Coffee heat rising

One o’ Those Days…Y-cumen In

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Argh! Today is shaping up to be “one of those days”… You know: when everything you touch — or so much as look at — goes SPROOOINGG!

As we scribble, the dog is hiding under the toilet and refuses to come out.

Why? I cannot imagine. Haven’t lost my temper this morning. Haven’t done much of anything out of the ordinary. She just…doesn’t wanna be with me!

No amount of coaxing will bring her forth.

So…okay. If she wants to spend the day under the toilet, she can spend the day under the toilet. I am DONE! Not gonna try to coax her out. Not gonna try to lovey-dove her into the kitchen for her breakfast. Not gonna take her for the morning doggy-walk.

Whenever I finish the current cup of coffee, I’m heading out for a morning human-walk. Dawg-free!

Otherwise, nothing much is up. Uhmm…far as I know, anyway. As we realize, dogs know a lot more about the world than humans do…so presumably SOMETHING is up. I just haven’t figured out what it is.

The Part That Disturbs Me Most…

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…is that my father seems not to have understood that a woman is not just a woman…is not just a woman. 

If you knew him, you would have come away — even after some years of friendship — with the impression that he thought all women were about the same. Much as, say, cats are about the same or zebras are about the same or doves are about the same.

And I really do think that’s approximately what he thought.

Yeah, he recognized that women are human beings (sort of…), and as such are not carbon-copies of each other. But still…

Yes: but still… He regarded women as creatures cut out of the same cloth. Most of us: less than perfectly bright.

No kidding: even though he did know his daughter operated on the genius level, in person he treated me as though I were…yes: less than perfectly bright.

And that, I sincerely believe, was simply because I was female. If his child had been born a male, he would have treated the kid like a future aeronautical engineer.

And for that reason — that amalgamation of all women into a category of “not quite bright” — he didn’t understand or didn’t accept that my kid-genius ambition to grow up to be an astrophysicist was real. That it was based on real understanding of books and articles that were — quite frankly — way over his head. And that I needed parental and professional support if I were to get past the very real, very hostile discrimination against women in the sciences, as that discrimination existed during the 1950s and 1960s.

He wasn’t having any of it, though. As far as he was concerned, the highest and best use of my intellect was for me to become a high-school teacher. And, of course, a wife.

Yeah.

He was still living at the time I finished the Ph.D. 

Was he duly impressed?

I think not.

To start with, I doubt that he understood what a Ph.D. represented: the type and amount of work it entailed. And to end with, I also doubt that he realized an academic career on the university level was much different from a high-school teaching job. Nor, indeed, did he understand the significance of publishing. As a matter of fact, I believe he ran away to sea before he finished high school. Hence he would have had neither reason nor opportunity to grasp those things.

Consequently, to his mind teaching was teaching was teaching. Something that women did. 

Wow! I’m IN!!!

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Lookee here! Looks like this post is gonna go up… First thing this morning that’s WORKED on the first try!

LOL! This is one of those days when everything you touch goes SPRROOOOIIIING! 😀

Right now, poor Ruby the Corgi is hiding under the toilet. I’ve lost my temper so many times this morning, she’s gone into a state of terror. Probably thinks I’m growling and yelling at her. Not at all the sh!t that keeps happening.

WhatEVER. Now we’re hunkered in the house, finally in relative peace. For the nonce….

hmmmm… trot trot trot trot….here she comes, up the hallway. Doesn’t seem to be too terrorized by her human.

Walks over to the dog bowls. Guzzles some water. Choke choke choke choke….

This is a new thing: she’s taken to choking every time she drinks her water. Gonna have to take her to a vet….but that’ll be a trick, without a car.

Apparently this is not a Cleaning Lady Day, contrary to my expectation. No sign of Wonder Cleaning Lady.

She normally goes to the Wonder Accountants’ place first — straight across the street from the Funny Farm. But it’s pretty early just now: coming on to 8:30. So, alas…we still have a good chance that she’ll show up.

That means an hour of picking up and organizing before she gets started. And then half a day of bang bang wooOOOOO scrub scrub splash splash get the f*ck out of her way. 

True: I have no business complaining about someone else working her buns off to clean up my house. What an ingrate, eh?

But….sometimes the ole’ ingrate wants nothing more than to be left alone. And just now, to tell the truth, I am so much NOT IN THE MOOD to have someone around. Just wanna be alone this morning.

Whatever was going bang bang bang in the attic or on the roof last night seems to have gone away. At any rate, the colorful racket has stopped.

Let’s hope it stays stopped.

But you know it won’t, right? Yes. It will start up again: an hour or two after 5:00 p.m., when I can’t, with any degree of sanity, call a workman and beg him to come over here.

I suspect the noise emanated from air in the pipes. But that raises a real troubling question:

If that’s the case, how did air get into the pipes???

Ugh.

Other possibility is the rotating roof vent. It may be a little out of kilter and so rattles and bangs when the wind spins it around. Just now the air is dead still…so if that theory holds true, the total absence of breeze would explain the total absence of noise.

So I know I really ought to call one of my guys and have him shoof around. But I just can’t shake off enough lethargy to make myself do that.

Ruby is about out of kibble. That means today I’ll have to walk to the supermarket or, preferably, to the nearby pet store to restock that stuff.

And that means having to hike along Main Drag West, where the passing sh!t-heads scream obscenities at every woman they spot strolling along a sidewalk. This, because my honored son has decided I’m too old to drive. (NEVER let your kid go into the insurance business!)

Yes: I can get to the nearby corner shopping centers on foot. To avoid the passing harassment, I have to navigate my way through the neighborhood’s interior streets, a complicated PITA.

And yes: the passing sh!t-heads are probably harmless. But listening to obscenities screamed at you is not fun. Not funny. Not in any way a temptation to walk to the store.

I’m beginning to hate living in this neighborhood, central location notwithstanding. Really…I’m tempted to follow SDXB out to Sun City, the mausoleum for old folks on the Valley’s west side.

Five reasons (and counting) why I let him go all by his macho self when he tried to persuade me to come with him:

* I’ve lived there and hated every goddam minute of it.
* The racket from that goddam air base is enough to drive you batsh!t crazy: ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR, starting along about six in the morning.
* The sexist, racist culture is simply more than I can tolerate. HATE is the dominant social theme out there.
* The distance from my son’s house is gawdawful: it’s damn  near an hour’s drive into central Phoenix.
* You can’t buy a decent cut of meat out there. 😀  Maybe things have changed by now (one can only hope so), but when I was camping at my parents’ house, I had to drive ALL THE WAY INTO NORTH CENTRAL PHOENIX to buy a quality steak. Apparently people on the west side eat nothing but hamburger.

What an awful place it is.

Friend of mine who happens to be of the darker persuasion took it into his head to move out there, a couple years ago.

He bought a house and moved in….and the locals just rounded on him.

No kidding! He was made to feel SO unwelcome that within a few months he sold the house and moved back to the East Valley, whence he had emanated.

Yeah. Hate Harbor is what the place should be called. And I ain’t movin’ back there, SDXB or no SDXB.

Icky Sticky Day!

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What was that I said, earlier today, about maybe the rain letting up a bit?

Har har hardy har har!

None of that, Pathetic Human!

Ruby the Corgi and I just darted in the house, barely ahead of a fine little downpour.

Wunderground ventures to say we have a 97% chance of “precipitation” — their grown-up word for “rain,” far’s I can tell.

“Thunderstorms possible around 4:30 p.m.”  No doubt…

Well, we shall see. It’s overcast and raining just now, at 3:00 p.m. If we add a thunderstorm to that, things will start to look lively.

Oh, well. At least we got the dog and the human walked before water started to fall on us. Ruby looks disgusted: unclear whether she wanted a longer excursion or whether she just dislikes gray skies and rain.

This will preclude firing up the barbecue — our usual mode of cooking dinner. So…presumably we’ll be having pasta tonight. Probably just as well: it’s hot and gummy outside. This way, we won’t have to go out in that stickum to fix a meal.

Hip hurts like the dickens! No idea what I did to spavin that joint. Must have rolled over oddly in my sleep.

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What an icky-sticky sky! Gray overcast with thick, spongey-looking clouds, sailing along ahead of what is pretty clearly a stiff breeze up there. Still on the ground: windy in the sky.

Presumably.

😀  Dawg is now conkered out on the bed. She’s already asleep! LOL! How does she do that?  I’m still wide awake, and will be until well after dark. On the other hand…or paw…it could be that none of her hips hurt to high heaven. 😀

Anything’s possible, eh?

Glub!

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Serious rain!

It’s been raining all night. Now, and quarter to nine in the morning, it seems to be letting up a bit…although the sky is still plastered with gray clouds.

Ruby the Corgi is conkered out on the sack.

Haven’t heard a word from my honored son. This being a Sunday, though, I hope he also is conkered out, in his own sack.

Kinda grateful that I was forced by the driver’s license fiasco to drop off the choir. This is NOT a day when I would like to be cruising the (un)lovely streets of Phoenix. Gray and soaking wet, it is.

It’s the sort of weather we used to get, once or twice a year, when we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Sure am glad I’m not there now!

😮  What a hell-hole that place was. Hot and humid all summer long. Other times…oh, my. The sh!t-head kids made the weather look mellow by comparison.

I was a weird little girl — wanted to grow up to be an astronomer, not a mommy standing in the kitchen baking cookies. And that was just too, too much for the little monsters at my school. They ganged up to make my life utter misery: month in and year out. Because the schools out there ran on a 12-month schedule, there was no relief from the bullying. Horrible time of my life!

When we got back to the States, the kids in the San Francisco public school where I was despatched didn’t know I was weird, and so they never tormented me. Amazingly, I even had friends, if you can imagine!

That never happened during the entire hideous 10 years that we spent in Arabia.

Y’know…. If you can see that your child is miserable at school, do consider transferring him or her to another school, one where the inmates don’t know the kid. A whole new start is one of the kindest things you can do for an unhappy child.

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Darn it! Was gonna walk up to the nearby Mexican supermarket this morning: strangely enough, one of my favorite places to shop. But that weather out there is just too gross to risk hiking around in it.

Well. We have enough food to last me and the hound for another couple of days. And…heh…rain in Arizona doesn’t last a couple of days.

More like a couple of hours… 😀

And so…back to loafing!

To Trick or Not to Treat?

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Comin’ on to 4:00 in the afternoon, a stormy evening is building up. Last night, a large part of the Valley lost power. Looks like we could be looking at a repeat performance.

Hmmmm….  I’d planned to join my neighbors across the street for this evening’s trick-or-treat antics. LOVE watching the kids in their costumes, and the whole Hallowe’en shenanigan.

But...hmmmm….. Maybe not.

In a truly major storm, Ruby the Corgi will be terrorized. That’s even if she’s safe in the house.

The neighborhood kids just ADORE her corgihood — seriously! So we’d planned to take her over to the WonderAccountants’ place when I go over to help hand out treats this evening. That is charmingly fun…

But… All it would take is one reasonably close-by lightning strike, accompanied by a blast of thunder, to scare the bedoodles out of this little dog. And that will cause her to take off, like a rocket, for points north of Las Vegas.

Darn!

That being a given, I’m having a raft of second thoughts about joining the neighbors for the trick-or-treat shenanigans.

Wunderground expects rain to start around 6:00 p.m.

Nice timing, eh? 😮

Apparently heavy rain is expected in lovely Phoenix tonight: one to two inches. Hey: that’s a lot, for Arizona! 😀

*******************

AND NOW….

It’s a true soggy-doggy night!

Rain has been pouring for the last hour or so. And I do mean pouring. 

This has put the eefus on the trick-or-treating, alas. The Wonder-Accountants and I did lurk in their garage for an hour or so, socializing and watching for customers. But hardly anyone came by, even before water started to leak out of the sky…  Now, though, buckets of water are coming down. And we have flooding every which way from Sunday.

So, we folded our camp and headed into our respective shacks.

Ruby and I are now officially loafing on the bed.

Too bad, really. I do love all the kids gussied up in their outfits and the teenagers running amok. Hallowe’en really is my favorite holiday.

Darn!