Money Matters

Since coming home from Respite Care I struggle with what to write about. Between falling asleep when I shouldn’t be and trying to sleep when I should be, I’m not doing a whole lot of anything else. That’s not entirely true. The physical therapist who's been coming to my apartment twice a week just ‘graduated’ me from her part of out-patient care for my broken and misaligned ribs and she’s been taking up two hours of my weeks since getting home. She always came at the same time as Tai Chi classes take place here so I haven’t been able to start them up again. She says I have her permission to use the walker as much or as little as I want as long as I remember to slow down, don’t make sudden turns or stops and starts. Eighty years of walking a certain way and I'm going to change that?

The nurse says she’s going to discharge me next week. “Are you sure you can dress that Mohl surgery site?” she asked and the jaded side of me almost answered that I’d been doing it for almost a year before she came along but the Nice Nancy in me assured her that changing the place I do it at, so that I can sit instead bending over like a pretzel, has made it doable without her. Other than that, taking my vitals and listening to my lungs for signs of pneumonia is all she’s been doing, so I’m glad I wouldn’t be tied down by her by-weekly visits either. And I won’t miss her ordering supplies for me that I really don’t need or want----I have enough wound care products that I could dress a whole military platoon. I can’t be sure before the bills roll in but I’ll bet my deductibles on that stuff will cost more than it would for me to just order it straight off Amazon where I’ll get credit card points as well.

The Occupational Therapist, especially, spent my money like it was sand in the desert. She ordered a toilet seat riser, for example, that still sits unused in a box and can’t be returned. Same with a box of 44 adult diapers that I only used seven of. Then there was the bed wedge and sock aid that I only needed for a minute and a half. But she was the person who had the power over deciding whether or not I was safe to go back to my apartment so if she said I needed a box turtle painted pink I would have said, "I'll take two." I got a bed rail that way and I do like it…only I didn’t get the one she suggested. I canceled the order soon after she left and got another one off Amazon you barely see while the one she suggested yelled HOSPITAL RAIL needed here.

Change of topic: For the first time in my adult life I’m having trouble getting my paperwork together for my income tax appointment with my CPA. And, no, it’s not age related. At least I don’t think it is. It has to do with my newly acquiring financial adviser last summer and not having a working printer now. I told him I wanted my fiances simplified but they are anything but that now. I went from two accounts to keep track of to five and as far as I can tell they all lost money last year. With my old, self-done financial set up I wouldn’t have lost a dime….but the chance of making money wouldn’t have been there either and I can live with that a whole lot easier than the ups and downs I see now. 

I’m anxious for all the bills to roll in from the hospital, doctors and other costs related to my fall. I want them paid off and history but the Adviser has me on too tight of a budget to do that. I’m seeing him on Monday. I need at least one account that is more fluid because I like to pay my bills off in one shot and not having payments hanging over my head. Yes, it’s a First World problem and I try to remember how luck I am to have them rather than the other kind where just finding enough to eat and a place to stay warm is something REAL to worry about. At least World Central Kitchen loves my guilt trips because I just drained all but $10 of my PayPal account with another donation to their cause of feeding people in war and disaster zones around the world. Looking over the charity donations I made in 2022, I saw a pattern. I apparently wanted to feed people and animals during floods, fires, wars, earthquakes and the homeless in inner cities.

I hate worrying about money. I just HATE it! And the scary part is that I see myself in my brother who is giving himself and his kids heart burn worrying about money. So far I’m keeping my worries to myself (if I don’t count my blog readers). So far I don’t obsess to the point that it’s one the two themes I talk about with family like my brother does. When he’s not asking someone to give him a ride home from Memory Care he’s asking someone to give him ride to the bank. And I can’t keep from wondering if this worrying isn’t coming from our mom. She set the standard with her life-long worrying about money---justifiably so, given her childhood but not so much with my brother and me. We were taught by example to always have extra $20 bills stuffed in pockets or books. Always have something to give to someone who needed food for their kids. Even a secret bank account was not out of the realm of possibilities with her. Then we stick a guy in Memory Care like my brother is and expect him to forget the safety net of carrying money on him at all times? We all know how impractical that is in a place like that but still I need to keep reminding myself that his kind of worrying is nothing new. It just sprouted wings to carry the worrying to new heights. ©

Tax Time and the Dog

One of the pitfalls of tuning out the world, not knowing was is going on beyond my quiet, snow covered yard is I get in a rut where the show the squirrels and the dog put on becomes the highlight of my days. Here’s what happens: The squirrels come to my bird feeding station that’s a foot off my deck, the dog barks and I wait until a squirrel gets greedy enough to no longer be satisfied eating what’s in the ground feeder and he climbs up the pole. That’s when I let the dog out on the deck to chase the furry tailed rodent. Levi comes back in tongue-hanging happy and it takes a few days for the squirrel to get brave enough to try pole dancing again. And while I’m plotting against my squirrels, the rest of the world is doing God knows what to each other. Yup, I’ve joined the geriatric, tuned out set for sure. 

Or have I? A few days ago I tuned back into having media on in the house. The storm out East drew me in and before I knew it I was watching the San Francisco auditions of American Idol. Then I discovered that while I was away the gods of programing have decided to pull Morning Joe off the air. Oh, crap. Apparently, too many of his viewers, like me, had put themselves on a media blackout so now I feel obligated to watch his prolonged death on the air. I hope it’s not as long as Letterman’s exit plan. I can’t wait for him to leave so we can see what Steven Colbert will do with that time slot. 

In the meantime, like many Americans I’m getting ready for tax day---sorting and purging the filing cabinets. I have never minded paying taxes, never grumble about it, or looked for ways to hide income or cheat the system the way a few people do. It would have been easy to do, being self-employed most of my work life. But in my experience, those who do those things eventually get caught and life is too short to spend it arguing with the IRS. Spending your life looking over your shoulder wondering when someone is going to report you for your ill-gotten gains is not my idea of fun either. I knew two people who did that and both paid heavily in the end. One lost a farm that had been in the family for generations and spent time in prison. He was one of those people who believed that all local, state and federal laws and taxes are bad. All guns and resistance to authority is good. I can’t image living that way.

I go to a CPA for my taxes and I don’t have much to gather this year---it all comes to me in the mail from banks, Social Security, the pension administration, etc., but old habits are hard to break so I still designate late January as purge-the-filing-cabinet time.  It hasn’t be as bad this year as the last two when I was still dealing with issues related to my husband dying. This year will be the first tax filing entirely on my own, with his name and details not appearing on anything. The death and dying bills have been paid. Insurance, pension and financial issues are all straighten out. Everything of Don’s that could be donated, was donated and the tax write-off taken. Yadda, yadda yadda. At least the receipts and records I’m sorting, now, aren’t like re-living a sadness too deep to explain. I did find Don’s last billfold, still loaded with his ID, cards, money, etc. and I did my widow's work---I unloaded it. Then I decided Don is going to buy me one last gift with the unexpected windfall. Or maybe it should be from Levi since I found the money on his birthday.

Levi just turned seven. That’s like 21 in people years if you go by that old wives tale. We are having a fight. He’s schnauzer stubborn. I’m old lady stubborn. We’re fighting over how he eats and it’s all my own fault. Back when he was a puppy I read something in a “flaky” (?) training book about how dogs and cats need the mental stimulus of finding their food instead of having it given to them in dishes. For cats, that meant hiding kibble around the house so they’d have to hunt for it. For dogs like schnauzers that like to chase small vermin that meant rolling kibble across the floor so they can chase the food, crawling under and behind stuff when necessary. It’s a fun game, but recently I decided that he might out live me and Levi should learn how to eat the normal dog way. He’s not liking that idea one little bit. He’ll stand next to the bowl, bark and take off running then he'll look back at me like I'm dumber than a plastic mannequin. He’s probably thinking his human is getting senile and needs to be retrained. If I don’t give in (to stop the barking next to the dish) he’ll wait until after the lights go off at night before he gives in and eats from the dish. If it wasn’t so cold and icy outside he’d probably run away from home and it if wasn’t so cold and icy outside, I’d probably go with him. I’m really bored right now! ©

Taxes, Texas and Mourning Doves

Every dawn and dusk my deck rail is the gathering spot for three Mourning Doves to roost. Sometimes if I get up early enough I’ll even find them sleeping in my heated birdbath. Whether they are the same doves day in and day out, I don’t know but a trio of doves has been showing up for over a decade. Given the fact that the oldest known Mourning Dove was over 31 when it died, my doves could very well be long-time residents of my rail. I love the rhythm of life they represent, the sameness of having habits you can depend on and look forward to seeing. They are monogamous birds and I’ve often speculated about their couple plus one status. Maybe one bird is an off spring? Maybe one birds is a widow or widower or maiden aunt who never found a mate? Or maybe they’re all swingers living an unconventional Mourning Dove life-style. It doesn’t matter if we’re looking at people, birds or animals we all like to assign a back-story to what we see before our eyes.

Someone from Lubbock, Texas has been coming to my blog a lot lately. (My FeedJit tracks when visitors come and go and their city of origins.) You would not believe the back-stories I’ve been composing in my head to explain his or her interest in my blog. But mostly seeing Lubbock, Texas, show up on my FeedJit brings back great memories of a vacation Don and I took to San Antonio in 1990. Traveling around Texas the summer was a John Steinbeck kind of vacation. We hit all the back roads, going to out-of-the-way, tiny towns and we met many colorful and memorable people. We got a lot of mileage out of retelling the highlights of that trip including meeting our all-time favorite street person who took a liking to us and who shared her Rule for Living. “Never, ever buy food,” she said. “People throw out enough to feed an army!”  That ‘never, ever buy food’ would get repeated for years to come as Don and I would be walking into a grocery store.

I’d like to ask my anonymous visitor if she/he knows the name of a place not far from Lubbock that was no more than place along a country road that had a post office, a huge barn full of Willie Nelson souvenirs and a replica saloon from the Old West (not open for business) where Willie Nelson supposedly parked his tour bus when he was playing around Lubbock. My husband was a huge Willie Nelson fan and the people at the barn said it was okay to walk around the Nelson encampment if no bus was parked out front, which we did. Over the years I’ve wondered if the saloon wasn’t just tourist trap and Nelson never set foot on the place, but in my husband’s imagination he had walked the same porch as Willie Nelson and that somehow was like going to church.

Change of topic: People who’ve never lost a spouse wonder sometimes why it’s so hard to move forward. They don’t know that the reminders of our loss come at us when we least expect it. Like yesterday I went to our my CPA to get my taxes done. Well, guess what. Filing my taxes for 2013 is my first year of filling as a single person post Don's death which meant my taxes went up and I now owe $1,100. In the past we’ve always gotten money back filing jointly. My CPA set things up to have more taxes taken out of various income sources so that I don’t have to pay in the future, but at 26 months after Don’s passing I didn’t expect there to still be ‘widow’s work’ to wrap up. Duh, I should have known---yadda, yadda, yadda---but I didn't.

I've often compared my financial life to playing a game of Monopoly. One trip around the board you may get to buy Boardwalk and built a hotel. But always hanging over your head is the very real possibility that hard times or the tax man will come along and take all your houses and hotels. The moral of that little analogy is never, ever attach your self-worth to the things or money you accumulate while living. It's the people you've known and the people who you've touched that makes you wealthy. ©

P.S  Thanks to my visitor from Lubbock the mystery was solved! (See comments.) The photo above is of the place I was trying so hard to remember...Luckenboch, Texas. Thank you for, BTexas!