To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold
infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour. -William
Blake, poet, engraver, and painter (1757-1827)
A calamity that affects everyone is only half a calamity. -Italian proverb
Great to hear from you, Pretty impressive for 160k well done on that score not so good with the car however.
[Colleen Teahan Waldron OMG you MUST have Al help you install this Patricio
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Carol Riera Lol. That's for sure.
-
Patrick James Dunn I'll never have to touch The Dreaded Burning Ground ever again!]
- Carol Riera Lol. That's for sure.
- Patrick James Dunn I'll never have to touch The Dreaded Burning Ground ever again!]
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. -Charles Peguy, poet and essayist (1873-1914)
To and from Folk Fest: 10.57 km over 0:37'47 for an AVG 16.8 km/hr. Didn't need a rain jacket for any of the commute rides on weekend so pretty lucky about that. Only used my lights on Friday and Saturday, returning home, after 10:00 pm. Sunday, we left around 8:00 pm as we'd seen most everyone we wanted to hear and we were ready for an early night in preparation for full day of errands/packing on the morrow.
Hi jan, think I sent an email last night but was so tired when I got home from Folk Fest that i'm not sure. Jim may have mentioned that we are hoping to stay with you on Tuesday nite on our way to Manitoba. If we get off in time we should be there around 6 pm. If that doesn't work for you please let me know.
Thanks Corinne
Hi Paul, I'm interested in the September concert but don't have time to buy my ticket before I go. Hopefully I can do so on my return. Bonne vacances, Cheers, Brenda
With the horrendous events currently happening everywhere in the world, the plight of the 300 Nigerians girls seems to have fallen off the radar. If you live in Vancouver, please see the notice below re: vigil to be held on Wednesday.
Whether or not you can join in the vigil, would you please consider sharing this invitation among your friends via email or social media? The bigger the crowd, the more newsworthy the event, the more pressure brought to bear. Thanks in advance for your support. Respectfully, Sandra Vander Schaaf
(Co-Organizer with Nicola Aimé, Bring Back Our Girls - Vancouver)
Social Media details:
The "Bring Back Our Girls - Vancouver" Facebook page is here:
https://www.facebook.com/bringbackourgirlsvancouver
The "100th Day World Vigil" invitation is here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/252628364860891/
The poster, which you can share freely, is here:
Hello! I've been trying to find the time to send out a quick update
for several weeks now, but time always seems to be at a premium.
Following, though, is a quick update since I last sent out an e-mail
in October of last year, I believe.
First, I'll update you about Mum and Dad. Dad has been doing a lot
better this year, and it's been commented on by the doctor and other
people on the first floor at Christie Gardens, where he lives. The
first floor is the Assisted Living floor. He's even been referred to
as "really sweet"- which might surprise some of you! He still walks a
lot and, as the caregivers' supervisor said, Dad has actually
developed his own cognitive stimulation program. He walks up and down
the hall and reads the names of all the residents which are up beside
each of their rooms. He never seems to tire of doing this, although I
think it rather burns his caregivers out! Luckily, they each work
only three days a week with him, as we had to increase their hours to
12 hours a day, meaning they work 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM and the agency
provides seven days a week coverage. He's also sleeping more these
days, so
when he is napping, the caregivers can sit down.
Mum, however, is a bit of a different story. She is still in the
apartment although now has a caregiver in the mornings. She had a
very bad fall about three weeks ago, the
onsite staff found her in the morning, on the floor in the bathroom,
and suspect she had been there all night. She may have been
unconscious at some point. Sadly, she
forgot that she had an alert system on a cord around her neck, and so
she did not press for assistance. She is very confused a lot of the
time, and struggles gamely to
converse but her vocabulary has been quite affected which leads me to
suspect she may have had a stroke. She had a TIA many many years ago
and was warned that the next one
would be "The Big One". I don't think she had been feeding herself
properly, I realize now she had been trying to tell me when she went
to the grocery store, she was not
able to buy groceries, because she could not remember her PIN for her
credit card. (Hint to all the techno-obsessed in the financial
industry: it may be a good idea to offer
older people the kind of credit card for which you still have to sign,
so older people won't have to remember their PIN…)
I feel kind of bad about the food situation, but all I was getting was
"when I went to that place, I could not use that thing, you know that
thing that you do" and I was
never sure what the "thing" was. She uses the word "thing" as a
substitute for just about every kind of noun you can think of. I
began to suspect there was a problem with
food, because the day after the bad fall, when I went over there after
work, I found her sitting in her underwear on her living room couch.
She couldn't remember if she had
eaten, she didn't seem to know what was going on, and when I went to
the fridge, all I could find was cranberry juice and yogurt. One of
the tasks of the caregiver is to
make sure Mum eats breakfast and lunch - she does take her dinner
downstairs in the dining room of the building - and also take Mum to
the store to buy food.
Sadly, Mum has since had another fall. I came home the evening of
July 18 around 10:00 PM to find my phone ringing and it was the nurse
from Christie Gardens, saying they
had found mother, on the floor, once again. I assume this time she
remembered to press the alert button. And earlier in the day she had
gone to have an xray, because there
was swelling in her wrist, and that's probably arising from the
earlier fall. So, already the xray will probably not be up to date and
we may have to get it done again.
Mum is on the waiting list for a room on the same floor as Dad;
however, because she is adamant she doesn't want to be anywhere near
him, I have asked that she be put in a
different "neighborhood", so that they do not eat in the same dining
room, etc. It would be rather nice if they could both live in the
same apartment and we could double up
on the caregivers, because Dad is now running about $14,000 a month
and Mum is at the $3000 a month mark and that is likely to rise.
As you may guess, Mum and Dad still take a big chunk of my time, as
going to deal with things in person and helping them out in person is
only part of it, I have had to spend
a lot of time this past year, writing to various financial
institutions, trying to sort out all the accounts and money, as it was
rather in a muddle. I have also found some
financial institutions to be totally uncooperative. I've also had to
write a lot of letters to get Dad a special pass for the Wheel Trans
special bus service that he has to use if he
needs to go anywhere, because if we don't have a pass for his
caregiver, she would have to pay to go with him. Of course, after
spending the best part of a week running
around, getting the photographs done, getting the forms filled out,
getting the doctor to sign it, when I sent the package in, it was
lost. Eventually the documents re-
surfaced but not before they had gone ahead and sent me a duplicate
card so, for once, I have two of the things.
There's probably more I could write about that I've been doing, I keep
a log of the time it takes but generally,for in-person tasks,
purchasing, financial management, tax
preparation, and so on, I'm averaging about 2 hours a day most weeks.
This might lead some of you to wonder what my brother is doing. When
my friend called earlier this year from Australia to wish me happy
birthday, she asked: And is your
brother doing any more? My answer was: I'm sure he thinks so! In
truth, he does go to the department store close to where he works when
Dad needs more socks, undershirts
and underwear - the in-house laundry at Christie Gardens has rather
trashed Dad's clothing - I won't even describe what they did to 2
lovely new pairs of LLBean pyjamas, I'm still processing that damage,
but for one very nice pair of wool trousers, marked with the Christie
Gardens orange, dry-clean-only tag, have been washed instead, meaning
they are now capri length, so will have to be replaced - and, as a
result, Dad and one of his caregivers now do his own laundry, this was
considered to be a useful cognitive stimulation exercise for him. And
Rod does try to go and visit every so often, he aims for weekly, but
he just does not have the time to do things. He has a full-time job,
a nearly full-time role in his union at work, and then his wife, of
course, tends to think they should spend their social time with her
family. They just went on a holiday to Cuba, along with four or
possibly more members of her family. I think Rod finds these "gang
holidays" a bit trying…
As for me, I do try to fit in a few things I might want to do with my
own life. Last year, to decrease my burden on the family finances -
mother and I have an arrangement
that she pays some of my bills and I stick around in Toronto so I can
help her, otherwise I'd be back in the US in a heartbeat - and while
this is still in effect, I decided I should go back to work to
supplement my pension so that I would be less of a burden on the
family finances. So I work two days a week, at a couple of locations
walking distance from my home, doing merchandising for a company
called TNG which I believe has global operations, at least they are in
the U.S. and I think parts of Europe. Then I still have my apartment
building, which takes up a day a week usually, and the rest of the
time I juggle everything else I may need to do for myself, including
taking care of my four-storey house - actually small by North American
standards but, 'round these parts, it's more usual to have a large
house and a small garden, rather than the other way 'round.
I have also been able to do some acting, when it is available. As
anyone in the business will tell you, work for women drops off
dramatically after they hit 40. Professionally, if anyone asks how
old I am, I will only admit to being over 40 because it does increase
the age range I can audition for. I am currently able to play parts
from the mid-forties and up. I did complete a commercial for a law
firm called Diamond and Diamond which is running on TV here, I haven't
seen it myself, but I keep getting asked if that's me! I also did a
corporate video about two weeks ago for Esso, which is a large
petroleum gasoline retailer here, had to do that in both English and
French and it was all ad-lib, and then, in late May, I also had a part
in an independent feature film being shot in the US, playing Shirley
Regal, the alcoholic single mother of the protagonist, Della.
Any of you who are interested in seeing the trailer can go to the
following link:
http://igg.me/at/Friends-Dont-Let-Friends-Date-Friends/x/707614
I've tended not to apply to exhibit my paintings because I'm always
concerned, with everything going on with Mum and Dad, I'll forget
about a deadline and miss it. However,
I did enter one of my paintings in a competition called The Celeste
Prize. You should be able to find my entry at the following link:
www.celesteprize.com/works/pg:en14/ord:data_real/page:16
The only other issues I'm dealing with are one local problem, and one
in the U.S., which is a nationwide problem. Two years ago I and
several of my neighbors were delighted
when the problem neighbors to the north of me - these being the ones
who took me to Criminal Court last year - got rid of their basketball
net. Hallelujah! No more being
bombarded by basketballs, no more being afraid to sit on the bench of
the bottom of my garden - because I have nearly been hit on the head
with a ball - no more garage door
being slammed continually by balls, no more trespassing by the kids to
get their balls back. This latter activity has damaged my fence and,
as they had also been using the
downspout to pull themselves up and over the fence, that has been
ripped off the side of the garage. However, one of my other neighbors
- great pals with my problem
neighbours - now has fixed a basketball hoop onto their garage, over
the shared lane. This is actually against the bylaws, they've been
told this, but of course the net is
still up. (One of the things I know is that our authorities,
including the police, are more concerned about being liked than being
respected…) Apparently, I am not supposed
to want to protect my property and asking these people not to slam the
balls against my garage door - went through four years of that - and
not to trespass, I have cemented
my reputation in the neighborhood for being an absolute bitch. I'm
not too concerned about this because the people who think this are few
- namely the neighbors beside me
and their pals with the basketball net, plus a couple of others who
have been indoctrinated by the problem neighbours - but the vast
majority don't really know who I am.
Anyway, we'll see how this one plays out - pardon the pun!
The probably more serious issue is the situation I'm facing in the
U.S. The mortgage servicer for my building there changed in 2013, due
to the fact the mortgage servicing
was transferred from Bank of America to a company called Nationstar
Mortgage and I am now in a situation where they are trying to engineer
a foreclosure. Nationstar Mortgage
is a mortgage servicer in name only, they're really a foreclosure
mill. Anyone who wants to read up on this can turn to the many, many
sites online where thousands of people
are filing complaints or posting their stories. (Interestingly,
there is not much overlap between the sites in terms of the people
filing, most of them are discrete
complaints and they number in the thousands. Tens of thousands if you
count the complaints filed with the authorities..) It is almost too
boring for me to have to tell you what I am looking at but, mainly,
they first refused to credit my cheques, then they started sending my
cheques back un-cashed, and began threatening foreclosure. One of the
saving graces of the situation is that my property is in New York
State and New York State is a judicial
foreclosure state, which means it has to go through the courts
(although that doesn't seem to stop Nationstar from going behind
people's backs to do this; one of the stories
online is of a three-time Iraq veteran who came back home and found
they were not cashing his cheques but were putting them into
"suspense". When he phoned them up about it, they
told him: We drove by your house, it's pretty nice, it'll fetch a good
price, and so we're foreclosing you!)
As it happens, this type of illegal foreclosure - frequently referred
to online as "fraudclosure"- is what went on in the U.S. back in
2008. The mainstream banks were doing
it. And that's why Bank of America dumped its mortgages into the lap
of Nationstar. (Mine was one of about a million current, up-to-date
mortgages that was thrown into the
mix to "sweeten the pot".) The banks were about to get fined for doing
the very things Nationstar is now doing. Most of the foreclosures
that occurred in the recession were
illegal, people lost their homes when they shouldn't have. It's
pretty disgraceful but it's what happens when capitalism runs amok and
greed is the driver of decision-
making. Even worse, the banks deliberately used forged documents.
Wells Fargo is currently involved in a court case where they had to
provide their in-house manual, and, lo
and behold! The in-house lawyers at Wells Fargo were told to go ahead
and forge documents when necessary to foreclose. It's all a pretty
sick situation, and some people have
been fighting over this with Nationstar for six years or more.
Nationstar's tactic is to damage the Borrower's credit rating - so no
use trying to get refinanced with
anybody else - then run up bills with late charges, fees, attorneys
costs and what have you, then foreclose and put the property on
auction.com, be the low bidder, and then,
go after the Borrower for a deficiency judgment. Long story short,
the Borrower gets nothing out of it. My mother actually suggested
that I sell but, if I were to try to do
that - and I don't want to do that - I would not get a nickel back out
of the situation. I would lose everything, original downpayment plus
my earned equity.
Nationstar is essentially going around America and stealing people's
property. And because they are a non-bank, none of the regulations
apply to them.
If you really want to immerse yourself, here are two links:
www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/nationstar_mortgage.html
www.facebook.com/pages/Nationstar-Mortgage-Victims/220607231354018
Before closing, I will just update you about the garden. We had a very
brutal winter and it has taken its toll on my garden. Even my thyme
and sage, which have survived 12 or more winters, fared badly and I
had to cut both back quite severely. The back garden didn't do too
badly but the front was devastated. This is pretty much true for most
people. It's due to the salt we have to put down to melt the ice. When
we next shovel the snow, the salt gets onto our gardens, as we are not
supposed to shovel onto the street -also against the bylaws but a lot
of people ignore that! I've more or less re-planted the entire front
half of my front garden, nearest the sidewalk. Hope this batch of
plants make it through the coming winter, as it does get rather
expensive to keep doing it all over.
So that's my news in a nutshell and what I am up to these days. I
look forward to hearing from you when you have a chance to update me
on what's new with you! Deborah
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