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| "Jimmy" the plumber finishing up installing the new pump for Bill's toilet. |
Good news folks, our basement bathroom toilet now works!
We got lucky yesterday when "Jimmy" the plumber called and said he was able to get the new pump.
He came yesterday and installed it.
It works!
Next!
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| The "pan" that collects the toilet matter and pumps it up the pipe out to our septic tank. The paper towels are there to soak up the overflow when the ball didn't work. Ugh. |
Well folks, we had quite a Thanksgiving day here.
As in many Thanksgiving days in the past, I assumed this one would also be quiet and peaceful.
Alas, it did start out that way. A sunny and brisk 55 degrees outside, just perfect for laying several wheelbarrows of mulch. That's the way it started.
As I was outside in our driveway shoveling my second wheelbarrow full of mulch I heard what sounded like Bill shouting inside the house.
At first I dismissed the sounds, my imagination.
But they didn't stop. Then I thought "Maybe something happened to Bill. Maybe this is IT."
I've been prepared for "It" ever since Bill came home from the rehab facility in March of 2021, recovering from his multiple strokes.
I put down my shovel and walk inside our house. I don't do the "movie thing" of running, besides I can't run anyway.
I hear Bill downstairs hollering "Ron!! Ron!!" in his stroke addled accent. He's in his bathroom.
I gently go down the thirteen steps to his bathroom and am confronted with a backed up toilet bowl with fecal (shit) and toilet paper.
UGH!
Backed up toilets, toilets "matter" up to the brim, is the main thing I hated about my hotel job. God knows I've encountered enough of them during my twenty some years of hotel front desk employment.
Bill didn't know what happened. Of course my first impulse is to blame him.......but for what?
I try to flush the toilet again and it only fills up to the brim again. Yes, some had overflowed on to my recently cleaned tile and grout floor.
I had absolutely NO IDEA what the problem was.
Okay........I call Service Today. And yes, this was on THANKSGIVING DAY.
Did you ever call a plumber on a holiday for service?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
What to do? I called anyway. Of course they were none to happy about me calling them on Thanksgiving Day but they were professional. Took awhile to get through though. I'm sure I pull someone away from their family gathering.
"Steve", who I talked to, tried to walk me through several options. Of course I couldn't find the things he was asking me to look for.
This is the basement bathroom. The toilet works by pumping UP the toilet stuff.
I asked him if he could do FaceTime so I could show him what I was seeing on the equipment. He couldn't do that but could receive some pictures that I sent to him. He determined that the "ball" wasn't working.
This "ball" is similar to the ball in the back of your regular toilet. Once all the toilet fecal matter builds up in the "pan" below the floor, the "ball" activate the pump. Apparently the ball wasn't working.
"Steve" then asked if I "could hold off" until Monday or Friday to send one of his service people out. Well, not really. I politely asked if he could send someone out now. Not only was I dealing with a malfunctioning toilet but I had to deal with Bill. Anything that disrupts his routine totally confuses him. And he uses that bathroom often during the day to take a pee and an occasional small poop. Especially several times at night. I could just imagine him overflowing the toilet again while I'm trying to get some sleep. And then the mess, and smell. As it was he had already taken some poop out of the toilet and put it in the trashcan. He tried to hide it but my sniffer is infallible. Of course he thought he did something wrong, which he didn't. Poor Bill, he tries to so hard to do the right thing and not cause me any more stress. But stressed out I was.
Just think of it, there's not much worse than having an overflowing toilet on THANKSGIVING DAY. Of course what I do in these Anus Horrible Days is to tell myself "It could be a lot worse." I could be in Gaza. No running water, food, fuel and the Israeli IDF bombing the shit out of them. But I digress.
Steve said he would send someone over. A few hours later "Isiah" arrived. He wasn't happy but he was professional. I apologized for interrupting his Thanksgiving holiday but their company is called Service Today. I've been using them eve since we moved down here to Delaware in 2006 and they always come the same day. I have several annual service agreements with them. Plumbing, electrical, and HVAC. They're expensive (they all are expensive) but they're good and I get a 15% discount because I have a service agreement with them. Remember just recently I had a several hundred dollar bill with them to replace some parts to my heating system and I had a new filtration system installed. The filtration system is good, because I don't have those sneezing and runny nose episodes I used to have from allergies.
Isiah (I didn't ask him to take his shoes off upon entering Casa Tipton-Kelly like I usually do, I didn't want to add insult to injury) came into our house and made the descent down the thirteen steps to Bill's bathroom. Yep, that was the problem. The ball in the pump system failed.
Now he gave me my options. He could replace the ball but he couldn't guarantee it would work more than a week. "It could work a week or a year" he said. But if I got a NEW pump system, they could guarantee it. Oh well, WTF. I just put out another $972 last week for new brake pads and rotors on my 2010 Red Subaru Forester that only has 97,000 miles on it.
So now the question.......how much? Isiah said he had to go out to his truck and do some calculations. He came back and the price was $2,795 and change.
OUCH!
Oh well, this is what I have savings for. But man oh man, the hits just keep coming this year. One big unexpected bill after another. Sure would be nice to save some money. But again, I have to remind my self I'm not trapped under rubble in Gaza or even worse, in the situation that my neighbor Harvey was in last year when his whole house burned down when his electric golf cart charger set off those propane gas tanks he had in his garage. Harvey, his daughter and two guests lost everything, barely getting out of their house before the explosions. And here I am fretting over the cost of replacing a pump for my basement toilet.
So I gave Isiah the go ahead. Then he told me, "There might be a problem when we can fix it." The supply store is closed today and will also be closed tomorrow and the next two days are the weekend. We probably can't get to it until next Monday."
Whatever, whatever; just fix it. He said they would try to get it fixed as soon as possible. And today I did get a call they they're coming out tomorrow. Actually they left a message on my iPhone because I was taking my afternoon nap.
Now the problem was to tell Bill where he could pee and poop. He could still use his bathroom but he couldn't flush the toilet. We would have to wait for "the pan" to fill up and I could manually flick on the power switch to pump the waster matter up the sewage pipe out to our twin septic tanks. Yes, in this out year of 2123 we're still using septic tanks. Not hooked up to a municipal sewage system. I have to arrange to have the septic tanks pumped out at least once a year. I try to pick cool days to have that task performed. One year I called the Clean Delaware septic tank guys on a hot and muggy summer day. Yes, you can imagine that smell as all our, uh......shit was pumped out in the 90 degree temps. I vowed never to do that again.
It took several explanations to Bill to "just don't flush the toilet when you go." Half an hour later he's asking me "What do I do?" Like I said, any deviation from our normal routine, Bill get confused. As a matter of fact, just a few minutes ago he came in here to say "goodbye" to me for the night and asked me AGAIN "What do I do?" I said (again), "Just don't flush the toilet." God, I don't want him scooping his poop out of the toilet and putting it in the trash can. Sorry to be so graphic folks but this is my life now. All your former and present caregivers know what I'm talking doubt. Poop is a big part of caregiving. Poop is what caused me and my brothers to decide to move our mother to Brother John's house in South Carolina. At her house in Pennsylvania she had poop in her bedroom closet, under the bed and on TOP of the toilet seat (I discovered that "gem" once when I stayed there overnight. Folks, I am poop adverse. But I try to remind myself what my friend Glenn M. told me when he was caring for his late partner/husband Mike, "Ron, it's only shit." And he's right. It can be cleaned up but the smell. Oh well, that's my problem. I'm just too squishy. As I told my friend Don McK this morning on FaceTime and who is in the hospital now, "I could never be a nurse Don." Folks, I'm a glitter kind of guy. Send me a glitter Christmas card and I'm a happy camper.
Well, I didn't plan to do a long story again but here I am. Tell you what folks, I'm ready for a long stretch of DULL AND BORING.
The hits, they just keep coming.
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| A Tipton Thanksgiving dinner about 1977 - from left to right - my Mother (partially obscured), my father, my sister-in-law and her husband Isaac, my brother who now lives alone (they're divorced and she remarried and lives in Florida) with his cat at the old family homestead in Pennsylvania |
This year, as in year's past when I am asked "What are you doing for Thanksgiving?", I respond with "nothing."
When my Mother was alive, I almost always went to her home (the old family homestead where my surviving brother, a MAGA Republican who I am not speaking to now....again, lives) for her traditional home cooked Thanksgiving dinner. As a matter of fact, that is how my parents met Bill for the first time.
I was estranged from them for about a year after they discovered I was gay. This was in 1964. My Mother caught me with my married boyfriend. Believe me, it was ugly. An incident which I've recounted many times in this blog as my longtime regular blog readers can attest to.
I think the year was 1965 that my Mother broke the ice when she sent me a birthday card (my birthday being November 9, conveniently a few weeks before Thanksgiving), and invited me to the family Thanksgiving dinner. I responded by telling her I would come but only if I could bring Bill. She said "Who is Bill?" I told her he was my boyfriend and I was living with him. She said "Absolutely not!" Then I told her "I'm not coming unless Bill comes with me." I can't remember the exact sequence of events but I think she called me back in a few days and said I could bring Bill.
Well, you know the rest of the story. They LOVED Bill. As I knew they would. In fact Bill became very good friends with both my Mother (who was only four years older than Bill) and my father.
I don't know what my Mother was expecting. My father didn't much care, he never did about anything in my life. Maybe my Mother thought Bill would be very effeminate. One thing Bill is not is effeminate. Bill is uber butch. For real. Or maybe she thought Bill was some kind of lecherous pervert. Well, I guess that all depends on the circumstance. Long story short, they had nothing to fear with Bill, all was well. And for many years Bill and I enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with my parents.
For a few years I tried giving a Thanksgiving dinner myself but Bill and I just don't eat that much to justify preparing all that food for the two of us. A few years we invited our late friend Ed C. over but that dropped off eventually.
For another few years I attended my late friend Bob McC. and Jim D.'s annual Thanksgiving Dinner for Lonely Gay guys.
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That was fun because most older, single gay guys don't have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving dinner. That's why Bob and Jim started up that annual Thanksgiving dinner event. And it was quite successful at one point having about twenty four gay men attending the Turkey Fest at their double wide mobile home on twenty-two acres of wooded land outside Georgetown, Delaware.
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| One of the tables at Bob and Jim's Thanksgiving dinner |
But of course, Thanksgiving at Bob and Jim's eventually withered away when most of the participants died, including Bob and Jim. No one has picked up the Thanksgiving baton since, including me.
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| Yep, that's me on the right leaning back in my chair |
I must say I did so thoroughly enjoy those Thanksgiving dinners at Bob and Jim's. Food was great, company was fabulous. Only downside was occasionally one of those guys hit on me, thinking the dinner was a dating app. But this is the curse of being a hottie like I was then (Ron says with tongue in cheek).
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| Thanksgiving dinner on the job at the hotel, often interrupted by a guest calling for fresh towels |
When I wasn't attending other's Thanksgiving dinners I was working at the hotel. Here is a picture of me having a Pity Thanksgiving "Dinner" that one of my co-workers brought in to me when I was working at the hotel one year. Dinner was good. I do like turkey and all the fixings. What I do miss though is the camaraderie of "family" whether it be traditional or untraditional like a bunch of gay men who have nowhere else to go on Thanksgiving.
But then what is Thanksgiving about? Being thankful, that's what Thanksgiving is all about. And this year I am more thankful than I have ever been. And that is because I am here with Bill. I am so thankful that I can take care of Bill at this time of his life and that we can be together.
So my wish to you good folks is whatever kind of "family" gathering you have for Thanksgiving, you have a wonderful time and you have much to be thankful for.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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| Christmas 1966 Pennsauken New Jersey (Polaroid photo) |
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| Ron the Octogenarian |
Today I begin my 83rd year on this planet.
Who would have ever thought I would reach the grand old age of 82 years old?
I am an octogenarian. That means I'm between 80 and 89 years of age.
So how do I feel about being an OLD MAN? Not any different from when I was 81 years old. A LOT different when I was 22 years old.
For one thing my whole body didn't ache when I was 22y years old.
I had loads of energy. Almost inexhaustible energy!
I could walk for miles and not feel a thing except exhilarated. Now I can hardly walk. I don't have the energy.
If you would have asked me when I was 22 years old I would have told you with complete confidence that I wouldn't live past 60 years old.
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| A much younger me from 1969 at a bowling banquet. I'm the one in the blue seersucker suit on the far right. The woman with the cigarette was a co-worker of mine. This is one of the few photos of me that wasn't posed. These are the best photos of anyone, the spontaneous unposed photos. Unfortunately, I don't have too many of them. In my mind this is the way I think I look. Then I look in the mirror now and I am always shocked. What happened to me? Oh well, I feel very lucky to have made it this far. Now to see what I look like when I'm 90! |
Oh for sure, I've had a couple of close calls. At seventeen I developed an infection from surgery which they (the doctors) didn't expect me to survive. In and out of the hospital for six months in the summer of 1959, I fooled them all and survived.
Over the years I've been in a couple auto accidents but survived uninjured.
In 1980 I almost lost my life when someone tried to strangle me. That was one time I thought I was checking out for sure. But I survived, barely.
Then there was the time I had a gun pulled on me by two muggers on 22nd Street in Philadelphia one Saturday night in the late 1970's when I was headed out to the local bar for a night of adventure. They demanded my money or they were going "to take my life." No way was I going to give them money (I only had three one dollar bills in my back rear pocket anyway). We had a standoff for a few seconds while they demanded my "money or your life." I figured if they were going to shoot me they would have to do it with witnesses so I ran away from them into the traffic on 22nd Street. They didn't shoot. I survived again.
I can related more such instances but you get the idea. I have been spared from an early departure from this life for several reasons, I think. Yes, I do think your lives are preordained.
My purpose now it to take care of Bill until he makes his peaceful transition from this life to wherever one goes when one dies.
Then my purpose to live out my days with Pat. We take care of one another. Without Pat I have no one and he is in the same situation. We were meant for each other. That's why I think we met ten years ago. Our journey was preordained, of that I am convinced.
Life goes on. I have a few more adventures left in this wonderful life I've been so fortunate to have lived.
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| Bill's VA occupational therapist checking out Bill's bathroom safeguards |
Yesterday we had the third visit from a representative of the Veterans Administration Home Healthcare program. This person was the Occupational Therapist. She gave us some very useful information about keeping Bill mobil and keeping me from further straining my back.
She was here about an hour and a half checking on our facilities (grab bars, smoke detectors, fire extinguisher, exercise routine, etc). A very thorough evaluation of our home environment and helpful hints to make it safer for both me and Bill.
On Monday Bill's home healthcare nurse spent the morning with us. Again, a very thorough evaluation of our history and what they can do for us to make our living situation here at home better.
A few things I was very happy to learn is that the VA will supply Bill with his Ensure protein drinks. Previously I've been buying those expensive drink supplements at our local Walgreens. Also they will supply us with eye drops and something really important to me, up to thirty days respite care for me annually. Oh how I would love to take advantage of that but Bill won't hear of it. Even though I can't take advantage of that respite break from my caregiving for Bill at this time, perhaps in the future. It's good to know that it is there for me to use.
The most important thing about this VA Home Healthcare program is that it takes a lot of worry and pressure off of me should Bill's health deteriorate. Before with the hospice program, although they were very good, I still had a number of hoops to jump through. He had to be approved to be on the program and then when he didn't die, I felt guilty for being on the program and the monthly cost to the Federal government. With VA Home Healthcare, I have a partner on call. Partners on call.
What I really find interesting about the VA Home Healthcare program is that I didn't even know it existed. I only found out about it the last time I took Bill to the local VA Outpatient Clinic to visit a VA doctor and she informed us that she was placing Bill on their home healthcare program.
The VA has gotten a bad rap over the years for their sometimes neglectful care of their veterans but I have to tell you, the VA has been wonderful with us. Even though I have Medicare both Part A and B I continue to get my main doctor healthcare through the VA. I've been doing this for thirty years now, ever since I lost my heath care in 1994. Bill has always received all his health care through the VA.
The VA has literally saved both of our lives several times over when we both needed surgeries. For many years when I worked at a bank I had fabulous healthcare insurance but I never used it. Then when I lost my job at the bank is (of course) when I needed surgery. The VA took care of me and I never saw one bill. Bill has had the same experience with the VA. One of Bill's emergency surgeries happened when I was house sitting here in southern Delaware in January 2005. Bill's gall bladder burst. I was stuck down here in Delaware by a snow storm. The local VA in Pennsylvania picked up Bill and DROVE him to Philadelphia for emergency surgery. Bill was in the ICU for over a week recovering from his surgery. The only problem I had was calling him on the phone. His Filipina nurse would not put me though because I "wasn't a relative." I managed to work around that obstacle through a friend who works in the medical field who called her and told her to put me through. She did. These days there is no problem with me and Bill's relationship. One time though the nurse thought Bill was my father. I had to correct her (she was embarrassed) and tell her Bill was my husband.
Thank goodness life has settled down here at Casa Tipton Kelly.
There were no trick or treaters last night, which is fine with me. Now to get through "the holidays."
Photo of the back of my home here in southern Delaware taken at 1:26 PM today - I may not have access to the boardwalk or a view of the o...
