Coffee heat rising

There’s Hope! (?) !

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Apparently Amazon is about to hugely expand its grocery delivery service. If that’s so — speaking of “huge” –it would solve a vast problem for me.

My son has purloined my car, believing that old bats shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Never mind that I’ve never been in a serious accident. Never mind that I haven’t even been in a fender-bender in years. Ohhhhhh no!  Old bats mustn’t drive!

Well… The truth is the main reason I do drive around here is to pick up groceries and drugstore items. This New! Improved! delivery service from Amazon (whose service already is pretty amazing…) will virtually eliminate any need for me to drive around at all, except to get to a doctor or a dentist.

A-a-n-nd-d….right across the street we have an Uber driver. He or one of his colleagues can schlep me to appointments. Meanwhile, if Amazon delivers, I’ll have almost no need to drive anywhere at all.

Jeez.

It’s like going back in time. 

When I was a kid, we didn’t own a car. Didn’t need one. Taxis and public transit took us everywhere we needed to go.

If that holds forth again any time in the near future, it’ll save a huge amount of money…and the PITAs of car fueling and maintenance, and repair will GO AWAY!

Can you imagine?

One of Those Days, Continued

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Magically, the toilet has started working properly. Yep: outta the blue. This was shortly after I’d called WonderAccountant to get the number of the excellent plumber we share.

The telephone started working, too. Why?????

So I had to phone her back and call off THAT excursion. She must think I’m even crazier than I am.

Tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts and not a DAYUM thing I can do about it. Too early to reach the dentist on the phone; plus it wouldn’t matter anyway because I can’t get to his office without a car.

There’s a dentist down the road from the Funny Farm, but I don’t have their phone number…so that is going to entail walking down there in 100-degree heat and soggy humidity. And…very probably finding them Not Open.

W.A. sounded a bit harassed this morning. Probably (as usual) working too hard. Having her nutty neighbor pester her over the phone surely cannot help her own sense of harassment… {sigh}

I fear it may be getting time for me to move into one of those horrid old-folks’ institutions. You know: where you live in a dormitory and you have staff baby-sitting you and execrable food served up in a dining hall.

Ugh. Any day I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim. But…what are you gonna do?

Doggy Day from Hell

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Migawd!  I had SUCH a sh!tf!t of frustration this morning that now Ruby the Corgi will not come out from underneath the toilet, where she’s hiding.

That’s after I stalked out of the house and hiked all the way around the park and back, by way of unwinding. She’s been under there nigh unto an hour, and still refuses to come out.

Helle’s Belles!

Well, I don’t know how to calm her down. Offered her all sorts of prime doggy treats: she’s having none o’ that.

Horrible morning.

Actually, meteorologically it’s quite pretty. It’s just that…well…what we have here is One of Those Days: when everything you touch, look at, or think about goes wrong.

Tooth aches. That’ll be a fine bout of dental surgery, no doubt.

Peripheral neuropathy is making the hands and the lips go BZZZZZZZZZ!!

Dog remains terrorized.

Toilet sounds like it’s leaking. Again. That’ll be another spectacular plumber’s bill.

Computer screen decides to “zoom in,” expanding the size of everything in view by about 120%.  “Zoom out” command does…exactly nothing.

Without a car, I’ll have to carry this damn computer to the repair shop: through the heat and humidity.

Yep. Just a few minutes after 7:00 a.m., and we’re already looking at ONE OF THOSE DAYS. 

***

Yea, verily: come 7:40 a.m., one of those days is what we’ve got.

Somehow, the computer fixed itself. How, I do not know.

Toilet: still leaking. Why: unknown.

Let’s try flushing it again to see if, by some miracle, that’ll stop it.

Nope.

Dork with the stuff inside the tank.

Nope.

So…that’ll be another fine plumber’s bill. Hot dayum!

Tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts: upper left molar. Too early to call the dentist. Plus: how am I gonna get over there without a car?

Helle’s Belles!  This is gonna be ONE OF THOSE DAYS.

Ohhhh well… At least the Dawg relented, climbed out from under the terlet, and is now snoozing atop the bed.

Yep.
This.
Is.
Gonna.
Be.
ONE OF THOSE DAYS. 

notes

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In retrospect, I resent people — esp my parents and teachers — for maneuvering me into positions that I wouldn’t have selected if I’d understood them better and that now I can’t get out of. Positions that affected my entire adult life.

If I had understood that as a National Honor Society student I could almost surely have landed a scholarship or fellowship to Berkeley or Stanford, you can be sure I wouldn’t have skipped my senior year in HS to go straight to the dowdy University of Arizona…so that my father could retire a year early. I would surely have gone to the University of California at Berkeley or, if my parents insisted on staying in So Cal, to UCLA.

Even if I’d stayed in secondary school one more year, he could have retired. He could have dragged me to Arizona and enrolled me in an AZ high school…allowing himself to quit his job that year early. To get me and them into Sun City (where young people were officially unwelcome), all they had to do was say I was living on a college campus, not with them!

Now, the truth is, he could hardly have been expected to understand the mediocrity of a degree from the UofA: to him a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. My mother probably understood that I would have been about 100% better served with a bachelor’s from UC…but she did have enough sense to keep her mouth shut around him.

What other things would I have done differently if I’d had a fukkin’ clue??

  • Majored in a subject that would get me  decently paying job, not a receptionist’s position + a high-earning husband
    • Such as????
      • Business
      • Accountancy
      • Justice Studies
      • Politics? Government?
  • Gone to UC Berkeley or even Stanford
  • Refrained from marrying the first decent man that came along
  • Continued directly from the B.A. to graduate school…but didn’t I actually do that?????
  • Gone straight into a Ph.D. program. Even though my undergrad degrees didn’t qualify me for graduate programs in anything other than English or French, a Ph.D. in either of those would have landed an academic job.

It feels incredibly stupid to me today.

But I wasn’t stupid. I was ignorant. I didn’t fully understand how the U.S. educational system worked. I didn’t understand how one university differed from another, and why. I didn’t understand why I needed to major in a salable subject, not in Mickey-Mouse woo-woo like English and French.

Soggy Doggy Day

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7:40 in the morning: Under a clear sky, the air is hot, wet, and soggy. Ruby and I  just shot in the front door, ahead of the babysitter by 20 minutes.

Yeah: that’s right: 20 minutes of peace and quiet, into which to jam one’s breakfast and coffee.

The Human stepped into a riot of ants as we stumbled along the sidewalk around the park. Got bit up royally.

Ah: The coffee is poured!

And so, to chow down…more or less…

8:00 a.m.
She’ll be here in minutes…

This is the thing about being a lone wolf all your life: You don’t want anyone around you!

That always has been my state of mind. Well…as long as I can remember, anyway.

Seriously: one of my very first memories is of sitting in a sandbox with the neighbor’s small kids, a boy and a girl. The sister brat takes her little shovel, scoops up a mound of sand, and SLAMS it into my face.

Instantly, my eyes are full of sand. And HURT? Lemme tellya hurt….

That was when I first learned to dislike and distrust other people.

We hadn’t left for Arabia yet…I just turned three years old on the day we arrived out there.

So…think o’ that: By the age of three, I hated my fellow humans. Already. Six miserable years in Aramco’s dreadful Ras Tanura grade school did not endear humanity to me any further.

So…yeah. Much as I appreciate whomever my son has hired to ride herd on me in my own home, I just don’t want anyone around me! Privacy is more important to me than safety.

Not a healthy attitude, I suppose.

****

Cripes. It’s twenty after eight. Where IS that woman?

Any chance (ohhh please, God!) that she’s not supposed to come over this morning?

Naaahhh…. More likely, she’s caught in traffic. I think she comes in from the far east side, which means she gets into profoundly hellish traffic jams on the way to the job. How glad ARE we that we don’t have to commute to work? Let us count the ways….

Here We Go Again…

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Ugh! Today is the 30th, and the calendar says one “Janie” is supposed to surface at 8:00 a.m. — that’s 20 minutes from now — and hang around until 4:00 p.m.

Janie is a babysitter. A woman my good son has hired to watch over senile little me, drive me to grocery stores, and whatnot.

  • That the Funny Farm is within walking distance of three grocery stores: meh! Doesn’t matter.
  • That I value my privacy above just about all else: meh! Doesn’t matter.
  • That just this minute, I do not relish the prospect of having someone in my face: meh! Doesn’t matter.
  • That the kitchen  needs to be picked up before someone barges in and starts sniffing around: meh! Doesn’t matter.
  • That all I wanna do at 7:45 in the morning is relax and play with my computer: meh! Doesn’t matter.
  • That, failing a good loafing session, the second-best thing I wanna do at 7:45 in the morning is take a nice skinny-dip in the pool: meh! Doesn’t matter.

Well…the latter probably isn’t relevant. At this  hour, one never knows what yard and pool workers will show up.

At least the Hound and I got out the door early enough for the day’s circumnavigation of the park. Not history’s most pleasant stroll, though: it’s muggy and sticky and yucky out there. Reminiscent of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia, where you could wake up in the morning and see rain falling out of a clear sky.

Arizona’s never that bad. But today, we’re in the competition. The air is hot, wet, and gummy. And air-conditioning notwithstanding, I sure am glad I don’t have a job where I have to throw myself around cleaning house. Or pretending to clean house.

***
A-a-a-n-d…here she is!

What a marvelous pistol this lady is! If you MUST have someone underfoot all day, this is the one to have. 😀  She’s smart, she’s witty, she’s friendly, she’s got her act 100% together. And I think I can pester her into taking me to a grocery store.

She brought over some nopalitos: a type of cactus-based delicacy.

Onward!