Cunning and Connivery at the Checkout Counter?

Just recently, I've been in pie-making mode.  My first attempt was a pumpkin pie, sugar-free for my husband. I figured pumpkin is healthy.  It's squash, right?  Fiber? Vitamin A?

Keeping health considerations in mind, I went down the aisle at my local grocery store the other day to get the fat free evaporated milk. The national name brand had a price posted, and hey, it was on sale! The store brand had no price posted.

I first went for the national brand, on sale at $1.39, but grabbed the store brand, too, just to see what the non-posted price was.

It was 99 cents.  I told them to keep the 'sale' national brand and I'd take the one for 40 cents less.

A couple of days later, Iwent to the same store, looking for French bread rolls for French dip beef sandwiches (OK, so, we took a break from the healthy stuff!), and on a table in the back of the store, there I saw just what I wanted, and hey, they were on sale! Next to these rolls I saw another brand, no price. 

I took both packages to the front, and once again, the sale brand was more expensive, by quite a bit, than was the similar product (lower in fat and carbs, by the way!) that had no price posted.

I am starting to think they do this on purpose.

Today, while shopping at a clothing retailer, I went through checkout with a nice, chatty cashier who asked me whether I wanted my receipt in the bag.  Sure!  And then, I stopped. I pulled out the receipt and noticed she had overcharged me for one item by $8.00 and charged me TWICE for the ONE cute coral straw hat I bought to wear out in my backyard while gardening. It took her a while,but she fixed it. 

And finally, in my last shopping foray of the day, I ended up back at the local grocery store, where I was going to save another 50 cents per item if I bought 8 'mix and match' items.   I watched that register tape and didn't see the discounts. The 'helper' at the self checkout couldn't figure out how much we were supposed to get back; she didn't have a calculator handy to help her figure out how much 8 x $.50 was going to be, so she sent us to customer service.

We got back our $4.00.  On one hand, I think, "These people have jobs?" And on the other, I see why they do.  If they make enough mistakes or yack at us enough to distract us, we may get home and never realize that we've been overcharged.

I try not to be any more paranoid than I have to be, but I really do wonder . . . and I have learned to watch the prices.

As my Granny would say, "Thievers!  They're all thievers!" :-)

Oprah, Meredith, and Me

When flipping through channels lately, more and more do I see that less and less will I see anyone my age on television.

That is, unless it's those models doing household chores and then with an accidental touch, their immediate landscape turns into the great outdoors and finally, eventually, they end up sitting companionably side by side in two separate bathtubs.  Beats post-coital cigarettes, I guess?

What's up with that two-tub thing anyway?  Middle age sex is that dirty?  I don't get it at all.

Well, two tubs is maybe slightly better than the Depends commercials, or "I've fallen and I can't get up!"

And then this morning, I saw Meredith Vieira leave "The Today Show," as Oprah left her show a couple of weeks ago.  Even Katie Couric is now moving from evening news to a talk show.

It's not that I see myself in Katie or Oprah or Meredith, although I have always liked Meredith's hair, but it's that their all leaving around the same time has gotten me to wondering why.

And I am wondering whether their leaving has anything to do with the rest of the people I see on TV and whether the networks are moving these women out.

Diane Sawyer was just over in Afghanistan. Maybe we should have told her to watch her back!

Just wondering . . . . 

A Silver Tsunami on the Streets of the Bay Area!

Well, I've been a Baby Boomer for a while now and praised and vilified accordingly, and now, thanks to last night's newscast, I'm part of the impending Silver Tsunami ready to terrorize the streets and highways of the Bay Area.

The newscast 'warned' that in the next 10 years, 1 in 5 Bay Area residents are going to be 65 (I think that was how they put it) and so younger residents will need to start thinking about how to have "the conversation" about our not driving when the time comes.

Really?  The younger folks should be worried about me? I am not talking on my phone, or texting, or playing grabass with my passengers, or shaving my bikini line, or smacking bratty kids -- or all of the above!

Actually, I find that over the last couple of years, I've become somewhat more careful as a driver. For example, I no longer drive with the stereo blaring; I want to make sure I can hear sirens coming down the road -- and approaching intersections!  I also find that I watch out for others a whole lot more; I am not being so distracted by daily worries of work, etc., and instead pay more attention to what's going on around me.

Part of that, I must admit, is trying to be a more defensive driver since I find the frenetic pace of the Bay Area freeways getting worse and worse.  If someone is coming from behind me and wants to get off the freeway at the same exit I do, will they wait for me? Nah, they speed up and go around me and cut in front of me, and yes, I am driving the speed limit or maybe a bit faster,depending on the flow of traffic.

The freeways have not been very pleasant around here for a very long time, and they seem to be getting worse. I can finally understand why my elderly friend would only take surface streets. She found the freeways too hectic.  I am starting to feel that way, too.  Even dear ol' 680, which I've always enjoyed driving, isn't quite the pleasure cruise it used to be.

The other factor that may be playing into this is the fact that my life has slowed down, anyway. Since I am not out driving in commute traffic any longer, I am not caught up in something and am not acclimated to the faster speeds and the need for quick reaction times for the idiots driving erratically on the roads.

I am glad to be out of  life in the fast lane, in all respects, but sure wish there was time and space for some slow lane time.

Even the slow lane is the fast lane on our freeways!

To the Root of the Matter

In my previous post I wrote that I had been up to spend time with my mom. We had a good visit; she recognized me two days out of three, which is a good result, as far as I am concerned.  I came back newly charged up to find a way to move her down here, and I am glad to report that I got her onto a waiting list for a place very near by.  Whether or not I can get her the financial aid she will require is another matter. 

During this visit with Mom, as always, several people told me I look just like her. I used to reply laughingly that if they didn't stop saying that, I was going to stop coming!  I don't see the resemblance, but many apparently do.  That's OK. My mom, age 78 and despite years of smoking cigarettes, has lovely skin, and I hope mine will hold up as well.

I also took a good look at her hair this time around.  (I wrote before that I was slowing down and taking a better look at everything around me, and here's another example!)

It's not all white, more salt and pepper, with some silver woven in.  So I start to wonder if I look so much like her now, will my hair age like hers did? Her mom had nearly all black hair until she died, with very little silver in it.  As my hair stands right now, underneath the color job I last had done a few weeks ago, I see that my hair is mostly dark -- some color between black and brown that I can't really name -- with some silver woven in. I also have some pretty striking white hair at my temples.

When I worked, I worried more about coloring my hair because I have always thought roots looked pretty skanky, despite what the younger generation allows itself to look like. After I got 'retired,' I let my natural color grow out for a while, but I didn't like it, so I went back to coloring it.  Someone else wrote that she colors her hair so as not to be 'invisible,' and it made me wonder why I still color mine.

The simple answer is that it looks prettier when I do.

One day, when my hair has made its transition to that beautiful white that I now see at my temples, I will let it all be white (although how I am going to make that transition, I have no idea.) I have two men friends, Mike and Ken, whom I've known since both were much younger and blonder. Both now have beautiful white hair.  Pop, also, has lovely white hair, and if mine looks as good as theirs does, I'll gladly wear the white. 

Until then, I'll keep working to keep my hair the color it was when I was in high school: not because I think it makes me look younger -- I am not fooling anyone -- and not because I feel invisible otherwise.

It just looks prettier to me, and that ought to be good enough!

Checking in with Mom -- "You Talkin' to ME?"

They, whoever "they" might be, keep talking about the Baby Boomers as the sandwich generation, taking care of both kids and parents.

Well, I don't have kids, but I have a mom, all right.  She's been in a skilled nursing facility, up in WA State, where my brother dumped her,  for about 13  years (And may I just say, now THAT is what I called skilled -- keeping her alive all these years, when the average is 3 years in a facility.)  Honestly, with the long list of things wrong with her, I don't know why she is still alive, but she is.

More or less.

It's not the life I would want to live, and in her more lucid moments, when I fly up into the Pacific Northwest, she expresses surprise at her whereabouts.

I wheeled her out in her chair yesterday, when the sun was out (oh joy), and she said, "Doesn't it EVER get warm here?"  Yes, I replied, when it's summertime.  "Well, WHEN is summer COMING, then!" she replied quite vociferously.

The social worker tells me Mom is in a state of advanced dementia, yet when Mom has her hearing aid in, and when she finally realizes that I am there, she becomes quite lucid and pretty chatty.

I have done what I usually do on these quick trips: clean out the old ratty clothes, replenish her wardrobe, spend short snatches of time with her -- she isn't awake for very long -- and then I head back to the hotel to rest up for the next foray into the life I sure don't want to live myself.

And while she hasn't quite yet got it that I was here today, she knew yesterday. But then she kinda blew that because she asked where her other daughter was. (She doesn't have one; she only has 3 sons. They all have children, or live too far away to visit, so of course they don't visit.)

God knows she could use another daughter, that's for sure, but there's just me.

Mom and I weren't that close when I was growing up, for  a variety of reasons. We were shopping buddies, mostly, but she seems to have spent most of her quality time with my 3 younger brothers.

So now, when my time has expanded and I've had the chance to slow down, to look at birds and hills, and all that nature stuff, I have also had the time also to slow down and see my mom. She is no longer the mom I grew up with, but I have to say we have a better relationship now than we did back then.

She said to me the other day, "You're just a sweetheart," and I asked her, "Who am I?" because it was so unlike anything she'd ever said to me.

She said my name, so I knew she was talking to me.

Like I said, time has slowed way down, in a way, now that I'm 'retired,' or whatever, and I think this time with Mom is yet another gift, and I am grateful.

The Yellow-Billed Magpie

The only other time I ever saw a bird like this one, albeit without the blue bits on the wing, I saw it in a London park, and I knew it was a magpie. Why? Because magpies are as thick on the ground there as mourning doves are here. It was just something I knew.  Maybe it's in my genes or something.

But until today, I had no idea that magpies lived in the U.S. -- well, except for the human variety, which Pop, my father in law,  can tell you all about.  

When I saw a bird like this today, just starting out on the trail up Mission Peak, I couldn't figure out what it was. Hmmm, I thought, it's about the size of a crow, black and white with deep sapphire blue patches on its wings. It kinda looks like a magpie, but . . . .

I grabbed my little East Bay Parks bird guide.  Nope, no pictures like that, no magpies.

I grabbed the new girly white iPhone with the pink antenna-protector thingy and tried to snap photos of the bird on the way up. No luck. I tried to look it up on the girly iPhone, too, but that was wasting too much good time.  I just relaxed and enjoyed the hike.

And then coming back down, my husband pointed this bird out, sitting on the barbed wire fence.  He/she (the bird) wasn't a bit worried about me; in fact, it was so busily chattering away that I almost felt it was inviting me to talk -- or trying to scare me away from its nest.I sidled my way closer than I'd thought I could and snapped a few photos.

It still reminded me of a magpie, and my husband pointed out its yellow bill and the bits of yellow around its eyes. 

Back home, neither of the other SF area bird books had a photo of this bird, so I turned to my big red field guide, The National Audubon Society Western Field Guide, which I bought recently at Borders' bankruptcy blowout.

I followed my hunch, looked up "magpie," and found it.  A magpie with a yellow bill, all right! 

A yellow-billed magpie. Whaddaya know?  Sometimes things just do make sense.

Up on that trail, I stood looking at that bird and also looking down at a campus where I'd taught English, oh, 15 years ago.  Back then, I would never have hiked, unless it was to Starbucks, and I also bet that had that bird plopped itself right in front of me on the sidewalk as I rushed into or out of the classroom, I'd have missed it.

Not any longer, and I am so grateful that I see differently now.

COBRA and other insurance that bites

Earlier this year, my husband's COBRA benefits ran out.  We knew it was coming, we did our research for state and federal high risk pools, we looked over various other offerings, and we ultimately we chose for my husband to purchase one of the HIPAA policies from Aetna. He has a pre-existing condition, so unless he wanted to go without insurance altogether for 3 to 6 months, he had to take a HIPAA policy from one of the big boys. Each company gives you only two choices, and he bought the best coverage he could.  I purchased my own separate policy and was able to do better since I have no real ailments.

You would THINK that if you chose a policy and already paid top dollar because you are in a high risk group, with guaranteed coverage, the insurance company would already have charged enough and not have to raise rates even higher.

You can see where this is going, can't you? My husband just got a notification that his plan premium, just started in February of this year, will be going up 10% in August.

I am so tempted to give them all the middle-finger salute, with both hands!

And yet, I have seen another side of the costs for medical attention. I visited a doctor who told me one price would be the cost for me if I had insurance, but only half the quoted price if I did not have insurance.  Now, why is that? And is this the same kind of pricing 'strategy' that is taking place with Medicare billing?

"It ain't fittin'; it just ain't fittin.'"