Moving On

Today is an exciting day for our big household for we've purchased a new, and probably forever, home after twenty-five years in Gig Harbor.  For twelve years my middle son Frank and his wife Ana have lived with us and eleven years ago their son Gabriel was born.  It was intended to be "temporary" but graduate school, student loans, and raising a baby made it logical to continue and most importantly, I am a mama who loves having her chicks around.  Where many parents are "bummed out" when school lets out, I was always thus when it was time to have them go back to school.  I loved summers with my four children.

We are not always in agreement as to how to do things around our five bedroom house.  We frequently have different schedules for eating.  Dave, my daughter Amy and I like an early dinner and settling in for the evening.  Ana, our daughter-in-law, is Brazilian and accustomed to eating much later than we.  I am sure Ana will agree that it is difficult sharing a kitchen.  I know that because she lamented it once a few years ago and now she shall have her own for the property allows us to stay together, have a bit more space and two kitchens. 

It was listed as a duplex, has been used as triplex at times, but is actually two homes with no common wall.  That last bit I consider to be a downside.  I would have liked to had a common door that our grandson could run through and would make it easy to care for each other's animals.  When Frank and family are in Brazil, their cat McGonagall will just have to come live on our "side" and when we are away without our little dog, Loki will have to go to them.  There are too many upsides to this new property to complain about something so small.  After all, we will only be steps away from each other and Gabriel will be doing homeschool in our basement.

That is an upside to the property.  It has enough space for there to be a room dedicated to Gabriel's homeschooling and violin practice.  Although my son Frank is a public school teacher they chose to homeschool Gabriel because of Ana's frequent extended trips to Brazil. In addition he takes violin lessons and plays in a youth orchestra. Although he's quite good enough after eight years that I do not mind the practicing, it will be nice for him to have a room where he knows his music is.

The new property will put us in Tacoma and on the other side of the Narrows Bridge and its ridiculously high toll.  Frank is the art teacher at Clover Park High School and so has to cross daily to work and Gabriel once or twice a week for lessons. Although we've loved living in Gig Harbor, once all my children were grown and I retired from the school district, there was no particular reason to stay.

Our current house does not serve my special needs adult daughter.  Her declining mobility makes it difficult for her to negotiate stairs and in the new place her bedroom will be on the same floor as family activities.  She will have three steps in the back door and Dave plans to eliminate even that with a ramp.  It will be lovely to feel that she's more a part of what's happening at home although she's always preferred her own company to that of anyone else.  At least if she wants a glass of ice tea there will be no reason for her not to get it herself.

We will also be in the same town as my oldest son and his family which will be a joy.  We have been only about 25 minutes away in Gig Harbor, but now we should be able to be at each other's home in half that.  We will be close for school events which tonight include Granddaughter Linda's performance in the Tacoma School District's Young Ambassadors, a group that demonstrates tumbling and calisthenics to grade school children and performs at high school sporting events.  She and her sister Lydia are also involved in dance and drama and we will be minutes away from those performances.

Both Dave and I are retired and beginning an exciting chapter in life, but mindful of what lies ahead.  We saw my in-laws move from the family home into a smaller more functional home, but didn't stop to think about it being far from public transportation and shopping.  Our home in Gig Harbor is in exactly the same situation.  I do not always want to be dependent on my children for rides to the doctor and shopping.  The new property is on a busline and walking distance to a huge grocery store. Especially happy for my husband is the fact that we will be very close to the Seattle Mariners' farm team, the Tacoma Rainiers!

Today we get the keys to our little kingdom and can measure for flooring and paint.  The work is about to begin!

Making a Penny Scream

 

A year and a half ago, at not-quite-sixty, my husband felt compelled to relocate 1,500 miles to return to work for Lockheed Martin thus turning our marriage into what is called a “commuter marriage.”  The necessity of this decision grew from the fact that we’d made some bad financial decisions that had put us into debt.  Within months we’d recouped the $40,000 of debt; Dave turned 62 and has returned home to Gig Harbor with an eye of my retiring in June.  There was an emotional cost to Dave’s time away so it is important that we honor the sacrifice and not allow our situation to deteriorate again.  Mostly we need to not return to living like middle class Americans.  I know how to live poor.

Having been low income more than half my adult life, I pay attention to folks who claim to have ways of saving money.  Some of my favorite reads have been compilations of a newsletter from the pre-Internet days called the Tightwad Gazette so it was natural that I “liked” the Face Book page Homemade Living Frugally.  After being a wife and/or mom for 42 years I have amassed plenty of tricks for, in the words of my late mother-in-law, “making a penny scream.”  When someone on Homemade Living Frugally posted the question as to how to save money on their food bill I perked up because I have my own opinions.  There were already 354 replies and I did not read but a few, but it set me to thinking about how helpful it would have been 42 years ago to know what I know now at age 62.  By no means am I a professional spendthrift.  That is a fulltime job and I have a job, but as my husband and I retire and our incomes become fixed we will be having more time and less money so am reverting to my single-stay-at-home-mother mentality.

My mother-in-law’s was not the only sage advice that I got early on in my adult life.  My neighbor when my first child was born, who later became my step-mother, told me, “The only part of my budget I really can control is food.”  I took that to heart and to this day it upsets me to have to throw away moldy or expired food.  My first and best advice to save money on food is to shop in your cupboard and refrigerator when planning meals.  Find recipes to use what you have before you run to the store to buy a long list of ingredients for that wonderful recipe you saw on the Food Network.  Save that recipe for a truly special occasion. The result of NOT shopping in your cupboard and freezer is a lot of waste and once again you might as well throw your money in the street. 

This was brought home when our old freezer (which had been my dad and step-mom’s and probably draining money in electricity) died.  That meant salvaging what I could and tossing the rest.  I discovered things that had put in there months and YEARS earlier and was furious at the waste.  We replaced the freezer with a much smaller version and I have become a fanatic about making sure stu ff gets used. 

I loved watching “Extreme Couponing” on TLC.  I have couponed, but not that extremely.  For one thing, as I referred to above, it takes time to dumpster dive for multiple copies of coupons, organize them, and make a battle plan as to which stores have what on sale.  Maybe when I am retired and have more time I will be able to do more in that direction, but I do get online for Fred Meyer and load coupons onto my rewards card and take advantage of their 55 and over days that give a 10% discount on the health and organic items that we use.  That’s another tricky tight rope and another blog.  First Tuesday is this Tuesday so I guess I’d better get busy.

Now How the Heck Did I Do That??

 

Bette Davis famously said that aging wasn’t for sissies.  At age 62 I quote her often.  Recently I added injury to the insults of age related aches and pains by injuring the muscles along my left tibia.  A search of the Internet reveals that this irritation and resulting pain is caused by "strenuous activity."  I would not have said that I engaged in that.

There is no denying that I do a lot of walking.  As an aide to a special needs high school student I hike all over campus while he zooms along in a power wheelchair.  When I am home I am busy with work around our houses and I cannot deny that having my husband Dave working 1,500 miles away oft times leaves me exhausted, frustrated and resentful but I would not have said that I was engaging in strenuous activity. 

When the pain first began I thought, “My goodness, I’ve pulled something.  How inconvenient.”  I did what I usually do with pain.  I ignored it.  It began the Thursday before Easter.  On Friday my own Special Needs daughter and I drove to the coast where our “someday retirement” home is.  My other children were unavailable for various reasons, but we’d come to celebrate Easter with my mother who lives six blocks from our house.  Saturday was a perfect day to give our two lots large lawn its first mow of the year.  It took two and a half hours to plow through the thick and somewhat damp “back forty,” as I call the back yard which stretches from our barn and cottage on one lot to our main house on the other, with our electric mower.  I decided that the front, smaller but more complicated due to flower beds and walkways, would have to wait until Sunday as we had guests coming for dinner.

My leg had hurt during the whole process, but I’d trudged along as I always do, drinking lots of water and breaking to scrape the grass off the underside of the mower.  Our company was Kathleen Arseneaux and her daughter Stacey came to dinner which I’d largely prepped while waiting for the grass to dry (which it never entirely did).  Toward the end of last summer I’d engaged Stacey to help me with the gardening.  Stacey doesn’t mind weeding whilst I loathe it, mostly because I can’t get on my knees with any reasonable expectation of getting up again without calling the Ilwaco FD.  Over dinner Stacey offered to mow the front the next day and I gratefully accepted.

So I went literally limping along in pain, doing all the things that I’d got used to having help with before Dave went away ten months ago.  The pain finally began to take a toll on me.  Sometimes it left me nauseous and by the end of my work day it was leaving me wanting to cry.  If I’d had time.  There were still chores at home to accomplish before I gratefully put my leg to bed, only to begin the process again the next day.  Finally, I emailed our doctor and received a reply from her PA as the doctor was out for the week.  She encouraged me to go to Urgent Care which I finally did next day, a week to the day from when I’d first noticed the pain.

Shin splints the Urgent Care doctor said after reviewing X-rays that revealed no hairline fractures.  To immobilize my foot and give the tissue a chance to heal she had me put in an ortho boot making me think of astronauts walking on the moon.  I hobbled to garage, got into the car and tried out my new footwear on the clutch of my Neon.  No, if I tried to drive from Tacoma Group Health to our home in Gig Harbor I’d likely get into a wreck along the way so I peeled off all the Velcro straps the nurse had spent so much time adjusting and used the clutch with my bum leg.  It already hurt and while it was getting no better, it seemed to be getting no worse.  The Neon is in the garage and I'm driving our truck, which is an automatic.

So now, until it is healed, I am hobbling around on my new boot, petrified I’ll fall down our stairs and actually break something this time.  And there are still things to do.  Dave is coming home for a visit a week from today so there’s cleaning and dusting I want to do and a birthday cake to order for my father-in-law and daughter.  To quote another old lady, my mother, “There’s no rest for the wicked.”

And I Don't Have Bette Davis Eyes

 

Right around the time that Dave was making his decision to go back to work which meant going 1,500 miles away from hearth and home, I had to schedule a doctor’s appointment in order to get my HBP medication renewed for another year.  The appointment was the day after Dave left.  Not surprisingly my blood pressure was through the roof; 157/97.  The doctor took it again a little later in the appointment—after I’d told her what was going on in my life.  It was down, but only to 140/80.  She also heard a heart murmur she said she hadn’t heard the year before and sent me for an EKG.  The doctor upped my medication which is an anti-anxiety medication and that made life more tolerable in more than one way.  When she got the results from the EKG she said that the damage dated back more than ten years.  Funny, how come no one ever mentioned it before?

It was the end of the school year and I wanted to take my daughter Amy and go to our home by the sea because I knew that I could deal with Dave’s absence there better than in Gig Harbor so I put off all the maintenance type medical appointments until later.  The last week of summer break I spent my days at Group Health Tacoma having an ultrasound of my heart, getting a physical, getting the girls pressed and having my eyes tested.  I don’t like to take time off from work for medical appointments 1.) because no one takes as good care of my student as I do and b.) because I try to save my sick leave for when my 90 year old mother gets sick.

Half of the results of those appointments went well.  Unfortunately the ultrasound confirmed that I have heart damage caused by HBP and possibly dating back to the ‘90s when I took ephedra in order to lose weight.  I am at risk of heart failure. When Dave left I'd felt like my heart would break, now I realized I'm in danger of just that. I’m taking my meds and eating more healthfully and I’ve lost ten pounds in three months.  At this rate I should reach my goal weight before I die—I hope.

The other bad news was that I have had some bleeding in my right eye.  My sight cannot be corrected in that eye.  In fact the glasses that I have, which are about ten years old, would probably be just fine if there wasn’t a twisted blood vessel that had caused the pooling of blood.  So tomorrow is another eye appointment at a different Group Health ophthalmologist in Federal Way to determine if the situation can be treated.  I am not looking forward to this, no pun intended.

Bette Davis was right when she said that getting old is not for sissies.