Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Seven Kinds o’ Hell

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Yech!!!!!!!  It’s lightly over-cast this afternoon and a chilly 85 degrees on the back porch. Mildly humid. And that translates, in Arizona lingo, to hotter than Hell. 

Seriously: it’s a freakin’ sauna out there. Just got back from a hike to and around my favorite local stores. And when we say “hike,” we ain’t kiddin’. I’d say the total came to a good three miles. At least. Down to the ‘Hood’s south border, past the church, downward ever downward to Main Drag South. Through the shopping center parking lot, around and around and around the HUGE supermarket. Finally out the door. Northerly northerly northerly back up to our part of the ‘Hood. Through the church parking lot. Past the apartments where my mother once wanted me to rent, northerly northerly northerly…finally reaching our street. Hiking, hiking, hiking…oh my GAWD!  

Hot? Lemme tellya hot.

About to faint by the time we reach our street, hiking easterly easterly until AT LAST we reach our north-south access road. Northerly northerly northerly, past houses with beautiful young kids playing in the yards <3, past the fine young neighbors’ places, up to the WonderAccountants’ place: straight across the street from the Funny Farm.

Damn near pass out as we reach the front door. Wrestle with two deadbolts. FINALLY get into the (mercifully!!!) air-conditioned house.

Ruby is waiting. She seems OK…uhm…I think. But the Human isn’t: the Human is about to fukkin’ die of heat exhaustion.

Stagger into the kitchen. Fill up a wine glass with ice and…and…oh what the Hell! pour a slug of white wine over it. Serve up half a can of dawg food. Turn on every fan in the room and collapse in front of one of them thar fans.

Thinking how much I miss San Francisco. How much I miss my relatives’ place in Berkeley. Why, dear God, WHY do I live in this Hell?

Oh. Because my son is here!

And oh: because I can’t afford to live in Berkeley. Or Sausalito. Or Richmond. Or most certainly not San Francisco. All the places I came from. All places I imagine I belong.

My gawd, I hate Arizona. Especially at this time of (the overheated!!) year. And this time of year — April — will extend through the end of September. Six richly hate-worthy months. 

What. A. Horrible. Place.

The Siege of the Front Yard

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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.

 

Hotter Than the Hubs…Again…

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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….

 

Turned Upside-Down in Space?

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Holeeee maquerel! WHAT is going on here?

Just tried to call my son, thinking it’s about dinnertime — around 6:30 in the evening.

But…

No….

No, folks: it’s breakfast-time!

It’s not 6:30 in the evening. It’s 6:30 in the morning!!!! 

Understandably, he was pretty peeved at being rousted from the sack at this hour.

And I’m pretty scared.

Scared that I’m so turned around and so goddamned confused that I don’t know whether it’s morning or night!

****

How terrifying!

Well. I guess this is a signal. And that signal’s meaning is pretty obvious:

Time to sell the house and move into a holding pen for the elderly. 

Guess I’m headed for the Beatitudes, a “life-care community” that stores you during the last months or (God forfend!) years of your life, as you rot away into senility.

Dear Lord! How I would ever so much rather be dead!

Seriously: I just abominate institutional living. Hated hated HATED living in the dorms in college. And now…goddammit! Now I have to end my life that way?

Time to look into alternatives. I simply cannot wind up my life locked into a dormitory for the senile. If I weren’t already crazy when they hauled me off to such a place, I would soon be stark raving insane.

There’s gotta be a better way to go. Let’s find out what it is. And…exit, stage left. 

Morning Has Broken…

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Like the first day…
Blackbird has spoken,
Like the first bird…

Actually, we don’t have blackbirds here in the lovely Sonoran desert. We have telephone solicitors.

The ba*tards start calling you as dawn cracks. Ringy-dingy-dingy Ringy dingy dingy ringy…. If you have any fantasy about sleeping in, fuhgeddaboudit!

We’re told phone soliciting is a prison industry. Apparently, a large portion of these nuisance phone calls are coming from convicts, placed from inside local and regional prisons. Makes you wanna just hurry right out and buy whatever they’re peddling, right?

I used to blast a horn into the phone whenever the ba*tards would jangle me up. Now…well..that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. And really: if the job is being done by people who are forced to it by their prison guards, I suppose it’s not every nice to try to blow out their eardrums.

I suppose.

On the other hand, it’s not very nice to jangle me out of bed by dawn’s early light, either.

I’d disconnect the phone at night, if I felt safe doing so. But…I don’t. I’m here by myself, and if anything happens that I need to call 911, then…yeah: I’ll NEED to call 911. Now, not after fiddling indefinitely with the damn phone.

What a gorgeous morning!! 

Guess Ruby and I had better head out on our morning walk, before the day heats up. And so…

A-WAAAAYYY

Time to Move to the Old Folks’ Home?

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Stay? or flee?

Do Ruby and I want to sell up, pack up, and move? Shift our base of operations to an institution for the elderly, where staff babysit you 24/7? Or…well…stay here, keep dodging the burglars and the sh!t-heads, keep managing crews of yard guys, housecleaners, pool dudes, repairmen…on and on and endlessly on?

One advantage of living in an old-folkerie: someone else rides herd on the hired help.

Here, I do have a cleaning lady who does an excellent job. Most of them don’t: they appear not to know how to clean house, at least not to middle-class American standards. So the presence of Wonder Cleaning-Lady is a huge privilege…and very possibly a rarity.

You shouldn’t have to ride herd on a worker doing a job that your mommy taught you to do when you were nine years old. In Wonder Cleaning-Lady’s case, I don’t have to…but too dam many of them don’t even seem to know how to use a dustrag.

Move into one of those old folks’ warehouses, and (in theory, anyway) you have an employee riding the herd.

Whaddaya bet, though, that you still end up with imperfect cleaning, dust still sitting on the bookcase shelves, dust still hiding behind the sofa, grease still sitting on the stove burners…on and on and on…  Y’know…if I have to deal with that, I’d rather deal with it in my own home,  not in some unholy institution.

But…Jeez!!

This morning Ruby and I repaired to the neighborhood park for our morning perambulation. And there was some guy out there, yelling suggestive obscenities at us. Yeah: at an 80-year-old bat!!! 

You can’t get away from the bastards!

Wait…isn’t that what the cop said after the Great Home Invasion Adventure?  😀

Seriously: you CAN’T get away from them.

If I’m going to stay here and if I imagine Ruby and I are going to continue our walking routine, maybe I ought to get us a pistol. One that’s small enough to fit inside a pocket.

On the other hand, I don’t want to shoot some jerk just because he asks me if I wanna f*ck. That wouldn’t be nice, would it?

😉