why might she have been willing to move?

  • Orangewood was within walking distance of my house (but she couldn’t or wouldn’t walk that far)
  • Luke Air Force Base generated a LOT of noise (although she was not bothered by it)
  • She might have felt safer, given her burglar paranoia
  • She would have been closer to fancy shopping centers
  • Although probably unaware of this: she would have had access to better doctors and medical facilities

None of these were strong enough motives to make her want to move.

 What are the pro’s & cons of my own place vs an OldFolkerie? Can these be weighted for comparison?

Pro’s

Staying here:

  • Maintain independence
  • Yard
  • Private pool
  • Spare room for guests
  • Quiet: privacy
  • Full kitchen
  • Separate freezer
  • Indoor, private garage for car
  • Own washer & dryer

OldFolkerie:

  • Communal living: meet new friends
  • Communal living: authorities keep eye on you
  • Relieves my son of responsibility
  • Bus to take you places

Is there a way to replicate the benefits of an old-folkerie?

Along those lines, note this site: https://my.aarpfoundation.org/ Many resources that could help you stay in your home.

Weighted value of pro’s & con’s:
(Sorry: WordPress will NOT let me format this table sanely…and just now I’m not in the mood to retype the whole thing…)

Issue/item Cons, my pl Pro’s, my place Cons, OW Pro’s, OW Real & potential drawbacks
Independence 2 10 1 2 Risk of fall
Yard 3 10 10 0 No yd @ OW
Private Pool 3 8 10 0 Expense, risk
Privacy 5 10 8 1 Limited, OW
Full kitchen 0 10 9 1 OW: no full kitchen
Sep freezer 0 10 10 0 OWs: none
Private parking 0 10 5 5 OW: none
Own w/d 0 10 10 0 No w/d in apt.
Hired workers 2 10 5 5 n/a
Taxi/Uber 3 10 3 10 T/U: about the same
Trans included 0 10 8 8 Slow, PITA; no transit officially “included” at my place
Meals 8 10 8 5 OJ food was awful! Limited mealtimes
Frees Son 10 2 2 8 Need to find services to help when he is unavailable
Social life 8 2 3 7 Need to reach out to make friends here
Sum above 54
Cons, my place
 112 Pro’s, my place
 92
Cons, Orangewd
 52 Pro’s, Orangewd

 

If this list is reasonably complete (is it??), from my point of view: the pro’s of living at my place outweigh the pro’s of Orangewood by more than twice; the con’s of living at Orangewood outweigh the cons of staying here by almost twice.

If fear of a catastrophic fall or a sudden health emergency is the main motivator for institutionalizing oneself, would it not make as much sense to ALWAYS CARRY A CHARGED-UP PHONE or one of those call-for-help buttons?

Either of those is infinitely cheaper than forking over the value of your home plus still more of your assets to some institution. And, IMHO, infinitely better  than consigning yourself to a prison for old folks.

Soggy Doggy Day II

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Ick! It is SOOO HUMID out there at 7 in the morning that by the time the pooch and I got home from a leisurely mile’s stroll through the ‘Hood, I literally had to peel my jeans off my legs!

NASTY weather, hideously reminiscent of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…only without the beautiful beaches on the Persian Gulf. Just desert, repetitious middle-class tract housing, and swampy heat.

At the crack of dawn.

Garden spot, this….

Actually, it is a garden spot! 😀  Irrigated lots sporting bright green lawns; big ol’ 1950s ranch houses; huge and ancient shade trees; citrus trees abounding.

As we perambulated through the lower reaches of Upper Richistan, we passed a young dad pushing a pair of twins in a double stroller. Dad: white. Kids: brown. Cutest li’l thangs you ever saw in your life…and evidently adopted.

A couple of families over there have taken in youngsters from duskier races. A house on the main road into U.R. is home to two teenaged boys of the African-American persuasion; all the adults in the house are whitey-white. The young fellas like to practice basketball in the front yard, which is grand fun to watch.

As the sun has climbed into the sky, humidity is a balmy 30%. Clouds and haze lurk overhead. The AC labors mightily, groaning to keep the indoors moderately livable.

Loafing, I daydream about the Old Neighborhood, where DXH and I lived for well upwards of a decade after we were married. Loved that place!

It was so beautiful. Here’s the old house. It was so beautiful — even more so inside than outside. Built in 1929. Zillow claims it’s worth something over $1.2 million.

Yeah. Well…whatEVER.

It is a LARGE place, in a famed historic neighborhood, smack in the middle of the city. If you worked downtown, your commute would essentially be nil. Same if you taught at Phoenix College or worked in any of the gerzillion office buildings up & down Central Avenue.

I loved that house. Didn’t want to move. But…

We moved because we didn’t feel safe. The transients and the crime level in those parts will take your breath away. After a couple of hair-raising incidents — German shepherd notwithstanding — we moved to get away from the bums and the crime.

{sigh} I miss it, and I miss our classy neighbors.

But I don’t miss feeling scared half to death at night. Don’t miss the guy who broke in one night, chased off by said German shepherd. Don’t miss the guy who tried to break in, another night, but couldn’t get past the deadbolt. Don’t miss the bum who took up residence in D-XH’s car one night…he flew into a rage when D-XH had the nerve to climb in, start the engine, and begin to pull out of the driveway, headed to work.

No. Encanto is a beautiful historic district. But if you have any common sense, you don’t wanna live there.

Another Balmy Arizona Summer Day…

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I.e., you have to be balmy to keep on living here!!!  Just now it’s 106 in the shade of the back porch, 20% humidity. Clouds built up to the north, tantalizing with a vague promise of rain…but as we scribble, they’re burning off.

Arizona…what a garden spot!

Man, I’ll take San Francisco fog over burning heat, any day.

Speaking of the which: spent half the afternoon doing battle with the pool. The current Pool Dude seems to have f*cked things up royally.

Had to buy a big heavy bucket of chlorine tablets (none remained out there at the pool or in the pool shed). Dosed the drink with that stuff.

Next: decide whether to backwash…decided it’s toooo damn hot to wrestle with that task. Get the vacuum system to work properly: see that it’s picking up most of the debris. Think gotta clean out that filter NOW. Decide it’ll hafta wait.

ohhhhh gawd, tell me I don’t have to track down and hire a new Pool Dude.

See, the problem with these guys is a substantial proportion of them are jailbirds. If they’re on probation and they get into trouble — apparently that includes so much as a traffic ticket! — they end up back in the slam. This, as you can imagine, does not help to keep the algae outta the pool.

😀

Maybe what I should do is install some cages in the backyard where the Authorities could store the Pool Dudes. Then I’d always have one of the critters around to contend with the drink. And maybe I could even get the state to pay me for putting up the resident convicts….

Arrrrggghhhhh! What a place we live in!

Teeth hurt. Don’t know whether it’s from aggravated clenching or whether there’s an infection or some other such nightmarish pending dental bill. We shall see over the next few days, no doubt.

If I were a grown-up, I’d stumble out to the kitchen and bolt down an aspirin or an ibuprofen.

But I’m not a grown-up. Consequently, I’m bolting down a glass of wine. Oddly, that does nothing for the sore tooth.

Ohhh well. It sure tastes better than ibuprofen, though!

😀  😀

Driving around this afternoon eyeballing real estate.

Yknow, my mother was a real estate agent. Like me, she felt some strange magnetic attraction to Reel Estate. What it is, I do not know. But the whole business fascinates me.

I used to write about real estate for Phoenix Ragazine and for the weekly Phoenix Business Journal. Sometimes I think I should try to wriggle back onto a local publication’s staff — actually for awhile I wrote for a national real estate trade rag, but the truth is, I find the local market a lot more fun.

Yesterday I stopped by an open house and met a lovely young Realtor. Ohhh how ambition blooms forever… Well, I wish her well and hope she gets rich…or at least finds a nice rich man to support her. 😉 Real estate is one of those endeavors that looks like it should make you rich, but that at best maybe won’t make you poor.

***

Dog’s conkered out. I should conker out, too…dawgs having better sense than humans…

This, That, & the Other

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Hotter than the Hubs out there...and wetter than the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Seriously: it is SO hot and SO humid, you step out your (soggy) front door into a corner of Hell. Or…more likely, into a corner of Lovely Saudi Arabia.

Today and yesterday have been weirdly reminiscent of the balmy old days beside the Persian Gulf.

There, the air would get so wet that sometimes rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky. We’re not that bad…yet. And I sincerely hope we don’t get there.

Ugh! Gotta go to the store. Get stuff for me and the hound: stuff that can’t wait. Then another errand…while I’m running around, I prob’ly SHOULD run by the mid-town Best Buy and get another power cord for this li’l computer.

Because…AS YOU AND I BOTH KNOW….wherever you are, you can’t get there from here. Whatever room I happen to be in, when the power runs low on the MacBook, the power cord is on the other end of the house!

😀

Ogling real estate in Moon Valley, a sprawling Mittel-America tract where my friends La Bethulia and La Maya moved. Look at this shack, for example. It’s on the high side of houses out there: not the best available, but far from the tackiest. I’d say it’s comparable to my current hovel, in style and size and maintenance.

Guess if I wanted to run away from the Romanian Landlord, that would be a likely candidate. It’s not quite as large as my house…but truth to tell, my shack is one bedroom too much.

Relatively pretty, as tract houses go.

But…y’know…so is mine. And my house is closer to M’hijito’s, by some miles. And click through the photos to see that thing next door to it. That’s a weird lash-up, isn’t it? It looks, for all the world, like a commercial structure with an underground garage.

?????

Not likely, in a suburban middle-class tract. But…weird, isn’t it?

Dunno that I could live in Moon Valley: too much emotional baggage.

A dear friend of mine: her husband died out there. He had cancer, and he died excruciatingly. And…well…her behavior left something to be desired. So did mine, come to think of it. We should never have been socializing in the kitchen while he was dying in the bedroom.

Horrible.

After he passed, I never heard another thing from her. She sold the house in Moon Valley; moved to Scottsdale. Then, apparently as she herself sank into decrepitude, she moved back to the Midwest, where her adult kids lived. And that was the last I knew.

Moon Valley is a bland tract of bland, throw-’em-together stick-and-drywall huts. For my purpose, it’s kind of a sentimental journey, cruising the Web and eyeballing the overpriced ticky-tacky. But in fact, my house is far nicer: block construction, real walls that keep out the burglars.

Seriously: a good-sized man could break right in through a wall out there, simply by delivering a good-sized kick. When my friends moved into that house, I went out to help her paint and fancify the place. You would not have BELIEVED the ticky-tacky construction!

No kidding: you could break in with swift kick to an exterior wall. The walls, which were pretty much all stick-and-plaster, were so poorly insulated that as I stood on the tile floors painting the living-room (she had the whole house tiled before they moved in!), I could feel the HOT heat under my feet. You don’t even wanna know what their power bills must have been.

***

Here I am at the neighborhood doc’s office. Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting.

What I wanna do is ask him if he’ll refer me to the Alzheimer’s facility at Good Samaritan Hospital, in downtown Phoenix. That’s about a 10-minute drive from my house…as opposed to an hour’s trudge to get out to the Mayo.

Also, quite frankly, I want a second opinion. The Mayo is halfway to Payson from my house. Good Sam is straight down 7th Street: outside of rush hour, an easy shot. Soooo….we’re talkin’ two advantages here:

  • If the staff at Good Sam do indeed appear to be competent, then we have excellent doctors within easy reach; and
  • Good Sam is right on the route to my son’s house and to a dear friend’s house! Thereby producing an excuse for visiting. 😀

*****

Didn’t get far with that scheme. Oh well: I’ll have to keep at it.  A little peripheral neuropathy isn’t gonna kill me. Soon. And if my brain has turned to Swiss cheese, there ain’t much anyone can do about it.