Coffee heat rising

In-fukkin’-furiating!!!!

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Never fails! Sit your tail down in a dinner-table chair, and RINGY-DINGY DINGY!! There’s some a$$-hole on the phone trying to hustle you to buy whatever they’re peddling.

Literally. This happens almost every time I sit down to eat. This morning, they jangled their way into my breakfast…again.

grrrrrrrrrr!!!!

If I had any sense, I’d disconnect the phone before I sit down to eat. But…but…

a) I’m too lazy to remember to do that;
b) I highly resent being forced to disconnect MY phone, for whose service I pay richly, because those a$$holes keep pestering me with ads.
c) Sometimes I want the phone to ring through to me at this hour.

****

Comin’ on to 9:00 a.m. I’m so sleepy I mostly just wanna go back to bed. But that doesn’t make sense: far’s I can tell, I was out cold all night. Slept like the proverbial log, all the way thru till sometime after 7:00 a.m.

So…why do I feel like a zombie?

Thinking about how my mother killed herself. She smoked herself to death.

Literally. She was never conscious when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth or in her hand. Or, usually, in her mouth. Puff puff puffety puff puff puff. You knew when she was awake, morning or night, because you could smell the stench of her goddamn cigarettes emanating from her bedroom. That’s how heavily addicted to nicotine she was. She couldn’t pass more than an hour — if that long — without a murder weapon in her mouth.

Not surprisingly, this habit drew her onward to her death. A peculiarly ugly and painful death.

She managed to time that death just as I was coming up on the deadline for my Ph.D. dissertation.

When I explained to the dean who ran the Graduate College that I needed more time to finish because my mother was dying, she said, effectively, tough nougies, and then announced that if I didn’t complete the book by the deadline, I would be dropped from the program, and no, I would NOT be given a second chance to complete the degree for which I had worked over the past many years.

Evil to the left of you… Evil to the right of you… Evil in front of you… Evil behind you. Every which way you look, there’s another slice of evil. :-0  That’s academia for you!

Okay, admittedly, they didn’t kill her. She killed herself. But she did so with an addictive drug (nicotine) that made countless magnates rich as Croesus, as they killed the far more countless nitwits who were their customers. And in the process, she created an opportunity for the ba*tards at Arizona State University to make me even more miserable than I already was.

And that was plenty miserable!

It’s the primary reason that I would not go back to work there. Nor, very probably, in any major academic institution. People who run those places have no empathy whatsoever with the worms that make up their constituency.

For some time after my mother was murdered, I considered — very nearly with seriousness — a kamikaze run. I would get a job in a tobacco factory or in the offices of a cigarette company. Then one day walk into the place with a bomb or three in hand. Set them off and blow up the damn place. 

Blow myself up, too…which would be OK, because that would be better than spending the rest of my life in prison, should I survive the attack.

Ahhhhh, the Almighty Dollar…

Lookin’ Up!!

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Well, the day has brightened considerably since I wrote this morning’s glum and grumpy blog post.

The lovely WonderAccountant, who lives across the street from the Funny Farm, called and asked if I’d like to make a Sprouts run with her.

WOULD I?????  Ohhhhboy!

So shortly, we had a week’s worth of shopping out of the way.

And now I’m infinitely cheered. I hate grocery shopping…and doing so without a car elicits a special sense of aggravation. The food’s in the house, the annoyance never happened, I haven’t had to pay the Uber guy to drive me around…zowie!! 

And better yet, my friend and I had an hour (give or take) to shop and enjoy each other’s company. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to do that about once a week?

***

Meanwhile: here’s a cop copter overhead, loudly circling around and around to the north of us. Just now he’s far enough away that any perps he’s chasing will stay out of our precincts (I hope!).

Wait…yes…by golly! He’s scared them off further north! With any luck, they’ll stay out of my yard this time. 😀

Another Day, Another…????

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GORGEOUS morning. Sky is clear, if a little fuzzy. Ever-so-slightly fuzzed-up dawn sunlight glows down into the back patio. Temperature is cool and soft…. Just wanna take the dawg and go for a walk.

Actually, what I want to do is finish this mugful of coffee and go back to bed. Preternaturally sleepy this morning…for reasons unknown. Slept well last night: no excuse for feeling like I’ve been up for the past 12 or 14 hours.

‘Tother thing I’d like to do is stroll across the street and ask our excellent new Uber driver if he’d like to Uber me to my favorite grocery store — some miles on into town. But that does seem like more trouble than it’s worth.

The theft of my car (by an honored family member…/eyeroll/ ) means I have to walk everyplace I need to go: to the grocery stores, to the veterinarian, to the Walgreen’s, to the…on and on and endlessly, painfully on.

In theory, I could walk to the nearby Albertson’s, Sprouts, or El Rancho. It’s a gorgeous morning, a perfect day for walking a couple miles.

But…I spavined a foot, and truth to tell, it hurts just to walk around the house. Sure don’t want to take a chance on getting a mile or so from home and finding, all of a sudden, that I can’t put any weight on that paw.

My son stole my bike, too: so that obviates bicycling to the store. In that department: thinking about buying another one from the second-hand store up the road, and then asking said neighbor to store it in his garage or backyard. Problem there, of course, is that any time I need to use it, I’ll have to roust him out of the house and retrieve the thing from him. If he’s not home, I ain’t goin’ anywhere.

*****

{chortle!}

JUST got sat down in the front patio and it’s

BRRRRRRRBLAAASSSTTTTBRRRRRRR!

Neighbor’s yard guy out there with his weed-whacker.

One should know better, right? What on earth would make me imagine I should be allowed to enjoy a gorgeous, cool, sunny morning? How stupid of me, eh?

So…Dog and Human are back in the house, barricaded in behind heavy steel doors, closed tight.

Y’know, this is when (& where) I need SDXB in his (former) abode a block up the street. He would keep my bike at his house, no question of it. He’d probably keep it some place where I get at it even if he weren’t at home. So at least I’d have been able to get to the grocery store this morning.

How stupid IS this stuff, anyway?

It’s looking more and more like SDXB was dead right about moving to Sun City — where the Younger Generation cannot follow you. That makes it about 110% more difficult for them to try to run your life.

Really, I do appreciate the many, many things M’Hijito does for me. But that appreciation fades at the line where I get told what to do and when to do it, told what not to do, dragged to doctors I don’t like…on and on.

Nothing that I need to do this morning is gonna get done, because while confined to the house I have no way to get those things done. Well…no practical way. Yes, I could walk a mile each way to a grocery store, there and back, dragging a roller cart to haul my purchases. But…well…not right this minute, eh?

If I hadn’t already spent several years in Sun City when my parents were out there, I’d be out there with SDXB right now. But…

My goodness, how I detested living in that place!!

The attitude might be different now that I’m an old bat, not a college kid. But even still…it would be hard to shake off those negative feelings, and even harder to force myself, like my mother, to pretend I like the roar of fighter jets blasting overhead from dawn to noon. Horrid!!!!!

It’s so much better here on the north end of North Central Avenue. Gotta find a way to stay here, have what I want, and not be pushed around….

Cox Gouge

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So I call Cox Communications and ask what the outrageous gouge for $115 is for, since I never make long-distance calls and hardly even make local calls. The moron who answers says, in effect, that’s just the regular price.

No, it’s not. I’ve never had a $115 gouge for ordinary local phone service.

Sheeeee-ut.  Now I’ll have to ask the Owner of the Male Voice — i.e., my son — to call those clowns and ask WTF that’s about.

Jayzuz! Never a dull moment.

Lazy, Hazy, Gauzy Day of Summer

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Well: Day of Spring: it’s only April. But in Arizona, the weather will be summerish by most region’s standards.

What a strange and gorgeous day. Lovely, balmy temperature beneath high, soft gray clouds.

Normally, Ruby and I would have taken off for the park by now. But I’ve spavined a hip, so she and loaf. She has taken over the foot of the bed, and I’ve repaired to a pile of pillows. What could be better, eh?

A-a-a-n-d…as we scribble, in comes another fake email under a friend’s name. At least two dozen of these have hit my in-box over the past year or two. She’s a fellow volunteer at the church — or was a “fellow” while I was still doing that. Dropped out of the choir and the church phone-answering job when my son started dragging me to the Mayo every Sunday morning: the end of a fun activity and the loss of a bunch of friendly associates.

ohhhh well. Anyway, I haven’t been able to shake the scamming emails, no matter what I do to try to block them. Just now, dozens of these reside on my in-box…it’s gonna take an hour or two to delete them all. What a damn nuisance!

Better get to work on that….

Here’s another one, claiming an auto-payment to Cox will be made…in the amount of $115.

Oh, yeah?  I don’t normally do auto-pays, for obvious reasons. So…scam or no scam? Do I really have to call Cox today and navigate their nuisance-y system to find out WTF this is?  And if it is a scam, how did they get my payment data???

And why would Cox be gouging me for $115, when I don’t make long-distance calls?

Godlmighty, am I sick of this stuff!!!!!!!

Why Didn’t I….?

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Ever find yourself wondering What the dickens was the matter with me that I didn’t {do X, Y, or Z} instead of the stupid thing I did do? 

Afraid that’s not a rare occasion for Funny. Honest to Gawd. I’ve done and said the stupidest things over the years…when if I’d kept my mouth shut at the time — even for a few minutes, to say nothing of a few days — things would have turned out much for the better.

Case in point: My father & his bitch wife.  If, that time when they came mincing up to me and said “ohhhh we want your permission to get married,” instead of uttering a slack-jawed “well, o’course!” (while thinking these idiots are grown adults: why do they imagine they need their kid’s permission to get married?), I had said “Are you kidding? You’re sixty-some years old, not sixteen years old. You don’t need my permission to do anything,” things might have turned out a lot better for them.

Why?  

Well, this is just a guess. And that guess is: if they had stopped and thought about whether they really wanted to marry, rather than getting a kid’s imprimatur, they might have thought twice about it. Or who knows? even three times… They might have slowed down enough to give themselves several weeks or, better yet, a couple of months or three before they waltzed into marriage.

A marriage that turned out to be flickin’ miserable. The LAST thing those two needed to do was get married.

Living in sin would have been infinitely preferable: at least they wouldn’t have had to navigate courts and laws to get un-hitched.

Simply proceeding as girlfriend and boyfriend — keeping their own apartments at the old-folkerie but acting as grand friends — would have more than infinitely preferably. Then they would have no hitching to un-do.

Like all of us, I’ve occasionally made spectacular mistakes. Some of those have had less than sterling results.

The upshot of these adventures, over the years, has been one crucial rule of thumb:

When in doubt, don’t. 

Sounds glib, but it ain’t. Seriously: if you’re not sure about some decision you’re about to make, don’t proceed with it. 

STOP!!!

Stop and wait. Nine times out of ten, you will indeed have time to wait long enough to think things through; maybe to discuss with a trusted friend or advisor, or just to put it all off until your head clears.

And that, my friends, is what you most need to do before making any key decision.