Monday Maids Day @ Condo

I woke with plenty of time to do the Monday morning chores, and I'd done some of them ahead of time Sunday night.  Cats were rounded up without incident, I was out of the house at 7:55am.  T was in a good mood throughout.  It is regularly the most stressful period of my life, whether that sounds silly to the rest of you or not.  These biweekly Monday mornings.

Traffic to the condo was pretty darn busy, didn't feel like a city under Quarantine at all.

Upon arrival I did a 43-minute dance video, since then I've mostly been attending work meetings via Skype or Zoom, and I've got another work meeting in 15 minutes.  Then I'll head back to the house to cook dinner.

I've had some time to get used to my amateur hair self-cut, and my OCD fingers have found a few irregularities that I've corrected with scissors.  I think I'll do a better job next time, will probably be a bit more brave and take the top down to #7 and the sides down to #4, with some sort of attempt at tapering in between.

As I drove here this morning I was wondering -- if I were to move out of the house for whatever reason, say next summer, would I want to live at this condo?  Probably the main issue would be whether I could downsize my personal property to fit -- abandoning the greater share of my board games and remaining books.  There are no toys I have at the house that I don't also have at the condo.  I'm not big on having lots of clothes or shoes, those would easily fit if K were to remove more of his stuff.

I know ideally I'd want a little more space, and perhaps a different location closer to running trails.  But this condo is a known and beloved place with lots of fun memories and an emotional connection with K, and I feel utterly safe here.

Well, I don't have to decide that today.  One important thing to keep in mind is that I can get inexpensive senior living housing once I'm 55, which is just 19 months away.  So if the time frame is next summer anyway, I may as well wait until I'm 55 toward the end of the summer, and buy senior housing then.  Yeah, next summer I'll be 5 years from retirement.  Sounds so close when I put it that way.

Oh, I'm leaving the frozen keys here in the freezer ... won't be back here until at least Friday ... three-day weekend so I should get two nights to self again!

tax season

Downloaded the new version of TurboTax and started on my 2020 tax return.  I don't have the form from Fidelity for my play money account yet, so I can't finish.  But the IRS isn't accepting returns yet anyway.  I'll have some net gains from my trading activity of a few hundred dollars.

I had to spend time tracking down all my charitable contributions, because I started several new ones during the year as part of my Green Communism initiative, which will push up my refund amount.  Also, a bunch of our theater season tickets were converted into donations when the shows were canceled.

This year I'm not buying new season tickets -- I'm not sure whether they're even available yet -- but until we're all caught up with the regular monthly bills I'm not laying out that kind of cash for entertainment.  I'm keeping the joint spending to a minimum right now.  And there hasn't been much reason to spend on myself either.  Dax vet bills are the biggest expense on the horizon right now.

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Was looking at some senior living places, there's so many kinds.  Not all of them are inexpensive.  Some are reserved for low-income seniors.  Some are luxury buildings that cost a lot.  And many of them are meant for people who are disabled, frail, or in cognitive decline.  I'd be an "active" senior, heh.  Some are 55+ but others are 62+.  I don't really need an inexpensive place until I retire, and at that point I may be moving away anyway.  So, I don't know if senior living in the DC area is really going to happen, but if I decide to live on my own before I retire it is at least worth investigating.

Reminds me of when I went to visit my father in his assisted living building, I remember I was envious because they had a library and a board game room and all their meals were made for them.  Not much privacy, though, I wouldn't be able to play loud music and smoke and have fellas over for spanking parties.  But if I get to the point of needing assisted living, a library and a board game room would be great.

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Sometimes now I swing between feeling like I'm handling the social isolation of Quarantine OK, and feeling like I'm on the verge of boredom.  Now I don't even have a weekly TV night with T, he quit that when Star Trek ended.  He's just playing his video games every night after dinner and all weekend long.  Tonight I was bored enough to start doing my taxes, heh.  I offer to do stuff with him but he'd rather sit by himself staring at a screen and fiddling with a controller.  Sometimes he plays video games with friends online, but mostly it's just solitaire.

I thought about making a habit of playing music on the keyboard every night after dinner but I was concerned that might feel too much like work, after spending a day doing chores, exercising, working, cooking ... I should do something more playful and relaxing, not goal oriented or skill building.

I wish I could pay to skip the vaccination line, heh.  No, not really, I'm OK if there are people who need the vaccine more than me.  I can understand letting school teachers and first responders go before me.  And then people who serve the public in restaurants, shops, and agencies.  Flight attendants, bus drivers.  But it would also be easier to administer if they just went by date of birth -- everybody born before 1950, then 1960, etc.  Let me know when you get to my birth year.  Here in MoCo it's still just the folks who are 75+.  Other states are pulling way ahead of Maryland, even DC is faster than Maryland.  Most of the people I personally know who have had their first shots work in health care.  The rest are white guys over 65 who live in DC.