Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

August 6 Grinds On…

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Egad! Just stumbled out back…glanced at the back-porch thermometer. A HUNDRED AND SEVEN DEGREES. Yeah, you saw that right: 107º… IN THE SHADE OF THE BACK PORCH ROOF!

Yep: 107 in the shade. 

Almost as balmy as lovely Saudi Arabia, whither my parents and I spent 10 years. Except it was damn humid there…I’ve seen rain start to fall out of a clear blue sky. Here, it really is “a dry heat.”

And the “dry heat” is significantly more tolerable than swamp conditions. Not anything that you’d like to frolic in…but at least it doesn’t suffocate you.

I see we’ve got a dead shrub out back. Looks like it’s not getting watered. Drag the hose over to it. Remember to ask the Yard Dudes to be sure the system reaches that part of the hedge. And have them take out the dead thing.

Yard Dude: there’s another of those fine jobs one is mighty glad not to have. Gerardo and the boys get started as dawn cracks: that’s so. But they’re sure not done before the heat comes up. I don’t see how they do it!!

We’re told we have a 15% chance of rain. Why do I doubt it? Maybe later tonight: like, well after dark. But not any time soon.

After dark…it’ll still be too hot for Ruby’s feet. So that’s another daily doggy-walk we’ll miss today. We did get out, as usual, along about dawn…even then, it was nigh unto too hot for her. I’m afraid this evening will be well beyond the pale for little bare doggy feet.

Yech!!  What a place!

Soggy Doggy Day

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Just back from the a.m. DoggyWalk. What a morning! At 6:30: hot, wet, overcast, soggy. REALLY an unpleasant day. Feels like horrid Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the ever-humid Persian Gulf.

Sometimes I wonder how my mother survived nine years in that hell-hole.

Well. She didn’t, really. She came home with amoebic dysentery — a gift from a brainless neighbor who failed to soak the salad greens in Clorox before serving them up to guests. That evolved into the enteric cancer that killed her.

WHY are people so stupid?

WHY do people flat refuse to follow instructions (like “disinfect all raw vegetables & fruit before eating them”)?

WHY can’t people keep their damn dogs under control when they’re in public?

“Doggy-walk” means “dodge idiots and their rampaging animals”… In cooler weather, Ruby and I would wait until the resident morons get done hauling their dogs through the neighborhood, so we can go out in relative peace. Today, though, you can be sure will soon be even hotter and even more humid than it is right now. And so: out the door as dawn cracks!

Spotted a crew of workmen slaving away on the exterior of a house that’s being rebuilt. LORDIE! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have! How those guys survive in this swampy weather escapes me.

This is the kind of day that makes me deeply miss the San Francisco Bay Area. My relatives lived in Berkeley, which really was a lovely venue. My mother parked us in the City, in a bourgeois apartment development called Parkmerced. Not my favorite place…but about 110% better than unlovely Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia killed my mother. The amoebic dysentery that she brought home morphed into an enteric cancer. And so she lived horribly for 10 years out there, and then back here she died horribly in about 10 months.

Not before she and my father dragged us to Arizona, though. She thought it was some variant of Paradise. I think it’s a variant of the opposite venue…  What a place!

Ohhh well. The dog and I are back inside, where the air-conditioning is blasting away. The kitchen needs to be picked up. The house tidied. And the human driven to a grocery store.

Ugh. Another lovely day in Arizona…leave us all enjoy it!

 

Rasty-Nasty Day, Continued….

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So…yeah. The sweaty nightmare continues. As we scribble, Wunderground claims the temperature outdoors is 103°. The back porch thermometer, sequestered under the shade of a north-facing roof, reads 111°…. Yeah.

Yard dudes have screwed up the watering system. Had to fart with that and fart with that and fart with that some more, trying to fix it. Still don’t know whether I’ve got it right.

How do I hate this place? Let me count the ways.

Trust me: if my son weren’t here, I would be in the San Francisco Bay Area right now. That’s whence I emanated, and it’s where some of my relatives still live.

Wherever I might wander…you may be sure I would NOT remain in this superheated hell-hole.

Hmmmmm….  Where might I wander, anyhow?

* San Francisco Bay Area (fir$t choice)
* San Diego (a little warmer than I’d like, but it’s a neat place.)
* Prescott (an Arizona small town graced by a sophisticated private college. Pretty place to live.)
* Suburbs of Tucson (the University of Arizona provides a fairly rich cultural life to Tucson. And the weather’s not as hot there as it is in Phoenix.)

I can’t afford to live in the San Francisco Bay area, my first choice. And the truth is, none of those other places are any better than where I am.

In fact, where I am is better than those places, because my honored son is here. If he were to move someplace else, I very well might follow him. But I’m not likely to move away from him.

Because between the two of us, he’s the one who still has a functioning brain. ;-D

Seriously…he does navigate 21st-century society about ten times better than I do. He understands things that have come into being since I quit paying attention to those things. He knows how to resolve issues that mystify me. And he rides herd on the hired help one helluva lot more efficiently than I do.

So…whither he goes, so go I. If he stays put, so do I.

😮

A Rasty-Nasty Day in (Un)Lovely Arizona

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Yech!!!!!  This morning Ruby and I plowed through the heat and humidity reminiscent of the weather in Rasty Nasty, the horrid seaside oil & shipping colony parked on an Arabian shore along the Persian Gulf.

My father was a merchant seaman. Shortly after I was born, he got himself a handsomely paying job in Saudi Arabia, as a harbor pilot steering tankers and freighters out of the port at Ras Tanura. Horrible — truly horrible — place to live: hot, dangerous, disease-ridden, unwelcoming to the Yankee set. Hence, my father’s nickname for the place: Rasty Nasty.

It truly was awful, from an American’s point of view. My mother caught amoebic dysentery out there, which led to the enteric cancer that ultimately killed her. My father and I managed to escape it…apparently because neither he nor I ate the infected salad that an idiot neighbor served up to us for a farewell dinner.

No kidding: we were slated to go back to the States, permanently, when she came down with this horrible endemic disease…because one woman was too goddam stupid and stubborn to soak the goddam lettuce in Clorox before tossing it into a salad!

This was a habit the Company tried to instill in the ladies: when the wives got out there, they forthwith had to attend classes designed to protect Americans’ safety and health. That particular lady really was blindingly stupid…and she just ignored everything the Company tried to teach her.

Result: she killed my mother.

Think of that. We’d been out there 10 years, during which my mother duly sanitized every bite we put in our mouths, and in the LAST WEEK before we were to go home permanently, that bitch murdered her by failing to clean the goddam produce.

Her laziness killed my mother.

The treatment for amoebic dysentery, at the time, was fierce. And it was carcinogenic. Not surprisingly, then, she came down with cancer. By the time her doctors discovered it (women’s complaints of abdominal pain in those days were discounted as signs of hypochondria), her abdomen was filled with columnar growths. There was nothing they could do to save her.

As you can imagine, I could do without weather that reminds me of that horrible place. {chortle!} I can do without anything that reminds me of Saudi Arabia.

At any rate, those fine adventures were brought to mind as Ruby and I plowed through the swampy heat this morning, and passed men working like Arabs at a house where they were building an add-on.

Yeah: out there at the crack of dawn, climbing ladders and hauling lumber and pounding nails…augh! Surely there’s gotta be a better way to make a living?

Another Soggy Doggy Day in Arizona

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LOL! What was I was mooning on about yesterday, how even though it’s hotter than Hell here, at least the air is dry and the humidity is low?

Har har!!!!

Today we’re looking at a high of 114º, with humidity of 27%.  If that ain’t Rasty Nasty, the lovely American oil compound where we resided on the shore of the Persian Gulf, I’d like to know what it is!

Twenty. Seven. Percent of the air will be water!  Ugh!

Welp! The dawg and the human are back from this morning’s trek around the ‘Hood. The human is drenched with sweat. What a horrid morning!

We passed our friend Josie’s house: she who inherited the place from the City of Phoenix after her place was bulldozed to build an airport runway.

Pore folks live on airport property, ya know. So there she was, minding her own business as she dodged jet airplanes, and along came the City, grabbed her house, and gave her SDXB’s place. He had moved to Sun City — and so anxious was he to get away from his bosom enemy, Tony the Romanian Landlord, that he handed the house over to the City for a song.

Little did anyone (other than SDXB) know that the plumbing under the kitchen sink had been the target — several times — of SDXB’s amateur repair jobs. It had sprung a series of leaks, and each time he, being too parsimonious to hire a qualified craftsman, did the fix-it job himself.

Well…this time when it sprang another leak, the water flooded the entire damn house! Especially the kitchen, the laundry room, the dining room, the living room, and up the hallway into the bedrooms.

Good…
Lord…

So Josie came home to a deluge. All the carpeting had to be removed. Plumbing changed out. Cabinetry repaired. CAN you imagine?

These houses were cheaply built to begin with — though they’re far better constructed than today’s junk out in the suburbs. You don’t even want to know what resulted from SDXB’s amateur plumbing job.

😀  You don’t have to know: all you have to do is glance at the ripped-out carpeting piled in Josie’s front yard!

Anyway, just now it’s as wet outside in the open air as it is inside Josie’s house! High, ineffectual-looking clouds lurk off to the east and the north. Not a great day for hiking a mile or two around the neighborhood.

Ugh! I could brain my father for dragging me to Arizona. Too late: his brain resides inside an urn, as part of a pile of ashes.

But seriously: whatever could he have been thinking? Didn’t care, I guess, what hauling me to the middle of the desert and plopping me in a third-rate university would do to my optimistically planned academic career. Hey! Why does a woman need a Ph.D. from Berkeley, anyhow?

How do I hate Arizona? Let me count the ways…

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As we scribble, the temperature in the shade of the back porch is 118°…yes, that IS one hundred eighteen degrees. Clear skies: no sign of rain. But 13% humidity. That’s today’s low, in the wet air department.

Think of that. Thirteen parts in 100 doses of air are water. Ugh.

Let’s see what it looks like in Saudi Arabia, the hell-hole where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf:

Hmmmm… Temp: a crisp 105 degrees. Ahhh, how balmy! But….uhm…humidity? FORTY-EIGHT PERCENT.

Yeah. Almost half the air you breathe in there is water. 

Ugh. I do recall it: hot, wet, and miserable.

Here, we’re only hot and miserable. 😀

So…the Human reminds itself: Qwitcher bellyachin’!