Tuesday, April 25

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for;

Seeing green grass at the bottom of the old grass.

Seeing more birds around the yard.

Seeing pussy willows and buds.

Hollywood is looking a little better with the extra grooming.

I had a phone conversation with Trainwreck that was frustrating as usual. She was talking about how "she needs to get her garden going so she could grow vegetables for the kids".

She hasn't grown a successful garden in forever, her kids are grown, and they are fine. I told her that for all the trouble and time, she would be just as far ahead to buy them each a big bag of potatoes from the Hutterites in the fall.

I told her she needs to focus on herself, and getting out of there, NOT on planting a garden. Why would you worry about a garden and yard work if you are LEAVING?!

She said today how badly she needs to leave; her house is too full to clean, the dust and mold was killing her, and so on. So I said "then accept the help from your kids, or from other people, and leave". She said that she couldn't do that to them. Then she mentions how ill she is, and tired, and that she can try to do something "in a couple of months when she feels better". She literally has six months before next winter, and an unimaginable hoard that would take at least that long to get rid of if she took a big truckload out every single day.

Again she talked about how "maybe there will just be a big fire then". Back to bullshit and not dealing with anything. Also, like I would care if she did. Who is she threatening? Me? So what?!

So, then she got miffed and "had to go". Well, guess what, that's how our talks are going to go now. I have no sympathy for her whining about her problems, when people have offered her help.

I went to the riding barn and nearly got hit by an idiot that was there picking up their dog (R does dog grooming). Why are people so stupid?

River looks like he's been having fun. It rained a little bit today, and he absolutely hates being wet, and always rolls when it rains to dry out. He was so dirty!

We did our Liberty/groundwork in the arena, and while he did better on a few things, he is still slow to turn on the haunches to the right, and still makes far too large a circle at Liberty on the right lead. Well, we worked on it.

We're supposed to video that pattern tomorrow, and I don't know if it will be worth submitting for a class or not. Sigh.

Then we rode outside in the outdoor arena, and that was nice. The dogs on the next door property were raising some unholy mayhem with what sounded like a coyote (probably defending her den, poor thing), but it didn't bother River.

I feel like I am sitting in a very different position on River now, with the bareback pad, and it's taking some adjustment.

I came home and didn't do much. I had a nap.

I learned about the ship "Montevideo Maru" which has been discovered on the bottom of the ocean.

"Montevideo Maru was a Japanese auxiliary ship during World War II. It was sunk by the American submarine USS Sturgeon on 1 July 1942, drowning 1,054 mostly Australians aboard—prisoners of war and civilians who were being transported from Rabaul to Hainan. The sinking is considered the worst maritime disaster in Australia's history. The wreck of the Montevideo Maru was discovered in April 2023."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montevideo_Maru

Comments

[sherlockishere]

Good for you for standing up to TW. Honestly, I don't know how you do it. I get really impatient with people who are self-destructive (probably an effect of having to live with my parents' self-descruction).

My friend G in Louisiana has a similar pattern. In her case, she gives money to her adopted 40-something year old son, who is sociopathic and a drug user. To the extent that she's bought drugs for him when he couldn't get them for himself and was going into withdrawal. He's stolen from her over and over again, and she's spent so much money on him that she is now 80 and in poor health and has absolutely no retirement fund. It makes me crazy to think about the situation, and I had to step aside from the friendship some 30 years ago when Sam was born, because I knew what she was doing was so terribly wrong.

I'll never understand what makes people do these things.

[gottawonder]

I care very much about my sister, and she's always been a hoarder.

You know she'll never change, but periodically life forces her to move, and she has to do something about the current hoard.

I am tired of hearing about how much she wants to move, and how the dirty condition of her house is causing her to be more ill. If I am not allowed to bring anyone in to help her get rid of it, then she shouldn't be complaining to me.

She has help offered from many different people, and she won't take it. Sure, she'll hoard up wherever she goes again too, but at least she wouldn't be in an abandoned ghost town (this place is so depressing, and downright dangerous in the winter because it is so isolated).

This past winter, all I got from her were phone calls about how bad it was living there, and how sick she was, and how she wanted to end her life because it all seemed so hopeless. It's too hard for me to keep hearing that over and over again, and also not seeing her accept help.

[ratunderpaper]

Is it possible to distract TW while someone else (spouse, sibling) goes through one room and sanitises it/takes some of the trash away while she isn't looking?

It sounds drastic, but it sounds like drastic measures are needed. And, would she ever notice if some of her hoard was gone?

[gottawonder]

You could probably show up at her house and just throw out some trash WITH her permission, and we have indeed done that before. She's fine with you taking a couple of bags of actual kitchen garbage or a single rotten chair or something.

What you can't do, is to fill up the back of your truck with something like boxes of stuff from inside her home like take all of the stacks of magazines, or her decorations, or movies or books or things that are, after all, her possessions.

Her issue is that she owns too much of everything. It isn't all garbage, but if you have a house that is full of knick knacks and books and clothes and blankets and so on, you can't dust it or clean under it. That's where the issues with dust and mold happen.

Then, it's the giant commercial garage full of old furniture and bags of clothing. You could maybe sneak out a load of that, but it's a drop in the bucket. You'd have to sneak out a load every day for possibly several months to empty it.

The mental anguish and loss of trust would not improve the situation.

This isn't tossing out a box of old wood once a week, that the owner probably recognizes as not necessary if pushed. This is a person with a ton of mostly not really garbage that is just an overwhelming amount.

Right? Books aren't really garbage (unless they are damaged), but if you have your house lined with them and maybe twenty or thirty more boxes in the garage, it's just too much for the space. Nice glass vases aren't garbage, but if you have more than a hundred of them scattered through your hoard, it's just too many.

It's really hard to explain the giant scope of the issue.

At some point she really does need to move. Most of us could do it with a big moving van, and maybe we'd still have to get rid of a bunch of stuff. We'd have to get rid of a lot if we had to move into a one-bedroom apartment from a big old house.

My sister would likely have to just abandon her current property, and in a very short period of time would be scarcely able to live in whatever new space she moved to.

[ratunderpaper]

I suppose you could clean up the garbage garbage, but someone of that age will not change their mindset from hoarder to Marie Kondo, even if their life depended on it.

I just discovered that the neat-as-a-pin elderly doctor across the street has a garage packed full of hoardy junk. It was a surprise.

[gottawonder]

I have no illusions about her changing.

I'm not at all trying to just help her clean up her house for the sake of decency, though it does cross my mind. I want her to either accept help to clean it all out so she can sell it (some farmer might use the building if he lives close enough), or just walk away so she can live somewhere else.

What she needs to do is move somewhere SAFER, because this place is in a literal ghost town. She is surrounded by empty houses full of raccoons. She lives out there alone (I think there is one other person not too far away) and her health is not good.

In the winter it is a lonely drive of close to half an hour from her place to town, and the highway is in terrible condition to that town, because no one lives there.

She has to haul her water because there is no town water system (because it is no longer a town), and she's been having trouble doing that lately. When she doesn't have water, that means she can't shower or use the toilet or wash clothes.

She ends up driving to town to shower and wash clothes at another family member's home sometimes.

Her septic system froze up a few months ago, and she wouldn't accept anyone's help to get it thawed out. That means she was literally going to the bathroom outside, in the winter, and apparently she was doing number two in a pail and dumping it on the side of the road away from her property.

There is NOTHING there for her, except her stuff. Her kids all live in another city, about three hours away. Other family all live in town, half an hour away.

Family has offered to help her get a suite at the lodge in town (more like an apartment), her kids have offered for her to come stay with them until she can find a place to live near them, she could also apply for low-income housing units in the area, but she wants none of those options.

Yet she also says that she wants to leave her current situation but feels that she needs to deal with it herself, even though most days she is too sick to get out of bed for more than an hour or two.