It’s six minutes to midnight and the Cassowary and I just came in from a late-night constitutional. Soon’s I finish this, it’s into the pool.
Weirdness in Arizona: the 90 degrees outdoors feels cooler and more comfortable than the 85 degrees inside the house. Just turned the thermostat to 78 for sleeping purposes. The unit’s banging away, cranking chilled air that does little to dispel the sense of oppressive heat inside the building. But oh, it’s lovely outdoors.
In the “good” old days, people here had sleeping porches. Those who couldn’t afford to spend the summer disporting themselves in Prescott, Flagstaff, or Payson, up in the high country, slept en plein aire, with a bit of bug screen between themselves and the scorpions, the black widows, and the (few, in those days) mosquitoes. Burglars and rapists were not an issue.
Sometimes I think it would be worth doing: have someone come and install wrought iron fencing all along the eaves in back, with a deadbolted door or two. Then velcro some nylon bug screen to the inside. This would accomplish three things:
• On a night like this, I could sleep out there on a hammock, reasonably secure against bugs and roaming madmen.
• When the weather’s nice and cool, I could throw open the bedroom’s Arcadia doors and not worry about visits from passing sh**heads.
• It would bring the unfenced pool back up to code. (You didn’t ask, which was wise, but since you wondered: you can substitute massively locking doors to the backyard for prison bars around the pool).
Just imagine how lovely it would be to sleep outdoors this evening, under the quiet stars! Or how sweet to sleep indoors of a winter evening, under a down comforter, with the bedroom doors full open to a 60-degree night.
Lately I’ve been considering where I’m going to live during the next and presumably last stage of my life.
It’s a question that was brought into sharper focus when I fell and hurt myself badly enough that I couldn’t easily take care of my home or myself. The shoulder still isn’t healed—but even though it hurts quite a lot, on and off, all the physical work around this house still has to be done. Caring for the pool (a daily project), dealing with the quarter-acre yard, cleaning and maintaining a four-bedroom house…they all represent physical labor. And there’s no one here to help. Just now I ache all over my body, as though the shoulder pain spread to every other joint all the way down to the toes. But none of the work can be put off just because my back hurts.
Clearly, I’m not going to be able to care for this house for many more years.
Then there’s the issue of the costs. Property taxes can go nowhere but up, and at $2,000 a year they’re already at the border of what I can afford. Because I have retirement savings, I don’t qualify for the cap on taxes for the elderly. Though the new AC repairman clearly was trying to scam me, the truth is that sooner or later the HVAC unit will have to be replaced, to the tune of around $6,000. The interior needs a paint touch-up, and the exterior will have to be repainted sometime in the next five years. There’s a crack in the living-room tiles, an ominous development. In another five years, too, the pool will need to be replastered, a $7,000 job. Power and water bills keep going up and up. With no credible source of steady income, where on earth is the money going to come from to cover those expenses?
And who is going to take care of me when I can no longer care for myself?
This train of thought brings me to consider the best thing my father ever did for me: he moved himself into a life-care community. After my mother died, he sold his house in Sun City, divested himself of his possessions, and used the money to buy into a Baptist-run independent living community. This gave him (and later, his new bride) a garden apartment, access to hobby and meeting rooms, two meals a day in a central dining hall, and guaranteed access to nursing care.
For me as his daughter, it meant I didn’t have to take care of him as he grew older and more infirm. When he had a heart attack and triple-bypass surgery, the institution moved him temporarily to a studio apartment next to the nursing home, where an RN checked on him several times a day to be sure he was taking his meds and to coax him to eat. And after he had a stroke, the only medical practitioners who would care for him and respect the wishes he had expressed in his living will were the staff of nursing home at the life-care community.
It wasn’t ideal. The food was awful. The doctor on the staff was ripping off Medicare right and left. The institutional setting was depressing—at least, I found it so. But it probably was better than the situation he would have faced had he tried to stay in the Sun City house for the rest of his life.
After he died, I discovered the staff had provided him with a lot more care than he had contracted to receive. A woman in the central office spent a fair amount of her time running interference with the various bureaucracies the elderly have to negotiate. As he grew more confused in age, he would occasionally mess up his checkbook; someone at the office went through and corrected his figures, balancing and reconciling them against the bank’s statements. So. He got his money’s worth, and then some.
I wouldn’t care to live where he was. They’ve torn down the garden apartments and replaced them with massive people warrens. I’m not a rabbit or a caged chicken, and I don’t want to live like one. However. There are alternatives.
My great-aunt was the one who turned my father on to life-care communities. She came to Arizona one year to visit several such outfits, which at the time were a new development. She sold her house in Sausalito and ended up in a place in Oakland—I believe it probably was this one. From what I understand, it was very pleasant. One could find worse places than the Bay Area to live out one’s last years.
Interestingly, it’s run by my correligionists, the Episcopals. Not that it matters. The Baptists were no less craven than any for-profit outfit about extracting funds from the inmates where my father lived, and I can’t imagine that would differ according to the proprietors.
The Episcopals run a number of life-care communities in northern California. There’s this rather amazing place in San Francisco, for example. I’m sure I can’t afford to live in the City, of course…hell, I can barely afford to live in Phoenix! Here’s a place in the Santa Cruz area that might be less extravagant than living in the heart of San Francisco. One in Pacific Grove, which is near Monterey, probably costs no less than the place in the City. More promising, possibly, is this one near Santa Rosa.
My aunt had enough money to be comfortably set. She and my uncle married in middle age, neither of them with children. They both worked for the California Academy of Sciences their entire adult lives, and my uncle invented the precursor to the Kodak Carousel slide projector. As you can imagine, even a small royalty would have allowed them to buy the architect-designed house in the Sausalito hills where they lived all the time I knew them.
Chances are I can’t afford any of these places. My father and his wife were paying, for a three-room apartment and two meals a day, more than my ex- and I paid for a 3,000-square-foot ranch house with a pool on a third of an acre of prime North Central real estate. On the other hand, most of their food, their utilities, transportation (to a degree), property taxes, insurance, semiweekly housecleaning, landscape care, and nursing home insurance were included in the cost.
I already have nursing home insurance, though I suppose I could stop paying on that. But even with the long-term care insurance, my total monthly bills come to less than my father paid for his dim little apartment. And that was for a not-very-appealing place in Phoenix, Arizona. The cost of living in northern California is so much higher that you likely have to be a dot-com millionaire to live in one of those places.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, though: I’m sending away for their propaganda packages.
LOL! Frugal Scholar has a great story today about finding a pair of Not Your Daughter’s Jeans at a thrift store, discovering they fit pretty well, getting a compliment from DH (!!), and so going in search of similar togs. None of which fit at-tall.
Was going to add my most recent shopping tale in a comment to hers, but Blogger won’t let you post a comment unless you have a specific gmail account open, and since I’m busy with the Festival of Frugality, I’m not logging out of that account, into the FaM account, out of the FaM account, and then back into the FoF account just to scribble a few words.
But this is funny enough to share, anyway. Hence:
Yesterday I wandered into a boutique in the thriving strip mall where Leslie’s swimming pool store resides. This shop always has THE cutest clothes in the window. Highly covetable.
Within those air-conditioned climes I found a cute top, gauzy with nifty crewelwork trim. Dig out the tag: $135.
Moving on…
The sales clerk came bouncing up and offered to sell me anything she could. I asked how to tell the sizes, since the sizing wasn’t obvious. She also had to dig around for a tag and finally came up with one on a chic-looking pair of low-slung pants: Large.
“Uhm… Large? That wouldn’t begin to fit around my rear end,” said I. “How do your sizes run?”
“Oh,” quoth she, “they go up to about a size 10.”
“A size 10 is ‘large’?”
“Yes.”
“How are you able to sell many clothes? The average woman in this country wears a size 14. That is not ‘large.’ That’s average.”
“Actually,” she started in—hang onto your hat: this is where it gets good. “Actually, the reason fashion sizes run small these days is that the Japanese are buying so many clothes, and they’re kind of small.”
“I don’t see any Japanese customers around here,” I observed.
“Well, because of the demand in Asia, manufacturers are all making clothes for Chinese and Japanese women.”
“That explains a lot,” I said. “I hardly ever buy clothes any more, because nothing fits. And you know, at size 12 I don’t think I’m fat.” (Objectively true: I’m well within the normal BMI range for a woman my age and height.)
“Oh, no, nooooo, you’re not fat!”
You don’t think so? “Well, the only place I’m buying clothes these days is Costco, because that’s the only place where I can find things that fit. Maybe American women would like to wear cute clothes, too?”
Exit, pursued by a globalized bear.
Isn’t that the most hilarious thing? Literally, there is no Asian community anywhere near that store. The demographics are mostly white followed closely by Latino and a fast-growing African-American community. Last I saw, few of us looked especially underfed. How do retailers that have absolutely no concern for their customers stay in business?
So, the next time you try on umpteen berjillion outfits and can’t fit into one of them, you’ll know:
Some of you will recall my recent enthusiasm, now a few months old, to renovate the aging face, which was beginning to show the signs one might expect in a survivor of the Pleistocene.
After a fiasco with a product called RoC, I ordered up some Alpha Hydrox AHA Enhanced Lotion from the Internet. This old favorite has about the same concentration of alpha-hydroxy acid as the expensive stuff my dermatologist used to dispense, at a tiny fraction of the cost. The plan was to try to plump out some of the wrinkles and fade the age spots a bit, and then to disguise what remained with liberal application of new-fangled powder mineral makeup.
So, did any of these shenanigans do any good? Well, judge for yourself. Here’s a before:
A bit blurry, but probably just as well. Some things are best not studied with excessive acuity.
Now here’s the after:
Doctored and painted!
Definitely not going to win any beauty contests. But I think it’s better. The hide looks healthier, and the splotches and uneven coloring are smoothed out.
The keys were twice-daily application of Alpha Hydrox (which I could only find at Amazon.com) and various ordinary drugstore face creams or hand lotions; daily application of a sunscreen; weekly exfoliation with plain old baking soda, and artful painting with Kirkland Borghese mineral makeup.
Naturally, sensing that I liked the stuff Costco immediately took the makeup off the shelf. It appears to be out of production altogether—you can’t get it online, either, nor, apparently, can you buy it from Borghese. After traipsing to three Costco outlets, I finally found a few in one store, where I bought two sets for the cost of one small jar of powder from The Body Shop. When it runs out, I guess I’ll try L’Oréal, which is the drugstore version of Lancôme.
Benign sunscreen
Considering that it’s been barely four months since I started this regimen (not to say “experiment,”), the results are not bad. No doubt if I keep it up, by the time I’m 70 I’ll look like I’m 18.
w00t!!! Funny is hosting the Festival of Frugality next Tuesday.
I’m just sitting down to start reading submissions. It’s not too late to send yours!
Looking forward to seeing what everyone has been up to this week. Here’s a link to the Festival itself (note the proprietor’s superb taste in blog templates 😉 ), and here’s where you go to enter your latest and greatest post.
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
See your golden words in glowing lights! Win a chance at Editor’s Choice!
Thank heaven the air conditioning guy showed up today—and by midmorning. By midafternoon the thermometer in the shade of the back porch read 115 degrees.
The unit has been laboring almost nonstop, all day long, just to keep the house at 85 degrees.
When I consider how my cash is spent…
The guy charged me $275 to replace a part that may or may not have been shot. I have no way of knowing, of course, what was wrong. He could have sold me a new air-conditioner if he’d felt so inclined…I wouldn’t have known any better.
Matter of fact, he did try to sell me a new air conditioner.
The owner of my longtime air-conditioning company, which over the past couple of years has been stumbling badly through the depression, finally sold out to someone else. He’s still around; whether as a part-owner or as an employee is unclear. But the new outfit? Not good.
First thing that happened was just a day or so ago I got a phone solicitation from someone who pretended to be “with” the company (i.e., “they hired me here in the boiler room and gave me this script”). He tried to high-pressure me into renewing the annual service contract, which I had long ago decided not to renew, because it’s such a waste of money. All it does is pay for two service calls up front, one in the spring and one in the fall, to inspect the equipment. It gives you no leg up on service when your unit craps out and no discount on products or service during the effective period.
Because he presented himself as someone who worked for Jim and Carol (owners), I wasn’t scorchingly rude to him as I would be to someone I perceived to be a phone solicitor. But I should’ve been. It took three repetitions of the fact that I’m unemployed and can’t afford to pay for a service contract before I got him off the phone!
Now today comes this new service guy—not the usual guy. Very slick sort of a fellow, not the amiably disheveled type that is our usual AC repairman.
I’d run out to Ace to pick up a nonprogrammable thermostat before he showed up. When I told him I’d learned the Braeburn unit that had been installed wasn’t meant to operate a heat pump, he demanded to know who told me that! A bit taken aback, I said I’m a big girl and can use the Internet. I looked up the unit and the model number and learned that it’s incompatible with heat pumps, which probably explains why my power bill went through the roof the instant it was installed.
He then tried to convince me that the immediate jump in the power bill had nothing to do with the incompatible thermostat but that my unit is out of date and needs to be replaced.
I said I’m unemployed and can barely afford to have him come in and fix the thing, much less pony up $5,000 for a new one!
He then tried to persuade me two more times that I should buy a new air conditioner. When I told him rather strenuously that i. don’t. have. the. money to buy a new HVAC unit, he suggested that I should take out a loan.
Then he pitched me for a service contract. He gave me the usual slippery hustle: if I had a service contract I could get the expensive new part for a discount. The contract would only be $150….
“Look,” said I, “How much will it be to buy a contract and install the part?”
“Three hundred and fifty dollars,” said he.
“Good. And how much would it cost just to install the part, without the service contract?”
“Two hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
“There you have it! Just install the part, please.”
So he won’t be coming back.
I should’ve called Sally’s guy a month or more ago, but just haven’t gotten around to it. He services both parts of the heating/cooling unit in one $65 trip in the spring (the way these guys justify $150 is by claiming they have to come inspect the AC in the springtime before you start it up and then heater in the fall before you start using that, which is clear and present ridiculousness).
Anyway, the nonprogrammable thermostat is a little easier to use than the programmable model. At least I don’t have to dig out the encyclopedic instructions and study them for 15 minutes every time I want to change the settings. It has one of those “save” buttons that causes it to reset the temp 5 degrees higher (in summer; 5 degrees lower in winter) until you tap it again to turn it off. This means that if the temp is set at a sleepable 79 degrees (about as warm as I can stand a cooped-up house and still sleep at night), when I get up in the morning I can press one button to move the temperature up to 84 degrees. That’s a degree off my normal setting, but one degree, I expect, will not make enough difference to bankrupt me.
Any more than I’m already going to be bankrupted. Literally, the unit has run all day long, barely stopping more than five or ten minutes at any time. It’s almost 9:00 p.m. and the thing is roaring away. It’s still 99 degrees outdoors.
And a good thing it is that I just went out there to look at the thermometer. For some reason the timer on the hose didn’t kick off, and the tap was still gushing into the pool!
Luckily, the water level was pretty far down, so after two hours of the hose running full-bore, it’s still an inch or two below the coping.
It needs to be backwashed, because of all the gunk the damn palm trees dropped in there. Tomorrow morning. Really. That will pull the water level back down to where it was and I’ll have to refill it again tomorrow.
Cripes. I’ll be lucky if the water bill is only $225. And the power bill a mere $300.
; daily application of 
