As expected, Mom returned home from the nursing home two days ago. I haven’t found the added caregiving burden to be too exhausting yet. I’ve set up my laptop to be in the same room as Mom’s bed so I can work while keeping up with her at the same time. I’ve been walking her to the bathroom almost every time (and it was almost every hour a day or two ago), although she couldn’t get to the bathroom in time a couple times and she did pee and poop on her sheets both days and I quickly washed them. I knew I needed to adjust badly since I had been going to bed at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and she’s been sleeping usually around 7:00 in the evening. After going to bed shortly after 1:00 on Wednesday, I was startled awake after she had to go to the bathroom at 5:50. I did assist her, but I didn’t fall asleep again. I used that opportunity to go to bed just after 7:00 last night and I succeeded. Let’s see if finally adopting human sleeping hours will make me healthier. My rib pain from over the past week hasn’t really abated and I’ve been constipated too, but it’s not like I feel either of those are emergencies exactly. I’ve been feeding her, dressing her, changing her, trying to handle all her paperwork, the whole spiel. It’s been fine and she has been mostly more pleasant.
Possibly the most frustrating aspect of all this has been navigating the bureaucracy. On the day of her discharge on Wednesday, the people at Van Duyn never told me that I was supposed to bring in the wheelchair that her in-home care agency PACE CNY brought to our house. When the cab service came to pick her up and take her home, they were supposed to bring a wheelchair in the cab because Van Duyn apparently does not allow any of their wheelchairs to leave the facility. Even though Mom thought she could walk in the cab, because none of the physical therapists at Van Duyn had approved for her to do this, she had to wait until another cab came that was equipped with a wheelchair, which would have to remain with the cab company. This silly round of musical wheelchairs cost her another hour in the nursing home, but we got all that resolved.
A bigger frustration has been that Mom was originally scheduled to go PACE CNY’s day center every Thursday, but she has been very poorly behaved. Yesterday, she went in for her initial PACE CNY intake interviews with various doctors, nurses, occupational therapists, and physical therapists to set up her service, but she got really hungry and asked to eat. They were serving lunch in the day center and she immediately screamed how she hated all the old people there even though none of them had seemingly said a word to her. She mocked some of the nurses’ smarmy, patronizing speech patterns, which at one point in my life I would’ve found funny but now I find it not okay, and there was an accordionist there and apparently after I walked home (before she came home on the PACE CNY bus), she had been yodeling to make fun of the accordion player. Clearly, she just wants to be alone, and we are two very different people on this. I dream of having a hangout like that where I can just be somewhere without some consumer-driven activity, and as I’ve said the community is what I really envy about older people, not their money. I gave up all these social engagements for caregiving, and I felt like the last time she was home Mom didn’t want me leaving the house. Now that I tried that when she was in the nursing home and still didn’t connect as much as I was hoping to, I don’t really feel I lost much. I went to my last Unique Peerspectives men’s group meeting on Tuesday and the guy who was running it has handed it off to somebody else, and the new host is talking about adding structure to it and planned topics of conversation, which again defeats the point for me. What I wanted was unstructured time for people to talk and shoot the shit about anything, not to feel like I was attending a lecture (which is probably why I got along in the men’s group better than the more lecture-based neurodivergent support group, even though I felt I had more in common with the people there). Since I never really connected in the way that I would like, I don’t really mind giving all these things up. But it frustrates me that Mom is being offered the kind of community engagement that I would want and she’s being so nasty about it.
Finally, there’s another web of bureaucracy I’ve really been struggling with. The Van Duyn business office told me that Mom would eventually be getting access to her Social Security checks again upon her discharge after they were deposited there automatically during her stay. Since she got paid on the 3rd and the 3rd fell on a Saturday, that means her payment was supposed to arrive today, but I knew this issue wasn’t going to be resolved in two days. I called the Social Security office and they refused to give her any information because she keeps forgetting her address or even that she bought this house (even though she successfully remembered her birthday, Social Security Number, birthplace, and mother’s maiden name, that wasn’t enough). They would not let me provide the address for them because although I do have a Power of Attorney, I didn’t send it to Social Security. I tried to get her to memorize her address due to a musical mnemonic clue. Didn’t work. The Van Duyn business office told me I should call Social Security. The national Social Security number told me I should call the Syracuse Social Security number, which redirected me to the national one. I raised my voice and was rather brash to some of the Social Security people about these authentication practices, and the guy I was talking to told me that if he allowed Mom the information without providing her current address, he might lose his job. Okay, but I find that very repulsive. Somebody told me I should try to contact the bank and do a three-way call between Mom, Social Security, and the bank. I was also advised to go online and while Mom does have a Social Security account online, I believe the last time she logged in was before they required users to set a backup code, so I never did so and I had no way to log into her account, so I deleted it and will have to reopen it after tomorrow. I mean I’m good to cover all our expenses for now, but I want to get this taken care of so I can move on to the next things, which are trying to reduce the housing payments back to what they were before by getting a new homeowner’s policy now that I have gotten the ramp replaced (but I have to have pictures to document that the ramp was replaced, and I don’t think I have a functioning camera now so I’m going to have to look for a digital camera somewhere, since I do not want a smartphone) and reinstating her school tax exemption, which she was no longer eligible to maintain since she was no longer living in the house but now should be. Those two things should lower our monthly mortgage payments from $1,000-something to $500-something until it is supposed to be paid off in September 2028, and that should give us a lot of freedom. I guess I’ve jumped through most of the hoops already though. The biggest frustration is setting up follow-up doctor’s appointments since I do not want to leave her at home, since I do want to be seen for my IBS and eating disorder issues. She’s told me she might accompany me to doctor’s appointments so I wouldn’t have to do that, but I don’t know if she’s really strong enough to do that and I would prefer to have someone supervising her at home. But if PACE CNY were doing that, they would want to send her to the day center: a thing I would probably love that she despises. So there will still be conflicts here. And I still haven’t told Mom about my day job that she told me not to take years ago. I don’t know whether she even remembers this, but I haven’t wanted to provoke her.
Starting with my next post, I’m going to begin to undertake a new project for my intros, so before I do that, I suppose I need to talk about the big racing new stories that I haven’t discussed yet.
As everyone expected, Christian Lundgaard and Scott Dixon are now officially swapping teams with Lundgaard replacing Dixon at Ganassi and Dixon moving to McLaren, although technically Dixon is taking over the Nolan Siegel #6 car while Felix Rosenqvist is replacing Lundgaard in the #7. Even though I will grant that Rosenqvist is a better driver than Dixon now, somehow it feels more insulting to replace Lundgaard with him than if they’d replaced him with Dixon. Always count on McLaren to do the most obnoxious thing. I’m sure Ganassi and Lundgaard will be laughing their way to the bank though because they will certainly gain more from hiring a rising Lundgaard than they will lose by dropping a declining Dixon. I get that McLaren hired Dixon and Rosenqvist to help them with oval setups in anticipation of IndyCar’s new chassis in 2028. Dixon’s setup knowledge may help them on ovals if Pato O’Ward is really that bad at oval setups as everyone says he is, but I really don’t see what Rosenqvist - a guy who kind of lucked into his only oval win - brings. I continue to think it was an O’Ward diva move because he didn’t like Lundgaard showing him up. But who knows with the McLaren firing squad? It’s not as though they didn’t screw over James Hinchcliffe, then Oliver Askew, then David Malukas, then Théo Pourchaire beforehand. (And news flash guys: you wouldn’t have needed to hire people to fix your oval setups if you simply hadn’t dumped Malukas in the first place.) Glad for Lundgaard. He earned it. I would’ve also been okay if Ganassi had hired either Rinus VeeKay, Colton Herta, or Kakunoshin Ohta for that car. While I think Lundgaard was the best choice, those other three would’ve been fine. Anyone else I’d have been royally pissed. I don’t think Lundgaard will overtake Álex Palou next year since Palou is much better than Lundgaard on ovals, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he proves every bit the match for him on road and street courses.
The more shocking news I suppose was that Brad Keselowski out of nowhere announced he was leaving and selling his share of RFK Racing. I would understand this if Keselowski was retiring, just like his onetime Penske #2 car predecessor Rusty Wallace did. Rusty owned a portion of the #2 car and then sold it upon his retirement. Given that precedent, I can understand why Keselowski took a swing at asking Penske for partial ownership, back in the day which led to his departure there. Penske correctly back then knew that Keselowski was not as vital to his operation as Rusty had been, regardless of the fact that one of them won a title for Penske and the other didn’t. However, I really thought Keselowski would be a lifer at RFK so this is really puzzling to me.
I honestly think Keselowski should retire now since I was already pretty confident that none of the RFK drivers will ever run again and Keselowski is certainly washed and consistently running worse than Chris Buescher and Ryan Preece, who aren’t running amazingly either. That almost forces me to conclude that the other co-owners forced Keselowski out because they think they can do better. I think they’re going to regret that choice because I think Keselowski was instrumental in reviving the team’s fortunes, arguably more as an owner and talent scout than as he did at a driver. Keselowski has a solid analytical mind and I think he has some good people working for him, but his engineers are probably better than his drivers. I’m not sure what precisely David Smith (who I used to work for) provided in his analytical role, but I’m betting it was tangible since I did find him better as a talent scout than as a statistician, even if I personally found the Preece hire to be dubious (and I guess I was half proven wrong).
I’m not really sure who’s going to be clamoring for Keselowski’s services at this juncture of his career. It wasn’t that long ago that you saw drivers forced out of rides after winning seasons, most notably Matt Kenseth in 2017, and Keselowski has only won once in the last five seasons and has been running a hell of a lot worse than Kenseth did at Joe Gibbs Racing (although I will admit that JGR has typically had much higher standards). Most people expected Keselowski to be the team leader at RFK when the team started, but I correctly forecast based solely on my teammate model that Chris Buescher would be close and a lot of people were skeptical, but this turned out to be right. More recent years have proven that it’s more about Keselowski’s falloff than Buescher being some kind of championship-caliber talent though. Yes, even at that, I recognize that Buescher has only barely outrun Keselowski if he even has at all since I know their performance has been quite similar, even though Buescher won five races there to Keselowski’s one. I guess I’d say that Buescher has outrun Keselowski over the entire schedule, but if you remove the road course races, they’ve been basically indistinguishable, but he definitely fell off this year due to his injury and he might be old enough that it will difficult for him to come back from said injury. A lot of boomer-era champions were able to extend their shelf life thanks to the past champion’s provisional, but that doesn’t exist anymore and there are hardly any DNQs in most NASCAR Cup Series races at all, so it’s hard to see what Keselowski brings except for his engineering aptitude. For a backmarker team, that might be more than enough. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing him replace Ty Dillon at Kaulig, but I guess we won’t know more about this until the coming months. Honestly, I think he should just retire. But I suspect that he won’t.
