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Household hints

Staying Home; Getting Safe

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So as I advance into my dotage, I do worry — more and more — about falls or confusion or strokes or Gawd Knows What could happen while I’m here alone. Between you’n’me, I happen to know my son worries about this issue, too.

One way to address it, once and for all, is to sell your home and move into one of those horrible old-folkeries…uhm, retirement homes.

I regard that option with horror. First, because I abhor communal living — just HATE it. That’s not the way I want to spend the last few months or years of my life.

Second, because the expense of those places is hair-raising. Horrendous! Everything I could get from the sale of my present home would have to go to buying myself into a “life-care community.” That was the upshot, with my father.

Sorry. No. That money is my son’s. It ain’t goin’to your old-folkerie, friends!

It looks to me like there could be another option, if you think it through and you’re willing to devise your own system.

Have someone who calls you every day at a certain time. And, ideally, a paid person who comes into your house or calls you every day or two to check on you.

Also, bear in mind that in Arizona, any cell phone will dial 911 in an emergency. This is probably true just about anywhere in the U.S. and Canada.

Any cell phone. Any place. Any time.

So: step number 1 will be to get several cell phones, and keep them all charged up. And ALWAYS keep one with you…at all times. 

All times, all places: no exceptions.

So: if you slip and fall; if you have a heart attack; if the burglar is coming in the back door; if you rear-end the car in front of you; if whateverthefuck, within a matter of seconds you’ll be able to call for help.

This, obviously, would not significantly reduce the risk of falls or heart attacks or rampaging burglars or whatEVER. But it would allow you to call for help easily and fast.

So, with at least one emergency cell phone on you at all times — maybe also keep several around your property, so there would be one in the car, one in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, one out in the backyard…and so on — you would be able to call for help quickly and easily.

Next: set up your exterior entrances so emergency workers can easily find ways to get in. Keys will have to be NOT obvious to your pet burglars. But they must be placed in spots that you can quickly and easily describe over the phone, so a rescuer can find them.

With these and any other emergency amenities in place, now fix up the place so you can live comfortably and safely in it, with a minimum of hassle to yourself.

For example: grocery stores are now delivering. GET USED TO THAT. Learn how to use delivery services, and set them up now, not later. Then, if you get too sick to drive or your car craps out and you can’t afford to replace it or you just don’t feel like doing battle with a grocery store parking lot, you can simply call or email to get a week’s worth of fresh food delivered.

If you’re going to stay in a house (as opposed to an apartment, for example), be sure a trusted neighbor, relative, or friend can get in, should they realize you may be in distress. More than one person should have keys, your phone number, and your emergency contacts. Now, not later

In an apartment, make it possible and easy for management, family members, and trusted friends to get in. Arrange for someone to check on you  if they haven’t seen you for a few days.

So…hmmmm….  I think the key to staying in your own place as long as possible is collaboration and cooperation. It seems contradictory — stay independent by depending on others. But it’s the only logical strategy.

* Yes, you stay in your own place with your own keys and whatnot.

* But yes, you have at least a couple of friends or relatives who can get into your place, too: with their own keys and whatnot.

* These folks, by the way, must be given emergency contact information, so they can call your friends, relatives, landlord, or…whomever.

* You always carry a device that can be used to call for help. Keep it in a pocket or next to where you’re lurking, at all times. Keep it charged up, too!

* While you’re at it, in addition to quick access to folks who can get into your home and help you, the house should be old-buzzard-proofed as best as possible. For example, every shower and bathtub should be equipped with grab bars. Any steps should be flanked by banisters or handrails, so you always have something to hold onto, going upstairs or going downstairs. And any throw rugs should either have rubber backing or a slip-proof under-mat, to keep them from sliding out from under your feet.

Look around your house and your yard and THINK SAFETY. Consider what might happen, and install whatever might prevent a little disaster or help you get out of one unhurt.

Think of your home as a system, not just as a dwelling. Who do you train to operate that system? How can you and they collaborate to make it work? How do you kick them into gear when you need them?

Yes, we do want to stay independent and in our homes as long as possible. But to do that…well, we’re going to have to depend on people!

😮

 

Porch Pirate Repellant…Redux

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The signs I put in front a year or so ago, asking the Beloved Amazon Dude or Dudette to please bring packages inside the courtyard and not leave them out on the driveway, rotted away in the blasting sun and the driving rain.

Interestingly, the signs actually work! The Amazonians do bring their deliveries into the courtyard, and the porch pirates apparently prefer not to expend enough energy (or risk being videotaped) to come inside the courtyard and steal stuff.

So this morning I spent an hour rejiggering three signs, sealing them into plastic holders, and securing them to the gates and the front door.

Hassle City! You not only have to redraw the signs, you have to snurchle them into the kind of plastic holder that goes into a 3-ring binder and then seal the plastic holder all the way around with layers of Scotch tape. Then you have to slither plastic strip things into the binder holes so as to use the plastic strips to secure the signs to the steel gates. These last — in the Land of 110-degree heat — a year or more.

Yea, verily: a first-class PITA. But less so, I suppose, than having to drive to Target or Safeway or Albertson’s or Walgreen’s or the hardware store to buy every little thing you need, when you need it. Over the past few years, I reckon Amazon has saved me a surprising amount not only in gasoline but in wear-&-tear on the car. And nerves: half the time when you go into a retail store’s parking lot around here, some transient barges up and demands a hand-out. Guess I’d druther pay Amazon a little more on the retail price of this, that, or the other dingbat than having to dodge or repel the local drug addicts.

One of the neighbors — a lively techno-type — set up a camera in front of his house and found it recorded some woman in her car following the Amazon truck. The minute the Amazon driver would climb back behind his steering wheel after dropping off a package, she’d jump out, run up to the front door, grab the package, race back to her car, toss the package in the back seat, and take off down the road after the Amazon truck.

Persuading the Amazon drivers to bring packages INSIDE a gated patio has worked well to discourage this chickadee and her ilk.

And (cough!) today….

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Yes: Today is still today. The world has not collapsed into a ball of bread dough. The air conditioning (thank the heavens) is still working.

Seen from the underside:

It’s too hot to breathe, AC or no AC. My right eye continues to fuliminate and as we scribble consists of one blue-green pupil in a field of bright blood-red.

Mercifully, it doesn’t hurt.

That’s something. I guess.

The covid (or whatever it is) continues to hold forth, though I’ll say today the cough is a little milder. However, I still have a fever: 98.2, it sez here.

For normal people, that sounds OK. But it must be borne in mind that I am a spectacularly cold fish. Normal for me is about 97. 5, and even that is on the high side. So we have about one degree of fever, which ain’t that bad. But which I could surely do without.

Just tried to clean and flush the steamer, which had about stopped dead as of dawn this morning. Kinda doubt it’ll do much good. Managed to fish a few little flakes of calcium out of the thing, but not enough to interfere much with its operation. So I don’t think “clogged up” is its problem.

“Clogged up” is sure my problem, though. My head is stuffed. My chest hurts. Breathing is a chore. The cough is dramatic. And I’m real tired o’ this stuff. 😀

Having done nothing today, I’m deathly tired and would love to go to sleep. That seems not likely to happen, though.

I should get up, get dressed, trudge down to the Walgreen’s through the chilly 95-degree heat, and buy another steamer. But ohhhhhh I don’t wanna!!

First place, you just know that if I traipse down to the Walgreen’s, I’ll find they don’t carry the things anymore.

Next, you know I won’t be able to find anything like it. This thing gets hot, and of course Big Brother wouldn’t want any of us to hurt our little pea-brained selves, so probably you can’t get your sticky little hands on it it. Or on anything like it.

Hmmm… This thing looks kinda similar. Mine is not that brand, but its design is like unto it. Now waitaminit…apparently you can rev these things up by adding salt to the water.

Why not? The thing is already not working. The worst that can happen is adding salt will totally bust it. Either way, I’ll have to trudge out in search of another one, or  order this one from Amazon (which will take another two days to get here).

*******

4:20 p.m.

How can it possibly be this early? Feels like it should be about 8:00 or 8:30 p.m.

But it’s not. It’s actually late(ish) afternoon. Ugh!

The salt-in-the-water experiment: YES!!!

It WORKED!!

No kidding. To my astonishment, adding a tablespoon of ordinary table salt to the gallon or so of water in the steamer’s tank revved it right up! Within 10 or 15 minutes, it was pumping out steam.

Who’dve thunk it?

Actually, it’s revved the thing up so much that a tankful of water is unlikely to last all night. Highly unlikely. But for the nonce, it’s pumping steam into the victim’s face, and I can sorta almost breathe.

At any rate, the contraption is working for the nonce. Probably I’ll have to get up in the middle of the night and fool with it. But that will mean I’ll have managed to steal half a night’s sleep. Which would be some kinda miracle.

 

Brave New World, Indeed…

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Sunnyslope rock garden, one of the many eccentric sights in those parts

{snort!} Living in a place where you need to have heavy-duty deadbolts on all the exterior doors AND, while you’re at it, on the back bedroom that serves as your office is for the birds. Not to say a PITA. This state of affairs is hugely exaggerated by encroaching senility: you can’t remember your name, to say nothing of what all the fistful of keys are for.

First off, I misplaced my key ring, the one with the keys to all the exterior doors, the mailbox, the garage side door, the car’s ignition, the car’s doors, on and on: SEVEN KEYS!

You realize, I have to have all seven keys. Otherwise I can’t get into my house, I can’t drive my car, I can’t get into my office, I can’t unlock the yard gate padlocks, I can’t get into the garage…on and on and endlessly, aggravatingly on.

They couldn’t have gone far. I knew I hadn’t left the house since the last time I saw the monster keyring. But “far”and “near” are basically the same when you haven’t a clue where something is.

Finally found them. Added the mailbox key to the key ring. Put them down. A-n-n-d…lost them again!

I.

Can.

Not.

Remember.

ANYTHING!

No matter how trivial or how significant.

This stuff is getting very frustrating and very scary. What else have I forgotten…well….

  • Have I paid the bills this month?
  • Have I gone into battle to figure out where a spurious bill of something over 5 grand came from?
  • Have I refilled the gas tank?
  • Have I fed the dog?
  • Have I walked the dog?
  • Did I water the plants?
  • Where’s my grocery list?
  • What groceries do I need?
  • Where did I decide to get gasoline, since Costco is now kinda out of the question?

Yes. Get gas. One of the consequences of deciding to quit arguing with Costco over their annoying shopper card is that one has to find some other station to refil the gas tank.

Headed westward out of the ‘Hood , by way of visiting the credit union and thence the high-voltage Sprouts out by the university, I stopped in a Circle K gas station. HO-lee mackerel!

You forget how creepy this part of town is.  A panhandler is stumbling around the gas station — fortunately he doesn’t importune me. A weird guy is also wandering through. The damn gas pump tells me I have to go inside to untangle some kind of mess.

Dodge the weirdos, get into the Circle K, and am told, no, nooo, nothing is wrong, all is well.

On my way, wondering WHAT is going to show up on next month’s AMEX statement.

Trudging across the city toward the ASU West campus and its branch of the credit union, I notice an odd thing: Once I get a couple of main drags past the freeway, I see many, many fewer transients and panhandlers. They cluster around the freeway overpasses and the signals a few blocks on either side, but once you reach about 35th Avenue…well… Nary a bum!

WTF? I never noticed that before. There’ve always been transients along that route…everywhere.

Not today. No one standing at the intersections, set to pester you when you stop at a red light. No one pushing stolen grocery baskets full of their worldly goods up the sidewalk. The mile-on-mile tracts of bland, cheaply built working-class and middle-class housing over there are effectively FREE of transients!

I will say, that has not always been the case. If you’d asked me before today, I’d have told you the population of panhandlers was pretty constant between here and the campus, especially the further south you go on the west side. But today…where were all the bums?

In our neighborhood, that’s where! 😀

Brought back to the repeating rumination that if it weren’t for my son’s strenuous objection, I would would be OUT of the ‘Hood by now. Long gone. The dust shaken from my high-heels. Never to be seen again!

Ohhhh well.

West-side errands completed, I cruise eastward, ever eastward across Thunderbird, a main drag that proceeds all the way west across the Valley from somewhere in Paradise Valley or Scottsdale to the sprawl out by the Air Force base, halfway to Yuma. Drop south on 19th and then, to avoid some of the heavier traffic and also to sight-see a bit, cut through Sunnyslope, a historic slum.

Sunnyslope has always been fairly dank, but as the years pass it merges into dire. More than a slum, it’s a central Mexico barrio brought north. It’s hard to imagine poverty of such depth in this country. Yet…there it is. People living in lean-to’s cobbled together with boxes and old boards nailed together. Ancient apartments that look like crumbling fire-traps. Once cute little houses tumbling down into the dust. And dust is what it is: precious few lots have grass ($$$) or gravel ground cover.

That notwithstanding, the staidly middle-class ‘Hood itself is officially regarded as part of Sunnyslope. This would be the result of canny map-drawing by our city parents, who have divided the burg into so-called “villages.”

Har har! Normal folks would call those “districts.” But whatever works for your PR campaign works. I guess.

Historically, Sunnyslope was a TB refuge. Until antibiotics were developed, about all doctors could do when you developed tuberculosis was advise you to betake yourself to a warm, dry climate. Arizona has plenty of that, and it was to provide the same that Sunnyslope came into its own. But of course, if you’re at death’s door with a lung infection, you’re not in any shape to found and build a business or to take on a steady job. So a lot of that population sank into poverty. And the poverty has remained.

So now it’s where your yard dude and your cleaning lady live.

Gerardo the Yard Dude lives in Sunnyslope…he’s sending his Eagle Scout son off to the UofA this fall. Not bad, eh? He and his clan — cousins, wives, mothers — own a row of houses up there, so the whole clan has cordoned off its territory.

Things, I suspect, could be worse.

 

 

 

Staying Safe in Your Dotage

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Gotta share this little essay I just posted at Quora. The prompt question was “How Can We Reduce the Number of Falls among Senior Citizens?”

Good question, eh? Here’s what I propose:

As an old bat who lives alone…this is my strategy, such as it is:
  1. Live in a place that has a minimal number of stairs. These are ridiculously easy to trip on.
  2. Where a step or more is unavoidable (for example, my house has a sunken family room, meaning that to get in or out of it, I have to step down or up), have a banister or countertop that you can hang onto whenever you have to navigate the steps. Train yourself to put a hand on this countertop or banister before taking the first step up or down, and hang on for the whole journey.
  3. Have several extensions (if you have a landline) or several cell phones that can be used to dial 911. Place these in strategic positions near the floor. For example, I have one in the bathroom (I set it within reach of the tub any time I take a bath or shower), one in the family room, one in each bedroom, one in the kitchen, and one in the dining room. DO NOT assume you will remember to carry a phone around everywhere you go when you’re at home: equip the home with many phones that can be reached from the floor and can dial 911. If these are cells, be sure they’re kept charged.
  4. Be sure each room has plenty of lighting. Make it easy to turn these on and off — at least one light in each room should turn on and off with a wall switch near an entry.
  5. Train dogs and cats to stay out from underfoot while their humans are walking around. This is easier said than done; you may need to hire a professional trainer for some pets.
  6. Do not(!!) have throw rugs laying around on the floors. Where you really need a throw rug — such as a bathroom rug next to the tub — be sure it has a latex backing or place a non-slip mat under it.
  7. Be sure your shoes and slippers have non-slide soles. Do not wear footwear that might slip on a tile, linoleum or wood floor.
  8. Do try to remember to carry a cheap, charged-up flip phone in a pocket at all times, except when you’re actually laying in bed or bathing in the tub or shower. Again, bear in mind: BY LAW ALL CELL PHONES HAVE TO BE ABLE TO REACH 911, no expensive connection required. This means that if you fall, you can use the phone to call the Fire Department or the Police, but you can’t call anyone else with it. I use these throw-away phones as an emergency SOS device when I walk the dog.
  9. Inspect sidewalks in the neighborhood. Look for places where the pavement is heaved and where the curb might not be easily visible at dusk or in the dark. Be sure to point these out carefully to the elder and remind them to watch their step in that area. If the sidewalk is heaved, call the city and ask them to come fix the paving.
  10. Suggest that the person carry a walking stick, whether or not they need it for mobility. I carry a hiking stick with me every time I walk the dog, not so much to avoid falls but as a shilelagh for self-defense — we have many drug-addled transients, prowlers, and coyotes in these parts. While I have indeed used it to chase off all comers (including Wile E. Coyote), it also works nicely as a support when stepping up and down curbs and around heaved pavement.
  11. Get plenty of exercise. I walk one to two miles a day, which I consider minimal. If that’s not practical, join a health club where you can exercise on their machines and swim in their pool. Use it or lose it!

And finally, if you have cleaning or yard care help coming in to do housework or outdoor maintenance, keep an eye on what they’re doing. They often don’t realize that some of your eccentricities — such as placing phone extensions on or near the floor — are there for a reason, so they’ll readjust things to fit their definition of sanity.

Making Telephone Solicitation FUN….

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Mwa ha ha! The idea I came up with for harassing the goddamn nuisance telephone solicitors is WORKING. And it is a bit of a hoot.

Thought I’d described this antic in a post here on Funny, but don’t see the thing in the blog’s dashboard. Must have held forth about it on Facebook. Oh well…

Here’s the gambit:

When a phone solicitor calls, instead of hitting “call block” (which, since they spoof telephone numbers, doesn’t block THEIR phone but instead blocks some innocent soul in your area code or even your own exchange), pick up the phone and speak sorta politely into it.

Let the crook begin to deliver his pitch. As he yammers on, take a deep breath and SCREAM AT THE VERY TOP OF YOUR VOICE, as LOUD as you can, into the phone. SHRIEK YOUR GUTS OUT. Give him the shrillest, loudest, earsplittingest

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH

you can blast out.

Scream nonstop until you run completely out of breath. Then hang up. Do not speak a word. Just hang up.

Most of the criminals are probably using headphones to do their job. That means you leave not one but both of their ears ringing. With any luck, maybe you’ll burst the bastard’s eardrum.

Interestingly, this seems to have worked. It’s 10:15 a.m. just now, and I just repelled only the first nuisance call of the day. Usually they start about 8:00 a.m. — sometimes even earlier. And the number of nuisance calls has dropped spectacularly, from around 10 calls a day to one or two. Some days even none!

No kidding: I was getting up to a dozen pestering calls a day. Never fewer than eight or ten.

Within a couple of days after I started the Scream Gambit, the phone soliciting harassment dropped like the bastards all fell off a cliff — down to one or two calls, and some days even none. For those that persist: it’s strangely gratifying to know you left the SOB’s ears ringing.

So far I haven’t done it, because I haven’t wanted to pony up the cash, but part of the plan is to buy one or more recorders so I can play back the SHRIIIEEEEEEEEEK into the phone without having to strain the vocal cords. But seriously: after s few days of this, the number of calls has dropped to the point where that may not be necessary.

Silence is golden…