Grand Finale Versus Grand Chore List

Yesterday after our walk, Amy mentioned some improvements she has made to her house, which she bought a year ago, and she talked about shoveling snow in the winter. This was inspiring: I could shovel! (Maybe; I have a chronically bad shoulder.) For that matter, I could probably do several of the things I currently pay a yard work person to do. I started listing them in my mind. Instead of paying someone to do such-and-such thing, I could buy the tool(s) needed and do it myself, though I felt a bit unsure about certain tasks: Could I prune a tree so that it doesn’t touch the house? (I did not even know this was a thing that needed to be done until my sister mentioned it a few years ago.)

But also, is this really how I want to spend my time and energy? Is this like Americans transforming from leading scientists into people who joyfully pick the strawberries immigrants used to pick (for 1/10 the hourly rate), as a member of the current administration described a few months ago? Is weeding alongside the path at the north end of the house and then doing that again and then doing that again going to be as interesting and meaningful as meeting new patients on the oncology unit at the hospital? I began to feel discouraged, deflated and overwhelmed.

Also, not to talk about money again, which once upon a time was bad form, but I had told my financial advisor that I am living fine on X salary, and he calculated that I could have Z income each month without problems, but Z is a little bit less than X, and actually, while I had been certain I was living fine on my salary, it appears that might not precisely be so (though how could I not be? The whole thing is a mystery).

I lived frugally for a very long time and in theory I could do so again, but maybe I couldn’t in practice, or maybe it would be an unpleasant source of stress. I decided to undertake a monthly analysis of my expenditures and just as quickly abandoned that tiresome-sounding idea. However, I have started adding up a given month’s expenditures once the next month starts, not putting it into categories or anything, but just getting an idea of the total and sort of noticing what I bought that maybe I could have not bought.

I think the money will work out, particularly if Social Security exists six years from now, which does not seem to be guaranteed. The premiums for my Obamacare are currently $1336 a month. I don’t know if it would be more or less in Michigan, but I guess I can hang on for one more year, at which point I should qualify for Medicare, if that still exists.

I was pondering how, when I am in San Francisco, feeling increasingly cramped and constrained in my studio apartment, I long to eat outside, but how could I do it? Setting up a folding chair near the trash chute and watching the neighbors’ rats run up and down doesn’t seem like it would be satisfying. In that regard, Ypsilanti is hugely better than San Francisco.

Another couple points of comparison: My apartment is full of light; many sectors of the house are dark. (Should be fixable.) I can have the windows open in my apartment pretty much every minute of the year: fresh air. There are screens on some of the windows in the house and I could open the inner window and have fresh air but I am transforming back into a Michigander: realizing there actually is hardly any minute when you would want a portal to the outside: In the winter, you don’t want to let the warm air out, and in the summer, you don’t want to let the heat and humidity in.

I am sure that my father, once upon a time, yearly replaced the screens with storm windows (these are an outer, second window) and later on vice versa. I don’t know if he kept up with that forever. It’s possible that at some point he just left the storm windows on all year, since you can hardly ever open the windows anyway, and since the storm windows would help with insulating the house in the winter.

My sister found the screens in the garage and installed a couple, taking off the storm windows. My approach to this is going to be that some of the windows have screens, some have storm windows, and that’s that.

Amy has groovy newer vintage windows where both things are available in the upper half of the window, and you just slide down the one you want to use. I would love to have those, but I would also love to have some caulk applied near a low brick wall out front, the lighting improved, the house rewired if necessary for improving the lighting, the deck power washed and painted, the wet basement fixed, maybe even the exterior of the house painted someday and much more. I may never be able to afford to do most of these things and so they will hang over me forever as undone to-dos. My father said the one good thing about moving to the retirement community after he was diagnosed with cancer was that it made his to-do list vanish. He said there were items on that list that had been there for 50 years.

Does it make sense to start a to-do list that will only ever get longer and never get shorter? I guess one approach would be never to say I’m going to repair or improve anything, though I’m not sure that’s the right idea, either. I think it is prudent to keep up with home maintenance.

I have never, ever wanted to own a house. I didn’t want to take care of a house, and I didn’t want to clean a house, but now here I find myself planning to do both of those things, at a relatively advanced age, which I had envisioned being devoted to my Grand Finale. Increasingly, being stuck in that little apartment watching the rats run up and down seems unendurable, especially when just a plane ride away is my very own unpainted deck and very own broken but you can still sit on it plastic deck chair.

I don’t know if these are reliable life lessons, but the two times I’ve seen a centipede in this house, they were in the bathroom. (Are centipedes always in the bathroom? Does a bathroom always contain a centipede, even if not in plain view?) Also, when I most recently saw a centipede in the bathroom, it occurred simultaneously with seeing a giant ant. (Does the presence of one imply the presence of the other?)