Other visits were from cousins Phyllis and Janice:
Mindy, Marie, Kody and Kayden:
Mair and Kitty. They stayed a month and we were able to take many side trips to various places of interest. We had had a exceptionally wet winter and spring, and as a result we had a glorious desert to show off to them. The cacti was in full bloom, as were the native wildflowers.
It was Mair's last trip with me. She was unable to take many of the tours with Kitty and I and she stayed in the car with Dick. It was sad to see her declining.
Debbie, Blake and Amber came in the summer (school vacation time) and braved our Arizona heat to see some local attraction:
The last of the year was Cody and Karen. We always enjoy our time with them:
These wonderful visits helped to take our minds off the over-riding problems of the year. Things at Falconhead had progressed to the point that we just couldn't handle it and with Dick's health declining could not go back and forth to Oklahoma to try to take care of the never ending problems of the tenants, so we made the very difficult decision to put an end to it all and contacted our two lenders on the townhouses and explained the problem to them and asked for a Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure. Verbally they said they would work with us and the nightmare started. At the same time we had to stop making payments to the Homeowner's Associations. The right hands of the banks could never get together with what the left hands were doing, as a result we kept getting contradicting instructions on how they wanted to handle it and it dragged on and on, at the same time the collection departments were calling us day after day. To add to what seemed like a nightmare, the person who was buying our condo suddenly wasn't making her payments. With the turn in the overall economy, her place of business had shut down and at age 60 she was finding it impossible to find another job. She finally forfeited on the loan and we had to go through the foreclosure on her. In the meantime the market had crashed and the condo we had paid $38,000 for, we had to dump at $9,000.
As the months progressed Dick's health got worse and he started the year in the hospital with his oxygen level at 72%. He was put on oxygen 24/7. We had some very bad times when he basically would 'lose it' completely and not be able to do the simplest thing, and a couple of times collapsed.
Then later he discovered he had breast cancer and had to go through a complete masectomy.
Me? Well physically I was doing fairly well except for chronic IBS, but my hair was falling out, my nerves were shot, my nails were splitting and I was more stressed than I can ever remember being.
The amazing thing was that through all this, Dick pulled off miracles in our yard, turning the pile of dirt to something really beautiful and all done, sitting on a chair! Photos to follow in the next blog.
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