Here’s just a bit of a catch-up; as you might have guessed from my lack of posting, I was away over the weekend, specifically, at my parents’ in Michigan. (Note to readers: my parents do not read this blog, nor, to the best of my knowledge, do any relatives, and, since I blog under the name “Jane the Actuary” rather than my own last name, I feel comfortable that I’m not indirectly disclosing their identity and invading their privacy.)
To be honest, it was tiring.
We got there Friday at lunchtime, having left super early to avoid the Chicago rush hour. The good news: there was virtually no moldy food in the fridge. The bad news: there was virtually nothing in the fridge at all. So we went off to Noodle & Co. for lunch, then came back, and, well, my husband started sorting through the accumulated mail to find the necessary tax forms, and I started cleaning the bathrooms — which, to be sure, was a suitably Good Friday activity, being penitential and all, but was not exactly what I had planned on — along with additional time spent on the kitchen, piles of papers on the kitchen table, and various other projects.
To be sure, it wasn’t all cleaning. We went to church Friday evening, grocery-shopped Saturday morning and went with the youngest to a local science museum and planetarium Saturday afternoon, while my husband and older boys went on a long hike in their ongoing Philmont (Scout Ranch) conditioning efforts. Saturday night we played a game of UNO, and Sunday we had a nice though simple Easter Dinner before packing up while supervising the kids following Grandma’s instructions on where to put the freshly-folded laundry, then heading home.
So all those thoughtful posts about Easter by my fellow Patheos bloggers — yeah, I missed that. Maybe they all missed that, too, and their posts were all written in advance, but I was irritated that Easter just didn’t feel very Eastery.
The good news was that my husband was able to find all the tax documents, so their taxes are done for another year. And Dad also voiced a feeling of being ready to start at least looking at some sort of “senior housing,” in part because his older brother has now done so. Mom, unfortunately, is another story.
Part of the trouble is that it’s not so easy to figure out a way to “try out” senior housing living. There is one CCRC around us that offers a 90-day trial, but only with the smaller units that they’d find “too small.” Maybe there are other places that are more purely rentals, where they could sign a short-term or month-to-month contract? Maybe even a “regular” rental (e.g., an apartment in a suburban “downtown” area) would help them get a feel for how much they would really miss not being in “their home.” Conceivably in such a case they could pay the rent for a couple months without selling their existing house; perhaps for a longer term they could rent out their home, though this would require a lot more work than even selling it — that is, they’d have to downsize and discard or place in storage much of their belongings in any case, but if they sold their home we could all decide together whether to remodel or sell as-is, whereas if they rented it out it’d require a major overhaul to find tenants (bathroom remodel, new flooring, remove the wallpaper, etc.).
So we’re still stuck.
Oh, and we’re watching the weather forecast for a planned Cub Scout campout this weekend that we may cancel on account of the forecast unseasonably-cold weather.
And how ’bout that GA-06 special election, eh?
How was your Easter?
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