34 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-5-18”

  1. Impressive photo, Aj. Welcome to my day. Chas finished his taxes so I figured I’d better work on mine. Now I have the info, just have to enter it in the form, scan it and send it to my cpa. Time for some sleep. Have a good Monday.

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  4. Good Morning. I was able to sleep in a bit, but must get moving soon.
    Yesterday we went to have steaks with R (my friend Les’s husband). He is trying to keep himself busy. He said if he slows down he gets depressed. Her clothes are packed up to take to a women’s shelter. He wanted another friend and me to go through them. I was uncomfortable pawing through her things, but I did end up taking a couple of pieces of costume jewelry and some note cards.
    As we were all sitting around the table talking after dinner, he said that he had finally thought to sit down and pay the bills. He noticed that several had positive balances so he started making some calls. Les had set up what she could on auto-pay and the rest she had paid ahead 3 months. Even now, a month later she is managing his life. She took care of all of their finances all these years and knew he would need some time to get used to it.

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  5. I’m back to work today, finally feeling “ok,” not great, but this virus is finally moving out of me after 10+ days. I’m back to more of a mostly dry cough.

    I’m afraid I owe Carol an apology, she ran through all her money again (spending most of it on Easter candy from the sounds of it) and will have to have her phone turned off for the month as she had no money left to pay her cell bill for March. It makes me crazy when she does that so I would up scolding her. I need to just back off and realize it’s ‘her’ money, none of my business since she doesn’t ask my help or advice about any of it. If she doesn’t have phone service for a month, it’s her choice. (It’s hard for me as I view it as a bill that has to — or should be — paid every month as a matter of course and without question, right behind paying her rent; she views it as an optional perk.)

    She’s either incapable (to a large degree this is the problem I’m convinced) or unwilling (true to some smaller degree as she could take steps to prevent this by letting someone at the facility hold back her phone money but she chooses not to) when it comes to handling the money she receives each month. But until she wants help with that, the money is hers to spend as she wants — and if she chooses to buy candy and other things & go without phone service, it’s none of my business really. It’s her phone, her money.

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  7. I want to help my daughter. She will never be able to make an independent life. But she is resistant as she wants to be “normal”.

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  8. Yes, I’m sure there are. I sent her a text apologizing but also saying I wasn’t sure how often I’d be calling her this month (when she doesn’t have her cell phone she can’t make calls out to different area codes); those calling in have to call through the main line, then they have to transfer it to the office mobile line, then a staff person has to find and walk it to her. The calls frequently wind up getting dropped in the process so you have to call back again. It really is a pain for both the caller & the staff.

    I did tell her that I viewed the phone bill as a ‘bill’ and a necessity, so something that just had to be paid every month. She clearly sees it more as optional, so that’s OK as long as she’s willing to live with that (which she seems to be).

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  9. There were a couple women from Hollywood Presbyterian trying to help her with budgeting a couple years ago, but she ended that when she felt like they were trying to tell her how she should spend her money. And that, she said in a huff, was simply going “too far.” I’m sure they were simply helping her recognize how to prioritize her monthly finances (she owed both of them money, by the way, which was never paid back, of course) so she could take care of her responsibilities before going on the monthly candy-buying shopping spree.

    They’re still good to Carol — we ran into one of them at the Christmas Eve service a year ago — and are very warm and welcoming when they see her.

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  10. Boundaries. You can be free to love people when you have boundaries. We can and should be generous, but generosity comes in many forms.

    Without boundaries, we tend to get somewhat bitter and we all know what happens when we allow the root of bitterness to grow. Let alone when we tend it, watering, fertilizing, weeding…

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  11. Morning…windy and cold here this morning. We had quite a day of tragic fires yesterday and they are warning a repeat of it today. Down the country roads we travel there was the loss of 4 homes and a couple of barns…thankfully no one lost their lives and all horses and dogs were accounted for, but the sight of charred pastures and burnt out homes is devastating….We are praying no one will be foolish enough to throw their cigarette butts out their windows especially today. As I walk the county road by our home, it is horrifying to see the butts lying alongside the road…keeps us on our toes around here sometimes!!

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  12. I see where they still have aftershocks in Papua New Guinea .
    People who throw cigarette butts out aren’t thinking. Not evil, just thoughtless. i

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  16. No danger of fire up here. We received another foot of snow over and above what was already on the ground. I went out to snowshoe trample down some of the snow so the oil delivery guys wouldn’t have to wade through it all and ended up in a big snow drift myself, laughing so hard I couldn’t get up. Husband, of course, took some pictures and then came and helped me out of the snow. Drove to work this morning and nothing had been ploughed yet. 40km/hour the whole way and I’m sure glad I didn’t meet any oncoming vehicles.

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  17. Roscuro – (re: last night’s discussion) – I had already read a couple articles about the case, so I knew the family had utilized the library. What I missed was what caused your reaction. I thought it was in response to Janice’s comment, which you then said was not the case, and that Janice also saw the irony.

    So I guess what I missed was more related to how that tone, and the comment about irony came about. Since I did understand what you meant about the taxes and the library, it is too complicated to try to explain what I mean.

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  18. Over on the prayer thread, I wrote about the successful appointment for getting my taxes done. I cannot tell you all how relieved I am, to the point of crying with relief when I got home. It’s not that I was afraid of having to pay, as I didn’t think I would (and I don’t), but that having to do it was hanging over my head.

    In the grieving process, everything is more stressful than usual. There are still a few things that need to be finished up, and doing taxes was one of them. With Nightingale having a lot of other things to do, I hesitated to talk to her about it, thinking “Maybe next week” week after week. But of course, letting these things hang over me was causing stress, too. The thought of doing them was stressful, but not doing them was stressful, too.

    So one day late last week, I made myself make a couple little appointments that needed to be made (my long-overdue haircut, and Heidi’s overdue rabies shot), and determined to ask Nightingale today about making an appointment for the taxes. My haircut appointment is for tomorrow, and Heidi had her shot and a brief health check this morning.

    After Heidi’s appointment, as Nightingale and I were having breakfast together this morning (something we do occasionally), I brought up the matter of my taxes, thinking she might make an appointment for later this week or sometime next week. But there was one open for 1:00 this afternoon, and we jumped at it.

    As I said on the prayer thread, I was nervous about it, but I am oh-so happy and relieved to have it all taken care of, even though I wasn’t expecting to do that today.

    There are still a couple things that need to be done (changes at the bank, hearing back from probate court and whatever that will entail), but I am feeling like I am coming out from under so many things hanging over my head over the past several months.

    When I think back over all the uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar things I’ve had to do over the past five months, seeing how much I’ve accomplished, how far I’ve come, I am kinda proud of myself. I’m sure Hubby would be proud of me, too.

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  19. So, tomorrow is my haircut appointment. Nightingale cut my hair back in December, but I do like to get it done the way Sue does it. She layers it just right, which enhances the curly-waviness, especially in the back. (For some reason, my hair is straighter in the front, but if it is cut right, it has a little more curl to it.)

    Hubby started going to Sue over 25 years ago, when she was first starting out. He liked the gentle way she cut his hair, as well as the fact that she cut it right. Then I started going to her, and the girls would also occasionally have their hair cut by her. She’s even had the opportunity to cut The Boy’s hair once.

    When I see her tomorrow, I will be telling her of Hubby’s death. I purposely made the call on a day when I knew she didn’t work, to avoid having to tell her on the phone, with no time for explanations.

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  20. I may have mentioned this before, but I saw this again today on Facebook – a meme complaining that Republicans are calling Social Security an entitlement. (The unwritten gist is that people are not due entitlements.)

    Um. . . what do they think an entitlement is, anyway? Every time I see one of those, I explain that they are indeed entitlements, as they are entitled to receive the money at a certain age.

    I think what has happened is that because so many complain about others who seem to have an attitude of entitlement (to things to which they are not actually entitled), somehow now the very word is misunderstood to be something one is not entitled to.

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  21. Kim – I have not yet begun to go through Hubby’s things. In fact, there is a pair of his pants, with suspenders still attached and maybe even something in the pockets, laying on a desk chair in our bedroom. I have not touched them, and they now have some afghans stacked up on them. The bags that came home from the hospital with his “personal effects” are also still waiting to be emptied.

    It is not due to denial or anything like that, just that I want all this other practical stuff, like what I described earlier, taken care of before I get into that stuff.

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  24. I am getting ready to play Five Alive with ten year old. I have never played it before. Neither has she. She will probably beat me.

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  25. I am here 😊 Hubby and I stopped by Chick Fil A for a quick bite to eat then took a ride on the country dirt roads…saw some sheep, horses, cows and llamas. It was too windy and cold today to take a relaxing walk through the neighborhood so we decided to put that off until tomorrow!
    Kizzie I am so happy for you that the stress of the appt turned to relief…the Lord is indeed leading the way and we have but to follow…so thankful 💕

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  27. This Navy wife is impressed by L’s commitment to care for her husband that way. I’m not sure I would have been that clever when I did the bills.

    Kizzie, have you thought about using Uber so you don’t need to wait for Nightingale? I don’t know if it’s available in your town, but it might give you a little more freedom.

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  28. My sister-in-law who died was basically her husband’s office assistant and the one who handled the business end of his job. Her father was a savvy businessman, now worth a great deal of money, and I guess she learned some of that, because she did an excellent job with the household finances.

    She had their investments on a rolling schedule, something due to mature every month (which is a smart way to handle finances if one ever has enough investments to do so), but knowing it would confuse my brother, the last few months of her life she was consolidating all her well-planned investments into something simpler so that he could figure it out. I thought that was smart thinking. (Funny thing is, he was way ahead of her in book knowledge.) And my nephews who have birthdays in December found they still got their birthday cards with money tucked inside, even though she died two months before. Whether she did a whole year at a time or just made sure she had their cards ready, I don’t know (nor do I know whether the nephew with a February birthday got a card–I suspect she did only to the end of the year).

    The best story like that I ever heard of was in Focus on the Family. At Christmas time, a woman went to the door to find a kennel delivering a puppy–bought and paid for by her husband before the dam was even pregnant, knowing that in a few months a puppy would be a great comfort–and a sweet delight–to his grieving bride. I don’t ever want anyone buying me a puppy without asking me first . . . but I think if my husband made an exception in such a way, I’d find a way to forgive him!

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  29. She beat me. But she has been studying the rules since she got the game, just never asked anybody to play. I was just learning them. That is my excuse and I am sticking with it.

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  30. Carol called (her phone switches off at midnight), the facility is unable to give her a ride to get an X-ray one of her doctors ordered and she has no other transportation (or money) now to get there. She said in the tearful voice mail that she’s going to save money so she can move out of there. 🙂 And on it goes.

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  31. Michelle – One issue is that we try not to spend more money than necessary. (Although, sometimes we do splurge on a little something, but nothing extravagantly expensive, of course.) But I do have that option in the back of my mind if needed sometime.

    In the matter of the taxes, Nightingale and I both wanted her to be with me, in case something came up that I needed to ask her about, or for her advice. Fortunately, the office was in our town, and afterwards, we did a little food shopping. This is a good week for these appointments because she has the first three days off.

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  32. I got to take the book I made of our local state park to the park (I had an appointment), and the ladies I saw were really tickled by it, more enthusiastic than I expected. I have no idea whether it will sell any copies, but they said that if I give them business cards they can hand them out. (I couldn’t make those up ahead of time, just in case they had corrections on anything and I had to re-upload the book, but I uploaded the book today and I’m working on business cards with the link to purchase it.) Even if I sell just a handful of copies, I will consider that success. I made it for myself, mostly. But I also knew that when I visited the Smokies, I wanted a book, and surely here and there will be someone who has visited this park once or twice a year (or more) for decades, and to whom the idea of a book would be fun. (Now, if such a person, or such a person’s children, can actually afford such a book, that’s another question! It’s $47 for paperback, $60 for hardcover, though I’m also offering PDF for $7 and an e-book for some price under $10. But it is literally the only book available, so I would guess at least a few people would be interested anyway–we will see. And if you have a choice of making a Shutterfly book of a few snapshots, and you don’t really like the photos you took, or buying a ready-made book, you just might buy the ready-made book.)

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  33. That’s great Cheryl.

    Is there a low-cost ride service you might also qualify for in your community Kizzie? They’re usually for ‘seniors’ (which you’re not really) but sometimes those age qualifications are set pretty low (mid-50s).

    Got an email tonight from someone I don’t know who is trying to find a mutual friend because one of this guy’s good friends recently died. But the mutual friend, unbeknownst to this person apparently, also died a couple years ago. Sigh.

    I think I’m headed for bed early tonight, first day back was a little tiring without the 2-hour afternoon nap I’m now used to (editor would have frowned up on that) — and I’m still struggling with some symptoms, including a sore throat and lingering ‘gunk.’

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