Coffee heat rising

NEVER Stops…

cripes. Come along about noon…I just get my spavined body settled onto the bed with the heating pad cooking the sprained groin muscles, and…

!!!!!BING BONGGGGG!!!!!

God DAMN it. 

Drag out of the sack, limp through the house…limp through the house…limp through the house: Gerardo and his boys at the door: all set to rake and blower and trim and blower and rake and, forGODsake fix the goddamn busted plumbing in the front yard and….

…and who the hell knows how much that’s gonna cost. 

All I wanna do is try to cook the pain out of my leg. Guess that ain’t gonna happen today!

God only can imagine how much he’s gonna gouge me for today’s antics. My guess is around a couple hundred bucks. DAYUM!

Can’t complain, because it’s work that…

a) I don’t really know how to do; and
b) I absolutely positively don’t WANT to do.

But…hafta say, today I’d ever so much druther NOT have anyone do it. DAYUM! Let me lay on the sack under the damn heating pad and freakin’ leave me alone!

My gawd, this stupid thing hurts. Why escapes me. I must have twisted the joint and then laid on it crooked during the night, while I was sleeping.

Wouldn’cha think that would wake you up? If it did, I sure don’t remember. All I know is, I came to this morning with my hip hurting so bad I can barely waddle around the house. And now it hurts and hurts and hurts and HURTS.

*****

GEEEZ! Talk about hurts! Gerardo the Wonder Yard Dude just charged me some staggering around of money to repair the irrigation system. Just what I wanted to do: spend the afternoon bankrupting myself.

And now I’ll get a blast of RAGE from my son, who will be totally NOT happy when he sees how much I paid for this project.

Daaayyy–yuuummm!

MAKE IT STOP, LORD!

{Cosmic laughter echoes out of the heavens…}

Securing the Security…

Lookit this hair-raising tale! 

This charming incident happened just down the road, in Tucson. Holeee shee-ut!

The victim is a famous person — or near famous, connected with the Today show. But y’know…it could be any of us. You or me or…who knows?

It’s a good reason to be sure you secure your exterior doors. And I do mean seriously secure them. Make it damn hard for anyone to push their way inside when you go to answer the doorbell.

One way to do this is to install heavy-duty security screens with similarly heavy-duty deadbolts. This is what I’ve done at the Funny Farm.  Mine are of this ilk, easy to get at Home Depot and to hire someone who knows what he’s doing to install them.

There’s a lot of choice out there, though. Look around for one that suits your taste, if you have nothing better to do. For me, the trick was to find something simple and clean-looking, reasonably priced to install, and as close to impregnable as possible.

Perps, I figure, don’t want to spend a lot of energy and effort on breaking in; so, when they see something like this, they’ll move on to the next house.

Annoying as Hell, in my not-so-humble opinion, to have to fortify your doors like they belonged at Fort Knox. But…better that than letting some jerk break his way in.

One of this thing’s benefits, too, is that on a  nice day it lets me leave the front door open (with the security screen closed and locked, of course). Fresh air flows in: perps stay out.

I have one on every exterior door to the house, plus one on the side door to the garage. Nothing, of course, is absolutely perfect…but these things do go a long way to make you feel safer and more secure, here in the Big and Ugly City.

Kaput?????

Well: we’ll see if Funny is kaput in the land of the flying computers…  AUGH.  It looks like my desktop is offline altogether, and the laptop is sorta offline…maybe kaput, maybe not kaput.

😮

To perfect that predicament, somehow I spavined a hip joint and now can BARELY limp up the hallway.

Hmmm… does that mean My hip is offline, too???  😀

Whatever it means, it sure as hell hurts!

Okay…

….TESTING….

Are We Still Online?

Looks like once again I’m back in to Funny about Money, despite the last week’s hijinks.

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! That’s surely some kind of little miracle.

It’s a gray, drab morning: 8:30 and no brighter than about 7 a.m.

Harvey the Beloved Pool Cleaner appears to be on the fritz. Looks like he’s stuck on on the bottom of the Hole in the Ground Into Which To Pour Money. I’m not sure whether this is Pool Dude Day — he comes around every week or so. But I’m unstuck in time and so have no clue whether this is one of his days.

If I stay here waiting for him, that will put the eefus on Ruby the Corgi’s doggy-walk.

****

Ah HAH!  His glorious convict-like Cuteness arrived! Pool Dude is here! Out back and puttering away with the dratted…uhm, beloved swimming pool. And when we say DOG JOY, we do mean dog joy. 

Yes: many of these guys are convicts. Pool cleaning is one of the trades for which prisons in Arizona train inmates. So, chances are pretty good that our beloved Pool Dude has seen the inside of a concrete cell.

That notwithstanding, he is a sweetie-pie. Just a very nice, very personable man. And he does a great job! So whatever he did in his previous career…I don’t much care.

As for Ruby: he could be Jack the Ripper and she’d still adore him.

 

Egad! Who’d’ve Thunk it?

Woo HOOO!  I’m IN!!

Yeah: Seriously, I thought there was NO WAY I could get back into Funny about Money, not without hauling the laptop over to the computer guys and begging them to fix it.

But mysteriously: here we are! 

At least I think so… We’ll find out when we try t…JANGLE JANGLE JANGLE!!!!!

Another goddamn nuisance phone call! From area code 160

Where the Hell is 160???

WTF: INDIA?

DAMN these pests.

Honest to Gawd! Sometimes (more and more oftentimes…) I think it’s not worth it to have a phone. Certainly not a land line.

Y’know, a cell phone that you can leave in your car so you don’t hear it when every moron and scam artist on the planet jangles you up?  Ohh-kayyyy…. But these days, a land line is just too much of a hub of scams to make it worth paying for the thing.

Especially when you’re ailing. Like now. It’s…

HURT HURT HURT HURT HURT HURT HURT….

Ohhh gawd,, do I hurt! 

My right hip is mightily spavined, And it’s not getting better. Every day is the same as the last: nonstop hurting. Can barely dodder around the house.

So…dammit! If it doesn’t get better within the next week, it’s BACK out to the accursed Mayo Clinic: there, presumably to sign up for surgery on the damn thing. Just what I need to make life perfect!

Huh! India: area code 160. 😀  By now, wouldn’tcha think I’d have enough sense not to pick up the phone for a caller whose number I don’t recognize?

Just too much a creature of the 1950s, I guess.

Really, I do need to come into the 21st Century!  I haven’t…because I haven’t wanted to. Too much hassle, too many headaches, too little return on investment in hassle. But…pretty soon I’m gonna hafta.

Dammit.

 

Owwwwww!!!!

Was it REALLY only a day ago that I was whinging on and on about the pain in the hip?

Feels more like about a year. HURT? Hoooleee Gawd, does it HURT! To get up the hallway from the bedroom to the kitchen & front of the house, I have to stick out my arms and balance myself on the walls, s-l-o-o-o-w-l-e-e-e limping along. Every step — every s-l-l-o-o-w, interminable step — HURTS

M’hijito will soon be on his way over here to tote me out to the damn Mayo Clinic. Is there a REASON we couldn’t first (pleeze!) visit one of the nearby hospitals?  Hell, no! Nothing will do but the (putative) best: the Mayo.

The Mayo is in Scottsdale. On the freakin’ far side of Scottsdale: a good half-hour trek each way. And that’s just to get there and back. I can’t drive in the state I’m in (even had he not purloined my car some time back). And so now he has to take a half-day off work — which he sure as hell can’t afford to do — to drag me across the city.

What a fukkin’ waste of time and gasoline!

Young Dr. Kildare used to practice right up the road. He, however, fled our sylvan dales to take up his career in Sun City: halfway to California from here. So it’s as far to YDK’s office as it is to the Mayo…and M’hijito does NOT trust any doctors other than those at the Mayo.

Myself, I can’t tell much difference. A good doctor is a good doctor. A narrow-minded dimwit is a narrow-minded dimwit. Doesn’t much matter where they practice.

{sob!} What a gorgeous day. This is the time, this is the day to be walking with Ruby the Corgi from one side of Timbuktu to the other.

But nooooo. Here I am, barely able to hobble across the room, waiting for my excellent and long-suffering son to come pick me up and drag me out to the far side of Scottsdale.

Just the gawdawful drive out there and back eats up over an hour of his work day. And that doesn’t count trudging through the garage and across the grounds and around the clinic to get to the doc’s office. So that means any time he drags me out to the Mayo, he gets in trouble with his employer

Legally, an employer is not allowed to fire you for taking time off to go to a doctor — or, interestingly, for having to drive a sick relative to the doctor. So…he’s not likely to get canned for today’s excursion. But you can be sure he’ll be swamped with fell-behind work and nagged interminably by the bosses.

I probably could get the Uber driver who lives across the street to schlep me out there — to the tune of about a million bucks. But (he being no fool) M’hijito likes to be present at the pow-wows with the docs. Which is good: years of unpleasant experience have left me aversive as hell where doctors are concerned. And no doubt I often barely hear what they say…in my eagerness to get out of their office.

GOD, I hate going to doctors!

When I was an infant — this was a year or two before we went out to Arabia, and I just turned three when we arrived in those sandy realms — as an infant I almost died at the hands of a brilliant doctor. One evening, hospital staff told my mother I would be dead by morning.

Can you imagine?

Well, they seem to have been wrong. I’ve 0utlived her, the poor woman. And she lived almost to a ripe old age. Would have made it ripeness if she hadn’t smoked herself into the grave.

Tobacco manufacturers and vendors should be prosecuted as the murderers that they are…

Oop! Sorry: sidetracked!

But seriously: if you smoke, quit. Someone is getting rich on your dying. A number of someones, actually. Cut the ba*tards off in their tracks!

Oh well: speaking of tracks, I seem to be easily sidetracked this morning.

Ohhh damn. Here he is!