Coffee heat rising

CAN you believe it?

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Ten in the morning…the dawg and I prepare to hunker down and loaf around the front courtyard half the morning. And…and this is when I discover that not one, not two, but ALL THREE of the hummingbird feeders have been stolen from the south side of the house.

Can you imagine? The greedy bastard (or bitch) ripped off ALL THE HUMMINGBIRD FEEDERS from the front yard.

I kinda incline not to replace them.

Yes, the hummers are endlessly charming. But the feeders actually are a bit of a PITA to clean and refill and rehang every few days.

Jeez. What would possess you to steal a stupid little bird feeder? Like…you’ve got nothing better to filch?

Welp…getting new ones will require ordering them from Amazon or traipsing six or eight blocks to the nearest outdoor store. Am I gonna do that?

Probably not.

Think I’ll make a couple of cardboard signs showing an erect f***-you finger and hang that from the empty feeder hooks.

Time to Move to the Old Folks’ Home?

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Stay? or flee?

Do Ruby and I want to sell up, pack up, and move? Shift our base of operations to an institution for the elderly, where staff babysit you 24/7? Or…well…stay here, keep dodging the burglars and the sh!t-heads, keep managing crews of yard guys, housecleaners, pool dudes, repairmen…on and on and endlessly on?

One advantage of living in an old-folkerie: someone else rides herd on the hired help.

Here, I do have a cleaning lady who does an excellent job. Most of them don’t: they appear not to know how to clean house, at least not to middle-class American standards. So the presence of Wonder Cleaning-Lady is a huge privilege…and very possibly a rarity.

You shouldn’t have to ride herd on a worker doing a job that your mommy taught you to do when you were nine years old. In Wonder Cleaning-Lady’s case, I don’t have to…but too dam many of them don’t even seem to know how to use a dustrag.

Move into one of those old folks’ warehouses, and (in theory, anyway) you have an employee riding the herd.

Whaddaya bet, though, that you still end up with imperfect cleaning, dust still sitting on the bookcase shelves, dust still hiding behind the sofa, grease still sitting on the stove burners…on and on and on…  Y’know…if I have to deal with that, I’d rather deal with it in my own home,  not in some unholy institution.

But…Jeez!!

This morning Ruby and I repaired to the neighborhood park for our morning perambulation. And there was some guy out there, yelling suggestive obscenities at us. Yeah: at an 80-year-old bat!!! 

You can’t get away from the bastards!

Wait…isn’t that what the cop said after the Great Home Invasion Adventure?  😀

Seriously: you CAN’T get away from them.

If I’m going to stay here and if I imagine Ruby and I are going to continue our walking routine, maybe I ought to get us a pistol. One that’s small enough to fit inside a pocket.

On the other hand, I don’t want to shoot some jerk just because he asks me if I wanna f*ck. That wouldn’t be nice, would it?

😉

We’re IN! Not to say FED UP….

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SURPRISE!!!!!  Our honored computer let me into our blog site! It’s a miracle! 

Gray, muggy day. Reminds me vaguely of life in Berkeley, where my relatives dwelt. Only considerably warmer than the East Bay, which was usually pretty nippy.

Dog and Human traipsed around the park, by the light of a dawn best described as “dim.”

Grrrr! Afraid I’m going to have to stop taking Ruby to the park — her paws-down favorite venue! — because of the a$$holes that habituate the place. This morning we had some jerk hollering obscenities at me — AN 80-YEAR-OLD WOMAN! — as we strolled across one end of the park.

Swear ta gawd!!!  What IS the matter with people?

Looks like we’ve got three choices:

* Stay out of the park, now and evermore.
* Get someone, preferably a large and male someone, to walk with us.
* Adopt a German shepherd to accompany us.

None of those appeal:

* Ruby’s little doggy heart will be broken if she can’t ever go into the park again.
* I don’t know any bodyguard-shaped men any more, and even if I did, nothing about little old(!!!) me would motivate such a fellow to traipse around the park with me, flexing his biceps.
* And I’m past the time of my life when I can handle a 90-pound protection dog.

So…it’s pretty annoying. Frustrating, as a matter of fact.

Yow! TAKE COVER!

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EEK, is what we say to all this. Eeeek!

:-D, not to say 😮

Seriously, quite the little freshet is blowing in from the north. Soon, we could reasonably guess, it will be roaring in from the north.

Here’s what SDXB and New Girlfriend observed yesterday, out in their Sun City digs. He said the wind blasted shingles off roofs and roared around…yipes! 

Gathered that they’re both OK, though he didn’t say whether he’d gone over to NG’s house to examine the roof. I do hope she stayed at his house (or vice-versa), so neither one of them would be alone in this insane weather. One way or the other, check the incredible prices for roof repair and re-installing!

So…. I do sincerely hope my honored son, the Insurance Dude, has laid on enough coverage for each of our shacks. This is freakin’ scary stuff!

Never a Dull Moment

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Every time you turn around, here’s some new shenanigan or headache to contend with. It’s getting old…very old…

This morning, in comes an email from a co-religionist down at the church. She and I used to work the front desk in the office, among other things. Soo…I go to answer this message and find it’s FAKE. It’s a spamming, scamming message sent under her name and email address.

Jeez. Don’t you know the mere act of opening that message has now invited that scammer to exploit and hassle me.

Goodie! I can hardly wait.

Just one more thing to pile atop the Handcart to Hell. 

  • My son is ill and pretty much on the outs.
  • I ain’t what you’d call “well,” either.
  • The pool appears to need some (expensive!) work
  • The park is infested with coyotes, so I can’t take Ruby the Corgi over there safely. That park is her favorite doggy-walk venue.
  • The peripheral neuropathy I’ve been enjoying, as it develops, can be a sign of a very serious ailment.
  • And on…and on…and on…

Part of the trouble here is that I’m now sick enough myself that I can’t handle all the stupid little ditz of daily life. And as you my recognize, most of this stuff is the ditz of daily life. One fukkin’ thing after another!

Garbage of that ilk, of course, flows in a steady stream. There’s never any end to it.

But gosh! I’m tired of it!!

Check Your Homewner’s Coverage!

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Hey! Take a look at your homowner’s insurance  policy and be sure it covers ALL the contingencies. You could be surprised…and that’s a surprise you won’t enjoy if suddenly you need coverage that ain’t there.

Just a few weeks ago, one of the desert’s occasional spectacularly violent windstorms blasted through Sun City, a seemingly endless suburb on the west side of Phoenix. The storm blew off roofs to the left of us and roofs to the right of us…and caused a fair amount of flooding. This happens every now and again out there — maybe once every three or four years, big-time.

SDXB, who lives out in Sun City nowadays, reports that a bunch of his neighbors discovered their trashed roofs were NOT covered by their homeowner’s.

Wow!  You don’t even wanna know what it costs to reroof a two- or three-bedroom house. So…

As annoying as it is, and as much as it does feel like you’re paying for air…DON’T neglect paying for your homeowner’s insurance…and making sure it actually does cover everything that could happen. Including a flying roof…