Today’s theme is ‘Beings who are not Human.’
My beloved Lonesome Dove, who sat on the rim of the birdbath for at least 30 minutes. Maybe longer. Enough time for me to run and get my camera with the telephoto lens. This little interlude made me very happy.
Later: a scary thunderstorm. Lonesome Dove had moved on by that point.
Discovered on some milkweed:
Another Monarch caterpillar. I’ve seen a lot of them this year, but never get to see the chrysalis. I’m not sure why, as I’m constantly checking for them.
And this morning, seen from the kitchen:
But there wasn’t just one fawn – there were three! The other two were hidden behind some trees to the left. Amazing. I’ve never seen three fawns on the property.
Magical!
Focusing on nature and all these wonderful beings calms me. I’ve been dealing with a bit of generalized anxiety of late. I’m not sure why – I have bouts with it and then months go by without any problems. When I saw Lonesome Dove last night and stood in the kitchen watching him/her, it melted away.
Stay in the moment, Claudia. Breathe.
I worked on deductions yesterday – most of which won’t work for Federal Income Tax, but will for New York State, because…we’re a Blue State – and am close to finishing. Deductions and taxes certainly can contribute to anxiety, right?
Today, I’m off to get the car inspected. Fingers crossed I don’t have to get new tires.
Happy Monday.
Hooray for blue states!
Yes, indeed!
Loving your gentle beings. They always take my breath away. Especially the deer. Soon, butterflies for you. Biggest sigh!
Been reading even if not able to get enough bandwidth to get a comment through. Looks like a lovely summer for you!
We already have monarchs flying around here, caterpillars that I saw last month, I suppose.
Hi Claudia,
I must live in a red state cuz we pay lots of taxes. My father-in-law loved paying taxes, it made him wealthy. Takes all kinds.
The wildlife in my neighborhood is booming, which I enjoy until I see them along the road, that hurts my heart.
Hope you have a great week!
Well ‘taxes’ are two different things. We pay high property taxes around here. Too high. And school taxes as well.
BUT, NY State did not go along with the horror that was passed in Washington, DC. That’s where the red/blue state comes in. So, at least we’ll most likely get something back from the state.
whoever said that mankind is the superior race?
they must not be nature lovers.
We are far, far from the superior race, Tammy. I agree.
Hi Claudia! Your photography is beautiful as always. Being a sufferer of GAD myself, I know what you mean about nature helping to melt it away. It’s what helps me stay in the moment the most. Take care!
Thanks for understanding, Jane!
Everyday that goes by, I thank my lucky stars for all the gentle beings that we have been surrounded by these past 36 years. I’ve really enjoyed our cranes…they seem to be the hit of the neighborhood. We have 4-6 families that come back every spring, and they have between 1-2 babes, so their numbers are increasing. I haven’t see our deer in a few months, though….hopefully, they just changed their feeding route.
A friend of mine helps Mother Nature, and helps to raise Monarchs. So, I just saw her chrysalis’….there must have been 10 or so, and lots of caterpillars. One had just hatched, don’t quite remember the correct term, so it was just hanging there in all it’s glory, waiting to get stronger before moving on. She keeps them in styrofoam coolers, and keeps them well fed during the whole process. Quite fascinating to see!
Hope you finish your taxes today! ;)
There’s a woman on IG who raises Monarchs and I’ve been able to observe the chyrsalis that she has shared with us. I never see them here, though, and I know they’re there!
They are probably in hiding, I would assume, because of predators. I’ll have to research that. ;)
But I get frustrated as I look under the leaves and everything! Darn it!
sorry about the anxiety, but glad there are beautiful things to help you with it.
more great photos again, too. thank you.
we have a pair of mourning doves and a single one, too … and the couple let him/her be there with them at the feeders. love that they do that and just sit in the tray feeder and on the deck for long stretches of time.
hope the tax paperwork is done soon and you can enjoy the rest of your day!
kathy in iowa
I’ve see our pair and Lonesome Dove together – but rarely.
Thanks, Kathy!
Claudia, taxes and car stuff cause me anxiety. I hate when they soak up my time. Saw cormorants on my last few walks. I had never seen them before on the man-made lagoons that snake around my development and empty out to the Bay. They usually are out by the Bay, especially on the power towers by the bridge. Hope you don’t need new tires!
No tires, but most likely I will in a couple of months. But I did have to get my rear brake light replaced!
The Dove and Fawn are so lovely and calming to watch.
Marilyn
They are. Thank you, Marilyn.
I understand the highs and lows, the up and down. I sometimes wonder that, for me, it’s a factor of not-the-best physical health and medications for it. Or if it’s age and worry, because I do worry an awful lot about my husband’s and my future.
House/property values are at almost record highs again where I live in SoCalif (this is scarily similar to Boom-Bust-Recession; my husband pondered today if the U.S. is talking themselves into a Recession but I’m not sure; only that I believe nothing coming out of the Trump administration) so we made a major/reluctant decision to refi the house one final time while my husband still has jobs and is earning a paycheck in semi-retirement. It was ultimately pretty easy, thank goodness our credit is very good; I found all the paperwork needed for the loan person. It doesn’t raise our monthly mortgage payment too high and we still got an enviable interest rate on the loan. So, it’s a relief we can now eradicate any lingering personal debt, and I hope it relieves some of my anxiety. We’ll still be living quite frugally; but, heck, most everybody my age is choosing to still work when they can get it.
I feel like I know too many people who are in their golden years and swimming in money but I actually feel they’re few and far between; a lot of aging boomers are struggling to make ends meet. I recently became in contact with an old friend from childhood (I haven’t seen her since the 1970s) and was crushed to hear that she and her husband lost their home in the last Recession, like I guess ten years ago or so, and it’s been a long climb back up for them; says when and if she stops working, they can’t afford the rent where they are (in San Juan Capistrano) so will have to move – – but they don’t know where, and that’s a nail-biter. Conversely when my parents were my age, their lives seemed so secure. They’d been in the same house for over 30 years when they began to retire; life was comfortably set in stone for them.
Same here. We have debt as well. I hate it. I wish that wasn’t the case. But buying a home later in life, unless you’re wealthy, involves late-in-life mortgage payments.
Yep; we’ve touched on this before; you and Don are as my husband and me, marrying closer to age 40 than 30 or 20, getting into home ownership with any permanence QUITE late. We’ve pondered leaving home ownership altogether and returning to rental housing. We’ve pondered moving to another state SO many times over the past few years; SoCalif is obviously expensive in some ways for retirees although we personally (not everybody does in Calif) have a blessfully-low annual property tax that’s pretty much set in concrete. Unless we go back to renting somewhere, we’ll always have mortgage debt and our home will never be paid off before we die (because we only bought it five years ago), and I don’t like using it as my ‘bank’ (my dad would be turning in his grave; he’d told me to never mess with home equity) but it’s now allowing us to have no debt (no personal debt) except the mortgage debt in our retirement/fixed-income years, so I’m feeling grateful.
Now, the challenge is to simply not spend money. It can only be for the big stuff, not the little stuff. The budget has to be paramount and no deviating from it. All my little hobbies and collecting-interests are done; no more. (I hope I can still get Mom’s dolls repaired; that guy in New York near Utica who was a restorer wasn’t expensive, but I never heard back from him.) Books now come from the library, not Amazon. Don’t go off-list when at the grocery store. Etc. Have to really rein it in. We pay the mortgage, we pay insurance and utilities and other necessaries/bills; then, we eat, and try to scrape together what we can for our ongoing/endless home improvements and repairs for an old 60-year-old house. No date nights and dinners out (maybe sometimes if a good coupon/deal pops up); no vacations, just little side trips, maybe an overnight somewhere. No new cars or furniture. I’m sure it’s like this for many people in the later years. We’ve just had to get really ‘real’ now and prioritize carefully. It doesn’t have to be sad. Personal discipline can be very empowering and the results uplifting. I’m very aware that there are too many people much worse off than my husband and I, and I just want to concentrate on my health and happiness. (Well-being; mindful living; conscious of the ‘now’ and the beautiful moments!)
You refinanced the mortgage for a Home Equity Loan?
Nope. We refinanced the mortgage to squeak out some cash; a cashout. A specified amount.
So we could pay off personal debt; everything but the mortgage.
We’d accumulated too much personal debt over the past years (embarrassed to say, too much use of plastic; it adds up; it wasn’t all frivolity [sometimes it was medical expense when we were just living paycheck-to-paycheck in a one-income household]); my husband went several years without any salary increase during the Recession although he at least kept his job, but his job never paid much although he had good benefits, like a pension plan which has now saved our arse in company with Social Security; he’s always taken multiple freelance work the entire time we’ve been married because his primary paycheck was never enough for us to live on – – and I’ve been ill with health problems since my 40s and wasn’t able to work again, yet wasn’t also able to get on any kind of disability as I was between jobs when it happened; c’est une longue histoire I just can’t get into … we got off to a rocky start, too, because he’d assumed a lot of debt at the time we got married due to a really ugly divorce. And, truth be told, we just didn’t manage money as well as we might have; sigh.
Anyway (this is all TMI, but to answer your question…)…
Last week, we went to a mortgage consultant recommended by our realtor.
I actually know people who do this (take a cashout) because they want to buy a boat. Or it’s how they choose to pay for their kid’s education. Pay for plastic surgery that insurance doesn’t cover. Or they wanted to take an exotic vacation, trip of a lifetime; tired of waiting to do it. I have friends who do it every time they want to buy a new car (they get new BMWs every couple/few years) and, believe me, they have plenty of money/investments and could pay cash for a car [even a beemer] so I don’t really get it (and they’re both CPAs).
For us, it was ‘desperation’ as the debt was weighing heavy and monthly payments on credit cards with high interest (some, over 20%) doesn’t make sense when we’ve essentially borrowed now against the house (and our own equity in it) for about 4%.
But this is also (these cashouts) what got people in trouble when everything was ‘so fabulous’ before the bust. If they took out too much equity as cash and got their mortgage number too high, they went under water in The Recession – – in Calif here, maybe their mortgage got to, say, $600,000 but, once the Recession it, their home was worth $300,000 if that. The way I understand it then, the bank gets that $300,000 if you have to sell and get out from under but you still owe another $300,000 on your loan. So, if you need out, like maybe have lost a job, you default on the loan, you’re on the street, you have nothing; you walk away, having lost your entire investment. In Calif, this is when our homeless-people problem escalated; you had whole families living in motels week to week or, worse, in their cars.
It can be very risky with home equity, it’s very individual, you have to be very wise. I still think it’s better not to touch it; again, how I was raised. But my husband and I need debt relief.
The diff now, and that’s the good thing about fixed income/retirement, is that we’re not dependent upon income from a job; we’ll have the social security income and my husband’s small pension. If we’re careful, we can always make our house payment each month; we have the assured income. The mortgage consultant helped us run the numbers and we only took out the amount of cash we needed to pay off the personal debt. As for home repairs and all the improvements we need to do, we’re on our own; just have to save up for each thing and do it gradually; like, first up, the roof. It would have been lovely to take a cashout to put it toward the house, but the whole point was to get rid of, primarily, the credit card debt. And our monthly house payment is now STILL less than rents around here; so, again, I am grateful. (It’s still $500 less than the house payment we had at our former cottage.)
Don’t listen to me, though. This is a subject for the specialists. Huge weight off my shoulders, but we can’t do it again. This is it. You don’t ever want to ‘borrow’ so much from your equity to where you can’t then make the payment on the mortgage each month; don’t ever go into that hole or you’re doomed.
My mom, of course, in her 80s, reverse-mortgaged her house so that she then had cash from her equity to pay for her nursing care at home, because her choice was to stall going into a convalescent home for as long as she could. The money went lightning-fast and she did this during the Recession when her house was very-devalued; she didn’t get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cash dollars, not even close. She died just before the last amount of money was available; it would have run out in a couple of months. Then what.
The bank can’t make you move while you’re still alive and living in the house as long as you maintain it (believe me, they come and inspect, regularly), keep it insured and pay the property taxes (and in our case, flood insurance). But the minute you’re dead, they want their money; the only reason they couldn’t proceed as fast as they wanted with me as heir was because I’d stated my desire to buy the house and we were in the courts, probating the Will, and no judge will let a bank come in and foreclose during that process. It was SO complicated, and I was SO sick with cancer at the time. I don’t know how I got thru it. Plus I was grieving my mom’s death, and I had that bank breathing down my neck every month, on the phone and by mail. I screamed at them one time, “You’re going to cause me to have a heart attack!”
I do know of someone who took out an equity line of credit to do work on her house. She just pulled out what she needed, when she needed it. I really don’t know the diff on all this stuff; it loses me. Home equity loan, equity line of credit; whew. Google it; get informed. I have to leave it to the experts. Be guided by people in the know, who do mortgage tweaks for a living. Just like when we were trying to plow thru Medicare supplements, because it’s so critical for me to have the right coverage as I have a lot of diseases and take a lot of prescription drugs, we went to a Medicare specialist. It was three hours with her, face-to-face and across a desk, in person, and it was three hours with our mortgage consultant, all the same.
In each case, we didn’t directly have to pay for the services of the Medicare specialist OR the mortgage specialist. The Medicare expert ultimately gets a commission from whomever we chose to sign up with for the supplemental plans. The mortgage specialist gets paid as part of the new loan contract; it’s all added in together; the only cash out of hand at the moment is that we’ll pay for a home appraisal (I think it’s like $300) as part of the loan qualification. They come out and measure the house; assign a value. They look at ‘comps’ in the area; what other houses are going for; what recently sold and for how much; any home improvements you’ve made to enhance the property value, etc.
(For me, this is meaning a week ahead of a large amount of work because, as you know, we’re in the middle of stalled home improvements and a majority of stuff is boxed up, so we’re spending the week before the appraisal moving one heckuva lot of boxes into the offsite storage unit, trying to appear decent enough for photographing, interior and exteriors at the house. I don’t feel up to it, but there’s no choice.)
Sorry for the length here; I over-explain everything. Again, I am no expert on any of this; and I’ve been an idiot when it comes to managing money.
Claudia I know just what you mean. Through my front window I watch the birds and the squirrels and sometimes the deer. They make me feel more centered. I especially like the feisty hummingbirds I’ve had this year. Getting a feeder for them was the best thing of the summer. I will continue to do that. Breathe, we all need to do more of that. My anxiety has been on the rise for a lot of reasons but I’m trying to work through it. Hugs.