Coffee heat rising

“Another Beautiful Day in Arizona”

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Okay, it’s “only” 96 degrees out there, at 8 o’clock in the morning. So saith Wunderground. Whatever: it’s HOT and it’s MUGGY. Ruby and I just staggered in from an hour’s walk…one of those excursions that leaves you wondering why on earth anyone would ever choose to live in this place.

Well. No snow in the winter. I guess.

But I’ll tellya: we used to live in San Francisco. And I’ll take fog and cold air over air so soggy at 8:00 in the morning that you can barely breathe. If my son weren’t here, I’d have shot out of here the minute my father died: yea, those many years ago.

Weather like this brings to mind the Good Ole Days in Saudi Arabia. You wanna talk about chez pitz? Jeez!!!! You’d wake up in the morning to a clear blue sky and see water dripping off the eaves, like it had just rained. HIDEOUS place!

After we left that garden spot — my father sent me and my mother home after she came down with a roaring case of amoebic dysentery and damn near died from it — we landed in San Francisco, where I went to junior high school.

Would that we could have stayed there! But ohhhhh nooo… After a few years my father landed a job shipping tankers out of Southern California. So it was off to lovely /s/ Long Beach.

I had been born in Long Beach, so my mother was familiar with the place. She was never a complainer: always looked at the positive side of things. But…ugh!!! Compared to the San Francisco Bay Area, it was chez pitz with a vengeance.

Oh, well. That’s there, not here. 😀 Here, it’s hot, it’s wet, it’s bourgeois, it’s icky. If I could move outta here today, I’d be on the road right now.

But alas, that ain’t gonna happen.

My son is established here. His dad and New Wife are living happily ever after here. I’m retired and would like never to see another university campus again. And so…here is where we are. 

 

Hotter Than the Hubs!

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5:20 p.m., Tuesday, January 16
Temperature in the deepest shade of the back porch: 111°

Holeeee Maquerel! Just stumbled in the house from (stupidly!) walking around the neighborhood.

If the unholy heat weren’t bad enough, I’ve managed to inflict a whole lot of equally dangerous behavior on myself: beer after beer after beer, every goddamn day!

Yes. My swizzling habit has returned. Not — mercifully — with a vengeance…but enough that I’ve been swilling two or three alcoholic drinks a day.

Holee shee-ut!  WAKE UP, ya dumb broad!

Staggering through yesterday’s heat, one clear thought finally struck me: GOTTA GET OFF THE SAUCE! 

Once.
and.
For All.  

So here we are, stone cold sober, sitting in a living-room chair emanating gawdawful heat from this afternoon’s (very stupid!) walk through the neighborhood heat.

Yeah. Wunderground claims it’s 105 degrees out there. But the thermometer in the shade of my back porch indeed does read 111 degrees. 

Floating in from the north and the east are banks and blankets of soggy-looking clouds. Ugh!! 

Well…I’ve managed to get into the air-conditioning while clinging to life. If I survive long enough, I’ll jump into the bathtub. But later. Not now.

New cleaning-lady surfaced today. Very nice woman! Smart and interesting. She worked very hard…oh gawd! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have!  At any rate, I hope she’ll be back, so I can hire her on a permanent basis.

If not…these woods are full of cleaning ladies: in less than two weeks, I’ll have someone permanent in here.

Meanwhile, though, the WonderAccountants have taken it into their heads to retire. 

Gawd help us!!!!

So now I’ve got to find a new accountant/bookkeeper. That’ll be a challenge.

One to take on tomorrow. Not now!

Hotter Than the Hubs!

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No: I kid you not: it really IS hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there on the front sidewalk. Hotter than that on the asphalt pavement.

Fortunately, we still have enough of our marbles to stay off the ashphalt! 😀

Just back from circumnavigating the neighborhood. Spavined a tendon in an ankle a couple days ago. It’s getting better…and  now  needs to be exercised gently with some regular walking.

So…out the door, with our kewl Walking Stick in hand.

Excellent! No strain, no pain on the sore paw. Well…except for the extravagant heat. Wunderground claims it’s 108 out there just now…but waddaya bet Wunderground’s thermometers are not sitting on an asphalt road?

Thinking, contemplating to pass the hiking time…. Would I, Could I like to be back in San Francisco?

Well, yeah. Actually, I’d like to be in Berkeley, where my late relatives used to live. Pretty little suburb. Nifty gourmet grocery store up at the top of the hill, next to the tunnel where the light rail came in from the East Bay. Miss it.

Miss it a lot. But…

* Realistically, I couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area.
* Realistically, my son is here and I ain’t movin’ away from him.
* Realistically, I couldn’t afford California income taxes.
* Realistically, I couldn’t afford the nice warm clothes one needs when living there.

So…get used to HOT! 😀

O’course, I’m already used to hot, having grown up in lovely Saudi Arabia, and having been planted in Arizona at the age of 17.

So: kwitcher bellyachin’ lady. You ain’t movin’ anywhere!

😀

GLUBBY Glubby Day

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Good Gawd!  High noon on a mid-June day, and…it’s 110 in the shade of the back porch! Today’s high was predicted to be a mere 108 degrees, with 38% chance of rain.

UNbelievable.

The dawg and I shot out of the house at dawn. It was already too late to be walking around out there. But tonight the temp is supposed to drop to a chilly 87 degrees.

Brrr! Better get out the jacket! 

Seriously: the only way Ruby can get her daily walk, in this kinda weather, is to take her out at sunrise, before the concrete and asphalt can heat up. Wait too long, and her little feet will be scorched.

This is the time of year when, really, I do wish I lived somewhere else. And…really…if my son weren’t here, I most surely would live somewhere else. Far, far from here!

Where would I go?

Well…the San Francisco Bay Area is whence my mother’s better side of the family emanated. Most of those folks are long gone…but the City is still there.

Given all the money in the world, I’d rent a flat in the Marina. Beautiful spot!

Given half the money in the world, I’d buy or rent a house in Berkeley: aging but handsome and urbane.

But of course, I do not have all the money in the world, or even half of it. Here in Arizona, a pauper like me (heh!) could afford to wriggle into any of several fairly pleasant venues.

One is a suburb of Scottsdale called Fountain Hills. It’s pretty expensive: upper-middle-class, close to the Mayo Clinic, near a slew of suburban amenities. Nice homes, though often cheaply built. Right now, the median listing price is just $799,000.

Yep. Must hurry right out and buy one!

Moving on… Another famously tony area is called North Central Phoenix. That’s where the Funny Farm resides: on the fringe of that district.

Here’s a one-bedroom, one-bath palace in North Central: a mere $94,500. What a bargain! An actual house, though, rather than a dinky condo? Get ready to pony up $745,000.

Every time I peruse the local real estate ads, I get more horrified.

Well, if by some miracle I can hang onto the Funny Farm until I die, M’hijito will inherit a valuable chunk of dirt. Zillow thinks my house is worth $584,000. Not much, by comparison of other Los-Angelized real estate in these parts.

But…he has expressed a desire to move to his dad’s home town in Colorado: a little burg called Grand Junction. Prices there are MUCH lower. For a fraction of what he can get for my house, he can buy a palace there.

Small town living is not to my taste, personally. But…he hasn’t spent his childhood in such a place, and so maybe as a grown man he might find it pleasant enough. Highly desirable, even. 

Exceptionally Yucky Day!

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Yes: I stupidly elected to take the Li’l Dawg for a walk, along about 8:00 a.m.  When we say “stupid,” when it came to that maneuver, we DO mean “stupid”!

Exceptionally unpleasant day. Hot. Humid. The air so thick you could swim through it. About as ugly a morning as you can imagine.

No one at the park this morning: other locals having better sense than I. Ditto the neighborhood streets. All the other humans and their dogs are holed up in their air-conditioned digs.

Reminds me of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Where we lived — on the shore of the Persian Gulf — we got days like this all summer. Hot. Muggy. Ugly.

My mother, an erstwhile Upstate New York girl, was unutterably miserable there. Me: I didn’t know any better. I was only a little kid. That place — that hideous place — was just life, the universe, and all that.

***

Hope we’re not slated to do anything today. Don’t see anything on the calendar.

That, alas, doesn’t GUARANTEE that we’re free of jaunting, junketing, and time-wasting.

Ugh. I cannot deal with another pointless doctor’s appointment. Nor can I deal with another 40-minute drive to the Mayo Clinic.

It’s too hot to walk to the grocery store (my son having purloined my car).

Too expensive to visit my favorite computer store.

Too far to walk to the Phoenix Mountain Park, there to climb hills through the scorching heat.

Too hot to climb hills anywhere through the scorching heat.

My son was going to put the new pool vacuum equipment together. That didn’t get done over the weekend. If I had my act together, I’d call Pool Dude and ask him to do that. But…act? what act???

When Pool Dude visits — as he does once a week or so — he cleans that pool himself. As long as we don’t get a dust storm (which also includes leaves and debris), the pool stays clean between his junkets. So I feel little urgency to jump up and down and nag my poor son to get over here and put that vacuum into action.

***

Daydreaming of my college boyfriend, an Eastern European fella. Well, he had been born and raised in the US, and so as far as he and I were concerned, he was a 100% red-blooded American boy. My parents, chauvinists to the core, thought otherwise. They considered him a foreigner, an alien, most decidedly not a candidate for the fatherhood of their grandchildren.

My, how they hated Paul. I adored him, and if they’d kept their mouths shut, we undoubtedly would have married.

They didn’t, though — keep their mouths shut, that is. They complained and griped and hollered and threatened….  Yeah: they threatened to disinherit me if I dared to marry the guy.

I finally folded and sent him on his way.

Found him on the Internet. He looks happy! And I surely hope he is.

He became an administrator at the University of California. Had we married, I would have landed a mighty fine sinecure there, or failing that (conflict of interest, y’know), would have found a tenure-track job with one of the state colleges. But when it became evident that if he and I married, I would never see my parents again, I sent him on his way.

Was that a wise thing to do?

Dunno. To this day, I do not know. I dearly loved the man. His sites on the Internet show a happy-looking family man…if I were the wife in one of those photos, I’d be happy-looking, too.

Oh, well!

One Li’l Catastrophe After Another

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Man! When we say it‘s one of those days, we ain’t kiddin’!

The latest news to crash on our skulls:  The Wonder-Accountants are freakin’ RETIRING!

And for an innumerate old bat like me, that is a freakin’ CATASTROPHE.

Because…in case you can’t imagine, eh?…my son is NOT innumerate. Not at all. Quite to the contrary. And…as with his grand-dad — my fierce and chronically angry father — my own inability to deal with numbers drives him up the wall. The frustration of having to watch an idiot like me try to figure out the simplest operations…well…it must be just awful for him.

It’s damned awful for me, that’s for sure.

Well. I can NOT figure my taxes: must have an accountant for that task, even when its stages are fairly simple. Tax prep is so far over my head, I have no hope of doing it right. Or doing it at all. And because my understanding of what the heck I’m supposed to be doing in said task hovers near the ZERO level, trying to connect brains with a new accountant is gonna be… Well…gawdawful, that’s what.

*****

In other sylvan vales: Mygawd, it is hotter than the proverbial hubs outside.

Went out for a quick walk around our part of the hood, mostly to try to run off some of the stress and worry. No dog with me, of course: the pavement is so hot it would scorch her furry feet right off her legs.

It’s such a pretty little neighborhood. Nothing really special, to tell the truth: 1970s tract houses, by and large. But everything is neatly cared for and handsomely painted and tidy and clean…I love this place.

Ideally, I’d like to stay here until I die.

****

That, alas, is no longer the American Way. Nowadays, we who lurk in the aging middle class are consigned to prisons for old folks, where we’re locked up and fed bad food until we finally get out of our family’s hair.

So about the best you can hope for, when you come unto my age, is a stroke or a heart attack that will carry you away forthwith.

Not the custom in my family, alas. My mother died horribly of a gut cancer, allegedly brought on by her incessant smoking  but more likely spurred by the hideous, gawdawful treatment she had for the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Arabia. It was a slow and ugly death.

My father wasted away in the excruciating company of the woman he unwisely married after my mother died. Took a good two years for him to die. Horrible.

My maternal grandmother supposedly died fairly young of cancer, apparently brought on by her flamboyant promiscuity. However, it appears that this story, as told to (or by…) my mother, was not true; in fact she lived to be 88 years old. Well…that’s if you believe the figures in Ancestry.com….a site that appears to be less than fully reliable.

The grandfather…well, if they’re facts, they’re pretty vague. If you believe the scanty data on Ancestry.com, he died at the age of 65.  Or not…who knows?

*******

Oh, well…. When we say side-tracked, we mean sidetracked, eh?

The reality of the day is the WonderAccountants’ decision to retire. A hair-raising contemporary reality that has nary a thing to do with all that historical, ancestral babble. 😀