Coffee heat rising

A Miracle! It Works!!

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Puttering around the backyard just now, I idly attempted to turn on the kaput gas barbecue. And…

A MIRACLE! The thing came on!!

It was dead as a doornail when last reported on here.

My guess is that my excellent son probably came around and quietly fixed it, without pestering me.

Whatever the explanation, it’s working now. Or at least, it was five minutes ago.

Thank the heavens! I do most of my cooking on that grill…not fond of cleaning up the kitchen after meals and projects.

So: come dinnertime we shall see. An attempt to grill a slab of fish or piece of steak will tell the rest of the story.

The question now is who busted it and why. I’ll have to ask the cleaning crew what they got into, and hope they’re at least moderately honest in replying. But really….there isn’t anyone else who would have had access to it. So one of them must have dorked it up.

Next Step Along the Way?

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Gawdlmighty, what Looney Toons around this place!  It’s beginning to look more and more like I’m going to have to move into one of those horrible holding pens for old folks. I’m not going to be able to live in this house or take care of the property without having someone HERE, with me, to deal with the unending slew of stupid little crises.

Now the barbecue is on the fritz, apparently as a result of some bird-brained cleaning lady’s ministrations. Naturally, today is Sunday, so I can’t get anyone out here to work on that.

And if that weren’t enough, something on the roof — presumably one of the whirling vents — is going BANG BANG BANG BANG…. 

Don’t want to ask my son about that, because I really don’t want him climbing around the roof.

Ohhhh Gawd!

I’m afraid it’s time.

Time to move into the old-folkerie. 

What a horror. 

Few things do I abominate more than institutional living. Just HATED living in the dorms at the university. And that is NOT how I want to spend the last few months or (God forbid!) years of my life. Frankly, before things reached this point I hoped I would die — of a natural passing; don’t panic, I’m not talking suicide here.

Jeez. I just CANNOT BELIEVE one of those nitwit women wrecked my barbecue. What the f*ck is the MATTER with people?

WHY, Indeed….

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Yesterday Funny asked a rather pointless question: Why is life plagued by stupid people?

No answer to that one, I reckon…

But here’s another variation:

WHY did my mother, an overall intelligent and rational woman, commit suicide by smoking herself to death?

Yes, that is what she did.

She knew that tobacco smoking could — probably would — kill her.

She didn’t care.

She knew the unholy horrors that would be inflicted on her loved ones as they watched her die.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much she would suffer, having watched her own mother die of a self-inflicted cancer.

She didn’t care.

She knew how sick her second-hand smoke could make her daughter.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much her daughter loathed the stench of her stinking cigarettes, which permeated their home and poisoned its air.

She didn’t care.

So…WHY, in the name of God, did she NOT care about any of those life-crushing things?

Because she did know all of those matters, I do not believe for one second that she didn’t understand what she was doing. She smoked herself to death: on purpose. And if it made me sick in the process — well, Alhamdulillah.  Apparently, she truly didn’t care: not only that she was killing herself (which may have been the whole point of the exercise) but that she was sickening me in the process. Possibly even killing me.

Well, obviously she never reached that final goal. But I was sick all the time I was growing up, with one respiratory ailment after another after another. Basically, to indulge her own craving for nicotine, she deliberately made me sick. And she did so over 16 years, until I got old enough to get into the University of Arizona and leave her home.

Why on earth would you do that to your own child?

How to Get Your Revenge on a Nasty Old Bat

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“Nasty Old Bat”: that would be me. I get orneyer and orneyer the older I get. And every now and then, some chucklehead will pull a stunt to get back at me. This one though, is too funny!

My son hired a woman to come to the house and keep an eye on me, here in my dotage. Ostensibly, she’s here as a cleaning lady. But the truth is she’s here as a babysitter. She was showing up at the crack of dawn and hanging around until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Watching, watching, ever watching….

As a confirmed lone wolf, this is something I could do without. I do NOT want some stranger underfoot all day.

Although I never said any such thing to her, she must have intuited it. She got increasingly surly as the days passed, and now we have this…

One of her jobs was to make my bed: a double-bed sized number that resides in the master bedroom.

So…a couple evenings ago, I climb under the covers on that bed and…R-R-R-R-I-I-I-I-I-P!!!!

LO! The fitted bottom sheet has been sliced with something sharp, from top to bottom. It has a hole in it that runs from the head to the foot of the bed!

Whaaa????

Well, by now it’s 10:00 at night. And when I tellya I’m SICK, I ain’t kidding. I just do not feel well enough to rip apart a queen-sized bed and remake it. Really: TOO TIRED TO CARE.

Figured I’d have her remake the bed when she came in the next day.

This had the effect of pulling the rip apart even more dramatically.

And SURPRISE! Of course she didn’t come in the next day. Or the next, either.

So now, I’ve got to get off my duff, pull the bedding apart, and remake the bed.

Not that big a deal…unless you’re sick as a dog. And in a lot of pain.

Pisseth me off…big-time.

She hasn’t been back in a couple of days. I figure if she shows up at the door, I’ll send her away. That will pisseth off my son, who went to some trouble find this woman. But I figure what she did was just plain malicious. And I don’t want her around here. 

Whole Afternoon Blown Away!

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Sheee-ut!!!!!  The lovely (no irony!) woman my son hired to babysit me all day, every day, schlepped me out to the Mayo Clinic to chat with the docs about the endlessly nagging peripheral neuropathy. Planned to touch on a few other sources of pain and stress, none of them exactly heavy-duty.

WHAT a waste of time!

We sat there and we sat there and we sat there and we sat there until we finally were ushered into an exam room.

And…whaddaya guess? We sat there and we sat there and we sat there and…  Finally I just announced that I was leaving. And away we went. No one even seemed to notice that we were fleeing the premises.

Before we left the building, I had to search for my clothes, which some accommodating soul had picked up and carried off.

Why d’you suppose the Mayo would do that? Evidently they know their doctors keep the patients waiting until the last rooster crows after sundown. If they have your clothes, you can’t get home.

Well, I was about ready to walk home in my underwear, so PO’d was I. One of their underlings apparently realized that, and she brought my clothes into the waiting room. And then…

OUTTA THERE!

Yeah. I do realize the Mayo has rafts on rafts on rafts of patients. And Sure, I do know they can’t ever be certain of when any one of those patients is gonna soak up hours and hours, more than any doctor could catch up on. But honestly….

Wouldn’t you think that when they see they’re running an hour late, they could announce that to the waiting hordes and offer to reschedule those who would prefer not to spend half a day twiddling their thumbs?

How hard WOULD that be, really?

The peculiarly annoying thing about our (mis)Adventures at the Mayo is that none of the other major local hospitals — Good Samaritan, St. Joseph’s, John C. Lincoln, on and on– seem to be very good. They all receive rafts of negative reviews!  Apparently, the Mayo is the best of a bad lot.

Right now, it’s 4:40 in the afternoon and I’m waiting (waiting…waiting…waiting) for the woman my son has hired to ride herd on me to GO HOME, DAMMIT!

No sign that she’s about to do that.

I don’t have enough in the refrigerator to feed dinner to myself, much less to me and her.

Wait: take that back:  A perfectly gorgeous slab of sirloin steak is in there.

And selfish little me: I would just as soon not have to share it with her. Dammit!

But if she doesn’t make a move to leave within the next half-hour or 45 minutes — it’s 4:20 p.m. right now — I’ll have no choice but to offer her dinner and then, without a doubt, host her in the spare bedroom.

Yes, it would be good to have her (or someone) stay here tonight. I did spavin a hip earlier today, and yeah: tromping around the house just now hurts like the dickens.

Just dropped an ibuprofen. We’ll see if that helps. If not…well, then I’ll have to find my own quack.

My long-time physician, the Beloved Young Dr. Kildare, first moved his practice to the far west side (a horrible drive from here) and now, within the past few weeks, has moved it into Sun City.

NOTHING could be  worse sign for a doctor. 

My mother died hideously under the ministrations of a Sun City quack. The doctors out there, the hospital out there…eeew! 

Yeah: those would be the ones who assume, ipso facto, that if you’re a woman you must be a hypochondriac.

And that, right there, is the Number One reason that you could not pay me to move to Sun City! Add to it…

*Endemic hate as a cultural theme…
* Loathing of young people…
* Constant, ungodly racket from that dam Air Force Base…
* Barrenness as a design element…
* Cheap, flimsy construction…
* Air-conditioning bills hovering in the stratosphere, because the houses were never built to be occupied during the summer…

What a horrible place!