Thank you for sharing this story. I’ll bet you helped more people today than you realize.
Yes, thank you! I’m off to start clearing out a closet.
Keep us posted on your mom. My hopes are that, if she moved into a retirement place and got some good medical care and counseling, she could live in relative neatness. The place we might end up is almost like a resort, with apartments and a cafeteria. But everywhere is clean. I can’t imagine anyone hoarding there…
I’ll add my thanks to @Atamasama for sharing.
While I was running the condo I saw a couple of similar situations, up close, but also from outside. To see the full inside story is all the more tragic.
One specific point that IMO bears repeating in large letters here and bears every aging person putting on a sticky on their bathrrom mirror is this:
There’s gold in every one of those words.
Many of us here, and our parents, are of the generations where owning a detached house was The American Dream, and people who live in apartments are to be looked down upon. Selling up the house and moving to even an ordinary (not senior care) apartment feels like failing. Like falling out of the middle class. It doesn’t need to to feel that way. It should not feel that way. But it probably will feel that way until unless you consciously examine your unconscious biases about where & how to live.
Above all, don’t become trapped by a logistical obstacle that’s bigger than you are. Each time one item is carried down to the basement or put on a sagging shelf someplace in the garage, you just made moving out harder. Each day you get older, you get incrementally unnoticeably more feeble. Both of willpower and of arms, legs, and back. Left alone to take their natural course, it is a mathematical certainty those two curves will cross. Then somebody else will need to rescue you from your own life as @Atamasama did for his Mom. If there is nobody else who cares enough, well, there’s your lifetime prison sentence.
I know you’re kidding but it is a serious issue.
Not having children, I’ve always thought my assets were for spending. I really don’t grok the idea of depriving oneself in retirement to deliver a significant gift to your 40-70yo offspring.
I’m pretty close friends with my financial advisor. My late wife was a wills and trusts attorney and they became great networking pals, referring appropriate clients to each other. Both of them had, and he still has, many stories of clients living on figurative catfood so they can deliver a windfall to adult children who earn 10x what the old person ever did.
The sentiment is, or at least can be, sweet and loving. But it often is a malignant form of self-abnegation.
There certainly are special cases, the disabled adult child unable to provide for themselves, etc. But absent that, live your retired life for you and your spouse / SO. Prudently to not go broke w years left to live, but also with an eye to not letting your years go to waste in service of a slightly larger pile of pennies when you pass.
Giving your children an unconscious but continuous veto on every dollar you might spend is emotionally and practically crippling. And for almost every case, nowhere near necessary. It’s just another self-imposed prison.
The people at my financial advisor company talk about this a lot. The president likes to talk about heirs who fly in to their appointments first class when their parents had always used Spirit.
I’m in a similar state because my wife is worried the economy is going to crash due to the orange menace. This is not an unreasonable fear, but we live comfortably on my pension+Social Security+various interest/dividends sources. Leaving her Social Security and ongoing paycheck plus our quite large investment portfolio completely untouched.
I read a blog by financial advisors for financial advisors. Much of the content is irrelevant to me, not being in the biz myself. But much of it is.
Along the way I’ve learned there are two large perennial challenges they deal with with most of their clients: getting the people still working to save enough, and getting the people who’re retired to spend enough.
Apropos to the thread title, Costco has started to put their Halloween items out. WTAF?
Well, just yesterday they took down the last of the red white and blue crap in the clearance bins near the door, so it’s about time for the goblins and ghosts and orange crap to take over.
After all, what other saleable holiday is there between now and then? 
Labor Day!
It’s time we rise up and strike at the Man!
Two neighbors conspired to dump their tree debris on my property, how fucking brazen as if I wouldn’t notice or not care?
It’s a vacant heavily wooded lot in the neighborhood. The lady next door with the help of the guy across the street, removed several cedar shrubs from her front yard that were very thick with age. Apparently they had mechanical means to get them out by the root. And then dumped them right on my property. I saw it on my walk, I buzzed her ring camera but no one was home. So I pulled and tugged a couple of smaller branches off my lot and left them on her yard. I couldn’t budge the stumps with roots.
I walked back later and she was out front and she gave me a nasty look. I approached and said hey I noticed your tree stumps were left on my property, I’m pretty sure you know it’s my lot because we discussed it before ( she asked about buying it) and there used to be survey stakes right there. What’s going? She whipped out her phone to record, started saying yes ma’am, I know ma’am, I’m just a girl by myself. Yeah I know I said, so who helped you move the trees. She said Larry helped me, I told him you wouldn’t like it if we put the trees there. I agree! That’s right so you couldnt dump them in your own backyard?or Larry’s backyard he’s got 3 acres!
Now, I’m waiting for an apology and an action plan to get it off my property. Not forthcoming.. I have to press the issue, why don’t you have Larry put the stumps on your lawn, there’s plenty of room. Yes ma’am. I have to pin her down ona timeframe, when? When? When? In total exasperation she erupts with I don’t know ma’am, today?…
That would be great, shall I check with Larry next? She just glared at me. What the ever loving fuck?
To her credit or Larry’s they removed the stumps that same day, where did they go? I have no idea.
Yeah, my wife was telling me about this giant glittery Jack-O-Lantern that Costco was advertising online. We just got done with Independence Day. I don’t need to start preparing for Halloween 3 months in advance.
Theres a section of our library that has scary books calling it summerween
See the pumpkin displayed in the window
In the evening on a Summer night
A little light a-shinin’ through the window
Lets me know something’s not right
Summerween, it is not fine
Addin’ to confusion in my mind
Summerween, this ain’t the time
Addin’ to frustration in in my mind
Along these same lines, there’s often a promo at various retailers or eateries called “Christmas in July”. Whereby they’re offering some temporary discount deal to you as a “present” 6 months offset from Christmas. (The antipochron?)
So far this year I’ve seen it in two places, one of which was all month and the other just the 25th - 31st. The good news is beyond the word “Christmas”, they seem to skip almost all the rest of the oh so precious and trite iconography.
Wise words, and thank you for that, and another thank you to @Atamasama for contributing a genuine sense of optimism about the inevitable house sale. I don’t really care about the image of downsizing to an apartment or townhouse rental, I just want someplace clean and quiet in a good neighbourhood, and worry about long-term affordability.
Although I must admit that there are moments when I wonder whether the best course of action might not be to just stay put, and hope that I shuffle off this mortal coil before I run out of money. This being a socially compassionate nation, home care services would be available if and when necessary at no cost from the same place – the Ministry of Health – that provides free universal health care.
Perfect!! heh heh heh WEEN
Bath & Body Works has gone all-in on Halloween fragrances, along with a weird-looking partner line with some entertainer. I still want summery things right now, and they’re pretty much all gone. They’re also trying to position themselves as a premium brand for some reason. Hope it works out better for them than it did for Crabtree & Evelyn; I really like some of their foaming soaps.
There are apparently people in my neighborhood who either cannot read a calendar or refuse to do so. I am STILL hearing fireworks in the evenings.
OK, so I have eczema. Mine is normally present at a pretty low level then occasionally flares up, sometimes very badly.
I was diagnosed as a kid, and I’ve seen multiple dermatologists over the years. Every one of them has emphasised that the best way to manage it is to keep on top of it- as soon as a flare up starts, get on it with a reasonably strong steroid cream or ointment before it really gets going, because it will be a lot easier to control and also uses less of the steroid, so less change of side effects.
With that in mind, why does every goddamn new GP- who all have access to my medical records and can readily check my diagnosis- insist that I need to show them a bad flare up before they will actually prescribe the cream? Do they wait for someone to have an asthma attack before prescribing an inhaler? They have my prescription records, they can see one tube lasts me about a year, so I’m not over-using it, but nope. I can’t have one ready, I have to let it get out of hand before they will allow me to treat it.
Every one of them apparently has a secret belief that every other GP and dermatologist I have ever seen in my life has made a mistake, and maybe I’ve just been sneakily lying about having this since I was 2 weeks old in order to get treatment I don’t need.
Oh, and on that note, why can’t this GP surgery get their prescription request page on the website working? It’s been 3 years. First year they told me the website was being redone so it was out of use,OK. Last year they were still having some teething issues with it, but that was a year ago. I’ve sent in the registration form multiple times now, despite it apparently being designed by an angry chimp who hates humanity where your ‘relationship to the patient’ needs specifying and you need to fill in your email both as the patient and the person filling in the form on behalf of the patient, even when you’ve ticked the box saying you ARE the fucking patient. Then you get to the worst Captcha I’ve ever seen- the stupid images that are using US English even though this is Scotland and we don’t even use the word ‘crosswalk’, on a setting where you need to magically tell if a single pixel of white on a road edge is part of one or not, on an image the size of your thumbnail with no way to enlarge it.
I’ve still not even had a reply.
I have it too, though mine is mild and just shows up as small patches of dry skin that can turn itchy and then painful if I ignore them too long. I have a tiny spot on my right hand and I occasionally put some over-the-counter cream on it to keep it from getting too bad. It will eventually go away after a while and then show up in some random place.
My WAG is that they want to make sure that it’s really eczema this time, and not something else that’s more serious or at least different that might be made worse by the cream. But then again, it seems like a good way to handle it is to give you the cream and then have you come back if it doesn’t help. As someone who has had it for years, by now you should know what eczema feels like, and it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. But I’m not a doctor.
Air quality in western Mitten State is HAWT, and hazy with smoke.
Also, I have a clogged pore (“zit”) on the inside edge of my NOSE, and I would like to submit a complaint to management. Damn thing hurts, and since I work in a food kitchen I can’t exactly mess with it.