Month: June 2026

Hotel Life

The other big development – other than all the cat news from my last entry – is that the time arrived this spring for me to take over my Dad’s finances, much as I did for my Mom 14 years ago. So I spent a week and a half in the Boston area at the beginning of May. Dad moved into assisted living several years ago and has settled in pretty well (that’s what this trip was about though I didn’t mention it at the time), but he’s in his 90s now and it was just time. Fortunately, he agrees, which is good because he is a hard person to argue with if his mind is set to the contrary.

Anyway, while we have a family vacation home on the south shore I could have stayed at, I was pretty sure that doing that drive every day would kill me, so instead I stayed at a hotel 15 minutes from Dad’s place. Good call, although hotels in the Boston area are not cheap. (On the bright side, rental cars in early May are cheap.) The hotel was a solid three stars, though: Close to things, very friendly front desk staff, lots of parking, reliable wi-fi, and a “business center” that I used to print some things.

I arrived on Saturday night and DoorDashed food for the first time ever. Somehow in addition to my food I ended up ordering two Diet Cokes from two different places delivered by two different drivers, so I screwed something up there, but otherwise it went fine.

Sunday through Thursday I had a pretty regular routine: Get up, go downstairs and get coffee and a pastry for breakfast, do some stuff in the room in the morning, have lunch, then spend the afternoon with Dad making calls, logging onto accounts and generally taking care of business. In the evening I’d go find dinner, then usually crash and watch television for the evening before going to sleep. The main exception was that Monday I went to his bank to add my Power of Attorney to his account, which they wanted my physical presence for.

Things generally went smoothly, though I ended up with a few loose ends I’ve been working on since the trip. But by the end of the week I had gotten through a lot of my to-do list and felt pretty accomplished, if exhausted. (Making phone calls is exhausting for me.) The one advantage to doing a lot of stuff which is largely financial is that by 5 pm most places have closed and I can stop because I can’t get in touch with people until the next day.

The main way that this differed from doing it for my Mom a decade ago was that with my Mom I stayed at my Dad’s house, had breakfast with him, and every evening after I was done Dad and I would go out for dinner. This time, after I was done I would go back to my hotel by myself. But I did take the opportunity to go out to dinner a lot, including to a couple of new-to-me restaurants. So that was nice. I also made a lot of Dunkin runs.

One of the odder moments came when I wanted to ship some stuff home, and I saw there was a FedEx ship center near the hotel. So I went there to get a box, and it turned out they didn’t take cash, and they didn’t take tap-to-pay, they only took swiped cards. This seemed pretty sketchy to me, as swiping cards is how numbers get skimmed, and tapping is way more secure. So I ended up passing and going to a Staples to buy boxes instead. (And I shipped from a FedEx office center elsewhere instead.) It was just weird.

Friday I checked out of the hotel, spent a couple of hours with Dad, and then – you may have guessed it already – went down to that vacation home I mentioned. As I was driving through the woods from the highway I felt myself relax, looking forward to a weekend of doing absolutely nothing.

Which is pretty close to what I did. I went out to dinner several times (Mother’s Day dinner was a little crazy, but being a single diner sped things up a bit), went for some walks, but spent a lot of time just sitting on the couch and watching TV. Saturday it rained in the afternoon. Sunday my sisters-in-law came to visit for several hours, which was fun. Monday night I watched Wake Up Dead Man after spending the afternoon with Dad again.

Debbi, by the way, stayed home. Considering Jackson’s condition, it was comforting for me to know that she was home taking care of everything.

I flew out Tuesday afternoon (flight options from the Bay Area to Boston are few these days – only JetBlue has nonstop flights). Fortunately all my flights went smoothly – dealing with long delays on top of everything else would have been a lot.

This was in some ways easier than it was for Mom, in large part because we handled a number of things for Dad when he moved into assisted living several years ago (such as selling his house and car), and his finances are generally simpler – or at least more organized – than Mom’s were. A big difference, though, is that lots of stuff is online now, whereas it was still on paper in 2012. This has pluses and minuses, mainly that a lot of accounts have 2-factor-authentication tied to Dad’s phone number turned on, and changing billing addresses and such can be more of a hassle. To some extent it was easier when everything was on paper and I could just change all the paper bills to come to me.

Once everything squared away, it will just be a few additional bills I have to pay every month, as well as having his taxes done every spring.

Anyway, this is one of those things we do for our parents, much as they did for us when we were kids. I’m fortunate that my parents were financially secure when this day arrived.

But as always, it was good to come home.

Cat Digest

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written much here, hasn’t it? But it’s been a busy year, so I’ll try to write a bit about what’s been going on.

Let’s start with the cats.

Last November we noticed Edison was licking his nether regions and looking pretty uncomfortable. A trip to the vet later he was diagnosed as having crystals in his bladder, which resulted in him – and consequently his brothers as well – being put on urinary food. Fortunately the switch was pretty smooth, and everyone likes the food well enough (which is good because it’s prescription and thus more expensive than their previous food). I am a little bummed that I can’t mix in some oral care kibble as I think that really helped keep their teeth in good shape, but apparently keeping his food pretty pure is the key to controlling the crystals. He still gets a little chicken and wet food as a treat, but otherwise this is their food now.

Then in April Jackson had a couple of problems: First he started peeing in some unusual locations, which led to a vet trip where he was diagnosed with a bladder infection. This was easy to treat – he got a shot of antibiotics – but the vet was more concerned with his weight loss. He’d been a big cat – 16 pounds at his peak – but he’d lost over 4 pounds.

A few days later we noticed he was limping, too, which I think was from getting startled when I stopped on Simon’s paw and jumping down awkwardly from where he was sleeping. This turned out to be not serious, but he did get worked over about his weight loss. Eventually it seemed that it probably wasn’t the big C, but was most likely irritable bowel syndrome. The treatment for this is a B-12 shot every week for 2 months, then backing off to once a month, and a steroid pill every evening. Additionally he’s getting a probiotic every night mixed with some wet food.

Superficially the results of this have been okay: The big plus is that he had been throwing up 2-to-3 times a week for quite a few months, and that has now basically stopped. But he hasn’t really gained the weight back, and he’s lost some muscle mass and has slowed down a lot. He does love getting the wet food, though, and his new favorite treat is whipped cream. He’s going to be 14 in the fall, and he seems like he’s aging early, but hopefully he has a few good years left.

Finally last month Edison started throwing up over the weekend. He is super-pathetic when he throws up, walking around meowing pitifully until he does. He got another vet trip, but the best they could figure is that he had some inflammation in his stomach. They have him a shot of an anti-nausea drug. He had one more hork a few days later and has been fine since. My best guess is that he either had a little too much chicken, or he ate something that didn’t agree with him.

So this has definitely been more cat excitement of the negative kind than we’d wanted this year. If there’s a positive, it’s that Jackson has been less antagonistic towards the dog, so there’s been a little less barking. But I do wish he could bounce back just a little more. He’s going in for another check-up in a week or so and we’ll see what the tests say then.

Simon has been our little feline rock through all of this, snuggling with Jackson and trotting around the house meowing his little head off as he plays by himself. He and Edison still mix it up from time to time. Simon is a little roly-poly guy with big lovable eyes, only not so little since I think he weighs more than either of the other two now.

Domino, the aforementioned dog, has been doing well too. We’ve had him for almost four years, and he’s settled into a routine of walking, sleeping, and playing. A year ago we replaced our back porch with one with a roof, and he enjoyed being able to sit outside in the winter even while it was raining. I recently discovered that throwing a ball onto the roof and letting it roll off is a great game which engages his body and his mind. It would be nice if his prey drive didn’t kick in when he saw the cats, but at this point he is what he is.

Three cats lying in a sunbeam on a gray blanket: Simon, a brown tabby, Edison, a black cat, and Jackson, a gray tabby with white highlights.