Category: life

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Bob and I have two cats and I sometimes feel like all I do is tell them no. Cisco wants out doors. No. Chloe wants to scratch the furniture. No. Cisco wants to eat the food off of my plate. No. Chloe wants to scavenge the kitchen counter for leftover. All they hear from me is no.

What worries me is that it makes absolutely no sense to them. For example, why can’t Cisco drag the chicken bones across the kitchen counter and then drop it on the floor so he can eat it. I was obviously done with the bones, why can’t he just pick the bones for whatever he can find. Why is he getting all hysterical about it?

Or why is it all right for Chloe to scratch the cat scratchers that Bob has so artfully arrayed around the house but not the couch and the chairs that are just a juicy targets. Why is one scratchable and the other not? And how, a poor cat, supposed to the difference.

They just run and hide when we raise our voices but I am sure they are thinking WTF. This is what animals do why are these two humans such pains in the asses.

I am surprised that they are both still civil with us. But they are.

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A senior moment that keeps recurring in my life is misplacing things. I lose my glasses the most. My eye sight is actually pretty good which enables me to ramble around the house without them. So, unless I have a pressing need for them, like watching television, I go without them.

I try to put them in the same place every night before I go to bed. The problem comes when I take them off earlier in the day for some seemingly benign act like rubbing my itchy eyes and forgetting to put them back on. At this point, they are lost. I go looking for them but without my glasses. This sometimes proves an impediment to finding them because instead of seeing the room clearly, there is a bit of blur obscuring everything.

In the past, I would just get my spare pair of glasses and wear them until I found them.

This worked pretty well until recently. I bought a new pair of glasses. The day I bought my glasses I was overwhelmed with the number of choices I had — there were hundreds of potential frames. This paralyses me. The more choices I have, the more difficult it is for me to come to a decision. So, I thought, well Tom you liked your present frames, just get a pair of frames that looks like the old ones you have. Genius, right? I got the exact same frame.

As we all know, the road to Hell is paid with good intentions, it has actually made it worse for my search for glasses.

Since I misplace my glasses on almost a daily basis, I constantly am putting on my spare pair. When the old pair and the new pair looked different, I could easily determine which pair of glasses I should be wearing when I stumbled across them. I would put on the new pair and return the old pair to my cram packed junk drawer until I need them again.

Now, so I just put on my old glasses which work until I stumble across my new ones. This would work if I also kept better track of my old glasses but I don’t. So, much to my chagrin, I will misplace my glasses and when I go to the junk drawer, the spare pare is missing. Which means instead of wearing my new pair, I was already wearing my spare pair and now, instead of looking for one pair of glasses, I am looking for two pairs of glasses.

Worse still, I don’t know which is my old pair and my new pair when I do find a pair of glasses because I didn’t think to check if there was anything that would differentiate the two pairs, I don’t know which pair I am holding — the old pair or the new pair.

As I am reading this back, I am thinking why am I writing about such a trivial matter. Then I think, wait a minute, this is important. As a Senior Citizen, this is how I spend a large portion of my day — looking for shit I can’t find.

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One of the advantages of living in San Diego is that you hardly ever have to use air conditioning or the heater. This is pretty much the environment I have been living in for the past 30 years. I write this as a way of explaining why I had such trouble when my fire alarm went off in my new smart apartment. Bob was cooking and apparently a minuscule amount of smoke got into the fire alarm setting it off. I could neither see nor smell any smoke but who am I to argue with a screaming fire alarm.

Bob turned on the stove fans. Alarm continued to blare. I opened the patio doors. Alarm still continued to blare. Bob told me to turn on the fan in the apartment. This seemed like a simple task and I gladly expected the challenge. In the good old days, you would just move the dial to fan, the fan would go on and the smoke would disappear.

The smart thermostats, however, are different. There is no moveable switch that can turn the fan on. The smart thermostat is a touch screen with icons. None of the icons look remotely like a fan. So I did would anybody would do in this situation, I begin to randomly hit the icons in the hope that one of those icons controlled the fan. Mind you, the alarm is screaming in my smart apartment. Scaring me, Bob, the cats and all of neighbors on the third floor.

The icons do bring up menus. Unfortunately the menu items are crammed onto a screen about the size of a baseball. I am unable to read them with or without glasses. So I was back to the tried and true method of randomly picking menu items in the hopes one of them turns on the fan. Finally after a few minutes something occurs and the fan goes on and the indecipherable amount of smoke clears the room.

Greatly relieved but also a little concerned that I can’t easily turn on the fan which also leaves Bob worried about cooking again. If the alarm is going to go off every time the oven is turned on we needed to learn how it worked. It was time for me to learn more about the thermostat. I thought since the alarm had been silenced I could calmly look at the thermostat and figure it all out. Wrong. There was still the same unrecognizable icons, the same small print, and I again found myself randomly picking an icon in slim hopes that it will be the one to tell me how to turn off the fan.

Bob suggested finding a Youtube video explaining how to use this thermostat. This annoys me because instead of being easy to use, which is how the apartment bills it, I have to watch a video on how to use this most excellent tool. I fight the urge and continue to randomly pick icons. This has become slightly more important in that I have managed to turn on the fan but now I can’t turn off the fan. After going through numerous menus and not seeing, and I mean not seeing in every sense of the word, I surrender. I go to Youtube.

This is a revelation. I thought there would be one or two videos of how to use the system. But there were numerous 5 to 10 minute videos about a variety of topics — how to set a temperature range to automatically turn on the air conditioner, how to set a temperature range to turn on the heater, how to set the temperature range for mornings and evenings, and so on and so forth. None however specifically were for how to turn the fan on and off.

I did find one that had the word fan and managed to get enough information to turn off the fan. Success. We were on the road to fully use all the great tools our smart apartment had to offer.

The problem with my lesson is that by the next day when Bob asked me how to turn the fan on and off. I couldn’t explain how it was done because it required going to the right menu options and, for the life of me, I have no memory of how I did it. Indeed, I had to watch the Youtube video again to explain how I turned off the fan. The fan I had turned off just last night. That is how easy it is to use the smart thermostat.

I guess what I am saying is that the apartment might be smart but the users are definitely stuck in the remedial class on how to work it.

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Bob and I moved house after 26 years in one place. Our old house was spacious. Having all of this space meant we had to fill of this empty space with stuff. This meant lots and lots and lots of stuff.

Stuff I had packed away in the hidden crevices of my house and had completely forgotten about. Stuff that I have no earthly idea why I bought or what purpose it served. Pictures of people who I no longer remember. Pictures of the Eiffel Tower — from several different trips to Paris. The same tower, the same picture, a different year. Books I will never read again. 300 plus CD’s that I haven’t listened to in 26 years because I no longer had a device that played the music. Checks from 50 years ago. Business cards from a place I no longer worked at. Old documents from a job I no longer had. Paper clips, sticky notes, pencils found in almost every drawer except the drawer where paper clips, sticky notes, and pencils should have been found. Technology that was dated and no longer used. Old flash drives that I haven’t accessed in 20 odd years. The amount of stuff we had was mind boggling.

We had successfully filled those empty spaces, no doubt about it. Now we needed to purge them before moving. Filling trash bags after trash bag. Collecting boxes for Goodwill Charities. Saving the really valuable stuff for a future garage sale. We could then move because we had less stuff.

When we arrived at the new smaller apartment, we still had too much stuff. We had too much furniture and the furniture we had was too big for our smaller space. So we purged some more. More trash bags. More Goodwill. More future garage sale items.

And still we have too much stuff. So we will probably have another purging event soon.

I realized two things. We spent all these years acquiring stuff and all this stuff did was weigh us down. It limited our options because we, of course, had to have big place to store all of our stuff. The other thing is I don’t miss any of it.

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For most of this summer, I struggled with a spider on our side porch. It all started one day when I noticed the string that turns on our porch light was out of reach for some reason. I pulled it down so I could reach it better. A few days later I noticed that it was again out of reach and I wondered what was happening to the string. This was when I noticed that the string had been incorporated into a spider’s web.

At first I thought I am not going to let some spider beat me. I pulled the string out of her web but the spider kept spinning the string back into web. Every morning I would take it down and the next morning the string would be back in a spider web. This went on for a week or so before I decided I would let the spider have her way. It was only a little stretch for me and I imagined it was a bit more work for her to spin her web and pull the string into it. I was being silly to fight with her about. So I surrendered.

Every so once in awhile I would need the porch light on so I would pull the string as gently as I could so I wouldn’t yank it out of the web. Occasionally, despite my best efforts to be gentle, I accidentally would pull the string out of the web. But the spider would repair it the next day and the string was where she wanted it.

Until the other day. The string dangled freely outside her web which was no longer translucent but grey and old. Day after day, I would check to see if she had reattached the string into her web and each day I was disappointed to see it hanging there.

She hadn’t returned to her web. I told myself stories. She didn’t need the string any longer or she moved to a new location but I knew she was probably dead. Spiders don’t live much longer than a year or so and it had been at least six months since I observed her work with the porch light string. She had probably come to the natural end of her life. It has bummed me out nonetheless.

I was of Katherine Mansfield short story “The Fly” where a man who lost his son in World War I struggles with a fly caught in his inkwell. Each time the fly gets out, the man puts more ink on it and roots for the fly to struggle free from his dilemma. He keeps doing it until the fly eventually surrenders to its fate and dies — upsetting the man.

I am at a certain age when people have begun to die around me at a frightening pace. Three people who I know in just six months. Others are getting sick and taking a long time to recover. Some, I surmise, just aren’t going to get better. Then there is the daily reminder of my own diminishing abilities — not hearing everything, pains in the knee, getting winded when climbing stairs, trouble seeing while driving at night and most of this is not going to get better. Only worse. Yet we, for the most part, carry on.

In the meantime I am waiting for my spider or one of her children to return.

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As I get older, I try to keep tabs on my mental state. So far, I think I am all right but every so once in awhile I think I might be a little crazy and I am just too crazy to realize it which leads me to present confession. I think my plants are watching me.

Now I rationally realize this is impossible but I still have this nagging feeling every time I give one plant water and not the others that I am pissing off the waterless plants. Watering the plants is not one of my normal chores. Bob does it. I water for ecological reasons or so I tell myself. If, while washing dishes, I notice water still in the glass, instead of tossing it in the sink, I give it to one of the house plants. There usually isn’t a lot of water. Just enough to give one of the guys a little dash.

Only one of the five plants is going to get water so I try to be fair. I put the plants in a rotation, so all is well as long as I remember my rotation. But I don’t. If we go out to eat several nights in a row, or I have too much to drink, or I just plain forget or some combination of the three, I worry that if I went out of rotation.

Now a normal person wouldn’t worry about this, right? But it really bothers me. I don’t want piss of the plants. It has gotten to the point that if I can’t remember the rotation that I give all of them a little water. The problem I have is that I am doing because the plants are behaving like assholes and not because I love them. It kind of pisses me off that I am letting a bunch of plants push me around.

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Marianne Lake, who runs Chase Bank, announced that Free Checking is going to end for that bank and she anticipates the other big banks will follow.

I only stay with the big banks for 2 reasons — Free Checking and Free ATM’s. If this ends I see no reason to stay with the big banks. They are completely useless to me as a normal business customer because every time I use my ATM, I am taking money out of my checking account. I am guessing that means if I use an ATM, I will be charged for writing a check. This ends Free Checking and Free ATM in one fell swoop.

The big banks are useless especially to those of us on the more modest side of the pay scale. I tried getting a saving’s accounts at a big bank. It cost more money to have the account than I received in interest. CD’s are better in the sense that I don’t lose any money but when I close out my last CD with a big bank I was getting in the neighborhood of .50 cents. You heard me right — .50 cents.

The sad part of this whole thing is my leaving will not be a problem for my big bank. In fact, a clerk accidentally spilled the beans with me one day when I was trying to find the best place for my $5,000. The answer was loud and clear. I just didn’t have enough money for the bank to bother with my accounts.

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I know it is hard to believe but I am an experimental type of guy. This means I occasionally, while cursing out my household chores, think is there an easier better way to do this. So, I try something. Most of them are failures but nonetheless important information to learn as you can now skip that particular household experiment. So not all a loss in hearing about and you get to know me a little bit better and who wouldn’t want that.

So my experiment this week was trying to fill my water bottle with one hand and wiping the counter tops with my other one. I can report to you that it was a complete fiasco. It is difficult to both hold a bottle, especially one with a small entry way, under the tap and vigorously wiping the dirt off of counter tops. It is like trying to tap your head and pat your stomach at the same time. Every time you check to see how the counters look, you unconsciously move the bottle away from the tap even with 40 to 60 percent focus I was giving it. Any time you would have gained by the dual approach you lose when you go over the missed spots on the counter top and wiping the water off the bottle. So you can mark this one off of your to do list.

I know that some of you are asking why wipe off the bottle before putting it in the refrigerator, nobody will ever notice. Well, not at my house. A certain someone will discover my crime and want answers. I just don’t have a good enough reply for why I didn’t wipe the water off the bottle before putting into the refrigerator. I mean how weak of an argument is I was too lazy to do it and I thought I could get away with it without anyone noticing. Take my word for it — it is really awkward position.