Old Stuff

Last month while doing my laundry a large puddle began to spread silently across the floor. I, of course, reacted in my usual manner to unforeseen catastrophes, I hollered for my husband. So he performed his normal hard water maintenance routine to descale bits and pieces of the machine, looked at everything he could get at to see if he could find the leak - all to no avail. We called the repair guy, figured out it would probably take two trips out to our farm, one to find the problem, the other to bring the parts to fix it, and between mileage and hourly rates it was looking costly. So we started inquiring about new machines. We truly wanted to shop local but we could not afford local prices, so off to the city we went. One good thing, we ran into a “no interest for 18 months” deal, so we can pay our new washer off bit by bit. They make it extremely easy to spend money you don’t have these days! 

We had to replace our mattress about a year ago. My aching back was causing me to sleep on our recliner most of the night. A couple days ago the mechanism on our love-seat recliner broke, for about the third time. Previously that handy man of mine welded something together and made it work again - not this time. Tears in the upholstery have been patched with glued on leather, now there’s tears next to the patches. We’ve been on-line browsing to replace it, also our ratty couch that we bought over 25 years ago. Another large expenditure, in many ways expected but largely ignored by putting it off for years.

I could gripe about planned obsolescence, which is, I think, very real, but I have to say we’ve gotten good use out of most of our household appliances and furniture. Nothing lasts forever. As you age, so does your stuff!

Food, shelter and clothing - the basic necessities of life. Really? There’s a lot more to it than that. There’s tons of stuff you need, or think you need, or have become accustomed to, that may not make it through your retirement years. Even if you think you’ve planned for every possible twist and turn of events, you may eventually have to get inventive to find the dollars to keep all the stuff you own functioning and in good shape. Yesterday we saved a few dollars by grooming my dog at home. He was beginning to look like a mop and collecting debris by the pound every time he went outside. Ted didn’t appreciate our fur snipping, toenail clipping and bathing operation, but doesn’t he look fine now?