Coffee heat rising

Glorioski! Glorious Day, Glorious Future

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Wow! What a gorgeous morning. Intermittent overcast with big, fluffy, cottony clouds. Cool but not cold. The sky wants to rain, but can’t work itself up to that much effort.

Ruby and I frolicked through Upper Richistan, as usual admiring the big ole’ expensive houses and their big, expensive irrigated lawns. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Ours isn’t “gorgeous,” but it’s adequately pleasant. Mid-middle class homes on lots that put enough space between neighbors.

Ruby loved up some workmen…cuteness is like some kind of joy drug for most people. We went on our way eventually. Now we’re back at the house.

And the Human finds itself wondering what next? 

Despite the family track record for longevity, we can pretty safely bet that I don’t have all that much longer to go. Relatives who have lived into their dotage have uniformly been Christian Scientists…tee-totalers, that is.

I ain’t no tee-totaler and never have been. My first boyfriend introduced me to wine when I was about 17, and I’ve been lapping up the stuff ever since. As we know, anything alcoholic is a handy device for shortening your life span. So I think it’s safe to figure I’ve got maybe about 10 years left — at most. Probably a little less than that.

The best I can hope for, I think, is to drop dead…and thereby avoid ending up in some nursing home or prison for old folks. That’s not outside the realm of possibility — as I say, the forebears who dropped dead in their late 90s didn’t drink. I do (with élan!), and so it’s safe to assume I’ve probably cut a good 10 years off the inherited lifespan. But that still would leave me another 10 years. Ten years that I do NOT want to spend in an old-folkerie!!!!

And therein lies the challenge: How to stay out of one of those horrible places. 

They soak up your life savings…and I want my savings to go to my son. Not to a holding pen for old bats. But….

But I have yet to figure out how to protect those savings for him, especially if I live much longer. Even more especially if I live much longer and get sick. How to evade those eventualities, though, does escape me.

If I manage to stay healthy into my dotage, though, M’hijito should inherit enough to retire in comfort…forthwith. By then, it’ll be time for him to figure out how to evade life in the old-folkerie…  😀

Hup hup hup hup…

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Waiting for M’hijito to arrive, collect me, and haul me off to the physical therapist’s gym, there to spend the next two hours going hup hup hup hup hup….  

Wish I knew for sure that a brain-numbing evening of mindless exercises actually works to ease the peripheral neuropathy, or whether the fading of the numbness and the buzz was the result of  Time and the River Flowing. Blowing away three hours on hupping and bupping is NOT how I would choose to spend my time. Seriously!

Well. Either the exercises are working or time is doing its job: dunno which.

The neuropathy is slowly — VERY slowly — getting better, though. So I guess if there’s even an outside chance that the hup-hup-hup routine is helping, it’s worth killing yet another evening on it.

But how many MORE evenings to squish with this stuff are we looking at? It feels like such a painful waste of time… Well, not painful in the sense that it hurts (it does not) but in the sense that I hate boring myself stupid when I have many more interesting things to do.

What would I do tonight, instead of killing an hour in waving my arms around?

* Walk Ruby from one end of the neighborhood to the other.
* Write a post for Funny about Money (hmmmm….)
* Watch the idiot box for awhile
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet

ooohkayyy… So, yeah: I don’t have anything much to do that’s any better. But at least I’d be wasting my time on my choice of time-wasters, not theirs.

 

Hotter’n’The Hubs…

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Okay, okay…not THAT hot. But it is humid, sticky, and too damn warm out there.

Ruby and I: freshly back from circumnavigating the park. It’s after 2:00 in the afternoon, which makes it a bit too hot to be frolicking around out there.

That notwithstanding…the dawg LOVES it. 

*****

My honored son, in a fit of filial righteousness, has made off with my car. Interestingly, though, this makes little to no difference in the Human’s frolics. Within easy walking distance, we have a computer store, a Sprouts, an Albertson’s (bloated supermarket), a Fry’s (bloated cut-rate supermarket), a pet store, a hair salon, a record store, a bookstore…and on and freakin’ on.

As a practical matter all this maneuver of his does is prove, indisputably, that one does not need a car if one lives in this neighborhood. Just now the human and the dawg have stocked in…

  • a pile of canned dawg food
  • a fine bottle of cold white wine
  • uncounted bottles of beer, cold
  • bread
  • cocktail tomatoes
  • chocolate chips
  • coffee beans
  • maple syrup
  • Parmesan cheese
  • corn on the cob
  • artichokes
  • asparagus
  • lamb chops
  • scallops
  • steak
  • more steak
  • fish filets

….and on and on and on…

So…somehow we seem not to be in much distress. 😀

Probably will wait until the day after tomorrow to make a cool-of-the-morning run on one of the nearby supermarkets, there to reload a bit. No hurry, evidently.

This has got to be one of THE best neighborhoods in the city in which to live car-free. As a practical matter, with an Uber driver living straight across the street, a train line running up main drag west, and a herd of public busses, there really and truly is no reason to own a car here.

It’s almost as good as San Francisco. When my mother and I lived there — back in the Dark Ages — we hosted my father’s fancy Mercury while he was off on the ships at sea. But we rarely drove it, except to rev up its engine a bit. Because we didn’t need to!

We were within easy walking distance of all the places we needed for daily errands, work, and school. And the busses and streetcars would take us just about anyplace else.

Amazingly, that’s now much the way things are here. 

Not what you’d expect of Phoenix, a powerfully car-centric, L.A.-style city. But things have changed enough over the past six or eight years that if you live in the right districts, you really don’t need to own a car.

And the presence of Uber drivers converts that to REALLY don’t need to own a car. An Uber driver lives right across the street from the Funny Farm…and another half-dozen lurk here in the ‘Hood. So all you have to do is pick up a phone to get a cab at the front door…for one heckuva lot less than it costs to own a car!

So…depending on my son’s whims, I’m thinking I’ll let him keep my car at his house. If he doesn’t want it taking up space there, we’ll sell it. Because…frankly…with a car rental place a block from the house and the Uber guy lurking across the road, I don’t need a car anymore!!!!!

Jeez.

Why own a giant liability on four wheels when you can get around conveniently in cabs and rentals?

 

What NOT to Do in Old Age…

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Gorgeous, cool morning. Few people and fewer dogs out and about. Ruby and I have a great (and peaceful) doggywalk. As we stroll through a fog of boredom, I consider…horrors abundant:

* My father having to care for my mother in her last, agonizing days and weeks.

* She dies and he moves into an old-folkerie, a venue I regard with horror.

* But he likes it, because after a lifetime at sea, he’s accustomed to institutional living.

* What he isn’t accustomed to is Helen, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West.

* Marrying Helen botches up the rest of his life.

Seriously: the last years of his life were ruined, not just because of my mother’s illness and death but because he naively married the dragon-lady. Apparently he didn’t understand that there was no real substitute for my mother, the love of his life. Did he imagine that one woman would be much the same as the next?

What have I learned from my father’s late-life experiences?

* Stay out of institutions as you age, if at all possible. Doesn’t cost any more to hire someone to come into your home to clean and drive you to the grocer and whatnot than it does to live in one of those places.

* Do not imagine one spouse is a carbon copy of the next. Do not figure you can replace a late spouse with someone new.

He would have been OK if he hadn’t married Helen. He wouldn’t have been happy, but he would have been contented enough by himself in a pleasant apartment at Orangewood, the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died. And over time he would have adjusted to the loss of my mother.

* Find new things to do w/ your life. A new hobby? Travel? Raising poodles??? Something that’s different and reasonably fun, or at least interesting.

I want to say that marrying Helen wrecked his life. But no: My mother dying is what wrecked his life. And she died prematurely because of her smoking habit.

So: Don’t smoke! Don’t take a partner who smokes, either.

He did smoke, but he had quit well before the time my mother started to get sick from the cancer. Get rid of that habit NOW: don’t wait until it’s too late.

* But remarrying wasn’t a solution, either. I’d suggest you NOT remarry after you lose a spouse. Or, if you must, don’t do so until you’ve known the new partner at least a year. Give yourself an out, and keep that door unlocked for as long as possible.

* It made sense for him to move into Orangewood.
* It made sense for him to take up a friendship and then a romance with Helen.
* What didn’t make sense was to remarry. And if he’d waited, they might not have done so.
* Once they had entered their marriage, they were both legally trapped in an official agreement. Getting out of it would have cost each one a ton of money, and a whole lot of bad feelings.
* Staying independent — staying free from the git-go — would have given each of them and both of them the leeway to choose how they wanted to live. Once they’d married, they both felt stuck in the partnership: a partnership they each came to realize was a mistake.

Better to live in sin, my friends, than to live in misery. Seriously: they would have been so much better off if they’d never married, even if they had chosen to move in together.

Still a GORGEOUS Monday

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Yep…we’re on the third blog post of the day. Tis true! and the truth is: telephone scammers notwithstanding, worries about old-age incarceration notwithstanding: this is an OBSCENELY GORGEOUS day.

  • Beautiful sunlight.
  • Beautiful mild temperatures.
  • Beautiful clean air.
  • Beautiful spectacular blue skies.
  • Beautiful little dog.
  • Beautiful glass of beer.
  • Beautiful beyond anything you can think of.

Beyond gorgeous.

Yes, you bet! I’m still damn scared of what the future holds. But when the present is this lovely, you can afford to divert your attention from tomorrow.

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Ruby has waddled off to her favorite locale under the master bathroom toilet. Truth to tell, it’s the middle of the afternoon and we have yet to do our daily dog-&-human walk. And that is solely the fault of the lazy, easily distracted human.

Distracted today by memories of a beloved old boyfriend, a man I came within inches of marrying. 

Ohhhhh how my parents hated the man!!!

Ohhhhh how I loved the man!!!

In my then yet-to-be misspent youth, I assumed they hated him because he was The Other. Not American, hevvin help us. Worse yet: Eastern European. 

Paul was Bohemian. Real Bohemian, as in the nationality — not metaphorically so. Why they hated him, I failed to grasp during my naive youth. But now in my Old Age, I see…yeah.

As an example: Paul thought it was OK — just brilliant, actually — for his best buddy to be diddling a barmaid he’d picked up during a night on the town. Because, after all, his wife was eight or nine months advanced in pregnancy, and so  she couldn’t “give him any.”

Back in the Day, when I was madly in love, I thought my parents’ distaste for Paul was based in their distaste for other-than-Yankee roots. They must hate him because his parents were not 100% Yankee. Right?

Well.

No.

Actually, they hated him because he was a jerk. And because they could see, clear as day, that marrying the jerk would wreck my life.

Luckily for me, he made an ass of himself one time too many. And so I wandered away from him.

Sometimes God actually is on our side. Right?

What finally brought God’s Word — or at least, Her Thinking — to my attention was the time that Paul observed how VERY right his best buddy was in picking up a chippy in a bar and f*cking her…BECAUSE his wife was too advanced in pregnancy to accommodate his dong.

No kidding.

He thought his wife’s pregnancy with HIS child was an acceptable excuse to diddle whatever li’l darlin’ he came across in a bar.

No. I really DO kid you not. 

Dumb as I was, even I could see what was wrong with that picture.

Soooo…out he went, pore ole’ Paul. And good riddance to him. Since then, I’ve managed to scrape up a LITTLE more discrimination, when it comes to men.

How long that will last remains to be seen…

Never-Ending…scams

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Brought back to the current stream of FaM posts by this morning’s scam phone call. Seriously: EVERY DAY here’s another goddamn scammer on the phone, trying to trick me into this or trick me into that.

Yes, usually I do hang up on them before they get very far into their pitch. But truth to tell, some of them have surprisingly persuasive intros…so you never know whether you’re hanging up on someone who matters, or hanging up on yet another crook.

Don’t get old, whatever ya do!  

Seriously, that has become a kind of jokey by-word for me..but truth to tell, it gets more and more to the point as the days go by.

And also seriously: as I do get older, day by day, I wonder more and more how much longer I’m going to be able to hold the mob of crooks at arm’s length.

Some of these crooks have information about you — whether it’s recorded fact or something they’ve gleaned by observation — that makes their pitches sound surprisingly convincing. They DO sound like they know who you are and what you do in your business and shopping activities.

And they DO know when you’re older. The assumption is that elderly folks are easy marks. There actually are nuisance phone-calling lists organized by the marks’ ages. That’s why you get more and more of this sh!t as the years pass.

I may reach the point where I’m simply going to have to sign off the telephone service. But…I NEED a phone for emergencies, and I use my phone for all sorts of personal and business purposes. So…how the f**k would I manage canceling my phone service?

Really, that’s hard for me to imagine. Because every strategy I think of either has serious drawbacks or has work-arounds that will be easy for the crooks to engage.

Hang up on them all?

That means I hang up on legitimate callers with legitimate reasons for calling. Some of those are financial reasons. Some are personal reasons. Either way, I get screwed when I slam the phone down.

And if I’m gonna hang up on every incoming phone call, why have a phone at all? I have to pay for this damn phone. Monthly! So now I have to disgorge a monthly payment for…NOTHING? For a service that cuts off friends and business acquaintances, because I have to disconnect every chucklehead who calls my number?

Don’t answer the phone until you know who’s really on the other end? That entails having to sit there listening to yakety yak yak until you can identify the caller; then if it’s someone you want to speak with, grabbing the phone before they hang up. Since a good 50% to 75% of incoming calls are time-wasters, this means a LOT of your time will go down the drain while you try to identify who’s calling.

One thought I’ve had: forward my phone number to an answering service, where their operator can determine who is calling and why; if they decide it’s a legitimate call, they either forward the call to me or simply email with the call-back information.

This sounds like an expensive work-around, to say nothing of a nuisance. Also, I have no idea whether there even are such answering services. To my mind, an answering service is for businesses and professionals who need to catch important incoming calls. Not for some little old lady who wants to circumvent the scammers….

Well…hmmmmm…..  There may be a simpler way:

Just stop answering the phone. 

ALWAYS let it ring through to the answering machine (or, if I decide to hire one, to the answering service operator). If I hear a pitch come in on the machine, pick up the receiver and hang up. Or better yet: BLAST a police whistle into the phone and hope it scorches the inside of the bastard caller’s ear.

That poses its obvious risks, though: Think of the possibilities for revenge! 😀

But seriously:  I suspect it indeed may be time to stop answering phone calls. 

Do you have a better strategy?