What WAS that idea?

My life has been real, real busy lately. OK, I wrote that in the last entry.

Regardless, I have come up with ideas for interesting/intriguing topics to write about. Except my mind is so jumbled up with everything going on that I forget about them later. I mentioned an idea in a reply to another blog a few days later. Now I can't remember what I wrote or what it was about.

Some of you have been asking about my mom. She's still in the nursing home, and we visit at least once a week. Weak but holding her own. Lately, she has been worried about the bills from the nursing home. Her 100 days of residential care from Medicare ended in late January, and now we're on the hook for $1,001 per week. That drains life savings away pretty rapidly.

I am preparing her application for Wisconsin Medicaid. That means the state would take over after her liquid assets reach the $2,000 level. Of course, that money was intended for me and my family, as her sole heir, so you can imagine how I feel about that. Not that there was a lot to begin with, but there will be much less now.

Yeah, I'm a little bitter about it. My wife and I have never had much money, and that won't change when what's left of her estate passes to me. By the way, she signed her house over to me 10 years ago, just after my dad died, but from what I've heard, Wisconsin may have designs on it anyway, once my Medicaid application comes arrives.

Anyway, she seemed relieved when I visited Friday and explained that she won't have to sell the house to raise money for her nursing home bill. That's what she had been worried about.

Someday soon I'll go into a major rant about the spending priorities of our country's government--the president's new budget and what it says about us as a nation. But not tonight.

By the way, my friend S (whom I haven't written about for a while), has been back in Wisconsin for the last few weeks on a short-term visit. We still write regularly--several times a week. But with the way my work is now, I couldn't get a day off to have lunch or dinner together ... much less anything else.

I'm in for another busy one this week. The special section is nearly done, but I'll have assignments nearly every night. And so it goes ...