Coffee heat rising

How DO they compete?

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Yea, verily: HOW do local stores compete with Amazon?

Just found myself running low on coffee grounds, something I’d ordinarily buy at AJ’s Overpriced Fancy-Dan Grocery Store.

But… but…

* My car has been purloined. No way I can get it back from the kid. And I can’t get to AJ’s without a car, or a 45 minute round trip by bus and hike.

* Until I can rent or buy another car — or threaten the kid with a lawyer (mine croaked over a few weeks ago…) — I’ll either have to take a bus to AJ’s or hire the neighbor’s Uber cab.

* It’s hotter than the hubs of Hades out there, and so you may be sure I’m in no mood to hike six blocks to a bus stop and stand in the 110-degree heat for 30 or 40 minutes waiting for a bus to show up; then repeat in reverse.

* This jacks up the price of a pound of coffee, to the tune of whatever the taxi driver across the street is charging for a ride to AJ’s and back.

Solution? It’s spelled A-M-A-Z-O-N

Mercifully, Amazon does sell fresh (supposedly) coffee beans. So whenever I get into gear, the first chore of the morning will be to order a bag of coffee from there. And here’s my favorite brand…only a little overpriced. Probably about the same as AJ’s charges.

So there’s the question: How do stores like AJ’s and Sprouts compete with Amazon?

Seriously: at some point it’s worth spending an extra buck or two to have stuff delivered to your front door. And the hotter it is outside, the closer that point gets.

Back!!(wards…)

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WHY does the Cleaning Lady do this????  No matter how many times she’s been here — and it’s been dozens & dozens — she invariably installs the roll of kitchen towels backward.

EVERY TIME. Backward: no matter what.

😀

I like paper towels to unroll over the top, with the loose end coming toward the user. This, to me, is the easy way to access them, and the least wasteful (because you have easy control over how many sheets peel toward you off the roll).

Luz, on the other hand, has other ideas. She installs the towels so they unroll away from the user, toward the wall where the towel holder is hanging. This, IMHO, is a PITA.  😀

Every time she’s here, she puts the towels in backward. Every time she leaves, I re-install them to fit my taste in paper-towel rolling. Every time she returns, she re-re-installs them backward.

{OOOOOh geez! Pool Dude just walked in, triggering a frenzy of Dog Joy. WHY does this dog love that man so much???}

He’s already done! Man! That guy does a job in 10 or 15 minutes that takes me half an hour or 40 minutes. And he does it about ten times better than I can.

My, how Ruby adores that man! And I have to say, given all the hassles he spares me, I’m in love, too!

{sigh} He just hyper-chlorinated the drink. So I won’t be jumping in there to cool down from the morning’s Dog Safari. But that’s OK…at least I don’t have to mess with toxic quantities of chlorine.

Fricasseed!

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And very likely, my toast is…toasted.

Yesterday afternoon I enjoyed a fine heat stroke. Yes, I do know what that is. Yes, I do know the symptoms. And Yes, I do know what it feels like… Because I’ve had one before.

In Arabia, when I was about 10 or 12 years old. It’s a hot and humid sand pit, Ras Tanura is. Horrible place, not meant for human habitation. That particular day — I remember it vividly — I’d been playing outside in the heat.

“The heat” was nothing new for the locals. And so even though it was hotter than usual and probably more humid than usual, I paid little attention to it. By the time my parents called me in for dinner, I was reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned. Especially steamed!

Today, your parents would take you to an ER or a doctor’s office if you did that to yourself.

Out there, though…not so much. There was no ER. No doctors on duty at 7:00 in the evening. And the clinic was way to Hell & Gone on the other side of camp, down by the refinery. Nor did we have a car: my parents would have had to call a cab to schlep me to the hospital.

So we had to sit down and wait it out. And y’know what happened?

Nothin’.

Yep: the usual. Nothing.

Today, with Pool Dude no doubt on his way, I can’t strip off my clothes and plunge in the drink. That would give the poor man cardiac arrest… So: get in the house and cool down in the AC.
S-l-o-o-o-w-l-e-e-e…

And Speakin’ of ARGHA!…

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BING BOOONGGGGGGG!

Ohhhh gawd, NOW what? Stumble to the front door.

It’s the CLEANING LADY FROM HEAVEN! Ohhh damn ohhh hell I thought NEXT week was her week….

Stumble out to the living room. Let her in. Start to pick up litter.

And pick up litter….

And pick up litter….

And pick up litter….

And pick up litter…..

Ohhhhh damn oh hell oh damn…I’d put off this mess until next week!

B-a-a-a-a-d Human!!!!!!!

What’s going on in the backyard?

NO! Hallelujah, boys and girls: it’s NOT Pool Dude. Just the wind blowing stuff around. That’s something. I guess…except tomorrow a.m. we’ll have to vacuum up another nice mess.

This place…

This place…

Gotta think about this place…

Am I gonna stay here for The Duration? SHOULD I???

Those apartments on the west side of Conduit of Blight Boulevard…hmmmm…. They ARE going downhill
…and down…
and down…

They were OK when I moved in to the neighborhood. But over the years, they’ve declined. And just now the decline is mighty steady.

If I’m gonna move to a more stable district, I may have to do so soon. Because…  I do want to leave this house (make that a house) to M’hijito…but it’s gotta be a place that will hold its value.

And just now, that ain’t entirely clear to me. If those apartments continue to slide downhill, they surely will pull down the property values in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Maybe…

Maybe…

Maybe…

…I should betake myself to Scottsdale or Paradise Valley or Fountain Hills before that process gets any further under way.

But dayum, I don’t wanna move. I’ve done more than my share of moving in my lifetime — and then some — and don’t wanna do it again. Especially now that I’m old!

My son expects to sock me away in an old-folkerie, in the not-too-distant future. I expect to take a flying leap off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before that happens…but either way, this shack needs to hold its value so it can get him into a place that will be a decent investment, real estate-wise. That may mean I’ll need to FIND such a decent investment…now…and get into it before much more time elapses.

Ugh. Spare me yet another move!!!

Glub!!

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Hot! Humid. Light overcast. Not enough to rain — which might clear out the swampy effect. Just enough to create misery.

Dawg and I have circumnavigated the ‘Hood again…pretty much a daily ritual. My bike is still missing: either purloined by my son or stolen by a passer-by. The upshot is the same. Whenever I work up the energy, I need to go rent a bike at the nearby bicycle shop. Then, presumably, find a place to hide it.

Antecedent to that, Ruby and I have circumambulated the ‘Hood, traipsing from one end of the place to the other through a hot, soggy morning. Now we loaf upon the bed. Ruby is already conkered out, and — after this morning’s damp tramp — I wish I were, too. Swilling coffee and munching chocolate no doubt will militate against any snoozing on the human’s part, though.

Here inside the house, it’s hotter than the Hubs…and soggy. Aim the table fan at the Human and the Dog. Gaze enviously at the snoozing pooch…think turn off that light, shut down that computer, and go back to sleep!

Yet and still…even inside the house with the AC blasting and the fan whirring, it seems too hot and damp to doze. So we play electronic “card” games on the laptop.

Missing my mother. How dare she work up the nerve to DIE, f’rgodsake?

She killed herself, actually. Poisoned herself with tobacco.

Seriously: never was she conscious that she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. And eventually, the damn things did their job: killed her painfully and hideously. Put my father through the tortures of the damned: doting on her, tending to her through every agonized minute of her last three or four months.

Life is evil, y’know?

Speaking of the which, my bike is still gone — probably in my son’s precincts. But I don’t care.

There’s a Goodwill store across the road, and on the corner a retailer of bikes and such. I’m thinking I’ll go over to one of those and buy another bike.

That, however, would require me to get off my duff, climb out of the sack, and hike through the humid, overheated morning.

How do I not wanna do that? Lemme count the ways.

Gasp! Huff! Puff!!!

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Just back from about two miles through 105-degree heat. HOLEE shee-ut! Not only hot out there, but passing muggy. If I had any sense, I’d plunge into the pool. But…

a) No, I have no sense; and
b) It’s 107 in the shade out there on the back porch

Jayuz, it’s almost as miserable as Arabia.

And THAT, my friends, is bloody miserable.

On the way to and from the shopping centers, I walk past these blocks of apartments that my mother wanted me and DXH to move into when we first explored this part of town.

WHY in the NAME of God would your mother want you to move into a ticky-tacky pile sandwiched between a freeway on-ramp and one of the busiest, loudest surface streets in the Valley???

Never did understand her enthusiasm for those dumps, except that they superficially resembled apartments she and I inhabited in Southern California.

Ugh. Long Beach Redux. Who would choose to live in such a place?

Oddly, though, our Realtor found us a development to the east of the freeway, a tract that amounts to a pleasant middle-class neighborhood with a nice park, plus some distance between most of the houses and the traffic racket. And the structures in it are HOUSES, not tumble-down apartments.

Phoenix is kinda weird that way. Ticky-tacky tracts interspersed with reasonably decent middle-class developments wrapped around upscale neighborhoods. That’s our garden spot.

Ohhh well. 

It seems unreasonably hot out there. Just now, Wunderground tells us the temp is a balmy 110 degrees. Lovely.

Passed a truck driver in one of the parking lots, loading boxes — by hand — into his semi. Ugh!!!! Some people’s jobs, eh? Offered to help, but mercifully he declined.

Finally made it home and now am  loafing in the air-conditioning.

You don’t even wanna KNOW what the power bill is gonna be this month. My guess,, though, is around $300.

Summer bills run upwards of $200 here. But then, in the winter they’re practically nil…so it all levels out.

Welp…at least we don’t live in Texas. Have you seen the horror shows emanating from that place? Floods that wash people away, drown folks hiding in attics...augh!

That’s whence my father’s family emanated. I can remember my uncle relating memories of times when he and my aunt stood on their wooden porch and watched tornadoes sail past on the prairie. Never did understand how they escaped those storms…guess the weather must have been off in the distance.

Argh! As my father used to say: Texas is a good place to be from…as far from it as you can get.