Thank you so much, everyone. The link is very much appreciated! That will definitely be priority one. For now, can this POA be done without a lawyer, just a notary? Thankfully, my sister will not challenge the POA. We are both breathing a sigh of relief that my mom is on board with it.

Thank you. I'm sorry about your mom as well. Our plan was for my sister to have medical POA since she is 5 min away and for me to have financial POA.

They have wills from 1992, probably done by the legal office at Fort Bliss. Outdated regardless. I meant estate planning beyond wills.

She is in El Paso. I'd take any recommendation, because I know they've never consulted a lawyer about anything.

That is a great point. Thank you. She is at that stage when she is losing her grasp on things but knows it. Thank you, yes. Unfortunately, she and I live in different states.

My dad has been in the ICU since mid-October and is not expected to live. This happened right in the middle of the process of my mom being diagnosed with some kind of dementia (not Alzheimer’s apparently). She wants to do a POA for me to take over her finances. She is extremely overwhelmed. How do you handle a senior’s finances in a way that keeps you from having any legal or financial liability for their debts? I need access to the accounts but do not want to be “on” them. Is there a specific kind of POA that I need to get? How do you prioritize spending? My mom has tons of credit card debt. She also has a huge chunk of money in her checking account (my dad did a cash out refinance on the house just before he was hospitalized to pay down the credit cards but didn’t get to it). In the same situation, I would take the money and pay off debt. But I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do in her situation now. For one thing, I’m afraid she will run them up again. When I have access to them, I could close them. I am wondering if credit that was only in my dad’s name will be her responsibility or not. When he refinanced, he put the house in his name only, so how is that handled? They are in TX, if that matters. Their monthly income is very good and will continue to be enough for her. She has excellent health coverage as well. But, assisted living is in her future. Even she agrees with that (which is miraculous). I think her monthly income will cover a nice facility, but credit card payments would reduce what she could afford there. So then it makes sense to pay them off. But then she’s left with no cushion for emergencies. Thoughts?

That tail! Swoon!

I have no experience with it but thanks so much for posting about it! I had never heard of it, but it looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for for one of my kids. And they take insurance!

Have you tried brushing them? We’ve got a kitty who is less into pets, but it’s his siren song for us to run the brush over our hands. He comes running and is purring right away and napping/cuddling soon after.

Amazon has several. This one comes in Monet or Van Gogh. This one is just neoprene, but with more art options. This one is just Monet, but bigger, I think. I find it easier to search Google than on individual sites.

Thank you all so much! I’ve added so much to my cart! I’ve got my fingers crossed she’ll love some of them and that my middle child/pup will share nicely. LOL Right!?! Mud is not something we have ever had a problem with before she arrived! That morning she found a small area under a jasmine bush without enough granite and went to town. That was a rough, rough morning for me. I can look at it now and laugh, but OMGosh I was fried that day. Such a good idea! It’s so hot here, and she loves ice, so I’m sure this will be a hit.

I have a 2 year old black lab (who is a saint), a 1 year old shepherd mix (3/4 saint, 1/4 sinner), and a 4.5 month old malamute/German shepherd mix (currently 1/2 saint, 1/2 sinner, which is pretty good for such a young pup, I think, lol). The pup is DD17’s, but I do a lot of the caretaking because of school and the fact that DD, whose bedroom is upstairs, has had a broken foot for 4 weeks. That’s tough navigating on crutches. Looking for favorite safe chews, for sure, but also intellectual stuff to keep this girl engaged. We do have some of those find-the-treat puzzles, and she solves them far too quickly. No “hard” ones yet though, so what are your favorites in that category? I am very tired. On the bright side, she was a brilliant potty-trainer! Required pics as payment…

LOL, yes I did! Thanks!

I have a 2 year old black lab (who is a saint), a 1 year old shepherd mix (3/4 saint, 1/4 sinner), and a 4.5 month old malamute/German shepherd mix (currently 1/2 saint, 1/2 sinner, which is pretty good for such a young pup, I think, lol). The pup is DD17’s, but I do a lot of the caretaking because of school and the fact that DD, whose bedroom is upstairs, has had a broken foot for 4 weeks. That’s tough navigating on crutches. Looking for favorite safe chews, for sure, but also intellectual stuff to keep this girl engaged. We do have some of those find-the-treat puzzles, and she solves them far too quickly. No “hard” ones yet though, so what are your favorites in that category? I am very tired. On the bright side, she was a brilliant potty-trainer! Required pics as payment…

Yes! And solar here, which we got in the spring and makes me not feel guilty about keeping the house cooler this summer. All y’all can just put on socks and a sweatshirt if you’re cold. This desert-dwelling, peri-menopausal woman is tired of being so dang hot all the time. We have an large urn water fountain outside the dining room window that attracts so many birds all day long. It’s so great to watch them make good use of the water in the scorching heat. There is almost always a line!

My MIL too! My own mother won’t buy me stuff I really want if it doesn’t meet her definition of fun. MIL buys me what I want.

The new puppy (second summer in the row for a new puppy) learning to use the potty bell at the door. Now we move on to the next stage, which is abuse of the potty bell for 8 thousand random outings a day. 😆 Obligatory puppy pic…

I had one, the GE Opal with the side tank. I LOVED it. LOVED IT! Named it Olaf, took amazing care of it, cleaned it once a week as instructed in the manual, proclaimed it my favorite purchase ever and one that I would never live without. I’m a middle-aged, constantly hot woman living in Arizona, and I LOVED it. I’m feeling lazy, so I just copied and pasted a review from Amazon that was almost exactly my experience. “Beware!! Black sludge no matter how you clean it By Chelsey on June 10, 2022I really loved this ice machine when we first bought it. It worked great, for about 5 months. Then I started to notice the ice was getting black stuff in it. We use distilled water, I clean it a cycle with bleach, then water, then 2 cycles of vinegar, then another water. Each time I would notice the black I’d clean it. And for a few days I wouldn’t notice anything, then it would return. I called support and they told me that I was doing everything right and they didn’t know what it was. Told me to call support specifically for the ice machines. As time has gone on, it has gotten worse. We’ve only had it 9 months now (ordered it September 9th) and now when I clean it, the black stuff is back as soon as it starts making ice. So we decided to pull it apart and found that it’s making black sludge that I’m assuming is some type of mold! Not happy since we’ve been getting sick a lot recently and my gut is telling me it’s the moldy ice 😭 I would really like my money back because these things aren’t cheap, and we haven’t even had it a year! All of this is completely aside from it being super loud and squeaky! It wasn’t in the beginning but has gotten worse. To say I’m ticked is an understatement.” So, bottom line, Olaf has passed. 😔 He has not been replaced. It was too much money to have only served a year, and that with the last few months worrying about what we were consuming. DH is great at troubleshooting, disassembling/fixing things, etc. and tried his best to take it apart to see if we could figure out what we were missing in the cleaning process that caused the sludge mentioned below kept returning, but we couldn’t figure it out. There are areas in the machine that are just inaccessible and impossible to clean. Even the underside of the top part where the cubes come out cannot be properly reached to clean, something I recognized early on and should have been a red flag.

There are tons of new YA novels based on the classics, some of them decent and lots written from a different perspective (time, class, race, culture, etc.). What if you did paired texts? YA reading generally goes faster than reading the classics, so you could compare/contrast quite a few. This would also get you reading books that interest your kids in the same way you want them to read the classics (which presumably interest you, although that’s not always the case with me these days LOL). You can google for classics paired with YA books, and quite a bit comes up. Also, the NYTimes has “Text to Text” pairings of classic novels and current stories that brings modern relevance to older books. All of those connections are interesting for our kids and look good in a course description. LOL

Did you look at the syllabus for this class? They have the topics broken down by week, scheduled into 32 weeks. I would take that as my lead. With books 1-3 in hand, I’d go through and schedule compatible lessons, pulling from the books incrementally as much as possible. For those who are unaware, this is Preparation for Rhetoric Writing, a WWS 1-3 condensed class that has been offered for years at WTMA. My DS19 took it in 8th grade, and it was quite doable. It was a good middle-school finale to let him focus on content writing and personal style in 9-12.

My 1 year old shepherd mix had surgery to correct luxating patella on her left leg in February and is scheduled for her right leg in July. Hers was fine until it wasn’t and went downhill fast, popping out so many times a day, and at a certain point we could not easily pop it back in. She was collapsing into a sit in an awful way so often. Then it took a while to get in with the surgeon, and we wished we had gotten her scheduled sooner. Since you’ve already had the surgical consult, I’d absolutely keep the surgery appointment. One thing I recommend is having large potty pads on hand for where she lays down the first while after surgery, when she’s on the heavier drugs. I wasn’t told until pickup that she might be so out of it that she may not realize she needed to pee until it was too late to get up in time, and she needed our support for the first while to get up and out. Definitely kept those on hand for July! Best of luck to your pup for a healthy recovery!

Thank you so much!

I’ve tried to figure out if it has a meaning and come up short. Anyone know?