Upside-down bucket list

Somewhere, possibly, there's an administration officer of a retirement village making use of a senior housing software program which will enable him or her to decide how much it will cost to house me in the year 2000 and whatever, and whether I'm going to be worth it to them to take in and care for.

There have been a few things in my life that I've said I really don't want to do, an kind of upside-down bucket list. One of them I talk about in my prostate book, which hopefully will be appearing by May/June this year; you'll have to wait and buy the book to find out what that was, because somehow it managed to take itself off my upside-down bucket list and put itself on my bucket list, where it didn't belong.

One of the other things is I don't want to do is go into a retirement home. I've had some experience of these: my wife worked in one for a number of years, and I've seen people who seemed lively and full of beans go into them and wind up sitting in a chair ground down by the general depression of the place.

Yes, I know that's not how they're advertised. But like it or not, retirement homes are the one of the last stages before departing the earth entirely, and if none of get out of this life alive, then a retirement home is where that not-getting-out starts for many.

Yes, they advertise swimming pools, with jaunty silver-haired people diving and rollicking about; they show the same silver-haired people enjoying the privacy of their own home or the social club atmosphere of the communal area. They show the extensive library, the gym, the whatever else is fashionable.

They don't show the hospital area, or the constant roll call of missing faces - turnover is high in retirement homes.

I realise I may not have a choice about going into one of these places - or worse, into a rest home. Circumstances may decide things for me. Perhaps if I take it off my upside-down bucket list and put it on my bucket list, fate will get fooled and let me depart in my own bed in my own home.

Time will tell.

Dog City

The little block of houses we live in has become Dog City.

There are only three houses in our block - until a couple of weeks ago, the only dogs were our Pomeranian cross and the old poodle in the house behind us, a dog that's not in the best of health and has problems with her eyesight as well.   Occasionally she'll have a bark at us through the fence, but it's mostly because she's not quite sure who's there, I think.  (Her only other quirk is to come out late at night, usually after we're in bed, and snort her way back and forth along the fence line, hunting for burglars, no doubt, or any other beings who have decided to encroach on her territory.)

Our dog, at a year old, doing
his somewhat bewildered look. 

The people on our right side used to have an elderly dog that never made a sound and wouldn't have said boo to a goose - if any such ever appeared around here.  It had to be put down quite some time ago.  This last week, the people there have got themselves two puppies, gorgeous ones (whose model I'm not sure of). One of them is pretty quiet, but the other feller likes to maintain that it's his territory and woe betide any dog who comes near - or even any neighbour who does.

Which will sometimes set our dog off.

On the other side of us we had had a woman living on her own for at least a decade.  She was dogless.  Recently, having retired, she sold the house and is currently spending some of her children's inheritance by going to exotic places like Russia.   The people who moved in, a lovely, friendly couple, have a dog.  A little dog, like ours, one, that like ours, thinks the entire block belongs to him, and no other dog should dare to sniff the wind (or do any other sort of sniffing) within cooee of him.  (It may be a her, I'm not sure.)

Suddenly it's:
dogs to the right of me,
a dog to the left of me,
one dog behind me,
volleying and thundering,
metaphorically....

$6 a day

Gated communities and retirement home complexes (like Table Rock Lake homes) sound like a mixed blessing to me. I visit one of them fairly regularly when I play for some singers who present short concerts there. The idea of living in one doesn't appeal much to me, but then perhaps I'm not at the stage of life yet where it would...if there is such a stage. Equally, perhaps I'm not the sort of person for whom the idea of a close-knit (but elderly) community appeals. I like people of all ages. As no doubt many of the residents of these communities do.

You may have read in the news recently about Richard Giese, the retired flautist who had worked for many years with the NZ Symphony Orchestra. He hadn't paid the extra $6 a day ($42 a week; $180 a month) that it cost to have someone checking on him daily in his retirement village home. He lived a reasonably active life for an 85-year-old - walking to the shops, playing his flute every day, going to the doctor on his own and so on - so I guess he thought he didn't need to pay any money for something that he wasn't concerned about.

Some time between February the 18th and March the 8th, he died of a heart attack. His lights remained on for a week, his mailbox wasn't cleared, and a neighbour realised she hadn't heard his flute for some days. And finally notified the retirement village staff.

His former wife was apparently the last person who spoke to him, and she said she was amazed that no one had checked on him, thinking that would be par for the course for a retirement village. In fact she rang the coroner when she heard that the date of death was undetermined.

The Dominion Post reported that Susan Bowness, North Island regional manager for Ryman Healthcare, which runs Rita Angus and 22 other villages, said residents were able to request daily checks, for a fee of $6 a day. Mr Giese had never asked for such checks, and it appeared his death was sudden.

Ms Bowness said the company was not required to check on its independent residents. "It needs to be understood that they are truly independent – they only get the services they request."

They only get the services they request. When asked by the coroner what could be done to ensure residents' safety, Ms Bowness said, management needed to make sure residents understood that the service was available if they needed it. Um, is that ensuring the residents are safe?

Also available - for an additional fee in each case - are the following:

Residents can ask for meals to be delivered.

Can eat at the dining room.

Can have medication to be brought to them.

Can have someone check on them.

Can have an evening telephone check.

Can have healthcare services provided by the village rather than by their own doctors.

It seems as though being old in some retirement villages can be quite an expensive business, if each of these items cost an additional $6 or more a day.

Study in retirement?

I had thought retirement might have a few more moments when I could sit and relax. Just a few.

So far that's not really been the case. Twice this week we've climbed up and down stairs carrying boxes of books from a church storeroom to the car and then, at home, piling them up around the place as we sort them out for sale. The books (and sundry other items) are leftovers from the OC Books, which closed three years ago. It's one of my retirement 'hobbies/jobs' to sort through them and try and find homes for as many of them as possible. My wife is working like a Trojan at putting them on zotero, so that we have a database of the titles.

So if I had a mind, say, to do some Online University work, it's not going to be happening in the meantime. Both the papers I've done so far through Otago were primarily online, and were paid for by my former work. That's another aspect: I'll have to actually save up to do any more study, to complete my online degree programs in crime scene investigation for instance. (Doesn't that sound more interesting than a vague degree in Humanities?)

New Zealand has a wide range of online courses available, but if I wanted to go further afield, I could investigate the huge range in the States, for instance via the college navigator at this address: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/. Having worked with stats for the last three years (and having always had an interest in them) the title of this Stats Centre appeals: I can look up crime and safety surveys, for example, which would help me with my course in crime scene investigation, n'est pas? (Did you know there was a blog called, Ceci n'est pas une endive?)

They also assist in finding the right college for a person to learn through, and when I put in my zip code (adding a nought onto it so that it falls in line with the US system) and ask for non-profits that will teach me a bachelor's course in two years, I find there are all sorts of places handy to where I live (in Los Angeles, as it happens, since that's what the 90010 zip code applies to). I could study through the World Mission University, the Cleveland Chiropratic College, the Yeshiva Ohr Elchonon Chabad West Coast Talmudical Seminary, the Loyola Marymount University (just in case I preferred a Catholic focus instead of a Jewish one) and the Otis College of Art and Design. To name only a few.

I'm not sure that any of them would focus well on crime scene investigation, but I'd have to get more information before dismissing them out of hand.

It could give me a third/fourth/fifth hobby to add to my retirement....

Photo of someone studying, by Aaron Concannon

Busy fortnight

What you might call a loaded couple of weeks.

Not only do I retire on Thursday - finishing 50 years of full-time employment (apart from a couple of patches when I was out of work) - but I've got

• two concerts at one of the Mosgiel retirement villages, on two successive Fridays, with two different groups of singers;
• practices for a bunch of brass band soloists for the Provincial contest in Roxburgh on Saturday week;
  
• rehearsals for the play, Shadowlands, twice a week - if I can make both rehearsals;
• continuing work on the musical that I've been writing music for over the last few months;
• some transcription work for a couple of singing teachers (shifting a piece of music up or down a key)
• and probably several other things like eating and sleeping and spending some time with my wife....

At least with being retired from Friday inclusively, I'll actually have day time spare as well as a few evenings. Which will be a major plus. I actually need to retire: I'm too busy to work! At least at this rate I won't need to take a diet supplement like Oxyelite to lose some weight (gained in part from too many morning teas at our office); I'll be rushing from A to B to C so fast the calories will simply fly off.

One of my current colleagues at work keeps suggesting all sorts of (mostly ridiculous) jobs I could take up in my retirement. I keep asking myself, what's retirement for, if it's not to stop working full-time....

So hopefully the dog will get some extra walks, my wife and I will have time to spend together doing some of the things we enjoy doing in tandem, I'll read some of the pile of books that have accumulated, watch the odd DVD, maybe volunteer myself for odd jobs for other people and...who knows. The nice thing is there's no need to get up in the morning by a certain time in order to arrive and start working. I can do it all from home!

Gold and the IRA

At the end of February this year, my job comes to an end. I'd known about the possibility for a while, but my initial reaction was that I'd really like to carry on working, because I enjoy working.

I became eligible for the pension/superannuation in May last year, so I've been getting that as well as my wages (well, I've been getting the bit that the Inland Revenue will allow me to have once they've taxed it quite heavily as secondary income).

I've been on holiday since the day before Christmas Eve, 2010. And something dreadful has happened: I've begun to consider that maybe retirement isn't such a bad thing after all. Freed from that constant stricture of having to go to work and stay there until the hours are done, I'm feeling quite good about the possibility of not working at all. However the income aspect is a bit of a problem, and maybe part time work somewhere (without stress or responsibility!) would be useful, just to pay those nasty bills that turn up occasionally.

I came across the acronym, IRA, recently. It isn't related to that Irish group who went round shooting innocent people (and some not so innocent ones) but stands for Individual Retirement Account - or Arrangement, depending on who's telling you what it means.

Regrettably I don't have much of an IR Arrangement...seldom having worked in a job where there was a pension attached, I'm having to rely on the Government to see me through (and they, money-grubbing people that they are, are even taking the tiddly bit of English pension I earned thirty plus years ago and using it to pay my pension here!) So I won't be taking up a gold IRA even though it sounds like a great idea...because the amount of gold I've got is pretty much limited to my own wedding ring and my English grandmother's one - and that looks like a very skinny curtain ring, anyway. Talking of rings, the phrase IRA gold has a nice ring of its own, but unless some currently unknown relative dies and leaves me some gold in their will, it's going to have to continue to ring without my appreciating the sound.

I don't know much about investing in gold (for the reasons stated above) but seemingly: Gold IRA accounts benefit from negative economic, political, environmental, or monetary conditions [that] contribute to a rising gold price. This is the reason gold has always been referred to as the “crisis commodity” and why investors are rolling their 401k and 401b's into Traditional gold IRA and Roth IRA gold accounts.

Does this mean anything to you? Plainly it means something to people who have gold to invest, so I checked out the Web and found out this: In the United States of America, a 401(k) retirement savings plan allows a worker to save for retirement and have the savings invested while deferring current income taxes on the saved money and earnings until withdrawal.

Sounds like a nifty plan, and I'd really like to be involved in a 401k gold plan in my imminent old age. Certainly appeals more than storing the gold I don't have under the bed. All I have to do (if I'm a gold holder, instead of a Gold Card holder - which I actually am) is do a gold IRA transfer.

Actually it's possible that the Irish IRA might well be interested in a gold IRA transfer....certainly more than a Gold Card transfer. Still, Gold Cards are not to be sneezed at. I travelled from Wellington to Paraparaumu on the train the other day - and back - for free because I'm a Gold Card holder. That was a Wow moment for me, really. So far my Gold Card has done nothing more than get me to and fro on the buses either at a discount (in peak hours) or free (in off peak). I'm not complaining, it's just that the train trip was the best bonus I've had in a while. Even getting into the movies with a Gold Card isn't much cop - you save all of six dollars....that's also pretty much Wow, but in a rather different mode.

Photo courtesy of IzaD KasmijaN

Retirement?

Blogging has taken a bit of a back seat over the last couple of weeks or so since I started doing a paper through Otago University. It's an online paper, which suits me fine, but it's a bit like there's no let up...once you start you have to keep going, though not entirely at full bore.
I'm enjoying it, though. It's called Research Methods, and it focuses on the way to do a research project, whether large or small. While I'm not actually planning on doing anything major in this line, it does relate to my work a good deal, and I'm learning some stuff that will be useful as I carry on working over the next couple of years.
When I could then retire - and may have to from this particular job. Time will tell. With the amount of money the superannuation brings in I'm not likely to be living it up too much. So I may have to do at least some small or short term jobs just to boost the income. My wife doesn't retire another five years, so unless she decides she can't stand to work anymore, we'll have a reasonable amount coming in - and the mortgage is finally paid off about the time I would officially retire. Which will be a relief after all these years.
Of course, if I can't get work, then I'll have to potter around in the garden dead-heading the perennials, or mowing the lawn more frequently, or tending the vegetables, or coming inside and...blogging (I mean: finishing my degree!)