Our house is for sale

Our house is finally on the market! If you know anyone who is looking for a very nice house in the San Francisco Bay area have a look at our listing. The house is convenient to 880 and is in a very quiet gated community.

Getting the house ready was an enormous undertaking. We painted the whole house, installed new hardwood in our bonus room, put new carpet throughout the house, and moved all our stuff out. Once we were out the stagers came in. For any of you who have been to our house you won’t recognize the transformation. For one thing there is no longer a pool table in the living room!

I was able to work with Duke to do a lot of the work but he had to finish it himself starting three weeks ago when I came down to Escondido to help Dad take care of my Mom. Every day she gets a little weaker. She can’t talk now and she is having trouble swallowing. Mom still seems aware of much that is being said and of what is going on around her. We don’t know how long this will last but except for breaks when my daughters or siblings come I’ll stay until the end. I’m taking one day at a time and am just glad I can be here for her.

While I have been down here Duke got the old house on the market and has started moving us into our new house in Reno. Long phone conversations about the house and the move have given me a respite from thinking about things here. My daughters and my sisters and brother have also been wonderfully supportive. My sisters were here last week. My brother comes again next week and my daughters have plans to come too.

Update

Back in February I blogged about helping my parents move to an assisted living facility. My Dad was recovering from a broken hip and my Mom was battling parkinsonisms. Since then Dad has made a complete recovery and is getting around with a walker and sometimes even a cane. Unfortunately however, Mom is slipping. According to the doctors the cause of parkinsonisms can be difficult to diagnose if you don’t have the typical variety of the disease. At this point the diagnosis is atypical parkinsons with multiple system atrophy.

Mom and Dad agreed that while the assisted living facility was fine it was not home and they really really wanted to go home. So last week Duke and I were down in Escondido helping Mom and Dad move back home. Mom is no longer able to get out of bed although her mind is still very sharp. Dad is providing most of her care. He does have a caregiver coming in 4 hours a day to help.  While Duke and I were there we talked to the people from Hospice and learned about how they can help. It seems like a wonderful service and will allow Mom to stay home until the end which I am afraid will be soon.

Leaving was emotionally wrenching and every time the phone rings I think maybe that is it. My sister is there visiting now and my brother will be there next week. Depending on circumstances I will probably go back down after that.

We continue to work hard on getting the house ready to sell. We have a list of 69 things to do and 26 of them are done. Painting and packing are good distractions from thinking too much about Mom. Our target to have the house on the market is now June 15 but I am thinking that it may take us a week or so longer. Right now I am trying to just take things one day at a time.

Health Insurance and Living in a Small Town

A good friend of mine is fighting a battle with throat cancer. HD (I’m used to calling him Dieter) and his wife Una moved to a small Oregon town in 2002 after they retired. The other day Dieter sent me an email telling me the bad news about his health. He also gave me some really useful information about their experiences with medical insurance. HD and Una have been roll models for what I want to do in retirement. I regularly follow their web site.  I really value and appreciate their advice. I asked and he said I could include a portion of his email here.

"Hello Marion,

I just read you latest blog, and I had to write to you with, what I
think is, a very important issue in your retirement.  And that is
health care.

Unfortunately right now I am battling throat cancer,  am in chemo and
radiation treatment. It was diagnosed early February, had surgery in
Portland at OHSU (the university hospital there) and now they are
mopping up after it with the other stuff.  Something I have to go
through. Wish me luck!

But the reason I write to you is the fact that health care in a small
town is a *BIG* issue (at least for us it is).  Depending on your
insurance type and willingness to pay a lot, it may be very difficult
to find doctors and facilities that work with your insurance company.
Una is fighting a brave and big battle with our insurance (their name
is xxxxx and they work through a Dr. network called xxxxxx).
They have strange ideas as to what is reasonable for a patient (i.e.,
going almost 2 hours one way to receive daily radiation, luckily we
talked them out of that nonsense and are having it in town).  Also
finding doctors in a small town may a problem, i.e., there is no ENT
doctor taking our insurance list. – Also, when we moved from California
to Oregon, we learned that the company we had then, did NOT operate in
Oregon, so insurance is not necessarily transferable to another state.
Just a few things to let you know. 

Best Wishes to your upcoming move and the prep work for it.
Take care,

HD (aka Dieter) and Una"

HD asked me to xxx out the insurance company name since they have to keep working with them. His email really struck a chord with me. I have read advice like this before but I usually skip right over it because I figure we are too young to have to worry about this kind of thing. But of course that is ridiculous. Anyone can need medical care at any age and when you need it it is too late to move somewhere else.

Duke and I currently have Kaiser HMO  for our insurance. We buy it through Intuit Cobra.We have been happy with Kaiser but It looks like it is not available available in Nevada. Since we will be right over the border form California we were thinking we would keep it at least until the Cobra runs out. But given Dieter’s email I am going to do some more research. When the Cobra runs out we will probably get a high deductible insurance with a Health Savings Account.  I’ll keep you posted.

Travels and Getting the House Ready to Sell

On April 17 Duke finished his first tax season working for H&R Block. Since then we shifted into high gear in our drive to get our house ready to sell so that we can move. We have lots of other stuff going on too.

One of my daughters was moving so last Saturday morning we helped her transfer a load of furniture to her new place and then we headed towards LA. Duke’s girls’ choir had a recital and one of the girls had a solo. The recital was great and the solo (her first time singing in public) was very impressive.

After the recital on Sunday night we drove to Escondido to my parent’s house. Monday morning we took Mom to have an MRI and an EEG. Mom goes back to her doctor this coming Friday. My sister Barbara and her husband will be with her for that. We are hoping to get a better diagnosis for the cause of her Parkinsonsisms.

On Wednesday we drove from Escondido to Reno. It always seems odd to me that Reno is essentially due north of San Diego. The road goes east of LA and then straight for many mile right past Edward’s Air Force base and up the East side of the Sierras. The mountains are beautiful. I climbed Mt Whitney 9 years ago so It was fun to go through Whitney Portal again.

On Thursday in Reno we had lunch with my Mom’s brother and his wife. Then we looked at a few apartments. Our plan is to get our house up for sale and then rent a place in Reno to use as a home base while we decide where we want to move for the next stage of our lives.

We looked at several places and think we will rent a house in a Del Webb Active Adult community, for people 55 or better. (Duke just turned 55 and I will turn 55 this summer). For less rent than they were asking for the apartments that we liked we can have a new house with a two car garage and use of the club house with indoor pool and walking track. I don’t think it is the kind of place we want to live in eventually but it should be perfect for the next year. It will be right around 240 miles from the old house to the new house.

The list of things we want to do before we sell the house is long. Before we left last week we painted our bonus room and now we are laying solid oak hardwood on th floor. Next we will lay porcelain tile in our laundry room and in the one bathroom that still doesn’t have it. Next we will get scaffolding and paint the walls and ceiling of the living room with the 24 foot ceiling. Those are just the first 3 big items on the list. In the next month we will also be helping Duke’s girls move and helping my parents move from the assisted living place back to their house.

June 10 is our target to have the house on the market so May is going to be a very busy month!

 

The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle

Our book club book this month was the Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. I wasn’t going to write about it because I really did not enjoy reading it, but we had an excellent discussion of the book last Tuesday night so I think I’ll summarize what was discussed and how it changed my view of the book. I’ll be interested in other people’s views of the book too.

The book is about a liberal couple, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, and an illegal immigrant Mexican couple Candido and America Rincon. Both couples live in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles. The book contrasts their lives. Boyle is a very talented writer. I have a very clear mental picture of the people and places in the book. His descriptions  and language are what someone called transparent. You don’t notice the language it just paints the picture for you.

Boyle also uses a lot of symbolism. Tortilla Curtain does make you think about illegal immigration and all its complexities. I can see why it is apparently a very popular book to study in High School.

Tortilla Curtain is very obviously intended to be like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. In fact it makes me want to read Grapes of Wrath again because I remember that although both books are disturbing I could appreciate Grapes of Wrath and Tortilla Curtain just annoyed me. I’m not sure why Grapes of Wrath works for me and Tortilla Curtain doesn’t.

One thing that really bugs me about Tortilla Curtain is that nothing good happens to the Rincons. Candido is hit by a car and later mugged. America is exposed to harmful chemicals by the one person who hires her and then raped by someone else on the way home. They have a blind baby. They start a wild fire. They are caught in a mud slide. Every time Duke asked me how the book was coming I had one more calamity to report. If some one writes a book and the plot contains only good things the book is considered ridiculous but when only bad things happen as they do in Tortilla Curtain it is apparently OK. It reminded me of the book A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry  because nothing good happened in that book either. Yuck!

What the book club discussion helped me realize is that Boyle apparently enjoys shocking people and Tortilla curtaian should perhaps be seen as fable or satire. It didn’t help me like the book but it made me realize that maybe it does succeed in what it is trying to achieve.