High Cost Of Living

 I am still reeling from the realization that no doctor really wants my business here in High Point, North Carolina. 

I am married. My husband is on medicare and pays none of my healthcare costs - never has, never will.  I make 20,000 a year. I filled out an application at for healthcare.gov because I am not able to afford health insurance. The lowest estimate I got for bare-bones healthcare is a $626.14 monthly premium. That is for Basic: $0 Well Visit, $0 Vision Exam, etc. 

WTF?!  

I assume I can't get health insurance for the rest of my life because I am married.  I only make $20,000 a year because I gave up my career in the move to North Carolina to follow my husband's job that he got fired from after three years. Now we are stuck here in the NC Triad for the rest of our lives. 

scoring points, then sulking

I was nearly late to work this morning after I lost track of time while finishing our holiday cards. I made it on time, but just barely. Because I insisted on showering  - I felt sticky. 

Then MonsterMustDie had to be a hero today, bringing my official Saturday work shirt to me after I had forgotten what day of the week it was. Then he went to a friend's house to bring in packages, water the tree, and feed the fish - but first he had to go BACK to my workplace to get the extra garage key from my car, after he had to put a new battery in my extra car key that was at the house. He's still recovering from today's adventures and still angry at me for making things so complicated this morning. He's sitting in the dark and not talking to me.

he must adjust, whether he likes it or not

Monstermustdie is already on his second beer this morning. He is on a downward spiral today because he realized his online shops are now in the negative balance from site fees. 

He insisted on only selling what he likes, which no one is buying now. 

He doesn't want to find low end work like retail. He's too old for a labor job. 

Thanksgiving 2021

Thanksgiving with my youngest sister and her family was very nice. Somehow, the short time we spent with them yesterday was very comforting and reassuring to me. I slept well last night for the first time in over a week and woke up in a good mood. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping from anxiety over money, loneliness, this deteriorating house I live in and boredom. 

I’m off work today and have no interest in being anywhere near a shopping center but I’d like to get away from the house. 

Tomorrow and Sunday, I’m back to work at the dress shop.  I’m looking forward to next weekend, when I’m off work 2 days in a row - probably the last predictable free time I’ll have before New Years, when we’ll take in holiday festivities in Greensboro on Friday evening and go to the Scandinavian Christmas Market in Raleigh on Saturday. 

anniversary, a birth, another birthday

 Friday was our fifth wedding anniversary and I was off work at the dress shop so we got out of High Point and into Greensboro for most of the day. We had lunch at Sticks and Stones Pizza, where MonsterMustDie had his favorite, the Bar Lights charcuterie plate, for his meal. I had a small Evergreen salad, which is my favorite there. It was actually a very pleasant day. No TV. No High Point. No house. just driving around in my air-conditioned car. 

I found out Monday that my niece gave birth to her second daughter on Saturday. 

Sunday was my birthday. I worked at the dress shop in the afternoon. I had talked to a couple of friends about the four of us getting together for dinner after work but MonsterMustDie did not want to leave High Point. He also said, as he does every time I invite him to go with me, that he didn't want to be away from home for hours because he had things to do. He wanted to order pizza at the closest restaurant to us - which is still packed with college students and Market people all week. I passed on that and went to bed early. I was beat anyway from being on my feet all day. I know he can't change is behavior, which he is increasingly out of control of and is probably early stage Alzheimer's disease, but it still has me being frustrated and angry constantly. He feels like I'm unappreciative of him when I express my unhappiness and that makes him angry. It's the gorilla in the room we can't deal with. 

On Monday, I visited friends in Greensboro and I ended the day having dinner with Karen at a nearby seafood restaurant. It was a late dinner and the restaurant was very empty. We had one side of the dining room to ourselves. I had the grilled salmon and she had a combo platter of shellfish. 

Yesterday was just hanging out at the house, catching up with filing and office work. MonsterMustDie was working his two-day job so I spent a large part of the day watching shows I like on TV and listening to music in the house. I also put what few Halloween/Autumn decor I picked up this year into a bin and stashed it in the attic. 

friends & SOBs

Yesterday, I had a great time having lunch with Karen and hanging with her and Bob for a while afterwards at their house. 

I got home to find the bins already at the curb with the household trash bin full of old merchandise from Monstermustdie. Apparently,  he had a bad day and decided to throw things away rather than sell them cheap. He also criticized my Alexa devices and told me he would never have any use for them.

I don't know what the catalyst for any of this behavior was. He went to Phil's house in the evening to help him restore a chair they have been working on, drank too much,  and stayed up past 12:35 a.m. watching anime.

soon, it will be October

Right on schedule, the nights are cooler and leaves are beginning to fall. I put out the big pumpkin Monstermustdie brought home with a new skeleton I got  to welcome the season. 

Nothing is working

 The weekend visit with Brian and Laura did not happen because our HVAC in the house died the night before we planned to drive down to Atlanta. Instead, we spent 10 days without air conditionining in a hot house while we waited on the local AC company here that MonsterMustDie has a personal connection with to replace everything but the duct work. They were supposed to replace the scrunched soft ductwork under the house as well but they said it was unnecessary. So now we do have a working AC/HVAC system again and I had to pay for all of it out of my savings. 

Future plans for traveling together to Atlanta have been obliterated by the schedule of antique shows he wants to attend. He is very excited about the new booth in the new antique mall here in High Point and is trying to fill it with higher-quality objects. The booth at the other mall was a complete failure. I had hoped it could at least serve as storage for objects that were crowding the den, dining room, basement, and back mud room but a lot of smaller things there just walked out of the booth. He never made a profit on sales there and only a few items sold from it. It was a very dark place were there were limits on the amount of lights people could use on the booth because the landlord wanted to keep utility costs down. The rest of the mall was filled with quaint, country merchandise that attracted a completely different type of consumer than what he wanted and, as far as out-of-the-house storage goes, he refused to put many items in the mall because he didn't want his carefully curated booth to look crowded. Complete fail, IMHO. 

But now, there is a new antique mall opening in High Point, just a block off Main Street, in a building much closer to market activities that is both well-lit and air conditioned. He is extremely excited about it and I hope he is successful there. It certainly looks a lot nicer and the other dealers do seem to be a lot higher-quality. We'll see how it goes. 

He also needs to be here for events like the grand-opening of the mall and pre-market. 

I know I could travel alone and I probably will, eventually. 

Meanwhile, there has been nothing for me to do here with no one to hang out with locally while the only friends I see here (a married couple) travel a lot for family, relaxation and work. I am eating too much and shopping too much out of boredom, with no income coming in. The condo is between tenants at the moment, though that should not last long. I haven't been able to find any freelance or remote work. I have finally given in and applied for retail work this week and it looks like that's the only thing I can find here. Retail work is always on a part-time schedule at near minimum wage so I won't be able to schedule appointments or trips more that a couple of weeks in advance and certainly not on weekends or holidays. That ends any possibility of my traveling again and I hope I can still keep appointments with my hairdresser and dentist. 

This month, nothing seems to be working for me.

weekend visits

I admit that the crab fest at my brother's house was a scary event that I did not know quite what I was walking into. Fortunately, everyone but my nephew and his wife were vaxxed and tested. No illness reported afterwards and there were some truly nice people there. Meeting my brother Jeffrey was great - much better and fun than either of us expected. I already felt like I knew his wife from our previous conversations. 

 A couple of weeks ago, we hosted our friends Brian and Laura at our house. We are on the route between Atlanta and where his family lives in North Carolina. It was a great visit. We introduced them to Karen and Bob. Brian and I went with Bob & Karen to The Forge Greensboro where Bob gave him the penny tour of The Forge, their facilities and what they do there with education in industrial arts while John and Laura went antique treasure-hunting around town. All of us met up later at Crafted The Art Of The Taco where we had one of their giant tables to ourselves near the front of the restaurant. It was also the first time Brian and Laura had seen our house in North Carolina. 

We both got tested again last week. 

Last weekend, we traveled to Black Mountain, near Asheville, NC to visit John and Kathy at their beautiful home in the mountains. It was, like the time with Brian and Laura, a very emotionally restorative visit. We both felt renewed after the visit.  We visited the studios and shops of downtown Asheville and traveled up the highway to visit the Folk Art Museum and the Grove Park Inn. 

While we were stopped at one scenic overlook I overheard one couple talking unmasked and without worry about testing positive for Covid19 two weeks ago while a tween-age boy was spitting on the sidewalk. Once we got back to the house and my sandals, I threw the my shoes in a plastic bag and didn't wear those shoes on the way home. The soles were covered in bad memories of those strangers at the overlook. All of us were masked the entire time we were out of their house. Rather than eat out, we had takeout the first night and the next two were great home-cooked vegetarian meals. 

We feel fine. I'd like to be tested again after we pass the 10-day mark from the trip. 

Speaking of trips, I have decided not to go to my niece's baby shower in Marietta, Georgia. I had one call with my sister-in-law when called to check what the protocol would be for the shower. It's going to be much bigger party than I thought and none of them are masking or are vaccinated. No one, including my pregnant niece, has any intention of ever being vaccinated. She was discouraging my decision to wear a mask. That is too much risk for MonsterMustDie and myself, and I certainly don't risk to bringing an infection of any sort to anyone especially vulnerable. 

I cancelled my RSVP in a phone conversation with my sister-in-law. I tried to phone my niece twice to let her know first but she never returned my calls. Anyway, it is my sister-in-law who is officially organizing the baby shower. 

We are still planning to visit Brian and Laura this weekend and I hope the weather will allow us to get together with some of the Women's Night group of friends on Friday evening and possibly another day while we are in Atlanta. Masked and outdoors and in a small group preferably. 

After this weekend, I believe all of our social activity will be online-only until after the holidays. That includes our local friends, Bob and Karen, because Bob is facing vascular surgery next week to deal with a dire situation that was made worse by a miscommunication with his doctors - they mixed up or lost his tests when he made an emergency visit in April an now he is a ticking time bomb with a 81% blocked inner carotid artery. 

I hope everyone endures and comes out on the other side of these times okay. 

Family Reunion

I took a road trip to Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend with my half-sister Jennifer and most of her children to meet our biological half-brother, Jeffrey, and his family. This was all made possible by his wife. Jennifer picked me up on the way from Charlotte, NC, where she lives on Friday morning and drove all of us to Jeffrey's house where his wife was hosting their annual “Crab Fest” gathering. This was the first and only large social event I've been to in two years. I really didn't know what I was was walking into but I was assured that everyone was vaccinated and Covid-screened before the party. The singular exception to all precautions was Jennifer's oldest son, who refuses to be vaccinated but had been tested recently. He was perfectly willing to take his chances. This was the first time I met Steven and his wife, Guadalupe. 

There were six of us altogether. We were all piled into Jennifer's car with one person always volunteering to curl up in the back. We shared a room at the local Hilton in Charlottesville that was just two miles from thier house. Just like a DragonCon weekend, I thought. 

A crowded gathering seemed like a good idea for a first-meeting with the least amount of stress because, if things felt awkward, we could just fade into the crowd and amuse ourselves on food and mingling. This was a very casual seafood boil party - paper spread on folding tables with piles of boiled crabs, wooden mallets, and pans of corn on the cob and roasted potatoes. I met all of their family and several very lovely friends of theirs. Jeffrey and I got along well and actually had a good conversation on shared interests in music and books. Our first in-person conversation was fun and actually very relaxing. It dispelled a lot of the anxiety, mostly his, about meeting us and we agreed to talk again later. Most of the younger people kept their face on their mobile phones, engrossed in a Pokemon event going on all weekend. 

All of the family members met for breakfast the next morning at Michael's Diner. That gave us some quality time together before we were back on the road to North Carolina. 

breakfast the next day with both families

my siblings and myself

the next generation

Faint

Monstermustdie passed out yesterday and had a laceration above his eye from landing on his wire frame glasses. 

They did the usual tests in the emergency room but found no reason for the blackout,  which scared everyone in the room at Splashworks.  

We have no idea why it happened. One minute, he was standing behind me while everyone was talking at work on Tuesday, where we had an event that lead to a short work-day and a visit from him while I was there. Then he did a face-plant on the floor. The EMS and the emergency room doctors found nothing really wrong with him. His blood pressure was low but not too low. His potassium was low. He was sweating and nauseous. Thankfully, no damage was done by the fall other than the cut on his face made by his glasses.

Easter 2021

 It's been an interesting Easter weekend again. 

I was off work from my temp job for Good Friday. K and I decided to hang out and bake Spring Quiche together. Then MonsterMustDie wanted to go to IKEA in Charlotte and K had plans to look there for things to go in their new house too so, since we're all podmates, we went together. MonsterMustDie was anxious the entire day but stuck it out for us and said he would only go shopping by himself in the future. K and I wanted to look at furniture and necessary objects while he just wanted to grab more solar lights for the backyard and leave. Once we got back from IKEA, MonsterMustDie stayed in High Point while K and I went to Greensboro to do some final grocery shopping and start the cooking at her house. She wanted to get the entire thing cooked that night and I was enjoying the kitchen hangout. Our husbands joined us in the kitchen and we ordered shwarma dinner takeout while the quiche baked. The plan was for me and to join them for lunch the next day to eat quiche and I'd bring a big chunk of it home to MonsterMustDie. He had enough socializing to last the week and wanted to relax at home. 

K texted me on Saturday morning to say she was taking her husband to the emergency room at Duke in Durham, a hospital she trusted. They were at ReStore to buy a beautiful desk they'd been looking at that was marked down when he had a spell of tinging numbness on his left side and felt suddenly off balance. As it turns out, he's been having similar, milder things like that happening for the last 6 months but when he had the worst one yet while they were out shopping, he had to admit it had been happening to her.  Saturday was off. He was kept overnight for multiple tests and observation. I truly believe the rest of the weekend would be spent quietly at home, staying in touch with K on his condition. We offered to check on their house, "fill and empty the dog" as they refer to it, and whatever else she needed. We all worried that Bob was in danger of having a stroke. She decided to come home rather than spend the night in a hospital chair and go back in the morning. 

Sunday morning, the hospital in Durham released Bob. They came home to Greensboro. He claimed to be rested and feeling well and they both wanted to have an Easter dinner with the beautiful untouched quiche in their fridge and roasted lamb and Spring vegetables. They needed that. Both of us came to their house at 5PM and had a celebratory dinner with them and their former next-door neighbors, all of us in various stages of vaccination - ok, I'm the only person with only one shot so far and they're all complete in their vaccinations - and enjoyed our first social gathering in over a year.  

Now, it's Monday morning and I am receiving my second Pfizer vaccine shot today at 10:00 AM. Then I plan to go to work. Hopefully, I will feel well enough to work tomorrow too but I'll just have to wait to see how I feel once the final vaccine shot sets in. 

Well, that was a surprise

We were watching videos of local law enforcement officers in Atlanta being completely unapologetic about racist, anti-Asian remarks they made and I was bemoaning that conservative news programs were referring to the spas where the murders of the 8 women took place as massage parlors. I really expected him to be just as appalled with journalists taking cheap shots at the victims but I got just the opposite reaction from him. 

MonsterMustDie, rather than agreeing with my sentiment, insisted that all spas are brothels and he would not back down on that statement. In his mind, that includes spas that I've been to with friends because he insists all spas have other activities going on in back.  

 I guess this is why men never have any interest in spa days. He says they're all, at the very least, jack-shacks. If that is the majority belief, that all of the women who were killed were prostitutes, no one is going to see much wrong with what happened. 

bad brain

I walked into the den last night and saw Monstermustdie watching a StarWars movie he had just seen last Friday. He had no memory of watching it five days ago. At first,  I didn't think much of it because he has a habit of repeatedly watching the same movies or anime series over and over but I asked him why he wasn't watching the next chapter of the series and he insisted he had not seen it before. 

My health is not great these days

Friday,  February 5th started with a migraine headache that had me in bed for 36 hours. 

Based on the advice of friends, I had my third Covid19 test on February 8th. That test came out negative, just like all the tests prior that we've both had. the healthcare worker who administered the test agreed with my friends that the headache the weekend before could have been Covid... but it wasn't after all, I am happy to know. I think the headache was just caused by a combination of stress, dehydation, and the antibiotics I had just been on for a UTI. Antibiotics do trigger headaches for me some times. I'd still prefer the pain of a paralyzing migraine any time instead of a UTI. 

Friday, February 13 I woke up with UTI symptoms again. Then, the power went out at 7:30 AM. I was saved by friends  - I remembered I still had some extra antibiotics for the UTI, given to me by a fantastic friend who had extra and sent them to me. The power stayed off all day but our pod-mates in Greensboro who still had electricity at their house and invited us - and the cat- to stay there until the power was restored. Fortunately it was back by the end of the day. We went home after dinner to a warm home.  

 Last week, MonsterMustDie got his second Covid19 vaccine shot. At least one of us has health insurance and is now vaccinated.

MonsterMustDie seems to be loosing his mind lately. Last Saturday, he was more inebriated than I've seen him in a long time, nodding off during our saturday Zoom with friends. His speech was slurred. I don't know what motivated him to get so wasted that day but I went to bed that night while he stayed on the couch with the beer he wanted to finish, just staring into space. He was back in his right mind the next day with no hangover, apparently. 

Today, MonsterMustDie is back to having memory problems. He is repeating the same questions over and over and he can't use the TV remote. I don't know if that is early signs of dementia or too much alcohol again. Probably a little of both, unfortunately. I really wish I knew how to take care of him when he fails. I don't know anything about these things and we don't really have a local support network here - we have two very good friends who live in Greensboro and that's it other than some of John's former work friends. He seems to be fading but he can't see it in himself. 

There are good days and bad days. There are some very strange behaviors that he's into now. I found out recently that he still has a bunch of old electronics in his car that he told me he took to recycling months ago. He lied. He's just taken all the trash out of the house and is keeping it in his car now. He's drinking a lot more now. He is impossible to talk to about any of this. He just gets angry and shuts me down and I am not able to argue. 

I think I need a vacation.

post-holidays

I went back to work at my temp job this morning. Most of the day so far for me has been searching for lost or missing files to update and refine under proper titles. It's an extremely slow process across the network. 

Yesterday was spent pacing around the house and snacking. I couldn't make myself go out into the cold, dreich weather outside to escape the house for a while. There was nothing I really needed and nowhere to go so I couldn't find enough motivation to step out. The weather is 10-day forecast is mostly the same. 

One thing I hope accomplish soon,  now that holidays are past,  is to get a plumber to fix whatever is dysfunctional in the kitchen at Casa WereMonster. The new sink drains at a snail's pace. We still can't use the new disposal unit and the new dishwasher has to be closely monitored because water backs up into the sink. Monstermustdie is useless for overseeing work on the house other than being there to let people in and calling me when it's time to pay for it. Thankfully,  things are very casual and close by where I'm working at the moment. 

New Year 2021

We spent New Years eve with Bob & Karen here at Casa WereMonater. I started cooking mince pies that I finished today.  I also made onion dip from scratch that was quite good. Looks like I might stick with that method next time. 

Monstermustdie made Hopping John and greens for dinner today. 

My first try at baking mince pies

dinner with pomegranate juice & Hopping John