Coffee heat rising

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!

My Mother Was Murdered

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The question returns to haunt: How could they have killed her like that? 

Next question: How could she have allowed them to kill her? She knew…she knew!

Well. The answer rolls into one: my mother was murdered by the God-damned tobacco industry, whose acolytes got her addicted to nicotine.

Craving, craving, ever craving…she puffed her way to the grave. By the time she died, she was going through two or three packs a day. She couldn’t have stopped, even if she had wanted to — which she did not. Puffety puffety puffety…chugging right into the grave.

A thousand curses on everyone who works in the tobacco industry. More than a thousand curses on any legislator who ever agreed to keep tobacco peddling legal.

They murdered my mother. Every goddamn one of those killers, from the tobacco company employees to the bastards in the legislatures that have kept tobacco legal, every single one of them is a murderer.

They’re all complicit in the murders of the SEVEN MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR. And one of those victims was my mother.

A horrible way to die, the cancer brought on by tobacco smoking. My mother suffered monstrously. So did my father, as he struggled to care for her during her hideous final months and weeks.

He chased me off from her bedroom, as she lay dying: didn’t want me to watch that show. Neither, I expect, did she.

But finally the show did end. She died: in vast pain until the last couple of weeks, when she was mostly unconscious.

It’s hard to understand why her death and the thousands of deaths like hers are not regarded as murder. Actually, the world-wide the toll is far larger than that: eight million murders a year. 

Why, my friends, do we tolerate this constant, ongoing mass murder?

Yeah, I know: money.

But money doesn’t make it right. Money doesn’t make it not murder. It just makes the murder even more immoral than it would be if someone weren’t getting rich from it. 

Reminiscing over Coffee

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7:45 a.m., back to shack

Ruby and the Human shoot out the door at the crack of dawn. A somewhat muffled crack…the sky is threatening….

GORGEOUS rainy-day weather: high fluffy clouds, soft air, people out strolling around the park.

Tony the Romanian Landlord is among them: out there proselytizing. He’s a religious nut: wants to convert everyone to his faith.

Ruby trots right along.

Weather is keeping most people in, so we don’t have to dodge any neighbors’ dogs. That’s refreshing.

****

Back at the house: COFFEEEEEEE!

Browsing the news reports… Gosh, am I glad NOT to be living in the Middle East anymore!

I grew up in Saudi Arabia — a less-than-sylvan venue. My mother was terrorized most of the time. My father had a pistol stashed on the top shelf of the hall closet… Heh! He imagined I didn’t know where it was. 😉

Not only did I know where it was, but in his absence I was given to hauling it down and fiddling with it. Luckily, it never went off.

My mother barely survived our ten-year junket out there. She came down with amoebic dysentery, which damn near killed her. She was in the hospital for weeks.

But…the upside was that she demanded to come home — that is, back to the States — and my father didn’t have it in him to decline. My guess is, she threatened to divorce him if he didn’t agree to come back to the States. But…that, really, I do not know as fact.

What I do know is that after she got out of the hospital and went through some grueling treatment, she and I flew back to California, where we stayed with the maternal relatives in Berkeley until my mother could get a job and land us a place to live.

When my father’s contract with Aramco ended, he got a job shipping out of northern California — and later, out of Long Beach, the grody urb where I had been born some 16 years before.

Driving back across the country from New York, they discovered Sun City, here in Arizona. My father was enchanted: NO KIDS!

He really did NOT like kids. Hated the sound of kids playing outdoors. Highly resented their presence.

At any rate, this glorious discovery brought us here to Arizona, the minute he figured he could retire.

***

He figured wrong: a recession raped his savings and so he had to go back to sea. But my mother and I stayed here, and I ended up going to college at the University of Arizona in Tucson…not Cal Berkeley, where I’d planned to go.

Thank you, Daddy…

To be fair, he really didn’t understand that there are differences among higher education institutions. To his mind, the UofA was the same as Cal Berkeley. I knew better, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

After I graduated, I landed a Mickey-Mouse job at a law firm in downtown Phoenix. Yeah: answering the phones.

Everyone needs a four-year degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key to do that, eh?

So my prospects, as I’d imagined them, were mightily fu*ked up.

Married a lawyer by way of making my living. 😀

Well. To be fair: back in the Day, that’s what women were expected to do.

Ahhhh, the good ole’ days!

ARF! say we. ARF and ARROOOOO!

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So Ruby the Corgi and I are on our way home from our early-evening peregrination of the park when we encounter a wandering neighbor.

“There’s a coyote in the park!” exclaims she, her voice radiant with fear.

No kidding, think I. Y’know, they were here first….

Oh, well. I manage to keep my yap shut, except to thank her for the dire warning.

By and large, coyotes — even the urban variety — are more afraid of you than you are of them. If one approaches you, the correct response is to turn and face the little fella, glare at him, and firmly utter these words: No! Ba-a-a-d dog! BAD dog! GO HOME!!! 

The standard coyote response to this is a horrified look that says, clear as any human language could say it, Good grief! This one’s crazy! Said realization crossing the critter’s mind, your dire enemy turns around and trots away from you.

LOL! But seriously: the presence of our coyote fellow citizens is the reason I carry a large, sturdy walking stick on the doggy-walks. Get smart with me, Fang, and I’ll knock you into the middle of next week!

By and large, though, coyotes are not interested in getting smart with you. They tend (wisely) to be  afraid of humans. And so, nine times out of ten, if they spot you they’ll turn tail and trot off to the wide-open spaces. When walking your dog in our parts, your job (among several) is to keep your eyes open and maintain plenty of space between the wild canid and your pooch.

Remember: They’re more scared of you than you are of them. 😉

Day from Hell Continues….

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WOW! I wish Funny’s readers could have been here a few minutes ago, to see the awe-inspiring little storm that just blew through.

And when we say “blew,” we mean “like a freakin’ tornado!” Great blasts of wind plus buckets of rain.

Well…it seems to have passed: rain has stopped, wind has dropped back to normal breeze level. But gosh! What a thing to see!

Luckily, Ruby and her human were not out strolling around the ‘Hood as this thing blew up. If we’d arrived on the other side of the park, we wouldn’t have had a chance of getting home before a good drenching. And….boyoboy, am I glad I wasn’t out driving in it!

Trees and shrubbery are still swaying in some residual wind, but the liveliest part of the storm seems to have passed.

***

Well, this puts the eefus on any scheme to stroll to one of the local grocery stores and restock the shelves. I ain’t goin’ out in that!!

Nonetheless, we still have plenty of supplies. We certainly can last well into tomorrow, and probably much longer than that.

Freshets like this one usually clear up within a few hours, here in (un)lovely Arizona. So by this evening or (preferably!) tomorrow, I should be able to stroll to the corner shopping center. Ohhh well! 😀

Start of a New Day from Hell???

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LOL!  Honestly: it just doesn’t stop! When we say “whatever can go wrong will go wrong,” we ain’t kidding!

Weirdly, I locked myself out of the house this morning, along about dawn.

HOW? That escapes me.

I thought the door was unlocked when I stepped outside in front, into the dim early light.

Well.

No.

Wrong!

Try to get back in: LOCKED TIGHT!

Side gate: locked.

All the windows: closed and locked.

So….I couldn’t get back in the house. And Ruby was trapped inside.

Fortunately, the neighbors were already up. Tom (the male neighbor over there) was puttering with his car.

So I descended on them…O lucky them!

Thank goodness they’re VERY nice people. Tom was able to get the door open.

And now I’m assigned to get some extra keys made, so as to give one or two to them.

Yes, my son does have a key. But…y’know…strange as this may sound, he has a JOB.

Right. He can’t jump up out of his desk chair and come charging up here to rescue his idiot mother every time she gets herself into some new predicament.

So. It was a disturbing way to start the day.