Coffee heat rising

And the Day Staggers On…

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Yeah: it’s still pretty “Rasty Nasty“out there under the cheery blast…uhm, glow of an Arizona afternoon sun.

The little dog seems significantly better this afternoon: the horking and coughing have about faded away. I think — hope — there’ll be no need to drag her through the unholy heat to have a vet look at her.

Exercise-traipsing around the ‘Hood just now, I was reminded of how much my mother loved Arizona…how grateful she was to my father for installing them in sizzling, sky-roaring, anachronistic Sun City. Oh, my…she did love it!

At this moment: Horribly hot for an exercise traipse. This is weather that makes me wish I were back in San Francisco. Even in Long Beach, that capital of the bourgeois.

Personally, I’m none too fond of Arizona. But I ain’t movin’ on…no way, no how. For one simple reason: my excellent son is here. And where he is: that’s where I’m gonna be.

If he were to decamp to, say, Colorado (where I believe he would rather be), I’d follow him. To Canada or Mexico? Not so much. But almost certainly anyplace in the U.S.

***

Heh!  I sure have lived in a lot of places on this planet! Let’s add them up…

  • Long Beach, California
  • San Francisco, California
  • Richmond, California
  • Alameda, California
  • Berkeley, California
  • Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
  • Beirut, Lebanon
  • London, England
  • Tucson, Arizona
  • Phoenix, Arizona
  • Sun City, Arizona

LOL! I’ve probably lost track of some of them! 😀

Now, yea verily: Arizona isn’t my favorite venue. Particularly not the gawdawful Phoenix area and its environs. The sole reason I’m here is that my son is here. And…as long as he stays here, I’ll stay here. If he were to move on? Chances are, I’d follow him. At the very least, I’d move out of the (un)lovely Valley of the Sun.

But more likely, wherever he goes, I’ll go.

A Rasty-Nasty Day

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Rasty Nasty…so glad to be gone!

Today’s weather is what my father used to call “rasty-nasty,” after Ras Tanura, the dreadful ARAMCO company town where we lived for nine years, perched on the shore of the Persian Gulf. It was a hot, soggy, miserable place.

Today’s ugly morning is hot and soggy, for sure. The sky dark gray with overcast, rain varying from drizzling to pouring.

Directing matters toward Hell, Ruby has  something wrong with her sinuses…or something. She keeps gasping and wheezing…hork  hork hork hork! Damned if I can tell what the matter is.

So I need to get her to a vet, but without a car, I can’t imagine how to do that through this unholy weather. I’d have to pick her up and carry her eight or ten blocks…and migawd!! Just now I’m so sick I can barely carry her around the house!

A guy across the street drives for Uber…but somehow I doubt he’ll agree to carry a sick dog in his cab.

Yesterday’s junket to the Mayo Clinic was just gawdawful! What I need today is to sit down, hassle-free, and be quiet all day. Doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen, though. Afraid to ask my son for a lift…yesterday he and I were at each other’s throats. Plus…he has — of all things — a job! He can’t be knocking off half the day to schlep me and my dog to a vet.

In related sylvan fields, I need to find a decent doctor who does NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic, halfway to Bisbee. Dealing with a doctor — especially when you’re a woman, Gawd help you! — is dreadful enough, without piling on a 45-minute drive each way. 

And “find a decent doctor” is no small task these days. Our wonderful old docs from the law-practice days are long retired, after having repaired to the Mayo some years ago (dragging us with them). And of late the quacks I’ve met there have ranged in competence from bird-brained to spectacularly arrogant; half the time when you describe your issue, they’re not paying the slightest bit of attention. Their minds are made up, and they don’t care be distracted by any damned facts, thank you.

Lawyers tend to know which doctors have been sued and which haven’t. That’s why you should seek a recommend from a lawyer, whenever you’re in the market for a new doctor.

Now that my lawyer hubby and I have been divorced for some years, I no longer know a lawyer to ask. Most of our friends are now retired…I haven’t seen a practicing lawyer in for-freaking-ever.

***

Blech!!! It’s getting still uglier out there! How it’s possible, I do not know…but the sky has turned even darker than it was.

I give up! Back to bed with me and the hound!

Escaped from the Mayo

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Okay..well…I guess I’m not quite ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. That notwithstanding, a visit to the Mayo Hospital does little to persuade me of that. LORDIE, how I hate hospitals, and how I hate that one in particular!

By the time we left that sylvan realm, my angry son and I were speaking to each other more or less politely. Sorta. So there’s some hope that we’ll get back to normal in a day or three.

Miserable experience, though.

***

How much longer do I have in this sylvan vale, really? 

Well…that’s no easier to tell for me than it is to tell for anyone else. My guess is, if I don’t get any sicker than I am (which isn’t very), we’re looking at five to ten years. But if I follow in the family Tradition of Extreme Longevity, it could be another twenty to twenty-five years.

Twenty-five: no, I would not expect. But twenty: that wouldn’t be very surprising. Women in my family have lived to advanced old age…and without medical care, because they were Christian Scientists.

Sometimes I think that the very reason they lived into their dotage was that they stayed away from doctors and hospitals.

Today’s experience at the Mayo was enough to cause you to hear the sylvan call of the Other World, that’s for damn sure. All afternoon with a needle stuck in my arm, miserable hurting scared annoyed pissed in the dark as to what was really happening… How CAN i count the ways….?

Well, I never want to go back there, that’s for sure. But since the Mayo is the best medical facility in the Valley — very possibly in the whole state — this surely was not my last adventure in those parts.

Ugh. Maybe I should convert to Christian Science…

Cross and Crown emblem

Parked at the Mayo

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Here we are at the Mayo Clinic in North Phoenix.  A needle is jammed in my left arm while staff infuses…uhmmm…some kind of gunk into me. No one has been kind enough to bother to explain what these torture sessions are meant to accomplish…only that I get dragged back here about every ten days for another one…and another one…and another one. Boy-o-boy, could I do without this!!

After 10 years in disease-ridden Saudi Arabia being jabbed — over and over and over again — with every painful inoculation known to science, I deeply hate shots and needles. So…even though the Mayo’s procedures are relatively pain-free, they fill me with dread and misery.

Meanwhile, my son and I are quarreling — we had a nasty squabble on the way over here — and so at the moment I’m passing miserable, He has stalked off, relieving himself of my (admittedly) obnoxious company. So I’m sitting here in the dark soaking up…whatever goop they’re pumping into my left arm.

Honestly. It’s getting to be past time for me to exit this earthly realm. Just now that option looks more and more attractive.

Unfortunately, women in my family who didn’t smoke and didn’t fu*k every dong that came along have lived to VERY advanced old age. They were Christian Scientists, so they accomplished this with no medical care.

So if you don’t imagine that was God’s doing, then you can suspect I have a lot of years ahead of me.

Presumably pretty miserable years….

Well, it feels like I’ve been trying to type this one-handed for years…so: away!

Melted!!!

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Argh! I overestimated the heat when I went for today’s exercise stroll. As we scribble, Wunderground claims the temp is 111 just now. “Feels like 117.”

Is THAT all?

Yeah…well, I’d have guessed 119. 😀

It feels like freaking Saudi Arabia out there, where we lived on the edge of the Persian Gulf: hot, humid, and suffocating. And yes, that place was capable of reaching 120 degrees. Nooooo problem!

So, 117 degrees doesn’t seem THAT out of the ordinary. Eh?

This is one of many days that make me wish I were back in San Francisco. Where I belong.

Ohhh well. That ain’t ever gonna happen again. My son is here, and I’m not leaving as long as that’s the fact.

{sigh}

Most of the time, Arizona has a tolerable climate. It does get absurdly hot in the summertime, as we can see by today’s balmy afternoon. But the winters are lovely, as are most of the spring and fall days.

That notwithstanding, I do wish my parents had never discovered Sun City, the garden spot that drew them here. Boyoboy! Imagine a whole gigantic subdivision where NO KIDS ARE ALLOWED!

Goodie.

You were allowed to live there if your brats were over 18 or off in college. I was 16.  So…

They engineered a deal with the University of Arizona whereby I would start my freshman year there a year early. So it went: I dropped out of high school at the end of my junior year, and they dragged me to Arizona. Soon as we got here, they exiled me to Tucson.

That I was all set to go to UC Berkeley the following year meant nothing to my father. (Well…he himself was a high-school dropout, and the truth was he understood little or nothing about universities and university education…) They yanked me out of school, sent me off to Tucson, and with great delight moved themselves into a pleasant tract house under the flight path of the war planes from Luke Air Force Base.

The cute little Sun City house was my father’s lifetime gift to her. And she was SO delighted with it! Seriously: she even made herself relish the roar of those damn fighter jets: as the pilots practiced, she’d sit out on the back porch in the morning sipping her coffee and simper, “Ohhhh! it’s the sound of freedom!”

Yeah, Mom… The sound of World War III comin’ our way…

She loved it, though. So it was a beautiful thing he did for her, after decades of marriage living in difficult conditions.

Charging off to college a year early was a nice ego trip for me…though it wasn’t the greatest of all possible ideas. At 16, I really was too young to go off by myself. I did OK — the UofA was hardly the most challenging of all possible higher ed institutions.  But I would have been better off waiting a year or two. And FAR better off going to one of the University of California campuses.

Not that I did all that poorly: I did graduate Phi Beta Kappa. But my social life left something to be desired. Like, for example…a social life.

So…heh! I guess you could say my life was melted. Just as I was melted by today’s blasting heat on the sidewalks of the ‘Hood.

And that was one of the first reasons that the phrase “I hate Arizona” became my byword. 

Here We Go Again…

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Dammit! Cop helicopter buzzing the neighborhood to the west of us.

By golly, I’m tired of this stuff! Every time you turn around, here’s another Happening.

Part of it is because we live directly south of a low-income, high-crime district. SOMETHING is always going on up there.

Only way to get away from that is to sell my home and move to a higher-rent, lower-crime zone.

But ya know what? I LIKE my house. And I like my neighbors. And I like our location. And no, I do NOT want to move to some other district.

This is an old-line, moderately upscale central-city neighborhood. Prices here are moderate, too. Moving to a similar neighborhood in a “safer” part of the city would cost me a proverbial arm & a leg. And, as one cop remarked, it wouldn’t accomplish the goal. ALL neighborhoods in the Phoenix area are plagued with crime.

Crime is endemic here. You can’t get away from it.

So, no. There’s no point in spending 87 gerjillion dollars to move to Scottsdale or Moon Valley or…whatnot. It’s all of a kind.