Coffee heat rising

Swampy Dampy Day!

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Whew! Just back from an early-morning doggy walk, over to the park and through the ‘Hood.

We cut it a bit short: the weather is so hot and so wet that strolling around out there is a miserable experience.

More miserable? Blue-collar working in this gawdawful heat.We passed a few guys getting set to start banging around: painters, carpenters, and them-such. Man! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have!!! 

So gross is the weather this morning that I was reminded of our life on the shore of the Persian Gulf, out in (un!)lovely Arabia. My father dragged me and my mother out there when he got a shore job with Aramco, and we spent nine horrible years out there. GAWDAWFUL place.

My mother and I escaped when she came down with amoebic dysentery, after a moron neighbor who had  us over for dinner failed to soak the lettuce in Clorox before tearing it up to make a salad. She — mother, that is —  was in the hospital for some three weeks before she and I were shipped back to the States.

My father stayed out there till the end of his contract; then came back to the States and got a Merchant Marine job shipping out of Northern California. Disappointing for him, but probably saved my mother’s life and certainly saved my sanity.

Yeah. Being an astronomy buff, I was the Weird Little Girl out there: tormented nonstop by the horrid creatures who were my contemporaries at the local school. Dare to be different in any way, and you were gonna suffer for it!

And suffer for it, I most surely did….

Ugh! What an icky day!  

Arizona certainly would not be my choice of places to live…if I’d had any choice, it would have been the San Francisco Bay Area, where my mother’s relatives lived. Cool, beautiful, and urbane. Here? Hot, tacky, and reactionary.

Really: most of the time, I do dislike living here. The summer heat is oppressive. The city’s style is grodiest Southern California: crowded, bourgeois, and politically to the right of Adolf Hitler. Traffic: crazy-making. Newspaper reporting: not worth paying for. On and on….

But I ain’t moving, not as long as my son is here.

If he were to take a job in California or Colorado, I might follow him. Anywhere else: probably not. More likely I’d move to Southern Arizona, to the cooler and more sophisticated environs around Tucson. The University there supports a real cultural life — a rarity in most of Arizona.

Ohhhhh gawd! The woman my son hired to baby-sit me just showed up at the door. DAYUM! There goes privacy….

Who’s That Knockin’ at My Door?

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Just realized…. These days, I never answer the door when somebody comes a-knocking. Or a-doorbell ringing, either.

Seriously: it used to be — back in the Dark Ages — that when you went to someone’s house and rang the bell or knocked on the door, they answered by opening the door(!!) and greeting you. Today, I won’t open the door unless I know who’s out there.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. My front door is secured by a heavy-duty prison-like screen door, on the outside of the usual decoratively wooden door. So, the exterior door — the real one — has a set of bars and outside that, a thick sheet of solid metal screen. Getting through that would not be easy!

My next-door neighbor has a camera installed above the front door. It relays an image of any caller to a screen inside the door. And no, she won’t answer the door unless she knows who you are and why you’re there.

Awful that we have to be that scared, isn’t it?

One might say times have changed and so our door-answering customs have changed…the implication being that in the good ole’ days you didn’t have to worry about who or what was out on the doorstep.

But no. I don’t think the folks who show up at your door are any different than they used to be. If they’re not a friend or neighbor, then they’re trying to sell you something or (of late) they’re census takers, surveying the locals. It’s a rare bird that poses a real threat.

That notwithstanding: These days I peer out a window before I go to the door. If I don’t recognize the person, I don’t answer. Or else I holler through the window to ask them what they want — and nine times out of ten, send them away.

Now I will say: I don’t want to be hustled by some door-to-door seller. Period. So one reason that door doesn’t get answered is to make it easier to repel those jerks. As for census takers and the like: they need to show me a mighty authentic-looking ID to get me to the door.

Fine times we live in, eh?

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Ugh!!!!!  Don’t know when I’ve seen a day this soggy since we lived in Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf. What a horrid swampy morning, under the glow of the morning sun!

Seriously: one wonders how the air could be this wet without clouds and rain. But…having lived by that gulf shore, one does know it’s possible. Horridly possible.

Out there, I’ve seen it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. No: no exaggeration. I’d be looking out my bedroom window, the swamp cooling that passed as air-conditioning pounding away, and all of a sudden water would just start to pour out of the air. No clouds. No sprinklers going. Just rain condensing out of the humidity.

That’s central Arizona for you!

Dawg and Human: just in the door after a stroll around the neighborhood, through the late pre-dawn hours. Made it back to the house before too much damage was done…though my hair is still wet from sweat and damp air.

Honest to gawd, WHAT possessed my dear parents to drag us to this Hellish place?

Oh, yeah: Sun City. No kids screaming outside your window when you’re tryin’ to take a nap! 

No joke: My father hated kids. And he especially hated them when they were set loose to play outdoors.

When he and my mother discovered Sun City as we were driving across the country one time, he thought he’d found Nirvana: NO KIDS!

Ugh.

So as soon as he could afford to retire, he quit his job, and they packed up and moved to beautiful (childless!!) Arizona. They got me into the University of Arizona a year early — I hadn’t yet graduated from high school, and no one under 19 is allowed to live in (un)lovely Sun City, unless they’re enrolled in college.

Anyhow…that’s how I got to this charming venue, stuck in Arizona when I should be living in the San Francisco Bay Area…where I belong.

Yes, I do hate it here. But my son is here. He has a job here. And I’m not about to leave where he’s living.

🙁

 

AMAZON!!

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Woo HOO! Thank the hevvins for Amazon and its insane home delivery!

As that paeon hints, their deliveries aren’t always perfect. But…in 110-degree heat, they sure do beat hiking down Main Drag West to the Sprouts, running around the store grabbing this, that, and the ‘tother; and then charging back through the heat to the Funny Farm!

My GAWD, it’s hot out there!

The back-porch thermometer says it’s only 105 in the backyard (with high, thick clouds in the offing…). Wunderground claims it’s 107. WhatEVER. It’s too hot and humid for human life, IMHO.

Anyhow, Amazon’s delivery guy just showed up with the pool floater I ordered. Didn’t bother to ring the doorbell, but fortunately I spotted his truck when he pulled up to the house.  So now we can re-load the chlorine in the backyard drink–without having to hike halfway to Timbuktu to get to the pool store.

My son’s having kiped my car is…well… I can think of a number of terms, all of them highly unflattering. But the long and the short of it is…UNHOLY INCONVENIENCE. When you live in an L.A.-style city like Phoenix, you NEED a car to get around, even to the most minor and relatively close destinations. Especially in 110-degree heat.

The Uber guy across the street would have charged me through the wazoo to drive over to the pool store and back. So…at least now we have the chlorine floating gadget. And we’re not bankrupted. Quite.

That’s something.

I guess. 

Not Exactly HOTTER than the Hubs…

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But at least VEERING toward hot as the Hubs of Hades. Outdoors: hot, sticky, gummy weather. Indoors: sticky and gummy.

July is the time of year when you do NOT want to be killing time in Arizona. The heat is fierce, and no, it is most surely not a “dry heat.” It’s as humid and sticky as (un)lovely Saudi Arabia used to be when we lived out there. Yuck!

Wunderground claims it’s only 94º outside. Supposed to get up to 107º during the day. If you asked me, I’d say we’d reached that goal already! At ten in the morning…

Ugh. If my parents were still living, I’d brain them both for dragging me to this hellish place.

They thought Sun City, over on the far west side of Phoenix, was just loverly. 

Yeah…

No accounting for taste, eh? If you love the sound of fighter jets roaring up and down, starting along about 5 in the morning: just loverly. If you love folks who hate kids and wish to live in a place where no such critters exist: loverly. If you love folks who hate people whose skin is darker than theirs and wish to live in a place where no dusky types reside: loverly. If you love grocery stores that sell nothing more exotic than a T-bone steak: loverly.

Ye gawds, did I hate living out there!

Finally got a job in town, one that supported a studio apartment’s rental. So…was able to escape loverly Sun City.

Now in my old age: here I am, parked in North Phoenix….most certainly not in the retirement environs of Sun City. To this day, the appeal of that place escapes me. Reckon it must be….what? ….

The whitey-whitness (No kidding: just a few months ago an African-American friend of mine bought a house out there. Within weeks he was literally HOUNDED out of the place!)

The ultra-tidy sameness of the architecture and of what passes for the landscaping. (Nothing like a gravel lawn to stay nice and neat, eh?)

The relative cheapness of the houses. (A comparable house in town would cost half again as much…or more.)

The remoteness from the rough-and-tumble noise of a big city. (Sun City is characterized by the silence of the tomb….when fighter jets aren’t blasting back and forth.)

One could go on and on, I suppose….but one would prefer not to.

Never was so happy as when I got into graduate school and made my escape to a university campus.

Ugh!!!

If You Have the Right of Way…

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…Then forgodsake TAKE IT!!!!!

Do NOT stop in the intersection and sit there looking stupid!

WHY, for Godsake, do idiots insist on doing that???

NO, it’s NOT “polite” to sit there going duuuuhhhhh when a pedestrian who does not have the right-of-way is standing on the curb waiting for you to get the f*** out of the road!!!!!!!

Then there are the morons who see you walking along a sidewalk as you approach the curb to an intersection. They’re already IN the damn intersection, and they stop and…yeah: stop the car and sit there looking stupid!

Whenever I come across one of these chuckleheads, I actually have to TURN AROUND AND WALK BACK IN THE DIRECTION I CAME FROM to get the nitwit to take his or her right-of-way. And NO, I’m NOT gonna walk out in front of some idiot who already has the right-of-way in an intersection.

WHY are people such blooming DIMWITS?

Stupidity is annoying enough under the best of conditions. But forgodsake. When it’s 110° in the shade and the nitwit is standing there holding you up while he’s trying to be “polite,” it’s freaking infuriating. 

Sheee-ut!  READ THE RULES OF THE ROAD in your state. Learn them. Then — please!— ABIDE BY THEM.