Today's Kids Think "Cicero" Must be a Rap Group

My grandmother's high school diploma from 1931.  Look at the options for getting your 16 required credits, which she focused on the classics like Caesar, Cicero and Virgil.  Compare that with the average college graduate today.  And this was from a podunk region in Tennessee, not some big metropolis like NYC or Boston.

Dying Dad's Tangled Finances

My already occasional blogging has taken a back seat so I can deal with my father being put into hospice.  The prostate cancer that he said he was “free of” some six months ago has metastasized throughout his body and he has weeks left, which will be spent bedridden in a state of stupor, with small periods of lucidity. 

This is bad, but not my biggest issue.  The problem is the old man is 85 years old and he did zero planning for any sort of care, his finances, banking, anything.  This health episode started almost two months ago with a rush to the hospital, from which time he has not been able to manage his affairs.  And no one has any idea about his bank accounts, bills, credit cards, anything.

So I had to start a “forensic accounting” of his life, digging through files and papers trying to make sense of everything.  He did not leave a list or information of any kind, like he was going to live forever I guess?  Unlike me he was a very unorganized man and a procrastinator.  Maybe he figured he would get to organizing everything one day and never did.

I did manage to finagle a Power of Attorney (POA) during one of his few moments of lucidity, but that has proven to be almost worthless.  Banks basically ignore POAs when the person is incapacitated since they are more afraid of fraud than making you angry (what you going to do, sue BofA?).  So banks just ignore the POA and wait, figuring you’ll show back up soon enough with proof of death and Letters Testamentary.  If you have those two pieces of paper, which means you have a probated estate, they have all sorts of standard processes and procedures to get you going quickly.  Until then, too bad.

So unable to have “him” pay for anything, including his credit cards and bills, I have had to pay all my father’s bills personally, including his dying.  Care is super complicated since he decided to re-marry at 83, just 18 months after my mother and his wife of 60 years died (he never lived alone and couldn’t).  This new 87-year-old wife wanted him to “die at home”, and since spouses get decisions over health care, could make that decision.  Problem was she wouldn’t pay for it, and the old man was unconscious and unable to do anything, and we couldn’t get into his accounts.  So I ended up footing the home nursing bill at $1300 a day!  After three weeks of that to the tune of about $25,000, the new wife broke down about him dying in the home and nurses being there 24-7, so I thankfully rushed him by ambulance to a nice managed care facility for a much more reasonable $350 a day, which he will stay for the last couple weeks of his life.  He's barely conscious for 30 minutes a day so it really doesn't matter where it is as long as someone is taking care of his medical needs.

All up, all in, I have paid about $30,000 of my own money to take care of him, his bills and his credit cards.  I can legally get this back from his estate – and since I will be executor will not be difficult - but that will take time.

He was just lucky he had a kid liquid enough to take this on.  There were some super easy things he could have done like just listing his bills and accounts in one place, putting a POA in place at the bank when he could walk in and do it himself face-to-face, or arranging for end-of-life care.  Heck, I do not even know what his funeral wishes are as he never wrote them down, so I am already running around spending time planning and making decisions for that. 

Managing his affairs and health has effectively become a full-time job, but one that will end in a few weeks and becomes estate management.

"Trapped" In California

 

I don’t know how many times I have told myself “I got to get out of this state”, especially during Covid, yet here I am, still, after 26 years and almost half my life.   The main thing keeping here through most of that time was my kids, but now they're launched and out of the nest, the main thing keeping me in Coastal California is the weather and the scenery.

I hate to admit that something that seems trivial in an era of air conditioning is keeping me in a place that I despise politically, but I’ll visit locations and stand outside sweating, looking out and the flat boring land for miles and miles around and think “I’d hate living here even if the politics fit me better”.

To be fair I am a bit immune to the worst California has to offer.  I no longer have kids in the California education system.  I am protected from the rocketing crime rates since I live in an enclave that actually enforces the law.  And I bought into California real estate a quarter century ago so am mostly immune to the high cost of real estate.  But if I were younger, had kids in school, and was looking at one-million-dollar starter homes with no existing assets, I would forget the nice weather and 12-month outdoor activities and move my ass somewhere else.

BUT I do think I will need to leave eventually.  That 12 months of outdoor activities is already slowing down as I age (no one tells out how badly and quickly your body falls apart after 50).  As I spend less time outdoors, the less important the weather is becoming.  Retirement planning, income taxes and the like also start looming larger, and soon the weather will be overrun by other considerations.

But where?

•  Texas - I have ruled out going back to my home state of Texas – it is getting too crowded and dense, all the small towns I remember as a kid are all now absorbed into the major metropolitan areas.  In my lifetime all the main cities will merge into one giant city of Houston-Austin-San Antonio-Dallas covering half the state, one giant suburb with enormous amounts of traffic and endless rows of strip malls. 
  
  
• Arizona - I just got back from Arizona, and while it looks good on paper (low cost of living, low taxes, independent libertarian bent in much of the state) it is too friggen hot AND too friggen tan.  No greenery.  No trees.  Its mountains can be nice, but I need green.  Oh, and its HOT!
  
  
• Florida  - The Villages, which is the largest retirement community in the US, is a hoot, and everyone should visit just to see what it is all about.  It is basically a land-based cruise ship with everyone partying and golfing, and would be fun for a couple of weeks, but would wear thin after that.  Plus it is super hot in the summer, and the topology is pretty boring - flat and few trees in what is essentially reclaimed swamp land.  They just stamp out houses on endless flat land that stretches out for miles, so if topography is important, this is not your place.

     I also checked out the Florida coastal areas, which are nice and green and lush - when they are not mowed over by a hurricane.  Coastal Florida is on the maybe list, maybe more serious if I slow down a lot in my 60s or 70s, and maybe I will swing back for more exploring in another year or so.

• Nevada - Reno has a nice feel: just enough city to be interesting but feels like a small town out in the burbs.  The issue there is the weather is extreme – too hot in the summer, then too cold in the winter.  I know a couple that just moved away from Reno since they hated the temperature swings. Most of Reno is also in a valley in the flight path to the airport, so air traffic noise is pretty bad in most of the neighborhood areas.
  
  
  Tahoe is too expensive – might as well stay in California.  Henderson, Summerlin and the burbs of Vegas have the heat issue, of course, but now also over-development and crowding.  I was in Summerlin for the first time in a decade last summer and was shocked by the amount of development, which isn’t going to slow down.

So nothing is striking me yet.  Next up I will be exploring the Tennessee-Carolinas area.  This is getting out of my geographic comfort zone as I have no family or friends out there, but let’s see how the climate and topography trade off.

The Hardest Part of Home Repair: Knowing the Part Name

The hardest part of home maintenance is knowing the names of things.

I see something in my house that needs fixing and I think “I need to replace the thingy behind the thing”.

 

So I try a web search and look for “thingy behind the thing” and no luck.  So I then go out into The Real World and find a helper at Home Depot.  But then my pride gets in the way when the always middle-aged guy says to know what I need, he first needs to understand how my fromter is connected to the wannuzit before he can figure out what my thingy is.  

I nod gravely feigning understanding the fromter since I don’t want to let on I am not versed in the masculine arts.  Telling him I use a 220 volt fromter (or 221 volt, whatever it takes), he waives me to a 100 yard isle filled with fromters, wannuzits and thingies that connect them, and sometimes I stumble on the solution, but usually not.

 

In the end I usually figure it out with a lot of YouTube, studying schematics, and often lucky guesses.  On the last go around I finally figured out the thingy was called an “escutcheon”

Musings of a Reformed Road Warrior

Hong Kong.  Tel Aviv.  Seoul.  I would travel and travel, at one point I estimated I spent 1000 nights in hotel rooms.  Today I hardly want to leave the house, and I largely don’t. What happened?

Besides burn-out I think it takes someone unique to be a road warrior, and it’s something I lost.  Extreme travel I think takes someone searching, someone seeking. 

The movie 2009 “Up in the Air” I thought captured it perfectly. Every time I watch that movie I point at the screen and yell “that was me!”.  The George Clooney character in that movie is lost, doesn’t have a home life.  I had a wife and kid during my travel days, but my then-wife exclaimed that I wanted to be on the road to be away from her, which had an element of truth.

 

But the desire to be on be road was ultimately about searching, yearning, trying to find the Thing Out There when you can’t find in yourself.  

 

I’d try to find it in all the lonely haunts I went alone: back allies in Kyoto, quaint plazas in Barcelona, 300 year old pubs in Brussels.  When I found an interesting place alone, I'd think I’d be back one day with the One, the Ultimate Gratifier.  And the thought of The One, in The Place Again, One Day, and it would be enough to fill the empty hours of nothingness I’d feel for the days and hours I traveled alone in the far airports, the isolated hotel rooms.  The fantasy of Gatsby’s orgiastic future with Daisy would sustain me through the glum of the alone now.

 

But the yearning, the seeking, it was all an illusion, maybe a self-pacifying coping mechanism for the hours of boredom, days of loneliness.  There was no internet back then, CDs and paperbacks the only connection during weeks-long overseas trips. So it was on the Self that all that alone time focused on.

 

I eventually figured it out, captured myself.  I found I didn’t need to go out and try to find It outside of me.  By the mid 2010s I’d gotten promoted out of road warrior status, and by Covid I found myself content to be at home and focus inward on the new home life I’d established.

 

Today I don’t even like to travel domestically if not for vacation, not seeing the point of the effort.  What a change from when I’d eagerly grasp at any travel at all.  

 

I see young people and laugh when they claim they want to travel the world to “change who they are”.  World travel doesn’t change you, it makes you more of who you are.

 

Maybe a small part of me misses it,  but when I think of the hours and hours of trying to fill the hours, I change my mind.