Sorry for the lacuna of blog again. I was down visiting my grandparents in their brand new home in Bend. This here, from Edna, is part of the very cute door decorations on all the units at the ... "home"? (Something like that. "Retirement home." Or, I like "death resort.")
Every unit has a little knickknack shelf outside the door, with cutely junior-high-locker-style decorations like this and this and this:
I had braced myself to be depressed by "Whispering Winds," like how could a retirement home *not* be oppressive and institutional, if even secretly under a thin veneer, but that expectation was thankfully disappointed at almost every turn. The place is amazingly nice and not falsely cheery at all. It's got a definite Pottery Barn thing going on, and a big media room, a pool hall, a "beauty shop," a putting green and a dog run (right outside my gps' balcony), a dining room where you actually order from a menu, etc. Even the reminders that you were in an "old folks' home" were usually kind of funny (this was in a nice little library on the second floor):
My grandfather, for the record, thought "Arthritis Today" was hilarious. As my mom finally decided, "It's the Nordstrom of retirement living." And it's two blocks from a huge medical center (which sadly they've already used), so that makes me feel better.
In any case, I'm glad they're done moving. I was talking to my grandmother about how the rest of the packing at their old condo went, and she said, "Well, we had one woman who kept coming by to visit... we never did find out her name."
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