Today was my half birthday; I was 78 ½ years old. I followed my usual morning routine without change and went off to Bikram. I continued working on the outer edge of my left foot. I can feel that the area right before the heel on the outside of my left foot does not make contact with the ground consistently the way the same area on the right foot does. Also, the alignment of my left foot is off. I believe these two facts are related. I have been working on getting better contact with my left foot. This triggers action in my left calf. We'll see. It's all one big experiment.
It was trash pickup day. When I come home from Bikram on Wednesdays, I make sure to take the last of the trash out of the house and place the poop bags, which I have thrown next to the trash container during the week, in the trash bag in my hand. I went to my kitchen trash, and it was - empty. Then I checked the bathroom trash; the same thing. Freaky. Yvette had taken care of it. Very sweet, but very disorienting.
We don't have municipal pick up here; we have to hire and pay a company. Those who don't do that have to take their rubbish to the transfer station on their own. As far as Mike and I were/are concerned, the transfer station is a tourist site. We take our visitors to it. It's just fascinating. We still take our recyclables down ourselves.
Rick from Raymond James had contacted me by email and asked me to call. I called him as I drove home from Bikram. I wound up being a good time for him. The issue is how to handle the combined IRA from Mike and me. They originally asked me to designate beneficiaries.
Without thinking about it, I listed August (Mike's grandson), Sidney (Mike's grandnephew) and Sam (my grandnephew). When I thought about it, that didn't seem too wise. It would cut the previous generation, their parents, out of the loop, and, as Shivani pointed out, it would not account for other children that may come on the scene. I asked Rick if we just could put it into the trust and have that money distributed along with all the other money. He said that I should find some other way to deal with the IRA.
Here's the problem: if it is distributed as part of the trust, it will have to be distributed at my death and taxed at a substantial rate. If, however, I list beneficiaries, they can roll over the money into their retirement funds, and the rate of withdrawal will depend on their life expectancy, not mine. At 70 ½ there is a minimal annual withdrawal amount. Mike and I were required to do this, and I will be required to do this for the rest of my life. I pay taxes on that withdrawn amount. However, if I keep the IRA separate from the trust and list the beneficiaries, they will not be required to withdraw the whole amount at once and pay the attendant taxes. If they are younger than 70 ½, they will not be required to take that minimum annual withdrawal.
In the process of organizing for my tutoring student, I emptied one of Mike's folders on his desk. I think it was one for the distance learning program. I have been resisting this because it means he's really gone, and all his projects are over. I think I'm slowly letting it in the reality of his absence. I'm in no hurry. As I moved items around on his desk, I found the car registration which I have been searching of for days. Knew I had put it someplace absolutely sensible.
My tutoring student arrived at 11:15. We worked on math. She is still having problems with procedure for double-digit multiplication. She confuses the procedure with the one for addition. She wrote another story. It was a little easier to pull details out of her today, but she doesn't use standard English. I'm not sure how much of this is because she was raised speaking Pidgin or because she has problems with language processing. Her aunt seems to speak Standard English. I'll have to ask her.
Pidgin, by the way, is the creole that came out of the mix of Hawaiian, English, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and English. Someone I know who went through the Hawaiian school system in the 80s said that his high school teachers conducted their classes in pidgin. Although it is called pidgin, it is not. It's a creole. In linguistic terms, a pidgin is a language improvised and developed for purposes of commerce; such a blended language becomes a creole when children start learning it at their mother's knee. Hawaiian pidgin falls into the latter category.
I had another long nap. I got up for my before-dinner walk with Elsa. The evening was clear, unlike the previous days, so I headed down to talk to Alexandra, a neighborhood high school girl, about entering the books that weren't already in the site's collection. As I walked down the street, I saw someone come out to pick up their mail. I thought it was her mom, Olga, but as I got closer, I saw it was Alexandra. Perfect! She said she would be willing to do it, but wouldn't be available until next week because she was a counselor at a STEM camp for this week. She was recently flown to the mainland for a STEM contest. Her group developed some sort of rocket. They came in 20th for the nation. Now, that's not chopped liver.
I came home and started packing up the CDs. Mike must have about 1,000 and he may have listened to one of two but no more than that. He certainly didn't listen to all 1,000. Again, I realize he was a neat hoarder. Our living expenses will probably drop just for that reason alone.
I'm up to 2200 in the count of categorized book. That's probably not quite accurate. Some books have been counted more than once because I am an imperfect user of technology.
For dinner, I had salad, buttered bread (I think I'm addicted), limeade and the last of a Thai tofu dish that Shivani bought. I have been eating dinner on the lanai with a view of the Pacific and the sunset more frequently than I have been eating dinner in front of the TV. I see the sunset when I look up from the book I'm reading at the time. I think this is a much better solution to eating alone.
I moved to the library/Mike's study to do the book cataloging. The tv didn't work. I couldn't get the remote to start it up. I put a new set of batteries in the remote. That didn't work. I unplugged the TV. Sometimes, shutting an electronic appliance down gives it a chance to rethink its objective in life, and it comes back on when the electrical supply is renewed. No soap. I was able to play the show I had been watching, Silent Witness season 8, on my TV. But I had the problem of having to use the computer to enter books into the CollectorZ program and watch the show. I did perfectly well just listening to it as a radio broadcast. If I got stuck figuring out who was who, I could switch it over from the CollectorZ site to Amazon. Rather enjoyed listening rather than watching.
As I walked Elsa, she turned around early again. Huh. When we got home, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. Good night, Elsa, Goodnight, Mike.
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