1,000 Greatest Drivers: Buck Baker
My mind is obviously elsewhere...
Now that my mom has been transitioned into long-term care, Medicaid is going to be draining all but $50 out of her Social Security money so I’m going to have to figure out how to cover all the things that were being auto-deducted from her account including her housing payment (for which I shut off the auto-withdrawal) and her insurance policies, but they probably won’t let the payments be transferred to me unless I have a Power of Attorney filed and the nursing home is not letting me use their notary public because she apparently only got 5/15 on her BIMS test, which has led them to believe that she isn’t competent enough to sign a form. Personally, I don’t think her forgetting what day it is has much to do with her ability to understand a form, because she still seem to understand everything I read to her, but unfortunately they disagree so I’ll need to find a notary public myself who disagrees, and that could be a challenge. Furthermore, I didn’t know until just recently about the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program, so it looks like much of the equity of her house might be used up by her stay in the nursing home, and nobody bothered to tell either Mom or me that this was a thing that had to be done five years ago. However, I have read that there is a Child Caregiver Exemption and I’m going to try to do this to protect the house. I have been living with her in this house for the last 14 years and I pretty much was choosing to do just these various online gig jobs in part so I could be there for her 24/7 whenever she needed me, so I think this counts but since Adult Protective Services was called here about her hoarding (even though it was stuff she wanted and I never wanted), I could easily see them arguing I wasn’t taking good enough care of her to qualify for this even though I was exactly following the instructions of what she wanted as much as possible. The problem is that I don’t know whether I have sufficient documentation to prove to whichever agency that I was providing sufficient enough care to keep her out of the nursing home for longer although I think I was in, and I still don’t entirely know how this works. In the era of DOGE, I’m sure they’re not going to be generous…
I did throw out a bunch of hoarded boxes today including my research on MERP and stuff. I think I’m just about done with social media after a pretty ugly debate I had on Bluesky. I knew I didn’t belong there to begin with as I’m too left for them and not socially liberal enough but after the people I was debating with want to blame powerless Gen Z men for the rise of fascism rather than the actual politicians or arguing that Kamala Harris “accepted the Cheney endorsement because she was trying to show she wasn’t an extremist like Trump” when I think a whole lot of people would say Cheney was objectively worse than Trump and I remember when he was called the height of extremism 20 years ago. Yeah man, I’m out. The only reason I was even trying to post anything on Twitter or Bluesky was just to promote my work, but it’s never got traction and I’d get a lot more traction if I did it on YouTube where I actually have more of an audience. I think I’ll be purging all those accounts soon. It’s frustrating how I’ve just become completely invisible and fewer and fewer people give a shit about me over time. I’m torn between knowing I need to go to a temp agency or something to get hired now to pick up Mom’s bills or wanting to visit Mom several times a week, but it looks like I’m going to have to choose one or the other and not both, and she still does want to come home but I still don’t know how to clear the house enough so she’s able to come home. At least my diarrhea from last week settled down and I’m back to working on the clutter…
