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Too late for a house?

Dear Annie: Usually active and energetic, I will be turning 80 in the spring. How I dread that birthday! Once my favorite season, spring now haunts me. A fine artist, a painter, I still have dreams of finding a house to buy — one where I could hang my paintings and invite people in to see them. I’ve been looking for several years. I’m finding that houses are either in undesirable locations or too expensive. I never married and have rented and lived in apartments for many years. But I want to have a garden and be more involved and attend more activities. I feel younger than I ...

Baloney is not free

Baloney is not free. That’s important to keep in mind in an era that finds America wading hip deep in a cascading tide of bovine effluvium. This nonsense is not harmless, not trivial, not abstract. And it always exacts a cost. If some of us ever knew that, they have apparently forgotten. As a result, we have become a nation awash in public lies — conspiracy theories without basis, crackpot pronouncements from figures of authority, misleading, mendacious misstatements false as a four-dollar bill, delivered every minute of every day to our television, computer and smartphone ...

Missing job satisfaction

Dear Annie: I enjoy my job, but I’m not satisfied. I’m not sure what I’m missing, though. I think I’m just daydreaming about an ideal job that probably doesn’t exist. But I don’t know how to reconcile that. I don’t want to be at my current job longer than another year or two. But that time is time I could be spending being happier, more fulfilled in my daily life. People say we should “live every day like it’s our last,” but that seems unrealistic — and financially unsound. If I knew I’d be dead in a year, I’d quit my job today. But that would be an ...

Eradicating robocalls once and for all

Say, here’s an idea for something Congress can do while it anxiously awaits release of the Mueller report. How about doing something to directly — and positively — help countless millions of Americans every single day? Stop all those damn robocalls that plague us once and for all! No one on the planet welcomes a robocall. No one. We dutifully sign up for the National Do Not Call Registry, but they still come, billions of times every month. They are the daily bane of our already harried existence. There is a renewed move in the U.S. Senate to crack down on companies that launch ...

Aging mother causing strife

Dear Annie: My family is dealing with an aging mother. Since my father died, she has moved often. Every place she moves to eventually has some issue, and she starts complaining. Soon she is driving me crazy about whatever it is. Even after the problem is solved, she’ll find something else to focus on. I have tried to get her interested in senior activities or exercise programs, with no luck. I have refused to participate in the past two moves, as it is difficult at my age and doesn’t resolve her issue. But my siblings keep moving her. They get angry with me and say mean things, and ...

Is the ACA unconstitutional?

“If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch, as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.” — Justice George Sutherland (1862-1942) Here we go again. The legal battle over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — will soon be back in court due to the largely unexpected consequences of a series of recent events. When the ACA was enacted in 2010, it was a stool with four legs. The first was a declaration that access to professional health care treatment — even for preexisting conditions — is a right to be ...