The alarm went off at the usual 6 am because I had plans to go to Bikram. I hit the snooze button. The house felt so empty. Not only no Michael, but 4 young, lively people had left yesterday. I was aware of the empty rooms as never before. It's not that it's a bigger space. I don't think it's even the size of the area. It's just that no one is in it except me.
I called Raymond James and tried to arrange for an electronic pay off of the mortgage. Mike and I had started working on this before he died, having the financial advisor at Raymond James pull money out of stocks gradually. Mike didn't really want to do it. His belief is/was that money is always better in his pocket than someone else's. He thinks debt is a great idea. Me, not so much. Quite on the contrary. I hate debt.
On my first date with Mike on November 8, 1973, he told me that he was $2,000 in debt. He might as well have told me he was a drug addict. For me, it was a deal-breaker for any long-term plans, which was too bad. I remember standing in line with him and feeling completely comfortable on our first date when we went to see the movie The Way We Were. We were good with each other from the start. What a shame I couldn't be his lifetime partner. Needless to say, I changed my tune while he stayed the same. I accepted his penchant for debt. However, the first thing I did when I had to deal with his credit cards was to pay every one of them off. I was planning on doing that even if he lived. I knew he would be out of commission for a while and I would have that chance. Okay, so neither one of us is perfect.
Paying off the mortgage serves me even better now that Mike is no longer around. I won't have the monthly expenditure. Mike and I paid the down payment, 2/3rd s of the cost of the house, plus some other miscellaneous expenses. The kids got the mortgage. Yvette is an army brat who got the mortgage through USAA. Our names couldn't be on the deed for them to get the mortgage because we weren't military. Some people go pale when they hear what we did. But that's what my mom did with us. We would never have abandoned her or pushed her out of the house. When Mike got into Catholic University in Washington, D.C., it virtually never occurred to us that we would sell the house and move to D.C., never. It only occurred to me recently that it would even have been a possibility. Besides our original trust in them, they have continued to demonstrate their commitment to Mike and to me. The kids will be paying me back, which will cover all my monthly expenses having to do with housing. Mike and I, and now me alone, were fortunate people. I have no children of my own, but I have the commitment of children in whose lives I played a role.
I came home late from my walk with Elsa and discovered I hadn't prepared my Juice Plus smoothie last night and had to rush to do it now. I put one in the freezer so it would be cold enough when I got home. I did my oil rinse while making it.
I stuffed the 1099 form from Tiaa Cref in my purse last night, so I didn't forget it in the morning. I didn't have time to do the dishes. I gulped down my two cups of water in preparation for the Bikram. I didn't want to be dehydrated in the class.
This was my first class since Damon and company arrived. I obviously didn't go the day of the funeral, Saturday, or Sunday or Monday because I made family the priority while I had them here.
The class went very well. J.J., who teaches the Tuesday through Friday classes, has a fantastic knowledge of how to do these postures and gives excellent directions. I now have a different understanding of the cobra pose. I have been making keeping my hips on the ground my priority. He said to make pushing up as high as you can with your arms, getting as much of an arch in our back, and then working on letting your hips drop to the ground. I don't know if this is best for everyone, but I doing it that way strengthens my shockingly weak arms and gets more of an arch in my lower back. Doing a posture with the emphasizing the right sequence is so important.
After class, I drove down to Miss Kitty's bookkeeping office to deliver the 1099 and a voided check so she could record the routing number. I will be getting some money back from the state and just owe the Feds $4,000 and something. I thought it would be much worse. I wonder what next year will look like. Kitty handed me the tax return. There was a letter on top addressed to Michael Ross and Elizabeth David-Ross. I realized that next year it would only have my name on it. It felt like I would be losing half of myself. I don't feel that way usually, but perhaps it will become stronger as time goes on.
When I got home, I got the smoothie out of the freezer, and put it in the frig, rushed into the shower. Yvette had written out the mortgage account information for the electronic transfer. There was the name of one mortgage company that didn't have an address on it. The contact at Raymond James said he needed the address for them, or the transfer wouldn't go through. I frantically called Yvette and Josh, trying to get the information. No go. They were both unavailable. Finally, I calmed down. It would be what it would be. If we missed the two-day deadline, we would have to start over again. We only have today and tomorrow to get it done before the amount we owe changes. I assume it doesn't change by much, but they will have to recalculate. Very annoying.
I then called Tiaa Cref beneficiary department before they closed at 5 pm E.T. to find out how much money is in that account. Question: do I want it to go into checking account or IRA? How will that affect my tax situation for 2019? I need to ask my accountant before I decide what to do.
The tax accountant emailed me that something was missing from Mike's Social Security form. How much had he paid for Medicare Plan D? What to do? She said to call the Social Security Department. No, they could not give me any information about his account. Could they please speak to Mike? I told them I would love that, but it wasn't going to be possible. They told me they couldn't give me the information because he was dead. Okay, what now? I tried calling our insurer, Kaiser Permanente. I got the same response. Boy, he died at an inconvenient time. Everyone wants to speak to Mike. I have sent everyone his death certificate. What am I supposed to do now? Miss Kitty said we could file without the information. It wouldn't change the outcome of the taxes.
I had received an encrypted email message from Kaiser Permanente through Voltage. I couldn't remember my password. It offered me a secret question. What high school did I go to? I put in every variation of it I could. Great Neck. Great Neck High School. Great Neck H.S., Great Neck North, and Great Neck North High School. None of them worked, and it was the only high school I attended. Although, I was the last class to graduate from the one and only high school in the community. The new building was finished and opened the following September, and my old school became Great Neck North. The tech support person told me to forward the original email to an address she gave me, which would cancel my old registration, and I would receive a new invitation to register. With a few glitches, I did it. It was my prescription account. A big whopping $58.75 in prescriptions for the year for me. I had estimated $50. What I needed was Mike's, which was much more extensive. But before I could get that, I needed to file additional paperwork, proving he was dead, and I had a right to see his information. I took a ballpark estimate of $200 for him. He was on tons of medication for his blood pressure, his anxiety, and his eye.
I took a much-needed nap after all that excitement. Everything is new, unfamiliar. Everything is frustrating and takes time. I slept for an hour, got up, and did a laundry. I have a ton of towels to do and my Bikram stuff. The sheets were done yesterday. I hung up everything on the laundry line. I love to hang the laundry on the outdoor laundry line rather than use the dryer. Besides the physical pleasure, it saves tons of money on electricity. The sheets dried quickly in the sun and moderate wind/ strong breeze. I went out to get them down. These moments of wrestling with sheets while their blowing in the wind makes living here magical.
A student I am tutoring arrived. The school evaluated her reading and concluded she was reading at a 1st-grade level. She's 12. Her family didn't send her to school consistently, and she is now living with an aunt who is responsible. When she read for me, I could see she had trouble with multisyllabic words, but her decoding skills on single-syllable words were good as were her use of context clues (figuring out what a word means from the sentence.) She had trouble with before and after in time, necessary if you are going to be able to determine when one activity happened before another. They're tough concepts until you get used to them. Learning them is as hard as learning to ride a bike or ski, but once you have the skill, it's there, and you can't imagine why you had trouble in the first place. She seemed to be able to follow my presentation of the concept. We'll see. I also discovered her made mistakes reading numbers, which suggests some perceptual problems. I think there are just a few problems interfering with her reading close to grade level. I had her reading material on a low 4th-grade level. She read slowly, but she could figure out most of the words. I also started working on her comprehension skills and some math. She can perform operations at about a 4th-grade level, but then it came out she did not understand place value. I went through a quick lesson. She's bright, but she may still not understand it. I introduce place value as a game. When a numeral lands on a particular spot, it assumes the value of the number it landed on.
The key is I randomly distribute place cards or pieces of paper with the place values written on them:, 1000, 100, 100, 10, 1. Instead of the order they are usually presented in, I place these papers randomly on the floor or table. Then I give students a numeral for them to hold and place on the various spots. The game works best when there are the same number of students as there are place value holders. Students scrambled to get to a place, somewhat like Musical Chairs. They then have to identify the value of the numeral they are holding based on the place where they landed. It's called place value for a reason. Do all students carry over from the understanding of this game to the context of formal math? Give me a break. But some do.
She left around 4:15. I played some FreeCell. It was an exhausting day with a lot of frustration. I walked Elsa, saw Josh was home, and texted, asking him to come up with the mortgage document so we could find the address of the company on it. He had it on a flash drive. Simply plug it into my printer, and it's done. It seems my printer can search on the flash drive.
We walked back to the lanai and discovered that I had poop on my shoes. Where did that come from? Josh located it on the living room rug. It's a multicolored Persian rug, and the poop blended in nicely. I had noticed the other day that the floor mat by the back door looked like it had a water stain. I figured that sweet Elsa had used it to pee that day when I forgot to take her out around the dinner hour I thanked her for being so considerate. I didn't detect the poop because of the multicolored rug and lack of smell. It must have been there at least a day, maybe two. I can't remember which was the day I became so distracted that I actually forgot to walk her at the dinner hour. I remember walking her later around 9 and thinking, wow! How come she has so little pee and poop to deposit. I got my answer.
Josh bent down and cleaned most of the poop up and left a piece of paper towel to mark the spot on the rug and wiped up the smears on the tile floor as best he could. I couldn't be bothered to deal with it at the time. Yvette asked me if I was going to use my Rainbow vacuum cleaner to get it up. It had never occurred to me before, but I thought that was an excellent idea.
Elsa and I did our before dinner walk. I'm not going to forget that so easily again. Yvette came up and did Graston and massage on me. My leg muscles are super tight. Yvette said she would call USAA in the morning at 5:30 am., then we would call Raymond James together. I ate dinner, salad, an egg sandwich with the left-over egg from Monday, and the left-over cheesecake from yesterday. I probably watched some T.V. and entered more books into the Collectorz.org app, which John Coughlin set up for me. I walked Elsa, washed my face, brushed my teeth, went to bed, and did a little bit of reading before I put out the light at 10 pm.
Good night, Elsa, Good night, Mike.
