Out and About

As it is already December, there are a few things that need to be done before the end of the month which is also the end of the year. One of those is to take a certain amount of dollars from an IRA fund that I have at Scottrade. It's one of those crazy things that seemed so far away when I first set it up, but to my surprise last year when I had passed my 70th year, I had to start taking withdrawals from it. There's a formula that has to do with the amount of money in the account and your life expectancy as calculated by actuarial tables. We went into the Scottrade office in Mesa where we had gone last year and the Senior Stockbroker there basically showed me how to do it all on-line. So that will be my task for tomorrow.

From the Scottrade office, we went to the Safeway store in Fountain Hills. It was the usual weekly shopping trip, mainly for orange juice and fresh vegetables. What I didn't do was get another bag of the little winter oranges that are so good this time of year.

I had a long telephone conversation with Grandson Varick and Daughter Mary Mae last evening. He was putting together a report for school that required him to interview an elder in his family. His questions started us thinking about and reminiscing some things we hadn't thought about for a long time. He was asking about interesting things that had happened in my life time. One of the stories I told him was about delivering -- well, more like catching -- a baby in the front seat of a car in the parking lot of the ER. What a cramped place it was for the three of us -- me and Mommy and eventually the baby! You know, I don't even remember what sex the baby was, just how thankful I was that it was okay. AND, what a problem we had getting the mother out of the car, even after the baby was born -- she just didn't want to move!

Varick was asking about changes in technology which got Forry and I to thinking about the telephone party lines when we were dating in high school. I think there were eight families on our line (we heard only four rings however) and four families on his line. We usually talked every night, but not for very long as after fifteen minutes or so, we would start to hear multiple clicks as people picked up and then hung up their receivers as they awaited their turn.

I used to think our parents had seen a huge amount of change during their lifetimes, from horses to cars to airplanes to space travel, but I think we've seen a lot during ours as well.