The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Yeah: come the middle of the lunch hour (you thought you were gonna be allowed to have something to eat??), BING BONG goes the doorbell.
Forgodsake. City water meter guy.
He descends on the equipment. Bop bop bang bang fix fiddle fiddle... They’re gonna bill me for his services, sez he.
Whaddaya bet that’ll be a couple hundred bucks. Or more….
No idea what he was supposedly repairing. No leak. No…nothing that I can tell is on the fritz.
Except, presumably, my bank account….
Forget this!
Trying to delete a largely erroneous post…my system, naturally, hangs and won’t erase the post.
So the sprinkler is running in the front yard, outside the walled patio. It’s the kind of cheap little metal sprinkler that screws on to the end of a hose. So…given our late experiences with our patio thieves, now I need to wait till the watering cycle ends; then RUN out there, unscrew the sprinkler, and bring in inside.
Or at least hide it somewhere in front.
Nahhh….prob’ly bring it in will be safest.
Can you imagine?? Having to run in circles and jump hoops to keep the local morons from stealing ordinary junk like sprinklers and bird feeders?
The hummers’ feeders are now inside, or, to the extent that some of them are still hanging up, ensconced in the backyard.
I’m assuming that any idiot who would steal a hummingbird feeder — over and over and over again! — will soon come along and steal the water sprinklers off the frontyard hose. So…need to let that water run about 20 or 30 minutes; then run outside and rescue the sprinklers from the front-yard hose. Bring them inside and hide them in the garage.
I ask you: How stupid IS this?
Really, it makes living in the Beatitudes old-folkerie look good: someone else can deal with the rampant morons!
***
Y’know…this stuff is making me awfully depressed.
Honestly: what kind of morons steal bird-feeders and lawn sprayers? And do I really want to stay here sharing a neighborhood with jerks like that? Maybe it’s time to move somewhere else!
Problem is, now that I’m old (with a vengeance!), about the only option for moving is to decamp to the Beatitudes: a dreary old-folkerie where they babysit you into the next world. And honestly: that’s not where I want to spend the last months or years of my life!
Horrors!
Truly: I love my home, and I absolutely positively do NOT want to move into an institution. Horrors, indeed!
Yes, sooner or later it no doubt will be inevitable, unless I’m lucky and I drop dead. But I just want to put off that horrible inevitability as long as possible.
Jerk neighbors who dork with your yard ornaments and your sprinkling system sure as hell don’t make that easy! 😀
Hmmmm….. Maybe a strategy might be to put up some small, discreet cameras out there. Let them run 24 hours or so. And see if they don’t capture our perps in the act. If I could catch them, I could report them to the police — or to their daddies — and bring a stop to the shenanigans.
Just back from a mile-plus peregrination of the ‘Hood, dragged along by my furry boss. How can I count the ways I just wanna sit down and swill a cup of coffee?
Stumble over to the easy chair. Flop down in it. And…
RINGY-DINGY-DINGY!
Goddamned phone. A Goddamned phone solicitor on the other end.
I tell him where to make his next phone call and slam down the receiver.
Honest to Gawd. Phone soliciting should be illegal. Seriously: I realize it’s “freedom of speech” and all. But shouldn’t the rest of us have something like “freedom of privacy” or “freedom of peace and quiet”?
***
The neighborhood park is so lovely! I adore this area. Beautiful, quiet, upscale, affluent, right in the middle of everything
O’course it ain’t perfect. Right across the street from the park stands a house whose occupants fled after a pair of home invaders barged in, grabbed them, tied them up, threw them in the bathtub, and proceeded to loot the house.
So. If you live here…yeah: you keep your doors locked all the time. And you do NOT answer the door unless you know who’s on the other side and what they want.
But then…come ON! No place is safe. Just the other day some sh!thead barged into a madly upscale home in Fountain Hills, a mighty swell dive. And I’ll tellya: before that happened, I would have said Fountain Hills is as staid and secure as you can get, this side of Sun City.
My mother, who was scared of her own shadow, cowered in terror all the time she lived in Sun City. She dwelt behind heavily locked doors and windows. And yet…really…she was less terrorized out there than anywhere else we lived.
Something must have happened to her. If it did, she never told me. But really: you wouldn’t act like that unless you had some reason to be scared.
Me, I find the company of a dog amply reassuring. Ruby is no German shepherd (not by a long shot!). But she does alert whenever anyone comes around.
And really, that’s about all a dog can do for you. You’re the one who has to take care of yourself: get to a safe place, grab your pistol, call the cops, whatEVER.
Ruby: the four-legged burglar alarm.
😀
Don’t even wanna KNOW what the temp is out there! Let’s see what we can find out from Wunderground, thereby stoking our neurosis without having to get up and walk onto the back porch to look at the thermometer…
Ah! A chilly 106 degrees in the shade…at 4:54 p.m.
Balmy, eh?
Stupidly, I walked down to the Albertson’s shopping center a couple hours ago. Extraordinarily bad idea! Just about fricaseed by the time I stumbled back in the house.
And…and…WHY is it so freakin’ hot in here, two hours later?
Because the AC is off. Or something….it’s set to some brain-banging STUPID temperature.
Just discovered that fiasco! Turned the unit back on (WHO the hell turned it off, and why?????). Set it for 77.
The motor just started to run. Temp inside the house is in the 80s just now–far as I can tell. May be higher. So it’ll take a couple hours to cool back down into a bearable temperature.
Well, it’s only a bit after 5:00 p.m. at the moment. So by bed-time, maybe the house will be sleep-able….
My hair is soaking wet. And since I haven’t been in the pool, that ain’t a good sign.
What the HECK happened here? This is not a cleaning-lady day. Far as I can recall, no workmen have been in the house. And you may be sure I wouldn’t have turned the AC off. Soooo….how did the thermostat get set at a Hades-like temp?????
Jeez. I wonder if someone could have come in the house and, in a moment of funny-ha-ha humor, messed with the thermostat? But…who? Cleaning lady? WHY? She’s no vicious nut case, and so wouldn’t have done a thing like that. Plumber? Don’t think he has a key.
Is it possible to dork with the thermostat from outside the house? If you get on the roof with the unit, for example?
Oh well. The thing is blasting cool air into the room just now. Soon it will be blasting a vast power bill into the house….
Literally unbelievable, as it happens today.
This afternoon, in came a hustling piece of snail-mail, trying to get me to Send Money Now and HURRY to sign up for that wondrous product. It looked like BS to me…sort of. But..but…sort of NOT.
Actually, it seemed to be trying to say my homeowner’s insurance is expiring and I need to renew a policy…right now!
Fortunately, the WonderAccountants were home. They live right across the street.
So I took the wad of paper over there. They looked at it and shortly decided it was a scam. Out with it!
Actually, it took them a few minutes of studying the thing to come to that conclusion. You can be sure that if they were given pause, I would never have been able to figure out that it was a scam.
Lordie! This stuff just comes avalanching in on us! When you need a professional to assess the validity of a piece of junk mail…ohhhh gawd! What kind of world DO we live in???
What incredible luck that those two wonderful folks moved into the house across the road! They’ve saved my tail feathers more than once!