Coffee heat rising

August 6 Grinds On…

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Egad! Just stumbled out back…glanced at the back-porch thermometer. A HUNDRED AND SEVEN DEGREES. Yeah, you saw that right: 107º… IN THE SHADE OF THE BACK PORCH ROOF!

Yep: 107 in the shade. 

Almost as balmy as lovely Saudi Arabia, whither my parents and I spent 10 years. Except it was damn humid there…I’ve seen rain start to fall out of a clear blue sky. Here, it really is “a dry heat.”

And the “dry heat” is significantly more tolerable than swamp conditions. Not anything that you’d like to frolic in…but at least it doesn’t suffocate you.

I see we’ve got a dead shrub out back. Looks like it’s not getting watered. Drag the hose over to it. Remember to ask the Yard Dudes to be sure the system reaches that part of the hedge. And have them take out the dead thing.

Yard Dude: there’s another of those fine jobs one is mighty glad not to have. Gerardo and the boys get started as dawn cracks: that’s so. But they’re sure not done before the heat comes up. I don’t see how they do it!!

We’re told we have a 15% chance of rain. Why do I doubt it? Maybe later tonight: like, well after dark. But not any time soon.

After dark…it’ll still be too hot for Ruby’s feet. So that’s another daily doggy-walk we’ll miss today. We did get out, as usual, along about dawn…even then, it was nigh unto too hot for her. I’m afraid this evening will be well beyond the pale for little bare doggy feet.

Yech!!  What a place!

Soggy Doggy Day

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Just back from the a.m. DoggyWalk. What a morning! At 6:30: hot, wet, overcast, soggy. REALLY an unpleasant day. Feels like horrid Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the ever-humid Persian Gulf.

Sometimes I wonder how my mother survived nine years in that hell-hole.

Well. She didn’t, really. She came home with amoebic dysentery — a gift from a brainless neighbor who failed to soak the salad greens in Clorox before serving them up to guests. That evolved into the enteric cancer that killed her.

WHY are people so stupid?

WHY do people flat refuse to follow instructions (like “disinfect all raw vegetables & fruit before eating them”)?

WHY can’t people keep their damn dogs under control when they’re in public?

“Doggy-walk” means “dodge idiots and their rampaging animals”… In cooler weather, Ruby and I would wait until the resident morons get done hauling their dogs through the neighborhood, so we can go out in relative peace. Today, though, you can be sure will soon be even hotter and even more humid than it is right now. And so: out the door as dawn cracks!

Spotted a crew of workmen slaving away on the exterior of a house that’s being rebuilt. LORDIE! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have! How those guys survive in this swampy weather escapes me.

This is the kind of day that makes me deeply miss the San Francisco Bay Area. My relatives lived in Berkeley, which really was a lovely venue. My mother parked us in the City, in a bourgeois apartment development called Parkmerced. Not my favorite place…but about 110% better than unlovely Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia killed my mother. The amoebic dysentery that she brought home morphed into an enteric cancer. And so she lived horribly for 10 years out there, and then back here she died horribly in about 10 months.

Not before she and my father dragged us to Arizona, though. She thought it was some variant of Paradise. I think it’s a variant of the opposite venue…  What a place!

Ohhh well. The dog and I are back inside, where the air-conditioning is blasting away. The kitchen needs to be picked up. The house tidied. And the human driven to a grocery store.

Ugh. Another lovely day in Arizona…leave us all enjoy it!

 

Rasty-Nasty Day, Continued….

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So…yeah. The sweaty nightmare continues. As we scribble, Wunderground claims the temperature outdoors is 103°. The back porch thermometer, sequestered under the shade of a north-facing roof, reads 111°…. Yeah.

Yard dudes have screwed up the watering system. Had to fart with that and fart with that and fart with that some more, trying to fix it. Still don’t know whether I’ve got it right.

How do I hate this place? Let me count the ways.

Trust me: if my son weren’t here, I would be in the San Francisco Bay Area right now. That’s whence I emanated, and it’s where some of my relatives still live.

Wherever I might wander…you may be sure I would NOT remain in this superheated hell-hole.

Hmmmmm….  Where might I wander, anyhow?

* San Francisco Bay Area (fir$t choice)
* San Diego (a little warmer than I’d like, but it’s a neat place.)
* Prescott (an Arizona small town graced by a sophisticated private college. Pretty place to live.)
* Suburbs of Tucson (the University of Arizona provides a fairly rich cultural life to Tucson. And the weather’s not as hot there as it is in Phoenix.)

I can’t afford to live in the San Francisco Bay area, my first choice. And the truth is, none of those other places are any better than where I am.

In fact, where I am is better than those places, because my honored son is here. If he were to move someplace else, I very well might follow him. But I’m not likely to move away from him.

Because between the two of us, he’s the one who still has a functioning brain. ;-D

Seriously…he does navigate 21st-century society about ten times better than I do. He understands things that have come into being since I quit paying attention to those things. He knows how to resolve issues that mystify me. And he rides herd on the hired help one helluva lot more efficiently than I do.

So…whither he goes, so go I. If he stays put, so do I.

😮

A Rasty-Nasty Day in (Un)Lovely Arizona

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Yech!!!!!  This morning Ruby and I plowed through the heat and humidity reminiscent of the weather in Rasty Nasty, the horrid seaside oil & shipping colony parked on an Arabian shore along the Persian Gulf.

My father was a merchant seaman. Shortly after I was born, he got himself a handsomely paying job in Saudi Arabia, as a harbor pilot steering tankers and freighters out of the port at Ras Tanura. Horrible — truly horrible — place to live: hot, dangerous, disease-ridden, unwelcoming to the Yankee set. Hence, my father’s nickname for the place: Rasty Nasty.

It truly was awful, from an American’s point of view. My mother caught amoebic dysentery out there, which led to the enteric cancer that ultimately killed her. My father and I managed to escape it…apparently because neither he nor I ate the infected salad that an idiot neighbor served up to us for a farewell dinner.

No kidding: we were slated to go back to the States, permanently, when she came down with this horrible endemic disease…because one woman was too goddam stupid and stubborn to soak the goddam lettuce in Clorox before tossing it into a salad!

This was a habit the Company tried to instill in the ladies: when the wives got out there, they forthwith had to attend classes designed to protect Americans’ safety and health. That particular lady really was blindingly stupid…and she just ignored everything the Company tried to teach her.

Result: she killed my mother.

Think of that. We’d been out there 10 years, during which my mother duly sanitized every bite we put in our mouths, and in the LAST WEEK before we were to go home permanently, that bitch murdered her by failing to clean the goddam produce.

Her laziness killed my mother.

The treatment for amoebic dysentery, at the time, was fierce. And it was carcinogenic. Not surprisingly, then, she came down with cancer. By the time her doctors discovered it (women’s complaints of abdominal pain in those days were discounted as signs of hypochondria), her abdomen was filled with columnar growths. There was nothing they could do to save her.

As you can imagine, I could do without weather that reminds me of that horrible place. {chortle!} I can do without anything that reminds me of Saudi Arabia.

At any rate, those fine adventures were brought to mind as Ruby and I plowed through the swampy heat this morning, and passed men working like Arabs at a house where they were building an add-on.

Yeah: out there at the crack of dawn, climbing ladders and hauling lumber and pounding nails…augh! Surely there’s gotta be a better way to make a living?

How Is It Possible?

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So while I’ve been bellyaching about this minor house matter and that minor yard matter, in comes the REAL news.

God help us. Please!

Turns out that my lovely and brilliant cousin, who was two or three years younger than me and who grew up in the San Francisco East Bay — where the California contingent of my mother’s family lived — dropped dead on his office floor.

Apparently he was just standing there when plop! Down he fell.

Stone dead. 

Can you imagine?

He was younger than me, by several years. Very, very smart: brilliant, even, in a low-key way. And just the sweetest man you could possibly ever get lucky enough to meet: a joy to know.

Heart-breaking. Truly — no exaggeration — heart-breaking. Because he was such a lovely man. You could not hope, ever, to know a kinder, smarter, gentler guy.

Dear God! How could such a thing happen?

Apparently none of the people around him had any earlier indication that anything was wrong with him. He just. dropped. dead.

It makes me feel so sad.

He was several years younger than me. When his sisters and I were growing up, he was the little kid brother. So…seriously: how in heaven’s name could this happen?