Mostly good things

Blogger is now not letting me reply to any of the comments so accept my apologies. It keeps showing I am not signed in and shows me as anonymous. I am not meaning to ignore you! This is frustrating.

To continue a bit with the hiring of the caregiver for mom...She is very reasonably priced at $25/hr and she bills in 15 minute increments. She said most of the larger caregiver services have like a 2 hour min, charge, but since she is there at mom's senior living place all day, bouncing from one resident to another, she just keeps track in 15 minute increments and says she will bill once a month. I'm guessing maybe this will cost mom around $800 a month, including laundry. WAY cheaper than the extra couple thousand (or probably more) to live in assisted living. The part about the assisted living place I toured (and another one I found some unit pricing on) is why are their apartment rent, just for the apartment, so much higher than where she's living. I get that they charge thousands more for the actual care, but why are the apartments themselves $1000+ more a month? The "alcove" studio type I looked at is almost $1000 more a month than my mom's 1 bedroom apartment where she is at and that still includes meals and housekeeping. I guess because they can, LOL.

I received my new Fire HD Tablet. It's so much bigger (and heavier) than my ipad mini. That will take some getting used to, but if I had gotten a new ipad, I was going to get the regular ipad that is same size as this and not the mini (because the mini is now so high priced). It has a nice display. I spent most of the evening getting my apps on there. I haven't downloaded an ebook yet to try reading, but I did watch a bit of a show on Netflix. It's different then the ipad/apple system, so will take a little to adjust. Just not quite as intuitive as using the ipad, but I'm getting it figured out. One app I really wanted was YouTube TV. I thought it was available to put on there, but apparently it's only available on the Firestick and Fire tv, not the Fire tablet. How stupid is that?! I found a hack online to install the Google Play store and was then able to add the Youtube TV app. The instructions (written and video) were a bit long and overwhelming at first, but I watched the video a couple of times and same for reading it. Then I went through the steps, pausing the video at each step and it all went smoothly. I guess I still have a little bit of tech geek in me.

The new cat food bowl arrived and it's super cute and so far appears to be "un-tippable" LOL. It's not for lack of trying though!

My work changed our VPN log in to a new system that went into effect last night. Of course no one can get on this morning, LOL. So, I'm waiting to hear when it's fixed. Ok, right after I typed this they got it working. Only an hour and 15 minute late start to work. Seems to be working ok now.

Another thing I finally got accomplished is getting my mom's IRA investment account transferred to the company we are changing to. What a headache! They were basically just dragging their feet to hold on as long as possible to the money, from the sounds of it. Just using an excuse and then when we'd supply that response required they'd come up with a new one. I am POA on mom's account. There is no reason they need her verbal approval, plus they already had a written letter, signed by her, instructing them to transfer the account to the new company. Finally, her investment guy's office went over the head of the branch office and went to the regional guy to find out why they are not releasing this. Then they tried to say they called and left mom a message about it. Nope - because her landline doesn't have voicemail set up! I called the regional guy this morning and left a message telling him I have POA on her account and they have that on file and what do we need to do to get this transfer done? When he called back, if he gave me any sort of run around, at this point, I was just going to tell him I'll be contacting my mom's attorney to handle it. But, he called back, was nice, asked for me to verify the new company account # it will be transferred to and then said it's all cleared and I could go ahead and call the office where I am transferring it to and let them know it's now ok to put in the transfer funds request again. I called investment guys assistant lady and she was happy and relieved to hear that and kept apologizing it was such a hassle with the old company (the one they left).

Last night at about 6:10 the caregiver's other lady that works for her stopped at mom's apartment to remind her to take her pills. Mom was all good with her (she was only there a couple of minutes) but she told mom why she was there and said show me where your pills are kept and mom showed her the dispenser on her desk (the lady said oh neat, that's a fancy one) and then the lady asked mom which button she presses and mom said this big one and she pressed it and out came the pills and then she went and got her water at the sink and took them and the lady said goodbye. It was great! 

But I don't know what is going on this morning.....mom was up and dressed by 7ish yesterday morning and went down early. This morning it is already 7:45 and she's still not dressed and just now got up out of her recliner. I'm not sure what time she got up (I forgot to set my app to motion detection when I went to bed because I am worried about our dog). But, it certainly doesn't appear Liz or her helper have stopped by to check on mom and make sure she's getting ready. I'm just going to watch and see how this goes. They'll know when she isn't down for breakfast and we'll see what happens.

I can't figure out how to reply to anyone from yesterday, unless I do it anonymously. Anyone else having this issue? It keeps showing that I'm not signed in, but when I click on "sign in" it shows I'm signed in.