Friday Morning Beach Report

Looking to the right

Looking to the left

Looking straight out to the islands

Where have all the birds gone?

Do you see the sailboat?

I'm just now coming out of today's fog. I spent the day preparing for next week's estate planning session and reviewing my file on tomorrow's alimony mediation.

Yesterday I contemplated whether or not there was some way to reduce my property taxes or pay off my special taxes (a California phenomenon known as Mello-Roos) early and save billions. Hahahaha.

The day before that I looked into a re-fi for my mortgage. Nope.

I haven't hit the jackpot yet. Well. In many ways, I have. I'm not so lost in the fog that I can't see that.

Wednesday Beach Report

I can't tell the difference sometimes between procrastination and dread. Is one the other's shadow? Are they conjoined twins?

It might just be the dullness of the  house after the departure of friends. The Santa Ana winds that blew in and then shifted. What is this sense that I'm forgetting something when I did finally manage to put my tax payments in the mail this morning? What is this dread?  I find myself in a procession of days when I cannot open my mailbox. Then when I do, I cannot deal with the mail. It sits unopened, scaring me, a troupe of ghouls behind the curtains.

I walked miles on the beach this morning. No dead sea lions, but I found these:

These creatures are by-the-wind sailors or Velella Velella--except they're not blue. I saw about a dozen of the clear ones like the photo above, and maybe a half dozen of the iridescent greenish black one as in the photo below. Wikipedia says they're usually blue. Remember THIS from last summer?

Now more dead ones. Just a few. But why aren't they blue? Why am I blue?

And I keep thinking of the ring-necked dove that I saw outside the window the night of the miraculous dinner. They are not native to California. I've never seen one here. I keep thinking I should have welcomed it. Put food out for it on the ground so it wouldn't have to battle the hoard of finches at the bird feeder. I haven't seen it again.

Maybe they're greenish black because of beach tar---but I don't think so.

Hospital Beds and Other Furniture

Let's begin with my desk:

Which is kind of amazing, considering it was barely visible and could not be approached without fear of bodily harm a week ago. My tax prep stuff is not quite yet off to the accountant, but I'm close. Very close. I predict that the file for a certain story I'm revising will be opened this evening.

Things are not going so well with the hospital bed for my mom. Every week for the last month, I've called the company that will be providing the bed after Medicare approves it. Every week, I've also called the doctor's office. The Company assures me that they are trying assiduously to get the paperwork that Medicare requires of the Doctor. The Doctor assures me that they've sent it to the Company. I call the Company back; they say yes, the Doctor has sent This but not That. I call the Doctor; they say, oh, we will send That. I call the Company who says, well, yes, they sent That, but they did it wrong. Repeat. Repeat. And on and on.

On Friday, while the blessed Rosa was with my mom, I drove to the Company. Hi, I said, just thought I'd stop by and see if we could phone the Doctor together, so that I'm not in the middle of this weird ping-pong game, blindfolded. Well, I didn't say that exactly, but something much more prosaic. Sure, the guy said. For fifteen minutes, the Doctor's line was busy. Okay, I said, how about you show me exactly what you need. I will go get it and bring it back to you today.

They actually have a hand-out that explains what Medicare needs. The piece the Doctor failed to provide is explained in the photo above, annotated and highlighted, propped up against my dashboard. I took it to the Doctor. Explained. Wrote my mother's name and birthdate on it. I'll wait for it, I said. Oh dear, that's not how it works, the woman behind the desk said. Oh yes it is, I almost said, mentally unfurling a sleeping bag and pillow while I yawned and stretched and said, I'm waiting for that fucking piece of paper, and I plan on sleeping here. Instead, I said okay. She said, I'm sorry. The doctor will get to it soon. I said, Thank you.

That was Friday. At approximately 11:30. The Woman said they would fax it to the Company. Uh-huh.

And you know what, I don't really blame the Doctor or the Woman at the front desk. Or the Company. I blame Medicare. The pile of paper the Doctor has already sent the Company is enough to paper the wall of a large room. The doctor wrote out a prescription for a hospital bed, just like he writes out a prescription for my mother's 10mg opiate pain killers. I could sell those. I could take those little pills myself and get doped up enough to never give a damn about her hospital bed. No big deal. Here's one little piece of paper. Now sign here. Take it to the pharmacy. Bingo. Opiates. A hospital bed? Nope. Let's not give an old woman who's almost 90 and in constant pain a hospital bed. God knows what might happen.

Monday I will call the Company. Visit the Doctor again, if necessary. When I get that bed, I'm going to work on changing the regulations. Any tips, readers?

Oh, and of course, when we get the bed, I'm gonna have a crazy party. We'll raise our heads, and then our feet, oh my god, we'll put up the sides so we don't fall out and then we'll put the sides back down and take pain pills until we fall on the floor.

This is a Cautionary Tale

No, this picture was not taken in jail, but if there were a jail for clowns masquerading as grown-ups, I would probably be doing some serious time.

Tax day was nigh, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the email from my tax guy landed in my inbox. I read the cover letter, checked the adjusted gross income, verified my name and social security number. The attachment was over 100 pages. I had house guests. I did not, I confess, comb through the hundred and some pages. There was a tidy little box in the cover letter that showed my refunds for state and federal and the amount owed for capitol gains for the sale of my farmland in the state of Nebraska. The net result was a negative number, (alas) but the letter advised me that all of this giving and taking would occur electronically. Ah, I thought, I don't have to do anything. How nice.

I awoke on April 16th with a jolt. Wait....wasn't I supposed to pay my quarterly estimated taxes for 2013? On the 15th?! I spent part of the day in denial, part in a panic. There would be thousands in penalties, I thought. I was too embarrassed to call my tax guy or the ever-so-patient financial advisor. What now? How could I be so careful, so meticulous all year long, and then screw things up?

At the end of the day, sick with dread, I called the financial guy, figuring that if I were a tax preparer, I would be in Maui at the bottom of an umbrella drink on April 16th, and I would most certainly not answer a phone call from me. "D" I said, "I did something really bad." There was a long pause while he contemplated what the crazy woman might have done. Vegas? A couple thousand Power Ball tickets? I explained. Then he explained. Turns out it's not a big deal. Yes, there may be a couple of days of interest... but it might be more cost effective for them just to forget it. Oh--and the quarterly payment for the state taxes had a one-day grace period for online payments. So I wasn't late there at all.

I was a wife for 30 years. I let my husband take care of all things financial. Bah!--why worry my pretty head? That philosophy has resulted in several financial migraines these last few years.

Oh pretty young wife married to the man of your dreams, I wish you a wiser road.

The 47%-ers in My House

My mother is one of the 47%. She began her working life at the age of 14 after she graduated from 8th grade. That's how life was in the 1930s when you grew up one of the rural poor. Her first job was as a mother's helper for a rich woman who had postpartum depression--though they didn't call it that then. "Never leave the mother alone with the baby," she was told. But one night when my mother was off duty the woman tried to kill the baby even though the woman's husband was right there. Both the baby and my mother were packed up and sent off to the grandparents' house. The mother went to an asylum. There might have been another child-care job after that, and at some point she ran the roulette wheel at a casino across the river in East Dubuque, Illinois. Her parents were quite taken aback the night they stopped in for a bit of entertainment. There was a food-service job for a Catholic men's college. She remembers putting the cherry just-so in the center of the grapefruit halves for the priests' breakfasts. There was waitress work, too, her feet screaming for relief by the end of a busy night. During the war she worked as a file clerk for a big aircraft manufacturer. After that came the night club jobs. Fancy places in Baltimore with names like the Chanticleer and the Band Box where she worked as a hat check girl or taking souvenir Polaroid pictures. "You always had to ask first," she said. "In case the guy was out with another woman." She was the hostess in a restaurant after she returned to the midwest and met my dad there. She raised four kids on a budget that never had any wiggle room. She canned vegetables from the garden, made jams and pies from the fruit trees, sewed our clothes, and stretched every dollar to the breaking point. After my dad died she began a string of factory jobs and finally landed a union job that paid a decent wage. Her final job was as a custodian for the city of Baltimore where she was horrified at how much useable stuff got tossed in the trash. I've never thought of her as a victim--or as someone looking for a handout. Although she'll tell you it was a damn good thing there were food stamps after General Motors told her my dad's life insurance policy "wasn't any good." We fell into the safety net, but it wasn't long before she hoisted us back out.

This year my daughter will be a 47%-er, too, I suppose, since she quit her three jobs to start grad school.

As for me, I'm a taxpayer. I'll bet you my tax rate is twice as high as Mitt Romney's. But I guess we'll never know for sure.

photo credit: Carol Sigurdson Klein

I didn't die, but maybe I'm delusional (see previous post)

I didn't die from eating the inedible gill of a rock crab (see previous post,) and while I am completely annoyed with the pending real estate transaction in which I may or may not sell my house, I did find a trillion dollars lying on the grass outside my condo complex today. HOORAY!

And while the IRS still hasn't let me off the hook for a teeny weeny misunderstanding, which I was sorely reminded of this afternoon when I paid my quarterly taxes, I was not carried off by pelicans during my five-mile walk on the beach the evening before last.

And while I may soon begin to introduce myself at parties as a failed writer, I have for some inexplicable reason been invited with a nice personal note to resubmit to the literary journal that I regarded as the creme de la creme on the list of journals that comprised my last batch of multiple submissions (all but two of a dozen have sent rejections, and one journal actually rejected the same piece twice.)

And while I am currently shuttling between  two half-furnished houses where I never seem to have what I want or need, I am fully aware that this is a problem of the 1%.

And while manufactures of nice lingerie, do not seem to understand that a woman my age might actually want to buy and wear such undergarments, I have succeeded in finding a couple of matching ensembles which have underwear that conceal about 80% of my stretch marks, though the enthusiasm regarding that success was mitigated by reading recently in a New Yorker short story a description of an unattractive older woman who wore "lurid lingerie."

And while I am tired and unusually cranky this evening, I am counting my blessings.
Margaritaville is a much better locale than Divorceville.

It's Turdsday. Shit I've Learned about Divorce #4: Money, Taxes, Joint Accounts, Credit Cards and Other Horrors

Taxes:
When my marriage broke up, I had all the financial trappings of a big fat life: a CPA who prepared my taxes,a financial advisor, a team of divorce lawyers. Imagine my surprise when the end of 2008 rolled around and I filed my first individual tax return in thirty years. Not one of those professionals had any inkling of how naive I was. I had no idea of how naive I was--cuz that's what naive is. You don't know what you don't know.


You were supposed to being paying quarterly taxes all year, the CPA said.
Yes, alimony is taxable at the full rate, the divorce attorneys said.
You need to come up with how much money?!?! the financial planner said.
I don't have any control over the tax code, someone else said.
Holy shit, I said.


Paying my income tax and the penalties I accrued from failing to pay estimated quarterly tax wiped out every cent I had saved from my rather fat alimony that first year on my own.


I've recovered from the tax debacle of 2008. But I managed to get myself into the penalty box again in 2009 when I goofed up my quarterly payments to the State of California. Here on the left coast of the country, a quarterly payment is not really a quarter. You pay nothing in the third quarter. That's because you were supposed to pay 40% in the second quarter. And, just by the way, the first and fourth quarter, you pay 30%. Um. For all I know it's that way in every state in the union. But I didn't know what I needed to know when I should have known it.


Joint Accounts:
I didn't know what to do with the joint checking accounts. After my alimony began, I quit using them. But it seemed weird to take my name off them. Someone else's name was still on them, and the accounts were being used by him. Maybe there was some strategic smart attorney something I didn't know, and I should leave things alone.Hmmm, the banker said. He could overdraw this account and you could be liable. That didn't happen. Thank god. But it could have.


Credit Cards:
When you get a credit card with someone, you might be just a simple little authorized user. It's a pain, because if you call the credit card company for any reason, you're just a big fat nothing. I'm sorry, they'll tell you. We have to speak to the owner of the account. But I'm his wife, you'll say. Who? Oh, that doesn't matter, they'll say. But if you get divorced, there's still a lot of fancy dancing to get yourself off the account. And what goes on with that account can affect your credit rating.


If you're not just an authorized user,you're probably a co-owner of the account. You can't get your name taken off. Period. We don't recognize divorce, the credit card company will say. They'll go on to say that the agreement you entered into with the credit card company supersedes divorce. You are liable even if you shredded the card long ago. Now you have to pay your divorce lawyers to help you settle this one.


Other Horrors:
Health insurance is at the top of my list of "other horrors." I won't even go into it. But think about your situation. Your health and how you insure it, and how all of that will change when you are divorced.


I wish you the best of luck.
Just telling you some shit you might want to know.




My divorce advice disclaimer: I am not an attorney, a paralegal, or a legal secretary. Nor do I possess any legal education or credentials of any kind other than having been married to an attorney for three decades and immediately thereafter involved in divorcing him for the next four years. My advice is based solely on my own experience and falls under the broader life heading of Damn It,  If Only I'd Known Then What I Know Now.

Thinking

I've done a lot of thinking the last few days. Some of it angst-y. Some of it more serene.

I've followed a couple of weird impulses. Like going to an open house for an old craftsman not too far from where I live now. The house is on the Register of Historic Places which would mean no property taxes, and in my head, I've already spent the money I would save....which is not saving it at all, is it?



Then I researched where I could live without paying state taxes. Hmmm. I imagined myself in various places all over the map.  But the states where I could stretch my dollar like a piece of soft sweet taffy aren't exactly whetting my appetite.


My divorce is pretty much behind me. It will be several weeks before the agreement to divide our joint assets is formally recorded or entered or whatever by the courts, but I'm done. There's nothing left to read or fight over, or think about, or be hurt by. I'm looking at the last four years in my rearview mirror.

Vroom. And eating my own dust. It's just now, I think, that I really feel the empty nest.

and the absence of the dogs.

If someone asked me out of the blue if I wanted to sell my house, would I do it?

In less than two weeks, I go back to the east coast for the Big Radiation Vacation. Maybe I'll fall in love with the city of Baltimore, or decide to buy a tiny old house trailer and live near my brother for a while and see how this whole radiation business for  my mom works out.

I could take her to see her sister every week. Because who knows when that last grain of sand in the hourglass will sift to the bottom.

"If you drive too sexy, I'll tax your seat.."

There's an unfortunate fact about alimony and income tax that I didn't know...until recently. Alimony is taxable income. That's bad enough, but I find it particularly irritating that Mr. Ex gets to count the alimony he pays me as a tax deduction. So here's how our little math problem shakes out. California (a community property state) + 30 years of marriage = half of Mr. Ex's income for me - 50% of what I get for the taxman + a tax credit for the dastardly Mr. Ex.
Sigh.
Update on the division of joint assets: Still undivided.

Taxman

I'm trying to get that stupid quote about death and taxes out of my mind because I really don't want to go there.

While most reasonable people had their tax angst back in April, I had mine yesterday because Mr. Ex a.k.a. The Procrastinator always files for an extension and October 15th was the deadline. Which we missed. WE, because he also procrastinated for months (and probably years) about dumping me. If he'd walked out 6 weeks earlier, I wouldn't have had to file jointly with him for '07. Ah well, as Lucinda Williams sings, If wishes were horses, I'd have a ranch. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, this is a dust mote, but still I couldn't sleep last night. Every time I put my head on my pillow, I heard the lyrics to that Beatles song (no, I wasn't wearing my IPod.) All I could think was, yeah I'd like to tax your seat. I'm just looking forward to the day when the only communication I have to have with Mr. Ex goes something like this: Wasn't that a lovely graduation? Wasn't that a lovely wedding? Wasn't that a lovely christening? (That would be for one of our not-yet-conceived grandchildren, NOT one of his conceived-any-day-now new kids.) I listened to Lucinda's new album a half-dozen times last night and now today I can't get those lyrics out of my head.

Don't know why I said those things

I didn't mean 'em

Wish you were bringin' your love back to me

instead of leavin'

But if wishes were horses, I'd have a ranch

Come on and give me one more chance

SWEET JESUS.