February 2007 Archives

So I waited and I guess at the end of January I got a letter from some official body or other saying Congratulations.  You have received a 3 step merit increase.  A strange letter, with no acknowledgment that an error had been previously made and since there was no acknowledgment of an error there was of course no explanation of the unacknowledged error.

Well, I was happy to get the merit increase, and when I checked with our highest level secretary, I was told that I would get the money I hadn’t gotten for the six months they had taken to ok my merit raise.  So I would get retro pay, and starting in March my check would show the new adjusted amount.  At this point, though, I haven’t seen a penny of it since some mistake was made and instead of getting more money my check for February was completely cancelled and some strange accounting had to be done to get me my salary that couldn’t account for my raise or the missing money.

Someday I will see it. 

So I had my merit review last February and at the end of March I went to a convention of college writing teachers in Chicago I think it was and, of course, because it happens every time, I got sick about a week after I got back with some stuff that settled in my lungs and just wouldn’t seem to go away for the whole stinking quarter. I hate conferences.  I hate airplanes.  I hate airports too.

And then around in there maybe April or June we all get an out of nowhere email from our boss saying that she was retiring.  This was like completely unexpected and out of the blue, and in itself a cause for tension and concern.  This boss was the first boss of the writing program who a real tenure track professor.  In fact, she had been hired in as a Full Professor, which is a pretty big deal.  And now out of nowhere she was going.

We had one other Professor in the program but she didn’t have tenure and the rest, well, we were all top to bottom lecturers, and we felt—or at least I felt—that it had been good to have a full real professor as our boss since she might be able to talk with the guys up in the administration in a way that a lecturer, such as myself, could not.

So that was upsetting: to have the boss split like that after five years.  She had been a pretty decent boss, I think.  Nothing really had changed for the better in terms of our pay or workload or anything substantial like that but she was not nuts for one committee meeting after another and having been for years at another institution a full senate faculty member she brought with her a senate faculty ethos.  She treated us more as if we were professors and that meant, most importantly, that she mostly expected us not to be in our offices, which is the case with most Senate faculty—they are not in their offices. 

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That's my office again.  Part of a bookshelf featuring one of those singing fish.  I don't know why the hell I bought that.  But I actually bought it.  It sings "Splish Splash, I was taking a bath."  I don't think it sings now though because the battery is dead. 

I thought about taking the rejection of my three steps to the union, but then I thought that maybe I should look into whatever official channels for redress or reconsideration there might be.  My boss said that, according to the academic manual, I had the same right as anybody else to write a letter to the appropriate parties asking for a copy of the official report upon which the rejection of my merit increase had been based.

So I wrote said letter and waited.  Throughout the summer.  When fall came I asked my boss if she would ask for me at the end of September, then I asked if she would ask at the end of October and finally, some time, in October I got a copy of the official report.  It didn’t make any sense.  For one thing, my boss had said that the committee had whole heartedly back my three step merit; but the person writing the report remarked that the backing could hardly be considered whole hearted since one person had voted against my getting an increase.

This clarified one thing right off.  Different people over in the administration building had reviewed the different merit cases. How could one vote against me be taken as a sign that I didn’t deserve my three steps when one person who had three votes against him or her had received the three steps? This could only mean that one person had approved a three step for a person with three no votes, and another person had reviewed me and taken one no vote as a sign that I didn’t deserve the merit.  Not only had two people done the review of the cases, but clearly these two people had never sat down in the same room or talked to each other to standardize the criteria they were using to evaluate the merit requests.

Second, and glaringly, the author of the report said that he or she didn’t see why I should get a three step merit for this last four year period of review when I had done at least as much, if not more excellent work, in the three years before that and yet I had not requested a three step at that time.  So why should I request and get a three step this time, when I hadn’t requested or gotten one before.  This was a major gaffe indicating that the person writing my review had not been given much information about lecturers and their contract or he or she would have known that the last time I was reviewed it was not possible, according to the then existing contract, to ask for a three step merit.

This was like more than annoying.  It was damn disheartening.  I couldn’t help but feel, while of course there was nothing personal about it, that my case, and probably the cases of other lecturers as well, had been handled in a cursory, offhand, and desultory manner.  But I screwed myself up, and sent a copy of the report off to my boss, along with my analysis of it, and more or less agreeing with my analysis, she wrote off a letter to the appropriate parties requesting that my case be re-reviewed.

So again, I waited.  Till the end of November, when I ask my boss to send off a letter asking what was happening with the re-review.

The photo shows a slightly different view of my office.  That’s my official campus supplied computer there, and the viewer will note that it has been adjusted to the proper height by the very latest in phone directories.  Next to the phone directory sits my modern up to date touch tone phone that will not allow me to phone anybody outside my immediate area code.

I have been a lecturer in the UCSB Writing Program since 1980 and that’s all I have been.  I have not moved up in any way shape or form.  I have not, for example, become senior lecturer or super senior lecturer or anything like that because there are no such things.  Part of a career, as I understand the concept—and possibly I don’t—involves moving up.  But that didn’t happen so I guess I didn’t have much of a career.

About the only way to move up was to get a raise.  For whatever reasons, my bosses have never told me I was doing a super job or expressed how grateful they were that I continued to exist.  So getting a raise was about the only way to get a pat on the back.  But it was a sort of private pat on the back because none of us ever talk about how much we do or don’t make, maybe because we make so little.  So a raise was not really a social status thing; you don’t go around bragging about how much you make.  It’s better to have something by your name that says “Super Senior Lecturer.”

So some time, in this last horrible year, February or March, I guess it was I was up for a merit review and a possible pat on the back.  It had been four years since my last chance at a merit increase.  And at that time I got a two step merit increase which was the most a person could get according to our union contract.  But the contract had changed and I made sure that the boss knew that people could now get three or even four merit steps depending on degree of accomplishment.

I wanted to get a 3 step because, well, that would be like a super pat on the back and also I am close to retirement and wanted to get my salary up as high as I could because my retirement benefits are based on my 3 most highly paid years of service.  So this one was a big deal for me.

I felt I deserved a three step (heck, I felt I deserved a four step), and after the review, which is always just awful, like a beauty contest or something and you are wearing no clothes, I got a nice letter from my boss saying the committee had approved a three step increase for me and congratulations.  So I got the pat on the back and some money too.

But, whoa!  These merits aren’t automatic; they go from the program up to the Dean’s office, and I got a letter from the Dean’s office saying I had received a two step and not a three step. And of course, this is the university and no reason whatsoever was offered as to why I got two instead of three.

 Well, that hurt.  Screw it, I thought.  I will just suck it up.  But that didn’t seem right, so I went to the boss and told her what I had been told and ask her if anybody else had received a three step because I figured that if I hadn’t gotten one that the Dean’s office had decided not to give a three step to anybody.

But, no, my boss says that three of my colleagues had received three steps, and that one of them at least, as my boss remembered it, had received fewer votes than I for those three steps.  I tend towards paranoia and this didn’t help.  Not only had I not received my secret pat on the back, I felt as if I had been slapped in the face, for what reason, I knew not.

And to top that off, because of my fatigue no doubt, I sent an email to my boss discussing my not getting a three step and pushed the wrong button I guess and sent the email to all of my colleagues.  So my slap in the face went public.

That’s a picture of my office at UCSB.  It must be from a few years ago because that’s a lexmark printer amid all the junk there, and now I have an HP.  That’s my trusty scanner to the left of the Lexmark.  Jeez, I must have gotten that thing back in the mid 90’s.

Well, the year that refused to die finally did.  And two days before it went off its final rewards, escrow closed and the money from the sale, minus paying off the equity line and back taxes, showed up magically in Joan’s checking account.

Maybe a couple of weeks before escrow closed—I can’t remember—I ordered another one of those huge dumpsters deposited on the Delridge property, and Dave and Dave and Dan and Dylan went up to Delridge and cleared out the final stuff.  They filled up that dumpster too with more stuff from outside the house and also with stuff from inside.

There had been talk of selling some of the furniture.  Really, though, it didn’t look like we could get much for any of it.  But we couldn’t throw the furniture out either.  So Dave decided that maybe the best thing to do was to rent one of those storage PODS and have it deposited on the property.  So we had one of those delivered to the propery and they filled that thing up too from stuff in the house—furniture and other smaller items.

For a few weeks, Teresa had been sorting through Joan’s clothing to pick out and save what might prove useful, and Steve had made several runs through the house with garbage bags cleaning out the refrigerators and drawers in what seemed an endless supply of chest of drawers.

WB and Joan had always had trouble—especially WB—with throwing anything out.  But during the last couple of years in their stay at Delridge things had just gotten out of hand.  They hadn’t thrown anything out, but stuffed every nook and cranny with old bills, paper work of all kinds, and just plain assorted junk.

 I now believe that if one is old and feels death approaching that one is responsible for cleaning up one’s mess before leaving this earth.  Sort of like picking up after yourself in a final sort of way. Because going through your parents’ stuff is hard, not just physically but emotionally.  

They ended up filling the POD completely up because Dave didn’t want to have to tell Joan, should she ask, that we had thrown out such and such an item.  The POD is now in a storage facility down in Escondido not far from where Joan is staying.  I expect it will stay there, unopened, until such time as Joan is no longer around to ask where such and such an item might be.

Then, who knows, what we will do, but we will do something.

Above: a POD, sometimes referred to as the “mobile storage experience.”  They come in all shapes and sizes.  When the economy completely collapses we will probably start living in those things.

Carol thinks I could have died from that pneumonia, had it been viral.  At the time she said, you look terrible.  I didn’t pay much attention, but one day I looked in the mirror, and I went out and asked her—pointing to my face—is this what you mean when you say I look terrible.  Yes, she said.

I had thought that when a person got old and grey that the grey applied to hair color.  Not so.  One can also get old and grey in the face.  I didn’t know that till the pneumonia.  The color of my face was beyond white; it had gone over into slate grey.  Now if my face isn’t positively ruddy, I think I look grey. 

H

Grey is the color of sick.  I saw this man about my age on campus.  I think he was down and out and had probably come unto campus from the bus stop to use the restrooms.  He had grey hair, a grey beard, his jacked zipped up to his neck, and he was grey. He was the color of sick.

I was getting back to my sort of normal color around the time the Delridge place went into escrow.  The buyer was a Native American; she had grown up in wretched poverty and never owned her own home.  It was a big step and naturally she hesitated, but she had money having become involved in some capacity with the local Indian run casino.

Apparently, she had, according to Suzi, felt spiritually drawn to Delridge.  Maybe it was the privacy and the brush all around.  She seems to have liked that it had been made out of the very earth upon which it stood.  She came up to the property a couple of times at night to check out the spiritual vibes in the moonlight.

We got through escrow somehow.  I made a mistake and wrote on some official document that the place had mold somewhere.  That’s what I had been told after they did the termite inspection.  They charged a pretty penny for that inspection; how many termites can there be in a house made out of mud?  But they had mentioned mold in their report, and so I checked yes next to: does the place have mold question. 

That scared the buyer apparently.  But Suzi managed to straighten it out.  I don’t know how she did but she did.  Also we had to get the propane gas turned back on, and there was some sort of 250 dollar problem with the septic tank. 

My sister in law, Teresa, Dave’s wife, thinks maybe selling the house helped to cause me some stress that could have led to or helped along the pneumonia.  Maybe so.  I had never sold a house before and didn’t know anything about how to do it, and I was doing it long distance.  And I have to say, it seemed, that when I wasn’t thinking about something else, and was just getting a little relaxed that damn house and trying to get it sold would pop into my head.  I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

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The picture shows the living room of Delridge. 

Finally, the summer of ought-six came to a close and it was back to school again, but about 2 weeks into the ten week quarter, I began to run a low grade fever.  It was strange.  I don’t run low grade fevers.  But I did this time.  I kept doing the school stuff but one weekend morning—a Saturday, I think—I woke to a temperature of a 104.  I felt crappy and a little scared.  I hadn’t had symptoms of a cold exactly, more just plain fatigue.

So I went to the walk in clinic with Carol and when they heard they had a sixty year old guy with a 104 fever they took me in almost immediately.  I had a doctor I had never seen before.  But he seemed to know his stuff and said we should get an x-ray.  So I walked down the corridor, sat, got an x-ray, walked back to the little room I had been in before with the doctor and he came in and said I had pneumonia.  He gave me a shot of something and a prescription for anti-biotics and said he was sending me home, rather than to the hospital because going to the hospital, with all the crap floating around in those places, was more dangerous than just going home.  Sleep, the doctor said, and don’t let yourself get dehydrated.

Of course pneumonia comes in both a viral and a bacterial form.  The antibiotics would help with bacteria but not necessarily with the virus.  I don’t know what kind I had, but the temperature went down in about 24 hours though it still hovered around 100.  Maybe the temperature had peaked on its own or maybe the anti-biotics helped.  Funny, but even with the fever I still had an appetite.

When you say you have pneumonia people look at you funny because pneumonia is serious business.  I didn’t really know what kind of serious it was.  I managed to have to cancel only one day of class, in the middle of all this; on another, I had a colleague show a video for me.  So I missed two days over two weeks I guess.  And slowly I understood why pneumonia is serious.  It just knocks the stuffing right out of you.  I had no energy.  Period.  I would drag my ass over to teach and as soon as I was done, I would drag my ass back and lie down.  It was like I needed a fork lift for my ass; it was dragging so bad.

And the crap just wouldn’t go away.  I had made an appointment—as I was told do—with my pulmonary doctor before the pneumonia hit.  So after I had seen my regular doctor about the pneumonia, we planned out that I would see the pulmonary guy to have a final check.  So I went and they x-rayed me again.  The doctor said I had pneumonia alright; the lungs were still a little inflamed.  And then he told me I had a bit of asthma.

Well, damn.  He had a doctor in training in the room with him, and he said to her, “Now what is the one thing Mr. Tingle can do to most improve his pulmonary health.”  Before she could reply, I said, “You mean other than stop this damn smoking.”  So one thing led to another and I was actually up and pacing the room on a rant about all I had tried to do over the years to stop smoking.  And I wanted help I said.  And the doc said this and then he said that, and I said I have tried all of the things you have recommended and that I didn’t understand why if cigarette smoking is as horrible as it is supposed to me why the hell couldn’t I check into like a Betty Ford clinic for three weeks to have a running chance at getting off the “shit.”  And I apologized for my language.

And then I apologized for my rant.  Thank goodness, the doctor, who himself looks like a stroke ready to happen, said my rant had been funny really.

Carol—who was there—said, yea it had been sort of funny, like watching a person ready to burst into tears at any second, and walking right up to the edge of the cliff and then veering away.
 

I don’t have a pneumonia picture, so here’s one of WB’s one good shed up on the Delridge property.

When we got back from taking WB’s ashes to Ora, SC, I stuck my head into this closet pantry we have right under the stairs to the second floor of the condo and right adjacent to the kitchen.  And man—when I stuck my head in—did it stink.  We had been gone back to SC at least a couple of weeks between the end of regular school and the start of summer school, so I figured maybe I had left something in there, an onion or possibly a potato, that had gone bad.

But I couldn’t find anything and when I started really looking I noticed that the wall of the little closet pantry was wet and covered with mold.  That’s what was stinking.  The damn mold.  So we took all our foodstuff that we had in the pantry closet—pasta and cans of stuff and rice and well just about everything we ate (except meat)--and put it all in cardboard boxes and piled them in the little corridor that runs from the main corridor to a little half bath.  The washer and the drier are in that little corridor.  So what with those and the boxes of food stuff it was hard to get to the little half bath and hard to get to the foodstuff too since it was all stacked on top of itself.

Finally, we figured out that while we had been gone there had been a major leak, more like explosion leak, in the closet outside our closet.  We have an end unit—our condo, I mean is an end unit—and at the end of our end unit is a communal closet that houses the water heaters for the whole building our little condo is part of.  So an explosion leak had occurred involving the water heater that had saturated the wall of the communal closet.  They fixed that, putting in new sheet rock.  But nobody had the sense to check to see if the sheetrock that was the wall of our pantry closet and was about four inches from the sheetrock they replaced had been damaged at all by the water explosion.

Man, what a mess.  I can’t explain condo law.  But because the explosion that saturated and ruined and molded up our wall was the result of a condo failure, the condo association had to replace the wall which meant the condo association did the hiring of the people to fix the wall and we consequently were at the mercy of the condo association to make sure the job was well and expeditiously done.  Well, I think it was well done, but it sure as hell wasn’t expeditious.  Damn, the repair drug clear into August what with people coming and going to do this and that.

 First, they had to dry out the wall.  I thought they would just knock it out, but no, because of the national mold scare, they insisted on drying it out just in case some of the mold might escape up the wall, mold apparently being very fast on its feet.  So they stuck this monstrous heat-a-lator thing in the closet that made a terrible racket and heated up the closet to about 120 degrees to kill off the mold.  And then there was this and then there was that and it just drug on and on getting the wall knocked down, getting it put back, getting it painted, getting a piece of carpet for the floor.

I was hoping to quiet down a bit and get some rest after the strenuous months before but, no, here I was teaching summer school—that was my mistake—and having to deal with the constant aggravation of people coming in and out of the condo at all manner of hours to fix that damn closet.

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Our renovated pantry closet is now the best organized closet in the entire condo.

Boy, my memory is just plain going.  Maybe not.  Seems to me you have to remember something before you can forget it.  So maybe my remembering is going.  Things go in one ear and out the other leaving no traces on those brain synapses.

In any case, the house sat unmoving on the market all through the summer.  I never thought about changing realtors.  I guess Suzi and I bonded.  She dropped by the Delridge house the day we were all there cleaning up.  She kept saying awfully nice things about our parents, until I said, well, frankly, we boys did not feel all that positively towards them.  And finally she had to say that she really hadn’t liked the way Joan had treated WB in her presence.  She didn’t go into details, but she didn’t need to.

Also, she told me that last year on almost the same day as the one we were sitting there at that table in the Delridge Kitchen, she and her husband had been topping a hill and were struck head on by a drunk driver.  Her husband was killed instantly, and she was in the hospital a long time.  You couldn’t tell to look at it, she said, but they had remade her whole face.  If I wanted, she said, I could tap her cheek and feel metal or maybe it was plastic.  In any case, I didn’t tap.  And she seemed to know her job very well, and be damned if I was going to start complaining to a woman, now a single mother, trying to make do after the sudden death of her husband and the remaking of her face.So I followed her lead and didn’t say anything as the house sat and didn’t move at 620K. 

 Carol and I belong to a club where we go to work out.  All the members there drive lexuses or Mercedes, or BMWs or some form of those monstrous SUVs.  My 84 Volvo with the paint coming off is always the oldest and rattiest car in the lot.  But I got to talking to a real estate guy in the locker room.  He was a real nice guy.  I haven’t seen him for a while but every time I saw him over the summer and into the fall he would ask about the Delridge house.

As we were coming up on November, he said one day that he didn’t think the market had bottomed out yet, and that maybe we should withdraw the Delridge House from the market for a while and then put it back on at the start of the new year at a reduced price, maybe 600K.  That way the listing would catch the eye of the realtors again and at the lower price it might move. This made sense to me so I called Suzi and suggested the move.  She wasn’t sure about withdrawing it but she did think, the way things looked, that the price should be dropped.

So we dropped it—I forget to what exactly—maybe 590K or 600K, and within two weeks Suzi called saying she had a buyer.  Turns out a person had been interested in the house for some time but hadn’t been up to the 620K, but she would be up to 585K, plus some of the fees normally paid by the buyer not the seller.  So we took it with one contingency.  Escrow had to close before January 1; then we would still be able to claim WB’s capital gains exemption and save ourselves an additional loss of 25K or thereabouts.

I ordered over the phone and put on my credit card one of those huge dumpsters you see behind stores.  Maybe 5 feet high or so.  The waste management company dropped it off and later picked it up at Delridge for around 800 dollars.  Carol and I drove down to Delridge on the Saturday when Dan, Dylan, Dave, and Dave gathered to try to pick up stuff from around and about on the property.

WB had three sheds and two of those had to be knocked down they were in such ill repair.  They were full of junk.  In addition to the tractor and the trailer previously mention, there was old cement mixer, the one used to mix up the adobe block, and more than one beat up and mutiliated wheel barrow and all sorts of other litter all over the place.  The guys filled that dumpster right up to the brim and overflowing in about four hours. But it looked like they had only made a dent and the inside of the house was hardly touched.

But things were getting into shape for eventual sale.  Suzi got a guy named Jose and his crew to come out and cut back all the brush a legal distance from the drive.  I don’t remember what he was doing but he was out at Delridge one late afternoon and was attacked by a swarm of bees.  This had to be looked into because Jose said he wouldn’t go back out there until the bee business was attended to and usually bees don’t attack people.

So I had Suzi call an apian—or bee specialist—who went out to Delridge and found that a swarm of killer or Africanized bees had taken up residence in one of the pillars on the wall around the court yard.  We hadn’t seen them because apparently they swarm only at certain times of day, late afternoon, it appeared, and indeed they would go after a person en masse if disturbed.  So the apian guy came out, located the hive, and wiped out the bees, lord knows with what.

I don’t know.  I just hadn’t expected to encounter killer bees as part of selling the Delridge property.  I had this quasi comic picture of poor Jose fleeing the Delridge property pursued by a pack of angry bees.  I guess we stepped in just in the nick of time because what with the bees and the rats it seemed the Delridge property was very rapidly ceasing to be a human habitation and becoming more a part of the local ecosystem.

The picture shows that portion of the wall where the bees took up residance, in a pillar I believe either directly adjacent to or under the bougianvillea.

What about those rats?

Those rats disturbed us.  WB and Joan had purchased four acres of Southern California savannah covered with mesquite, scrub oaks, and all manner of sticky bushes and grasses.  If a body got off the drive in and try to push a path through this brush it was a hard go; a machete might have been in order.  Certainly, bare legged one would have been scratched repeatedly and probably have given up any attempt at forward movement after a few minutes, and even with pants one would get scratched on the arms and sometimes even the face by a low lying branch.  It was pretty thick stuff with an occasionally bare space afforded by a protrusion of rock.

When WB and Joan first moved there in the early 80’s that brush was all there was in the area.  Higher in some places, lower in others, but mostly brush, a habitat: home to a variety of beasts and bugs.  Deer were seen migrating through the property when they first moved in.  Coyotes were spotted, and even as I recollect an occasional mountain lion.  It was not a good place to keep your domestic cat since they would end up coyote food.  Rabbits abounded and other small rodents.  Birds chirped; I especially liked to catch sight of your crazy looking road runner.

 But over the years more and more people moved in and, sometimes for aesthetic, some times for safety (mesquite goes up like a torch), folks cut back the native brush.  Deer no longer came through; no bob cats were spotted.  Dogs appeared and horses.  But Joan and WB did not cut back the brush, except such as necessary to protect the house from fire.  One of the effects of this ecological alteration appears to have been the mass migration of field rats from the brush where they had been to the brush on the Delridge property.

Those buggers were everywhere.  They had gotten into the attic at one point and then somehow removed.  But we worried, as we tried to sell the house about their having moved back in.  I want to call the rats field rats.  Field rats do not seem so alarming; they live in the fields and frolic about like free range chickens.  But a rat that lives in a house becomes, ipse facto, a house rat and that is another sort of rat completely.  A mean, viscious creature that eats wiring and leaves rat poop all over the premises and is generally a menace to society.

On the day we gathered to clean up the property,  I was inside when I heard shouting, yelling, cursing, rocks being thrown, and “Did you see that thing?”  For in their picking up of junk they had unearthed one of those rats which they described variously as being one huge sucker and as large as a small cat.  I failed to see it sadly.  And while we worried throughout the sale of the house about those rats, we never were required to bring in a rat exterminator.

Thank god.

Man, it’s hard to write about this last 18 months.  Too much stuff, I guess.  But as I said we got a real estate dealer by the name of Suzi.  I didn’t meet her till the day we brothers got together at Delridge to try to clean up the outside of the place, and some of the inside for if and when the house sold.  Because at that time, early summer, late spring, the house had been on the market for a while and wasn’t moving at 620K.  But in any case, we knew we would have to clean up, even with it being sold as is, especially the stuff outside.

WB had a least 2 sheds full of junk and junk all around the sheds full of junk.  You would walk around and stub your toe on junk, pieces of metal, scraps of iron, and a whole bunch of 50 gallon barrels, and a trailer for taking stuff to the dump that had four flat tires and, oh yea, the little tractor.  When one of WB’s neighbors had died, he had inherited this little tractor that he used for diverse grading purposes, including and mostly keeping the dirt drive into the place in drivable shape. 

So we had to get rid of that tractor since we doubted anybody moving into the place would want it and we didn’t want to just give it away since it was a good little tractor.  We thought about trying to fire it up.  But we had a problem doing that, what with no key.  So we told Suzi we wanted to sell it and she said she knew a guy that might want it, and I gave Suzi brother Dave’s number since he was the designated tractor guy.  And almost immediately this guy called Dave and said he wanted it, but Dave thought the guy was really trying to lowball us and he didn’t like the guy because he kept pestering.

So to continue with the tractor line of thought, the tractor was still sitting there right up till and after the time the house was sold.  By that time, we saw the tractor wasn’t something we were going to be able to move even with a key because the rats (those are another story) had eaten through all the wiring and plastic type tubing.  So I got the number of the guy who made the first offer to brother Dave, and called him, and he did seem like a peculiar fellow over the phone.  And I said we were selling the tractor and what did he think it was worth, and he said 500 dollars, and I said OK, but getting it off the property would be entirely his job. 

 I told him we didn’t have a key, but sure enough he called back and asked had we found a key, and I said no.  And then he called from the property and said the tractor was all stuck down in the dirt and the shovel part up front was down and  was stuck in the dirt and he didn’t know how he was going to move it at all.  Well, I said, I didn’t know what I could do being up in Santa Barbara and all; and if he couldn’t get the tractor off the property well that was the end of the deal.

Next thing I know he has called and he has gotten the tractor off the property and he sends a cashier’s check for 500 dollars and I send him a letter acknowledging payment and change of ownership.  I didn’t have a pink slip or even know if a tractor has a pink slip, so I didn’t send him one of those.  That tractor turned out to be a real hassle.  But we had it gone a few days before the deal officially closed

That’s the little tractor above up on a mound of dirt.  As you can see, it was not exactly a small mechanical contrivance.

So selling a house long distance isn’t so easy.  Especially if you have our fax machine.  I don’t know why we haven’t gotten a new one.  I guess because we got very few faxes, but when I started doing the real estate stuff I started getting faxes all the time, what with papers to sign and so forth, and that meant you had to be right there when the fax came in because the damn machine wouldn’t load the paper properly.  You have to stand there and assist the paper by pushing it down a little to make sure the machine drags it through and does its printing thing.  What a pain!

I was feeling really tired somewhere in there last year in March, April, May, June, July—somewhere in there, so much so that Carol started wondering aloud and frequently if maybe my sleep apnea mask wasn’t working.  The sleep apnea mask really worked; before I started sleeping with that damn thing stuck to my face—the apnea mask I mean—I had begun to feel really tired.  Saturday especially got to me; the idea of going out to stock up on groceries gave me a bleak feeling, like when am I going to get a break.  But after I started using the sleep apnea mask that dark feeling went away and I had a bit more energy.

But back then in those months Carol felt maybe that energy had gone away since I had started to seem pretty bleak again.  Certainly WB’s death and Joan’s health and the equity line and selling the house, as well as what I do for a living, had built up to a good deal of stress.  But Carol’s sense was that this wasn’t stress exactly but something more physiological.  Like the sleep apnea mask.  So I got another one, and it didn’t help.

 It wasn’t until just last November I realized that I was especially tired, not only because of the pneumonia I got around that time, but because, sometime in February, I had decided to go off Effexor.  I mean I was doing 375 milligrams of it per day, plus 300 Welbutrin.  Like that’s 675 milligrams of anti-depressant, so I decided to get off the Effexor, very gradually as people suggest.  Like a drop of 37.5 milligrams once a month.  Looking back I now see that on top of being stressed out I was going through withdrawal from Effexor. 

So underneath all my conscious strangeness and feelings of weirdness and fatigue and sort of out of body disassociate experiences, beneath all that I was going through withdrawal from a real mean anti-depressant and I didn’t know it.  I told people, when they asked, that I was going through a life crisis.  That’s what I thought.  I didn’t have a life crisis at 40 or at 50—but 60 was turning out to be one hell of a life crisis.  Well, maybe it was a life crisis, but one aggravated, agitated and irritated by an undercurrent at the physiological, biochemical level of a really nasty withdrawal. 

No wonder then that I nearly threw that fax machine through the wall one day. Damn, just getting a piece of paper into that machine felt like an overwhelming chore of unspeakable proportions.  Or something like that.

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That’s the back side of Delridge on the same foggy day.

Next we had to set about selling the house and figuring out how to do that.  As it turned out, we were in the position of putting the house on the market at a time, for the first time in years, that house prices were going DOWN.  Hard to believe.  We figured that house would have gotten 660K, maybe more, the year before.  We thought about putting it off; maybe waiting to see if the prices started coming back up.  But that would surely take a year at least for them to bottom out, and more than that to turn around.

We just couldn’t wait.  Brother Steve was scared to death that Joan would somehow get herself out of the place she was and go back up there to that house.  I suppose we could have just let her do that and she could have cooked her own goose.  But to brother Steve’s credit and ours too I guess we didn’t want Joan to die inhumanely.  So we decided we had to unload the house and pretty pronto since prices were still tilting downward.  Another reason being that if we managed to sell within the 2006 calendar year, we would still be eligible to use WB’s capital gains exemption and that along with Joan’s we figured would pretty much protect the profit after bills to the state and to the bank were paid off.

A real estate dealer was on the scene as soon as she heard about WB’s death.  She contacted us, I think, and offered her services.  She knew WB and Joan having approached them on several previous occasions to see if they were thinking of selling.  They weren’t, but she already knew the house and from the web page of the firm she worked with it was clear they knew the area—Valley Center—really well, knew what was selling, and what wasn’t.  What was hot and what not.  In any case, I spoke with her on the phone and she impressed me with her knowledge of the area.  She knew all the adobe houses too and what they were like and how they were moving.

We settled on 620K as the asking price in “as is” condition.  That meant we were not going to pop a lot of money to get stuff painted or what not to make the place look better, and it didn’t look as good as it could have.  During the last years, WB hadn’t been up to his usual work standards and the place was looking pretty ragged around the edges; some blocks were coming off the patio walls, and there were dinks and dents in the walls inside from where they had hit them with their ponderous electric wheel chairs.  And WB had tried to build a sort of porch thing off the kitchen door that looked like the construction of a madman, all shambly and falling down.

But they had four acres.  That was good.  The acres might attract people who wanted to run horses.  There were a goodly number of horse people about. But the house was on the small side with just two bedrooms.  Not exactly a family house.  But the walls were adobe and 14 inches thick. There’s nothing like 14 inches of adobe to moderate the heat; and the roof was red tile, and when the big fire had come through a couple of years before, the abode was untouched while the regular frame house a couple of hundred yards away was burnt to the ground.

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That's the "court yard," I guess you could call it, of Delridge on a foggy day. 

That’s partly why I got so fed up with the bank.  We were told we could handle getting Joan’s equity line extended through a local bank.  So that’s where we went with all our paper work.  We worked with a young woman—now gone to another bank—who was pleasant and pretty smart I think.  But neither she nor the bank seemed to know what they were doing when it came to extending an equity line to a trust.

I don’t know how many times we had to go back.  We thought we had given them a whole copy of the trust.  But they couldn’t find it, so we took what we thought they needed, since the trust was a large document, but that wasn’t enough, so we had to bring more documentation.  Then we started signing documents, and I noticed that the documents I was signing had William B. Tingle at the top and not William N. Tingle.  I thought maybe they could just erase the B and write in the N, but no way was that going to happen.  Every time we had to do something more, we would ask who says we have to do this, is there anybody we can call, and always the answer was the lawyers say do it and that was that.

This went on for months.  First getting the bank all the proper papers and then getting the bank to send back the right papers, and then for us to sign the papers, and get some of the papers sent back for correction so we could resign them.  And then we had to wait and wait for them to approve the extension.  We asked for 360,000 against the house, and really there was no reason why we shouldn’t get what we ask for.  But given all the mistakes already made and those damn lawyers out there some where, I couldn’t help but worry and worry over whether the loan would be approved.

 Finally, it was approved and all the documents signed when I got a call saying I had to prove WB was dead.  For God’s sake.  All this time, what had it all been about but getting money for Joan because WB was dead.  I was pissed and told Carol I was going to take in WB’s ashes and dump them all over the young woman’s desk and ask her if that was proof enough.  But Carol calm me down though I was about to blow a cork and managed to find WB’s death certificate that we had picked up when we got the ashes.

The whole thing just wore me down.  The bank as far as I could tell worked under the assumption that anybody who came in for a loan had to be a lying, cheating son-of-a-bitch whose only purpose in life was to find clever ways to defraud banks.  That’s one of the laws of bureaucracy: make every body pay for the actions of the worst among us.

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Oh, in the picture.  That's the fireplace WB built at  10194 Ramona  Drive.  WB was sitting  on the  right end of that fireplace one hot boring day when he lit his lighter under Micky the Dog's a-hole and made him fly across the room.

So how were we going to get that equity line extended?  Joan didn’t seem to have the mental wherewithal to do it, and yet she showed no signs whatsoever of being inclined to relinquish her control over her assets.  So I set about getting her declared mentally incompetent.  This was not so easy.

First I decided to contact the lawyer that had drawn up the Tingle Family Trust back in 2000, I think it was.  She said that she understood the situation being familiar with such situations as a practitioner of family law.  I had, she said, according to the terms of the trust to get two doctors to say Joan was not up to snuff mentally.  Honestly, I didn’t know if she was up to snuff mentally or not.  I didn’t want to force the issue.  One doctor had already given her some little test and he said she was sane.  She knew where she was and the date and everything. But the people where she was staying at that time seemed to believe that she was out of it.

I called and called and finally found out the day and the times of the visits that the doctor for that place was there.  The one responsible for Joan.  He was Dr. Lee, I do believe, and when I was finally able to get him on the phone, he said Joan was out of it and that he would sign a letter to that effect.  I said thank you and could he get another doctor to sign a letter to that effect also.  He said he would try.  I still don’t know what the big deal was; maybe it was something legal.  But I didn’t hear back and I had to call a couple times more, and finally he said he had the signature of another doctor.  With those documents in hand, I could drive down to the lawyer in Escondido and have Joan declared incompetent and by the terms of the Tingle Family Trust I would then be able to get the equity line extended with the overall goal of selling the house.

As soon as I got the doctor letter in the mail I thought there was a problem because it was one doctor letter with two doctors’ names on it, and not two letters each with a different name on it.  It just didn’t look right.  One name was where it should be and the other was just scrawled down at the bottom of the page.  But the lawyer said she thought it might do, so we made an appointment and drove down to Escondido to get Joan declared mentally incompetent.

As soon as I showed her the doctor’s letter, she indicated she was willing to accept it for the purposes of her paperwork but she was afraid no bank would accept it.  Honestly, I didn’t know at that time what the hell the bank had to do with it.  I thought if I had a legal letter from a lawyer a bank would accept that, but apparently not.  I started feeling pretty gloomy, but then the lawyer ask if we knew Joan’s mental state, and I said that we had just seen her not twenty minutes before coming to the lawyer and that she had been alert and knew who we were and had even talked with us cogently for a few minutes.  So the lawyer said, if that was the case, then we should all get in her car and drive back to the place where Joan was and get Joan, being of sound mind and all that, to sign the paper saying I was the financial executor of her estate.

All this was damn confusing.  I mean here I was with a letter signed by two doctors saying Joan was too out of it to know what she was doing, and here was the lawyer saying maybe Joan was sane enough to sign off on the Trust.  So we drove back to where Joan was and the lawyer and Carol and I sat there with Joan, and I told Joan that I wanted her to sign right here on this piece of paper—and I pointed to the line—and that unless she did that I would not be able to assume responsibility for her finances.  This I said, needed to be done, since she, Joan, didn’t seem up to it and I mentioned some things like her forgetting to pay bills.  She said she didn’t forget bills.  And I said, fine, but if she wanted her finances taken care of she needed to sign this document.  She took the pen in hand and gave me a real long look.  I wasn’t sure what that look meant.  But I think I saw some fear.  After all, Joan doesn’t trust anybody.  Why should she, being the kind of untrustworthy person she was, willing to write her most helpful son out of a will just because she didn’t get her way.

I said, “I will take care of it.”  And rapped my knuckles on the table as I sometimes do when I want to make a point or seal the deal.  So she took the pen and made her mark.  She took a while doing it since she takes great pride in her penmanship, and I must say, while a little shaky, the signature was clearly hers and fully legible.

The picture shows the Delridge house in its early stages.  You can see the slab and behind that some of the 10,000 adobe block WB made, and beyond that you can see the hills show few signs of habitation because when Joan and WB moved there in the early 80’s there were very few people out that way. 

God, even remembering the events of this last 18 months is exhausting.

So we got Joan into the place she is in now, a decent place.  But decent places cost.  In this case 5000 a month plus incidentals, plus drugs, plus trips for the hospital every time she falls down and they think she needs observation in case of concussion.

We needed we saw for sure to sell the house on Delridge, but in the meantime, we needed to extend the equity line Joan and WB had taken out on the house to cover the immediate expenses at the new place.  They had already taken out a number of years back an equity line for 50,000 but that was nearly used up and they were paying lots of interest.  Additionally, they had not been paying state property taxes for years, using some deal the state had, a real screw you deal, that allowed old people to defer property taxes with the idea that the money would be taken out of the property when sold.  So with that and having to pay off the equity line, a substantial chunk of money was to come out of the money we got for the house right off the top.

But first the equity line.  Since you just can’t put up a sign and expect the house to sell in a couple of days.  Additionally, Joan wouldn’t even talk about selling the house.  Also, she was forgetting things more and more and it didn’t seem as if she was up even to negotiating or doing the paper work necessary to get the equity line extended.

Doing that fell to me as the executor of the financial part of the Tingle Family Trust.  I wasn’t supposed to me the one to do this.  In the original trust brother Steve had been made the financial executor.  But at some point, Joan—and it was Joan’s doing—wrote Steve and “all his progeny” completely out of the will.  Unbelievable.  Here was Steve, living maybe 20 minutes from the Delridge place and going over there all the time to check on them, and bring in the mail, and take out the trash and make sure they had food, and even driving them occasionally to the doctor, several times when some sort of emergency occurred.

I mean damn.  One day Steve comes over and finds WB lying face down in the dirt and when Steve tries to help him up the old man curses him out.  Damn.  He helps out, puts up with their complaints about whatever he does and Joan writes him out of the will.  Probably she was pissed that Steve wouldn’t move right in with them at Delridge like she wanted, and then when Steve decided to take a break, for the sake of his sanity, and go on a little camping trip and visit us folks up in SB, she let it be known that she did not want him to go, and when he did, she had him written out of the will.  At least we think that’s when it happened.  The dates on the change in the trust strongly suggest the two events were related.

In any case, she didn’t tell Steve anything about it and he had to find out about it when looking for some papers she wanted and came across the trust and saw that he and all his progeny (if you can believe) had been written out of the will.  For God’s sake.  Around then we all started referring to Joan as evil.  We are linguistically a conservative group and don’t like to abuse a word and evil has been abused lately, but in Joan’s case it seemed to fit.

This is a picture of the drive into the Delridge House. When I say the house was off in the middle of nowhere, I exaggerate of course.  But this picture does suggest it was off a bit somewhere. 

After WB’s funeral ceremony in Escondido, Carol and I went to the mortuary to collect his ashes. 

As hard as it was on me and Steve too to leave SC, the only place we had known at that point, and felt comfortable knowing, I think it must have been harder on WB to leave that area and his family behind.  WB didn’t develop any real connections to anybody outside family.  There was his wife, of course, and the boys.  And beyond that his brothers and sisters back in South Carolina and that was just about it.

 He didn’t drink so he didn’t hang out at bars jawing with his co-workers.  He wasn’t really into sports.  So he didn’t go to football or baseball games.  Nor did he bowl or go to auto races or golf. Nor did he play pool or any manner of board games. He had fellow bricklayers that he would mention from time to time and he knew some of the brick mason tenders.  But I can’t say that he made any friends in California.

Well, there was one guy that he seems to have done a few things with or maybe a few things for.  This guy was as crazy as a loon and in fact ended up in the mental hospital.  Jack Sickler, I think his name was.  I remember that he and WB staked out Jack’s house I think because Jack thought that his wife was unfaithful.  And I do believe Jack talked about killing his wife and himself at different points.  Maybe they were friends since WB was loony too.  But I think it more likely that WB sort of looked after Jack and tried to keep him out of trouble, though he wasn’t much good at it.

WB was not social really or a scintillating conversationalist.  Even later on when he visited the homes of his children he would say a few things and then go to sleep in the chair he was sitting in or maybe disappear off into one of the bedrooms and go to sleep.  

I had occasion, when I was a brick mason tender, to observe him interacting with his peers at lunch break.  They would go sit in some unfinished house to get out of the sun.  They would sit on the concrete or pull up a can of some kind. WB would sit sort of off from the rest.  And mostly they weren’t talking at all.  But then WB would say something like, do you remember that job where we had blah, blah, blah and when was that exactly?  And then if any of the other guys had been on that job they would set to figuring out when that job was.  And then WB would say, and wasn’t so and so on that job.  And if anybody had been on that job too, they would set to trying to remember if so and so had been on that job or not.  And then somebody would say that no so and so had not been on that job but he had been on this other job over blah, blah, blah, and WB would wonder when that job had been, and they would set to remembering when that job had been.

And it would go on like that for the whole half hour, if they talked about anything at all. Those were some of the damndest conversations I ever heard. 

That’s WB in the picture mixing up adobe for the blocks for his masterpiece, the adobe house on Delridge.

 I think I will follow up on my previous entry by continuing to complain for a while.

So while WB was in the home—while all that was going on—and after too, Joan refused to face the fact that she had to leave the house on Delridge Lane.  It’s off in the middle of nowhere.  And partly because of her stroke and her obstinate refusal to listen to anybody, she had fallen down on more than one occasion, and WB being too weak, an ambulance had to come out and they had to pick her up.  This happened more than once; and they made it clear at one point that this falling down and their coming out to pick up business could not go on forever.

So that was one thing.  And we were not sure either about what our legal responsibly was, if any.  Steve was concerned that WB, when he was still there, would go out and even though he was nearly 100% blind from macular degeneration would climb up to the roof, fall off and accidentally kill himself.  If he did, was that our fault somehow?  Hell, we didn’t know anything about this territory.

Joan kept falling down and finally the brothers found a place for her down in Escondido, with a hospital right across the street.  She had a large and plain room and down in Escondido she was able to get herself ferried over to where WB was so she could visit him nearly every day.  She was getting about in this really ponderous electrical wheelchair.

Then I forget what happened.  But she ended up in the hospital, and when they went to release her, she got herself released into the care of a woman who had previously been their care taker, and what do you know, but over all of our expressed concerns about her moving back out into the middle of nowhere, she managed to get herself back into that house, upon which her health began to decline.

I had a long talk I remember with the care taker saying that Joan was just sitting there in her chair unresponsive and that she the care taker didn’t know what to do and that medical issues like this were outside of her range.  And then one night around then Joan fell and got stuck between two pieces of furniture and completely unable to move had to lie on that tile floor till past dawn when the caretaker came, saw her flopped on the floor, had to break into the house and called the ambulance to take her to the hospital.  Seems as if, from later reports, she had a real bad bladder infection and it had affected her brain in some way.  

Who knows?  But that ripped it.  No more Delridge!  So when she got out of the hospital, the brothers got her shipped off to a nicer place than the one she had been in before.  She didn’t have her own room, but she had three squares a day, and the place was clean, and what with brother Steve dropping by regularly and brother Dave too when he could, the staff was not going to just ignore her.

But that place was not cheap.  5000 a month, plus medicine, plus incidental doctor expenses.  5000 a month!  That’s not chump change.  So we had to move to step 2: sell the Delridge property.

That’s WB in the picture standing out in front of the house at 10194 Ramona Drive.  He must have just got back from church because that was not his usual apparel.  I don’t know what the hammer is for. He put the brick face on the front of the house and poured the walk way, and a little in front on him, you can see the footing upon which he erected a stone wall about 3 or four feet high.  And in the dirt right by his toe stretching back to the side of the house he put down flagstone, though, as I recollect the flagstone pooped out and he never finished laying it clear to the edge of the house.

This is February 7.  The day WB died a year ago.