I may have found a roommate to move in with me.

The day I posted my previous blog saying that I was looking for one or two people to move in with me and live here rent-free in exchange for being my part-time caregiver, I got a Facebook messenger message from my old friend Barbara Alkema saying “How physical is the job?”. I totally freaked out.

I’ve known her for over 30 years. She currently lives in West Virginia with her adult son Joshua and 4 cats. I had thought about asking her if she would consider coming to Indiana but I thought it was very arrogant of me to presume that someone would pick up their life and move to a different state for me. Barb points out that I sent her a link to the blog hoping she would “take the bait”. Well maybe yes but I sent the link everywhere I could think of. In addition to posting on Facebook I sent emails to lots of people including her. Unfortunately I had an old email address that was no good so when I asked her about her current email then I sent her the link. The idea that she might respond positively seemed like a ridiculous fantasy.

This was much better because she was volunteering based on my open casting call and I didn’t look like I was an egotistical ass asking her to uproot her life and move to a different state.

Back in the early 1980s before Al Gore invented the Internet (okay I know he really didn’t) there was an online service called CompuServe. You would use dial-up modems just like AOL which appeared a few years later. There were live chat rooms, discussion forums, news pages, and you could book travel just like you can on the Internet today. But it was all plaintext with no pictures and you connected at 300 baud. To compare that when AOL and other Internet services stopped using dial-up modems they were running at 56,000 baud. Today’s Internet is thousands of times faster.

There was a disability discussion group and that’s where I met a man named Jim Grubs. He was 50 years old, lived in Toledo Ohio, and had some kind of muscular dystrophy. It wasn’t the kind that I have. Jim’s parents were in their 80s and could not properly care for him but they had some money and so they hired a full-time live-in caregiver named Barbara.

I communicated with them both online through CompuServe and occasionally by phone. One time Barbara took the weekend off from caring for Jim and left him in the hands of a backup aide named Dede. She drove down from Toledo to Indianapolis to spend a few days with me. We had a great time together. We went out to dinner with my friends Rich and Kathy Logan and then went on to a comedy club where we saw a new rising star in the comedy world. You might’ve heard of him… His name was Jerry Seinfeld. This of course was years before his TV show. We had a great time. The next day Barb and I went over to the Speedway to tour the museum and who did we run into? Jerry Seinfeld! We told him we really enjoyed his show the night before. I wish I had the presence of mind to ask for an autograph.

In August 1986, Barb came back to Indianapolis and picked me up in my van and drove me to Toledo to visit with her and Jim for a few days. We took a trip on a ferryboat out into Lake Erie to a place called South Bass Island and to a resort town called Put-in-Bay. There is a huge lighthouse on the island that commemorates Commodore Perry’s victory in the battle of Lake Erie during the war of 1812. We also had a great time visiting with several of their friends and then backup aide Dede took over and Barb and I drove from Toledo to Chicago where we each visited some friends there. Then she drove me back to Indianapolis. I’m going to do an entirely other blog post about that whole adventure including a YouTube video of some VHS tape I shot on her trip out to the island.

The last I saw Barb in person was in 1990. She had quit working for Jim and was on her way to move to Texas with her seven-month-old baby boy Joshua. I remember she was here the day that my Grandma Osterman went to the hospital for the last time before she passed away.

Barb later returned to Toledo to work for Jim briefly but he passed away in 1995. Barb and I stayed in touch over the years. By email, Facebook, and the occasional phone call.

She went to school and got a job doing social work. A few years ago she developed health problems and had to go on Social Security Disability, Medicare and Medicaid. I wasn’t really sure if she was in good enough physical shape to help take care of me or if she would be interested in moving here. I did know that they were struggling financially but like I said, I thought I would be an idiot to presume she might move here even if she could.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve talked over all of the ins and outs of her moving here. She of course discussed it with her son Josh who has been a Facebook friend of mine for some time. He is in his late 20s. He’s a bit of a nerd like me. Loves sci-fi. Hates Trump. In a way more nerdy than me. He plays Dungeons & Dragons which I don’t. I’m sure we will get along just fine. Josh currently has a crap job working in a drugstore making crap wages. He was already looking for a better job so he will have to find one here. He has friends in West Virginia that he plays D&D with once a month but they say they can Skype with him or he can come visit sometimes. He also plays online with other people which you can do anywhere. He is on board with the plan.

I’m not wild about the idea of 4 cats coming with them because I’m not much of a cat person but given a choice between A) Living with a longtime friend, her son who is cool, and four cats versus B) Living in a nursing home… I will take “Plan A” any day.

You might think that we live in the United States of America but actually we live in a bunch of egotistical local jurisdictions that each think they know what’s best for their constituents especially when it comes to healthcare. While Medicare is completely federal, Medicaid varies state-by-state. We will have some hoops we need to jump through to get her eligible for Indiana Medicaid but after consulting with my lawyer we think we’ve got that one figured out.

Barb has plans to go visit a friend in a different part of West Virginia the week of April 6. The current plan is that she will spend a week with that friend that then take a bus here to Indianapolis and hang out with me for a week or so. It will probably be too strenuous for her to get me up and bathed and dressed in the morning but we are hopeful she will be able to put me to bed at night which is much easier. Her visit will verify just what she is and is not able to do. If that goes okay then she will go back home and begin to pack. Josh may come before her to start looking for a job.

I currently get nursing services from 8 AM- 6 PM Monday through Friday but that’s only because Carol is living here as my primary caregiver and she has to work. With Barbara living here full-time and not working I will no longer be eligible for that kind of nursing support. I will end up going back to having a home health aide come in for a couple of hours every day to get me up and dressed. We can also get respite nursing to come in and take care of me if Barb needs to go somewhere like a doctor appointment. We would essentially be back to the way things were with me and my dad before he got sick this past summer. My weekend aide has that she would love to come back and work for me seven days per week the way that she did for the past two years before we got nursing help.

In my original blog posts I said that I would need more than one roommate so that they could share responsibilities. However because Barb doesn’t have any friends around here and doesn’t work it will not be a burden for her to be here full-time. Josh can help out around the house as well as he already does where they live in West Virginia.

I took a tour of my house shooting video on my iPhone and sent it to them to show them what the house looks like. Barb will take over the main bedroom that used to be my parents room and Carol is currently using. We have a junk room which contains my mom’s old sewing machine, a worktable that my dad used to build my gadgets, and a closet full of my ventilator supplies. We will clean that room out and it will be for Josh. We’ve already cleaned out my office closet in anticipation of moving stuff out of the junk room. Karen will probably take mom’s old sewing machine. We are going to get rid of one of the sofas in the family room and the organ which nobody plays anymore. That will give us room to put stuff in the family room.

Barb will bring some furniture of her own and some she will put in storage here. They will bring their beds. She has a hutch she likes that we can probably put in the family room. She has her own sewing machine. She sells stuff she makes on esty.com at a store called MakeItSewByBarb. We just priced what it will cost to rent a U-Haul truck and it’s going to be expensive but it’s cheaper than hiring a real mover.

She is excited that we have a dishwasher. Josh is excited that I have a 3D printer he can use to make D&D figurines and map pieces. I’m excited that they have a 60 inch TV they are bringing. Mine is only 47 inches but it will do 3D so we will keep them both. We both subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access and Amazon prime so we can consolidate those and save some money. I will probably cancel some of the premium channels on our cable. I will probably cancel our landline telephone since we all have cell phones. There are a lot of details to work out but I’m extremely hopeful that we can do it.

So send up a prayer or two that we can make this work. This is going to be a win-win situation for both of us if we can work out the details.