1,000 Greatest Drivers: Fireball Roberts

I've decided to restart billing, although my posts might not be as frequent as last year.

My mom is still in rehab and it looks like she is about to be transferred into long-term care. I was told last Friday when I visited her that if she is switched from short-term to long-term care that Medicaid will drain all but $50 of her Social Security check from her bank account, which means at that point I would begin having to make all the payments that are automatically deducted from her checking account (our home equity line of credit, her insurance policies, and her credit cards mainly) but last year I was making less money per month than she did from Social Security. However, this morning I was told that I was making too much money to be eligible for Temporary Assistance, so I’ve got to get more income streams going.

I rented a dumpster and I have nearly filled it. It was scheduled to be taken today but I asked for an extension because I was waiting to hear from the code enforcement officer in the village of North Syracuse in case there was anything specifically he wanted me to throw out and add to the dumpster. However, I waited for him all day after he said he was going to come and check up on me again on the day that I was supposed to return the dumpster, so now I think I’m just going to throw out some garbage in the basement. I did not completely clean off the kitchen floor to the degree he wanted, but I have filled the dumpster about 80% including throwing out three mattresses, a non-functional air conditioner, and about 90% of the food in the house (which was all expired). Hopefully, I will have enough room to put all her dishes away without throwing anything out in the cupboards where the food was. Thankfully, the dumpster people gave me a two-day extension and I will be returning it on Wednesday with no extra charge. However, at this point, I’m almost certainly going to fill it with some portion of the broken down appliances in the basement - some combination of old humidifiers, fans, printers, coffee makers, and/or keyboards I guess. I’m still out of my depth here doing this alone and Adult Protective Services is not going to let my mom back home until I have cleaned it up to their specifications, but I need to obviously make money too if they are going to place her in long-term care so all her bills don’t fall behind, so here I go.

A couple nights ago, I read most of my last Substack post on a YouTube livestream and I got a few new subscribers from there and one of my YouTube subscribers was interested in being a paid subscriber here, so that’s probably another reason I decided to restart. With all I’ve got going on with the cleaning and wanting to visit Mom, I absolutely cannot guarantee that I will be posting these at anywhere near the frenetic pace I posted the 2024 columns so I won’t be announcing entire month schedules like I was (although I do have a schedule), but I’ve got to get some money coming in obviously. Another reason I decided to restart today was because I had planned to go through all the Daytona 500 winners I haven’t covered yet who did not win a NASCAR title in the week leading up to this year’s Daytona 500. Technically, this was going to start with Mario Andretti yesterday but that column would be way too time-consuming and I had to throw a lot of shit out, so I’m going to start with Fireball Roberts. The series will end when I write about Dale Earnhardt on February 18 on the anniversary of his death.