Coffee heat rising

Another Day, Another…No Dollar….

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Busted, disgusted, and can’t be trusted, as my dear ol’ daddy used to say. 😀

Hey! What can I say?  If I don’t need the dollars, why should I work my butt off to earn them?

Ain’t a-gunna do it!

Gorgeous morning. Dawg and Human have gone a-strolling already — it’s only a little after nine a.m. We’re back at the Funny Farm. Dog is fed. Human is fed. I can’t remember if the cleaning lady/babysitter is supposed to show up and supervise my waking moments…hope to Hell not.

GAWD, how I hate that!  My son really does not seem to understand that I am — as I have always been all my life — a powerfully solitary soul. I do not want people around me.

Most of the time, I don’t need people around me.

That notwithstanding, he hires people to show up here and watch my every waking moment.

Hmmm….  At 9:15 in the morning, it’s still fairly cool out there.

Instead of waiting for the Babysitter of the Day, I may just take Ruby and  head off for a stroll around the park.

But you do know what that will evoke, right?

Yeah. Shortly after Ruby and I get around the corner, the woman will show up. She will be pi$$ed that I’m not here — yes, even if I leave her a note asking her to please wait — and so she’ll complain to my son.

He will be accordingly pissed…and I’ll never hear the end of it. And yes: I’ll be ordered to sit here and wait for these women, whether I like or not, whenever they show up, whatever the day’s coming heat level will be.

What I need to do is give each of these broads a key so they can get in when I’m not here.

Right. And steal me blind, hm?

Honestly: I do not want these worthies around when I’m not here and in the house to watch them. So…that obviates the morning walk.

And the morning walk IS what keeps me walking. It’s what keeps the spavined hip moving. Opt it, and I might as well order up a wheelchair from Amazon.

GORGEOUS Day!

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Truly: what a beautiful morning!

Left the Corgi behind when I set  out to traverse the ‘Hood…partly because she remains stubborn (her new habit) about coming out from under the toilet when called, and partly because I wanted to have my own walk, not be dragged from pillar to post.

And…y’know…that was a good thing to do!

Without the drag-fest, I was left with the time and the  peace to think about Life (as it’s coming to an end…), the Universe, and All That.

And…yeah….

I’m thinking now that I’ll try to stay in my present home until the last cat is hanged.

Two reasons:

a) I love it here. Love the house, love the yard, love the pool, love the neighborhood, love the neighbors.

b) I want my son to  have this place. He may not think it’s the best thing since Paris, but even if he doesn’t….it’s worth a bare minimum of half a million bucks.

So if he decides to sell my house or his own castle, he can pocket enough to finance his retirement (no kidding!).

Then he could, in theory, move back to his dad’s hometown — Grand Junction, Colorado: a venue the kid covets. Or he could stay where he is, rent this house, and invest the proceeds until he’s ready to retire…then live like the King of Sheba. Or he could instead sell my place and use the profit to move himself to some fancy venue like Scottsdale. Or, decamp to the place both of us would prefer to live: San Francisco.

Spectacular thoughts engendered by a spectacular day…

Another Day, Another Cleaning-Lady’s Dollar

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My gawd, that woman works like a HORSE! And she says this is the third house she’s cleaned today!!

Augh! How does she do it?

Mystifies me. I can barely survive cleaning my own house in one day. And she does an awesome job with each task. For two or three houses each day.

Some folks really and truly are amazing. She’s one of ’em!

At any rate, it’s after 5:00 p.m. Wonder Cleaning Lady is still banging around the shack. I personally would just like to go back to bed. (Ain’t gonna happen, o’course: not at this hour!)

***

Ruby and I are just back from the park: watching the kiddies play and their older brothers & sisters babysit them. Love the park!

Love the kids!

Also love Wonder Cleaning-Lady. Because…one thing you may sure I do NOT want to do is clean house. Boyoboy, do I hate cleaning house.

My mother used to make me clean for her. She taught me to dust and vacuum and mop and scrub toilets and wash windows and polish mirrors and clean sinks and wash dishes as soon as I could hold a rag and a cleaning tool in my hand. And so it became my job to clean the house once a week.

A job I deeply hated.

And continue to hate.

So it is that I cheerfully pay the likes of Wonder Cleaning-lady to scrub and vacuum and sanitize and trash-haul and toilet-clean. Bless her!

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.