I wanted to get the car over to mechanic by 8 a.m. today for an oil change, and so he could look at one tire that keeps losing air pressure when it gets cold. It's a real pain in the butt....I'm rushing around trying to get out of the house and get to work, and then I drive about a mile and the low air pressure light comes on, forcing me to pull over in some parking lot and fool around with my cheap little air compressor so I don't damage any tires. I bought one from AARP and it sucks. There have been times I couldn't pull the hose off the valve stem and I wound up damaging the valve stem which then had to be replaced. You get what you pay for. If I get another air compressor, it will be the type you screw onto the valve stem, NOT the kind where you press down a plastic tab to lock the air compressor hose onto the nozzle.

I've already taken it in twice to a certain tire place last winter, and still I'm having problems with it. I got the oil changed but I'd forgotten this guy doesn't do anything tire-related, so since I got out of there by 8:30 a.m., I rushed over to the tire place to see if I could get it taken care of. There were already 5 people ahead of me and I knew I had a 10 a.m. appointment to do the nursing home paperwork to admit my mother, so the tire issue will have to wait til Saturday morning...early again.

Seems my oil changes will all be around $50 now, instead of the $25 or $30 I've paid for years. Being a newer car (2013), the car takes synthetic oil, which is more expensive. But you can also drive it for 7 or 8,000 miles instead of 3 to 5,000 miles, which I intend to do.

After leaving the tire place, I still had some time before my 10 a.m. appointment left so I made a quick stop at Walmart for catfood.

Then I went to Masonicare and got all the paperwork done in about a half hour. Wasn't thrilled to learn that once my mother goes on Medicaid, not ALL her expenses will be picked up. There may be prescription copays, and if my mother were to go to the hospital for more than 14 days, Medicaid would no longer pay for her room at the nursing home and then I would have to decide if I wanted to private pay to hold the room for her to the tune of $423 a day. If I decided not to, I'd run the risk of there possibly not being a bed open at the nursing home when my mother was finally released. Not something I'd want to risk, but the money would now be coming out of my pocket, since this would all be happening after I spent down my mother's assets. A sobering thought.

K. said this kind of scenario is very rare, and that she'd have to be very sick to stay in hospital for more than 2 weeks and if she was that sick she'd probably go into hospice.

Also, Medicaid allows you to keep $60 a month from Social Security payments in a separate account for miscellaneous expenses. So if I needed to buy her clothes, or if I wanted to pay for things like prescription co-pays out of that money, I could, although I could also just let the money accumulate month to month as long as it didn't rise above $1,600, at which point Medicaid would say my mother is no longer eligible for Medicaid. So you have to make sure the money doesn't pile up too much.

The other thing she warned me about is that if my mother ever has to go see a doctor (her primary care doc will be the staff doctor there, and they do have an in-house dentist and podiatrist and rheumatologist), I would either have to bring her to the outside doc myself or pay exorbitant fees to have a service take her. Not sure why the fees are exorbitant.

After I took care of the paperwork, I brought a small suitcase of winter clothes for my mother to the 2nd floor and some other stuff. I have more to bring but a little at a time. I think I can hang art on the wall by her bed, but it will be more limited than the assisted living place and I'll need to hang it all higher on the wall she wouldn't accidentally hit it.

I am still mulling over interest expressed by the nursing home to hang my mother's work in some places like the lobby. I'd prefer to hang it on the 2nd floor since that's where she is and she'd see it there often...perhaps in the small dining room where she's been eating, although it can get kind of crowded in there. K. had suggested the lobby, which my mother would only see if I was wheeling her around on one of my visits.

I hung out with my mother for 2 hours and walked her down the hall and back, which seemed to tire her out. On the advice of a social worker, I had purchased her a few camisoles from Aero store for about $5 each and I brought one of them in to see if it fit, which it seemed to (a medium) but wondering if it will shrink a lot if it's 95% cotton and 5% spandex. So not sure if I should return the other 2 I bought. The social worker who recommended them (more comfortable than a bra and offers some sense of modesty) said make sure to get extra large, becus this is a teen store and they run small, I guess, though my mother is pretty small.

So I helped her get the cami on and then a different sweater that she'd made and shirt that I'd brought over. I know all of her favorite colors, so I brought over the light blues and turquoises and pale pinks that go well with her white hair. She did seem to enjoy seeing her own clothes.

After that I went home and my dad came over around 12:30 p.m. I brought him to a Verizon store so he could buy more minutes (yeah, I know), then to that warehouse tool shop for something, then to Tractor Supply for a wheel they didn't have but he got birdseed, I dropped off some more of mom's books as donations to the library and then finally around 2 pm we got to Red Lobster where I used a gift card I had for lunch for both of us.

I enjoyed the ordinariness of running errands with my dad, which I haven't done a whole lot of in my life due to my parents' divorce, but more than that it gave us time to just talk about random things, which I always find interesting. I always like to learn a little something new. Today he talked a little bout when he served in the Korean War. A fitting topic since today is Veterans Day. He was a Navy Seaman First Class and he worked with a crew of 7 on a small salvage ship out of Bayonne, NJ, not far from where he lived. He only served 2 of the 4 years he was supposed to serve because my grandmother (his mother) petitioned through the Red Cross or something for an early release because my grandfather had a heart attack and in those days, the treatment for a heart attack was a year's bed rest!! I never knew this happened, but my grandfather spent a year in bed. So my grandmother was forced to take over my grandfather's service station/garage business and I'm sure it must've been a handful. So I guess she said she needed her son home to help with the family business, and they let him go.

Although it was a very tiring day, it did at the same time recharge my batteries.

Tomorrow it's back to work but working from home.