Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Still Pre-Xmasing

by

M’hijito called and offered to drive me to the stores. Convenient, since my car has been glommed and apparently I’m never gonna get it back.

So this is one shopping jaunt I don’t have to make on foot. Would be nice if I could remember what I need to buy…  Ohhhh well…

He, then, presumably is on his way over here.

Ruby the Corgi seems just fine today. She must have eaten something that made her sick yesterday: probably some bug or some human detritus lurking in the yard.

Human: less fine. Hip still hurts so much I can barely hobble around. Oh well. Thass overrode, swa maeg thisse.

Well, hafta say this: I’m so glad I don’t live in Sun City, an hour’s drive away from the young man’s house. My present castle is only about 10 minutes from his place.

This allows me to impose on him with regularity. Today, for example, he’s schlepping up here to haul me to a grocery store.

Others who can be imposed upon do exist here. A guy catty-corner across the street drives an Uber cab for example. He’ll come trotting right over if you pester him.

Turns out we have not one, not two, not three but SIX Uber drivers residing here in the ‘Hood! Can you imagine? We never have to call an actual taxicab!

Weather is a little less spectacularly gorgeous than it was yesterday. Some humidity has rolled in, so the sky is a bit overcast — enough to be kinda gray — and the air feels a bit sticky. Not enough to bellyache about…but not Arizona’s usual spectacular winter weather.

Uh oh…here he is.

And so, AWAAAYYY….

Pre-Xmas, Continued…

by

Ruby the Corgi seems to have gotten over whatever ailed her, the last time we met in these environs. No barfing(!!). No urgency to get outside.

Luz, the Cleaning Lady from Heaven, just showed up at the door. That was a jolt: I didn’t expect her this week!!!

Fortunately the house was sorta kinda almost picked up. So I didn’t look like quite the chucklehead that I am.

Ohhh well.

This morning: walked and walked and walked all over the ‘Hood. Gorgeous day.

Over on the east side of Main Drag East is a somewhat tonier section of the ‘Hood. Still tract houses, yes: but some look a little larger than ours; some look better built. They have irrigation instead of “desert landscaping” (read “gravel yards”), so the landscaping is pretty and much more inviting than ours.

Briefly, I wondered whether I could afford one of those houses.

VERY briefly: Of course not!!!! No, I cannot afford to maintain an irrigated lot full of mow-it-once-a-week grass. Nor could I afford to air-condition one of those palaces. Or pay the taxes on it.

So much for that idea. 😀

One of Those Days: Adumbrated

by

Hallelujah, brothers & sisters!  

Dunno what brought Ruby the Corgi under the weather last night, but this morning she seems to be miraculously healed! 

Yes. She’s scarfed down the usual dose of 1/3 can of dawg food. She’s patrolled the backyard — twice, come to think of it. Now she’s standing out there waiting for a burglar to chase off.

😀  Funny little beast. 

At any rate, today she’s acting like her old, healthy self, so I assume whatever ailed her must have been something she ate or some very fast-passing bug.

Whenever the human feels like getting off its duff, we’ll go out and patrol the neighborhood. LOL! The locals must be so glad they have a 30-pound protector looking out after them.

It’s a neighborhood that has much changed over the past few years, yet remains weirdly the same. Our dearest neighbor, locally known as The Ole Guy, disappeared with his wife some time back. He had told me he thought he was going to have to lock her up in an old folks’ home. And I’ll tellya: that guy would never imprison her in a place like that and then walk off, leaving her alone. If he put her in an old-folkerie, you can be sure he put himself there, too.

Meanwhile, SDXB has moved to Sun City, where he took up with New Girlfriend. He seems happy enough, though the last I heard old age has caught up with him and he’s been pretty sick.

I’d be sick, too, if I tried to live in Sun City. My parents proudly retired and moved to Sun City when I went off to college. They thought it was just the business. I thought it was abhorrent.

Seriously: you couldn’t pay me to live there: a ghetto for old folks.

But they thought it was The Bidness. His brother, Ed, and Ed’s harridan of a wife moved there. And my parents’ best friends from Saudi Arabia — Ruth and Hollis — joined them. My mother must have been thrilled to see Ruth move in. The in-laws: not so much, though.

But for me, the place had one major trait working against it: a kind of toxic sameness. All the houses looked alike. All the yards looked alike. All the people looked alike.

The people: old, middle-class, and white. Once a black couple dasted to move in there. They literally were hounded out by the locals.

Hereabouts: I haven’t seen an African-American type move in to these parts. Well, no: one bachelor bought a house a block or two away. But he moved on. Hounded? I doubt it: probably found it costs a lot more to live here than one would expect.

Property taxes are surprisingly high in these parts — probably, I suspect, because the houses are over-valued. Truth to tell, these same models occupy a fair amount of Sun City, which was largely built out by the same developer. A few are a little bigger than SC shacks — mine has four bedrooms, which you surely wouldn’t find out there. And the yards have six-foot walls, with city-owned alleys running behind them. (No alleys in S.C.)  But otherwise, the two developments are much the same.

Except…we have kids!

How can one live without the sound of kids carrying on outside?

Seriously: I love the racket of kids playing. Sun City — devoid of anyone under the age of 50 — was silent as a tomb. Well…except for the damn fighter jets blasting over from Luke Air Force Base. That was a racket.

Colder than a By-Gawd…

by

Yes: It’s quarter to ten in the morning and 55 degrees out there on the back porch.

Now, in the large scheme of things, that ain’t very cold. Especially not for mid-December. But for mystical, unknowable reasons, it seems damn cold! As my father used to say, Colder’n a by-gawd.

What exactly a by-gawd was (some sort of pagan deity???) and why a by-gawd was expected to be extra cold, I dunno. Or extra hot: it was possible for the day to become “hotter’n a bygawd.”

Arizona’s dry air does tend to mess up your perception of ambient temperature. In the summer, 100 degrees doesn’t seem all that hot. But in the winter, 55 degrees seems oddly chill.

The roar from the blasting fighter jet engines at Luke Air Force Base — just a few miles outside of Sun City — echoes all the way down here to our parts. And that’s a good 20 miles. WHAT a racket.

My mother, an inveterate patriot with a capital P, used to sit on her Sun City back porch in the early mornings and simper, over her coffee, “ohhhh, it’s the sound of FWEEDOM!”  

Yeah.

Well. No, Mom: it’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way.

Fortunately, WW III hasn’t quite made it to the back yard. Yet…

But that Air Force Base is one of the several top reasons that you couldn’t get me to move back to Sun City. The racket from those bombers. The hatred of anyone whose skin wasn’t dough-white. The dislike of young people in general (no, do NOT move in with your parents over summer vacation!!!). The mediocrity of the grocery stores. (Hey: old people’s taste buds are dead, so why try to sell them decent food?). Horrible place!

SDXB and New Girlfriend are still holding forth out there. The place is just his speed, of course. She was already there when they met, so I assume Sun City must be to her taste, too.

Last I heard, SDXB was mightily sick. N.G. was trying to attend to him, but she’s even more superannuated than I am, so that job may be beyond her. She’s such a nice lady: I hope she doesn’t lose him…now or anytime in the foreseeable future.

***

Welp, pretty soon now I should get off my duff and trot up to one of the nearby grocery stores. Yes: that is one the several ways in which this district excels over (un)lovely Sun City: we have not one, not two, but THREE excellent grocers within easy walking distance of my house.

* An Albertson’s
* A Sprouts
* A Fry’s

Plus an automobile mechanic, a hair stylist, a pet store, a veterinarian, an optometrist, a computer store, a Target, a drugstore, two sit-down restaurants and unnumbered fast-food joints…on and on. WHY would anyone want to live anywhere else?

😀 Okay, okay: it’s true. SDXB refuses to eat in restaurants, so for him, that detail counts for nothing toward our neighborhood’s livability quotient. He doesn’t keep pets….okay: no vet needed. He has virtually perfect vision…grrrr!  So it’s not hard to see why he fails to regard the ‘Hood as in any way superior to (un)lovely Sun City.

As for moi: I feel like I absolutely fell into it when my Realtor brought me to this place. It simply could NOT be better for a middle-class singleton living in a free-standing house.

The apartment blocks across Main Drag West have, it is true, pretty much filled up with some less-than-desirable neighbors. A cop was shot in the hallway of one of those buildings over there. So…yeah: I do have to keep the possibility of moving elsewhere in the back of what passes for my mind.

And…I do think that if I end up having to move because of real estate deterioration, it’ll be closer to M’hijito’s house. He lives within easy walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Market. So I can imagine buying a place down there. Also, a couple of pretty Fancy-Dan high-rise apartment buildings reside in that direction…right on the lightrail line.

So….if I felt like economic & social pressures would dictate that I’d better move before I start to lose a lot of money on this house, I probably would move down into his district…assuming it looks like he’ll stay in those parts for a good while longer. If he moved to some other part of the Valley, I’d prob’ly trail after him. If he left the Valley…???  I dunno: in that case, I might move into one of those high-rises.

Maybe.

And now it’s night-time….

by

No longer colder than a by-gawd out in the back yard...but not much fun, come 10:00 p.m., as a venue to stand around waiting for the dawg to do her Thing.

And waiting…and waiting…waiting..

Aarrrrgh!!!!

Traffic is roaring back and forth to the north of us. The ridiculous light-rail train is bong-bong-bonging up and down Main Drag West. And here’s a cop copter, sailing over the house.

Looks like Ruby did her Thing just in time to get us back inside before the party begins. We’re in. The doors are locked. Let us hope that will suffice, for the human & the dog.

Pretty night, though. Would be mighty nice in the absence of a few burglars, car thieves, wannabe rapists, and whatnot.

Blech!!! Begins to make Sun City look good….

 

Brrrrrrr! …I think….

by

Colder ‘n’ a by-gawd out there on the back porch. But…but…the thermometer reads 48 degrees….which just ain’t THAT cold.

Need to take the Savage Beast (all 30 pounds of her) for a walk. Now, not later. But my enthusiasm for that project is about nil.

And speaking of dawgs and jobs you’d druther not do: Ruby’s beloved Pool Dude was just here and gone. LORDIE, there’s a real you’d-druther-not!! Slopping around in cold water and chemicals when the air is so cold it makes your hands ache.

Ohhh well. Thanks to that lovely fella, the pool is sparkling clean (and it stays so!), and I do not have to lift one limp little paw to make it that way. Basically, he makes it possible for me to stay in this house.

Well. No: that’s not exactly so. True: I did used to clean the pool myself, which (as you may have surmised) didn’t kill me. My neighbor just to the west has drained her pool. And she leaves it sitting there empty. Actually, during the rainy season she leaves enough of a puddle in the bottom to breed hordes of mosquitoes, which fly in her other next-door neighbor’s windows and bite bite bite bite bite. They put that poor woman (known in her family as Other Daughter, she being the youngest of two) in the hospital. (Mosquitoes carry all sorts of diseases, not just malaria).

I taught Other Daughter’s dad to throw mosquito repellent and insecticide over the wall into the puddle, which seems to have helped some. Hard to tell, though: it’s too cold for skeeters just now.

Why on EARTH would you buy a house with a hole in the ground in which to breed bugs unless you were gonna use the hole in the ground???

Contemplating the neighborhood bullsh!t returns me, irresistibly and unpleasantly, to contemplating the possibility of moving back to Sun City, where people don’t indulge this kind of bat-brained behavior. (Out there, they have other kinds of BS to play with.)

My parents dragged me to Sun City when my father made his first pass at retiring from his job as a sea-going tanker pilot. Even though young people are not allowed in that garden spot, my parents claimed (correctly) that I had weaseled my way into the University of Arizona at the age of 16, and so would be living in dorms in Tucson. But in fact, I spent all the university’s “vacation” time in un-lovely Sun city: winter break, spring break, and three months’ worth of summer break.

Just hated living there! 

Oh, well. Life ain’t what you pay for, is it?

Speaking of (un)lovely Sun City, I haven’t heard from SDXB (“Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend”) in ages. Called out there a few times: no answer. I hope he and New Girlfriend are OK.

Unless medical care in that place has changed a lot since my parents lived there, Sun City is no place to get sick. The horrific excuse for “care” my mother got during her last months is one of several reasons I refused to move westerly, ever westerly when SDXB sold his house here in the ‘Hood and moved out there. That and the gawdawful racket from Luke Air Force Base. And the hate.

Those people hate everyone and everything in any way different from them. Foremost, of course, is skin color. Then affluence: better not be busted & disgusted and try to live out there… Then politics: if you’re a damnfool liberal, you’d better keep your mouth shut. Then religion: Judaism is not high on the list of preferred systems of worship…though my parents regarded Judaism more as a racial category than as a way of thinking.

What an awful place! Even if my son hadn’t been living in central Phoenix, NO WAY would I have followed SDXB out there when he took off for the West Side.

****

But…but…but…

***

It is indeed much cheaper to live out there than it is to live in town.

So occasionally I do think...maybe I should sell the Funny Farm and move out to dreary…uhm…lovely Sun City.

But really…why? 

Unless you hate kids, there’s really no good reason to move out there.

My parents did, effectively. Hate kids, that is. My father was regularly and utterly infuriated when a neighbor’s brats went out in their backyard and hollered and carried on as they played. But…he had good reason: he worked the swing shift, and he often truly needed to sleep all afternoon.

But whereas he could (and did!) beat the bejayzuz out of me for waking him up in mid-afternoon, there was nothing he could do to shut up the neighbors’ li’l darlin’s. If there had been a place to live where kids were not allowed, back in the day, he’d have been living there! 😀

What he would have done with me escapes me. Boarding school, prob’ly.

Anyway, he thought he’d died & gone to hevvin when he learned about child-free Sun City. And that is why and how we got to Arizona.

Heh! What an outcome, eh?  I believe my mother thought they would retire down the West Coast, to a small town between L.A. and San Diego.

It was very pretty down there. But he decided it cost too much. (Life cost too much for my father’s taste, come to think of it…) So when they found Del Webb’s Sun City projects, they thought they’d discovered Nirvana.

And I imagine they selected the one in Arizona because Arizona was SO much cheaper to live in than was anyplace in California.

Infuriating…retrospectively speaking. I had figured I would go to UC Berkeley. With that goal in mind, I’d worked my a$$ off in high school, weaseling my way into the National Honor Society and racking up absurd grade-point averages taking 5 solids every semester. Instead, I ended up in Tucson.

Shee-ut! Why would you do that to your kid?

Oh: because you matter so much more than your kid, right?

😀  😀  😀