The two terms at issue:
Group House: shared household where residents all pay rent and are assumed to be autonomous but effectively interacting neighbors. Domain: Real Estate, rental.
Group Home: shared housing often managed by some kind of staff and residents who may need special assistance due to health, age. disability, or mental capacity issues. Domain: social services
Has RantWoman misspoken? You dear readers get to decide.
RantWoman is reflecting on recent contacts with a buddy she will call Caregiver Drama Friend or CDF for short. The good news is that after a prolonged and gnarly spell of emotional upset and affronts to CDF's sense of personal reality, at long last, the number of guffaws per call, one of the main merits of CDF's conversations, appears to be on the upswing.
This could be the antidepressants CDF finally intersected with. It could be that CDF has just endured the necessary amount of lawyering and CDF is slowly moving on from lurid family meltdowns. Or it could be because RantWoman just ruthlessly seizes CDF's material and latches onto any and all opportunities for mirth, for full gut-busting belly laughs of the "Why turn on the television ...when I can get all the soap opera I need over the phone" sort.
Caregiver Drama Friend has, um, a unique approach to having it all. Until recently she was principle caregiver for her octagenarian father, or OF for short. OF has had strokes and broken hips. He has had tours of several area rehab facilities. He has ruggedly fought back from all these physical difficulties though as years have marched on, it is less clear what causes him to have really good days.
CDF has two siblings with whom she has strained relations; although the siblings are not quite MIA on the caring for parent front, their situation is orders of magnitude more drama-laden than other families RantWoman knows who are facing similar issues. Perhaps a good case could even be made that OF could live somewhere else and both he and CDF might manage to have tolerable times of it. CDF wants nothing better than for OF to be vigorous and happy. At OF's age, the former is tough and the latter comes in peculiar small puffs and not always for reason CDF predicts. At any rate OF is now trying the lving elsewhere thing, and CDF opines frequently about what must be happening at her sister's because of it.
CDF and OF jointly own one Big Purple House acquired in an effort to surround OF with people of all ages and to share his caregiving needs with roommates in exchange for housing. RantWoman has had a spell or two of living with landlords, and she suspects that proposition sounded better going in than it turned out to be. The Big Purple House, despite scads and scads and scads of historical charm, a parlor with hardwood floors, a front porch and big bay windows, also has spendy old house problems.
On top of that, CDF has too kind a heart or too miraculous a knack for finding housemates with substance abuse issues, uneven capacity to carry out the contracting projects CDF would sometimes barter for rent, or just too many idiosyncrasies.
But does CDF stop there? Uh-uh! Nope. No way. Add current and former boyfriends who both have hapless kids, ex-wives, AND baby-mama-drama. Next, add Lester the Loathsome Lecherous Legal Talent with Liver Trouble who is supposed to be helping with a custody matter for one of the hapless adolescents. Next add a lawyer from CDF's own legal team who CDF is certain justneeds to get laid, though CDF mercifully feels no need to offer such services herself.
But what has happened most recently to earn cDF a spot, coveted or not, in RantWoman's musings? Enter the firearm, a firearm of indeterminate provenance that caregiver drama friend just got out of the house when her irascible charge got too paranoid. CDF has no interest in the piece but recently it came BACK in conversation between housemates and a friendly police officer. Friendly police officer was on scene in a misplaced attempt to be helpful as to some outcomes of most recent legal pas de deux.
RantWoman has no experience of any sort with this firearm. RantWoman has had multiple conversations about it with CDF and generally concurs with CDF's thought that getting such a thing out of the house when OF was acting rather erratic was probably a very good idea. RantWoman believes CDF about handing said firearm off to one of the boyfriends for disposal at the next opportunity connected with his work. RantWoman thinks one way or another CDF would have felt need to chatter about the acquisition of any other firearms and there has been no such chatter.
CDF has had no contact for sometime with housemates. That could be one of the reasons up has become down and the firearam CDF got out of the house for everyone's safety has now in household conversational practice become a firearm that CDF might wield against housemates. Mention of such a firearm, however hypothetical tends to make even the calmest police officer edgy. Once the firearm came up in conversation, CDF's efforts to retrieve some possessions lately buried in the household's efforts to shift around its flotsam and jetsam took on ever more melodrama, to the point that during the retelling RantWoman finally made a peculiar offer.
RantWoman grew up in the sort of place where everyone who was anyone with a pickup truck would be wont to drive around town with shotguns on gun racks mounted on the cabs of their pickups. If firearms really, really, really were needed at CDF's, RantWoman offered to mount a gunrack on a Volvo and bomb over to the Big Purple Group home. We will not discuss petty details like rantWoman's lack of driver's license, lack of inclination to actually acquire a shotgun, or the logistics of mounting a gunrack on a Volvo. We will simply note that the gunrack on Volvo meme had its intended effect and RantWoman and CDF were soon rolling on our respective floors howling with laughter into the telephone!
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