Coffee heat rising

TIRED of Stupid!

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Just back in the house from the early a.m. doggy-walk. 

Trouble with Doggy-Walk is that every moron on the planet is out there on the sidewalks walking their doggies. And NO AMOUNT of repeating my dog doesn’t want to “pway” with your dog; my dog wants to eviscerate your dog will persuade the idiots to keep their damn dogs away from Ruby.

So that makes an early-moron walk a bit of a struggle.

God! I’m tired of stupid. 

WHY are people SO. DAMNED. STUPID???????

*****

Hot, humid, and sticky out there! That does nothing to enhance one’s patience with one’s fellow morons.

Oh well. It really is a nasty morning. Let’s see what the Weather Service says is goin’on…

????   Only 82 degrees! At 1% humidity(????).

Ahhhh, c’mon guys!

You sure couldn’t prove that by me. Google says the humidity level is 30% …. that’s a little more credible.

Ohhhh welll….

Ruby the Corgi and I kicked off the day by roaming around our local streets. When you are a dawg, you get to go out and sniff every square inch of asphalt…or else! ARF!

It is a nice neighborhood! Yea verily: such a nice neighborhood that I want to stay here until I die.

Letting old bats stay in their homes through their dotage is no longer in style. When I first moved here, an older generation of homeowners was still in place, and they tended to STAY in place until they died or until they truly could no longer live on their own, not for love nor money. I do miss those old ladies now — gone to their graves, every one.

Ohhh well, Before too long, I’ll be joining them.

Just hope I can stay in my home until the Great Reunion in the Sky happens! These days, older Americans end up in prisons for the superannuated: nasty institutions where you’re deprived of your freedom and kept in place until you die.

Horrible!

***

Hotter than the hubs out there just now!

Jet airplanes, probably from Luke AFB, roar overhead. Too lazy to get up and look at them: they could be an early-morning phalanx of passenger jets from Sky Harbor, the commercial airport to the southeast of here.

My stepsister and her family lived just up the road from Sky Harbor. You could hear the unholy racket inside the house with all the doors & windows shut tight. Roar Roar Roar all day long!

Crazy-making!

Hmmmm…. Maybe that explains something about her & her husband: demented right-wingers, they were.

😀

LOL! That notwithstanding…I did enjoy her so very much, and do miss her to this day. What an amazing woman she was! Back in the day when the highest and best use of a woman’s time was as a housewife, she went to law school and became a superior court judge.

A bit of a fascistic nut case, she was. But her politics notwithstanding, I surely did like her a lot, and admired her remarkable achievements, done during a time when women took undergraduate degrees in Education, because teaching in some high school was about the best any of us were ever gonna do.

****

Welp…I tire. A consequence, no doubt, of rolling out of the sack at the first glimmer of sunrise.

And so: back into the sack. 

A-w-a-a-a-y!

Fire Central!

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Gosh…am I glad we’re not still in Southern California.  That’s where I was born, yea verily. Though I grew up overseas — in Saudi Arabia — when my father retired, we moved back to the States, where we ended up in Long Beach, part of the vast L.A. sprawl.

Never cared for Southern California, myself. Smog is not to my taste. Nor are the noise and the traffic and the overall atmosphere of Looney Toons. But boyoboy! Today those fires would tear it for me!

I imagine my mother would have packed us up — well, “us” would have been “her and me,” since my father continued to make a living going to sea with the Merchant Marine — and we would have headed up the coast to the San Francisco Bay Area. She would have barged in on our relatives in Berkeley, and there we would have stayed until the drama subsided.

They would have put up with us for awhile, I expect: a couple of weeks, probably. Much longer than that:  ????  Unknown. But I suppose if she were really scared, she could have rented a motel room for us.

Anyhow…awful glad not to be there now!!

Goin’ All Mormon!

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Actually, in my case: Goin’ all Christian Science! 😀  The tee-totalers in my family were devout Christian Scientists.

My wild-assed parents were not among them. Yea, verily: in Arabia, where we weren’t supposed to get ahold of booze at all, my parents learned to make their own.

No kidding. In Arabia — where booze was soooo naughty as to be radically illegal — my father had an old piano crate in which he housed his still. The thing was always in use.

So I grew up with the stuff all around me, and as soon as I came of age, joined the honored parents in swizzling merrily.

Years of swizzling have passed…and apparently they’ve come home to roost. Or whatever swizzling does…

I’ve developed a fine case of peripheral neuropathy: constant, crazy-making tingling in the hands, feet and lips. GAAAAA!

What I’ve eventually discovered is that if I lay off the wine and the whiskey, the buzzing lays off me. 😀

So: it looks like we’re on the wagon now: permanently.

Depressing, but hardly the end of the world.

My Mormon friends are all tee-totallers. So I’ll have good company in this new endeavor.

Too bad: a glass of wine in the afternoon after dinner — I take my big meal of the day at noon — was one of those minor pleasures that make day-to-day living worth plodding through. But…well…I guess I’ll just have to find something else to amuse myself.

Easier said than done at this time of year. It’s only May, and already the weather is hotter than the hubs of Hades. So…hiking, walking, roaming through shopping malls, whatnot…that sort of stuff is Out with a capital “O”: that leaves loafing in the house as one’s main source of entertainment.

😀

Not that swizzling bourbon was my main source of entertainment…

 

Another Fine Day in Southern California

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Holy mackerel!  THIS is going on right in the vicinity of where my parents and I lived in Southern California. Really: it’s right down the road from where our apartment building stood.

My father would have been at sea, of course — he was an oil tanker captain. But by now my mother and I would be at her grandmother’s house in Berkeley: several hours’ drive away from the present scene of the drama.

Apparently thousands of people have been evacuated from the region. Or relegated to shelters…doesn’t that sound like fun!  My mother would have been terrorized!

My father, o’course, would have been off at sea. So she and I would have been left to cower at home…or to jump in the car and start drivin’ drivin’ drivin’.

Kinda doubt she would have betaken us to a motel. Most likely she would have driven up the coast to the relatives’ house in the Bay Area, and we would have camped with them until the drama subsided.

Mighty glad not to be in that melodrama this afternoon!

Unclear how long this is gonna go on, or how much risk of a real catastrophe exists. If it were me, though, I’d be sooooo far outta there! That’s for sure!

How Could She Do That?

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Y’know… It’s one thing to poison yourself.

But another thing altogether to poison your child.

How on earth could she have done that?  Why would she have done such a thing? Year in and year out?

My mother smoked. She didn’t just smoke a little. She smoked constantly. She was never awake when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. Not even in the shower! You knew when she awoke in the middle of the night by the stink emanating from her bedroom.

And I was sick all the time I was growing up in her household. Constant, unending respiratory illness. Never stopping. Not until I got out of her house.

She smoked herself to death. And she damn near smoked me to death. Maybe she imagined it would be fitting and lovely for us to share a grave?

Yeah, I understand: it was an addiction. 

But you know, a person can beat addiction. Apply some knowledge and some will power, and you can take it down.

She knew exactly what she was doing. The word came down in the late 1950s: tobacco smoking causes cancer. And it makes the people around you sick.

Oh, yeah. She knew what she was doing. She did it anyway.

It killed her.

What a waste.

Eeeek-a-Dawg!!!

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Ohhhh my goodness!  This evening I truly thought the Pool Dude had left the side gate open, that Ruby had found it, and that she’d taken off for Yuma!

Couldn’t find her when I went to call her in for the night. 

The back door to the house, in lovely weather like we’re having now, hangs open most of the time, so she comes and goes as she pleases. Consequently, the side gate to the yard is normally closed and latched.

But…Pool Dude was here. What does he know of dogs and of gates???

This evening she disappeared from view. Didn’t come to call. Ohhhhhhh sheee-ut!

And yes, the side gate was unlatched.

Ho-leeee shee-ut!!

Called and called.

No dawg.

Went inside to put on the clodhoppers, so as to go out through that gate and trot off down the road, calling and calling and calling…no doubt fruitlessly.

Just when I got back to the side yard, though: she surfaced.

No, she had NOT run away down the road.

THANK YOU, GOD!!!!

* * * *

Whew! After this, forgodsake, REMEMBER TO CHECK THAT GATE in the wake of any workman who stumbles into the yard!!!!!