April | 2019 | You Just have to Laugh….

My conscience is my baby brother. He lives in California, land of the conscience shamers. He has embraced this mission. So much so that he lives in a place called The Mission. Subtle but effective, which he always is. He never says to you, “you’re doing it wrong.” If he did you’d say, “what am I doing wrong?” and then he would have to sigh and just say, “everything.”

He wouldn’t be my conscience if I didn’t believe him. There in lies the problem. When you do have a conscience, it’s those things that challenge it that make you know it’s real.

Yes, Earth Day made me do this. All the posts on social media about what a terrible person I am for plastic bottles, toothbrushes, cups. I agree. This is terrible. We all have to work harder to be better. Not for us for our grandchildren. Now that I have one, I have two consciences. Ugh.

Why do I hate all my consciences? Because they make me try to be better. And that’s a bad thing? Because better always means harder. But is that really true? Is better harder?

Is it harder to say ‘no thank you,’ to a straw? Is it harder to drink from your own water bottle? Is it harder to use cloth napkins? Is it really, really harder to recycle when they come to your actual house to pick up the stuff in three different bins? All those conscience people are making it easier and easier every day for us to be better.

I promised you a bit of learning every blog. So here we go a few tips from this great article by Lani Seelinger:

Wash your clothes in cold water. Lani recommends this but so does my friend, Terri who turned me on to this just a year ago. It’s fine. Your clothes are clean.
Use those water bottles and hot travel mugs you have cluttering your house. I know you have 32 of them from every conference, 5K walk, and charity event you ever went to. They fall out of my cabinet and on to my head all the time. And as an added bonus here, recycle the ones with no lids!
Buy LOCAL produce, and anything else. But as spring turns to summer get to those farmer’s markets. Or, and this is why it isn’t hard, my big chain grocery store has a ‘local produce’ aisle. But that stuff.
Use your reusable bags. The magic is putting them in the car, isn’t it? Heres’an idea: Put a dozen in the car. Take six into the store. When you take those six full bags into your house and forget to take them back out to the car, you still have six bags in there. Then when you get home the next time, twelve bags in your house are really gonna’ piss you off, so you’ll probably put them back in the car.
Use that revolving door! Isn’t this nuts? But if you do, it keeps cold air in or out depending on the season and actually makes a difference. Now you know why they want you to have fun twirling around and around. Tell the truth, you’re a twirler, and you miss it.

Here’s the full article:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/196245-21-little-things-you-can-do-to-help-the-environment-that-are-super-easy-will

Let your conscience be your guide. Or I can give you my brother’s phone number so he can sigh at you, too.

I know it’s been a long time in coming. Most of you follow me on Facebook, so we haven’t truly been out of touch. But, wow! My life has been an amazing roller coaster of wonderfulness since Christmas. Yes, my last blog was about re-entering the Caregiving world. Truth be told, I was not happy about that. And it wasn’t even that dramatic. Well, it was for my husband, who had a serious leg injury, but for me it was “vanilla-caregiving-101.”

Since then, I’ve spent almost two months with my daughter welcoming our new grandchild and then a hasty return to presentations, TV appearances, having a caregiving script-in-hand read by professional actors, and working on getting more gigs to tell the world to get #prepared for the tsunami of caregiving!

I have neglected this blogosphere and I return renewed. I was truly thinking about what best serves my readers. And to look at my most well-received posts, I would say you guys love to laugh……….but even more, you love to be informed. So, like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, our journey is going to be those “Road to…………” movies where we can have a laugh or two, but I’m going to teach you what I learn about all this aging, caregiving. long-term health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, nursing home, Elder law, estate issues blather as best I can.

Today…….the “Road to Medicare!” This could be 327 posts or more. In fact, it’s so chock-full of road blocks, potholes, orange cones, warning lights and yes, even smooth paving that we could have a blog about only this.

Lo and behold, I know someone who does that! And in my inbox this morning, she sent me three myths of Medicare. I had already decided to talk to you about our Medicare experience after dinner with friends last night when everyone was chiming in about signing up…and there in my inbox was Universe confirmation that yup, we need to talk about this.

My husband will turn 65 soon, and since I try to take my own advice, we called the Medicare Guru and asked her to guide us a bit. We are fortunate to have retirees’ insurance, and since I won’t turn age 65 for AGES (um hmmmm, had to say that), we knew this could be shark-infested waters. If we made a mistake in the sign-up process we could suffer some real financial consequences. The Guru gave us sage advice and the following week my hubby went online to sign up for Medicare.

Five minutes into a seven-minute process I hear, “Cathy!” Uh-oh. I run to the office to see consternation all over my husband’s face. There’s a trick question. Are you covered by your employers’ health care plan? Yes, we are, sort of. No box for that answer. I know it means, are you currently employed with health insurance? I know that because, well, because I know that. But lots of people don’t know that. Right next to the trick question on the computer screen is a teeny, tiny button with a question mark in a circle above it that says, “help.”

“Push that button,” I say to my husband. He looks at me like I told him to engage the nuclear codes. But he does it with a rivulet of sweat poring down his forhead. Right there in black and white it says, “this does not mean retiree insurance.” Hmm! Okay then. Up until that moment, my husband would have answered that one question, the only trick question for him, incorrectly. And that could’ve caused some real problems for us in the immediate future. And that is one teeny, tiny problem with signing up for Medicare.

Below are the three myths that the Medicare Guru, Joanne Giardini Russell at Boomer Health Group shared in my email today. You can reach Joanne or her associate Gwynn Sharick-Elberson at 248-871-7756. It’s free to talk to them. They are super nice! Tell them Cathy sent you! You will love them.

Joanne Giardini-Russell

810-599-7116 – mobile

248-871-7756, ext 101 – office