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Month: August 2024

Soggy Doggy Glorious Day…

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WHAT a spectacular morning!

High clouds make for a glorious sunrise as Ruby the Corgi sets out to drag the Hu-mann around the neighborhood. Oh, my: it’s just gorgeous out there.

And damp. And sticky… Very humid: 31%.

What really, dear Wunderground, does that mean? Are you saying that 31% of the atmosphere we’re trudging through is water?

😀

Could be, I reckon. But Ruby doesn’t mind. She charges ahead, a little furry brown rocket. We fly through the ‘Hood, around Upper Richistan, up toward Gangbanger’s Way. Past Marge’s house, apparently unoccupied (????) but not for sale yet.

Marge was (is?) well into her 80s. She wishes, more than anything, to evade being stuck into the Beatitudes or Orangewood or any other such holding pen for the elderly. But there’s no sign she’s living in the house. So…I fear the worst.

She said she had willed the place to her son — meaning she willed him about half a million bucks worth of real estate. He doesn’t live here, so…as soon as title to the house passes to him, he presumably will put it on the market.

It’s a pleasant old 1970s ranch-style house. Not to my taste, and now needing a bunch of repairs and upgrades. But still…lots of people would fall all over themselves to get it.

I actually might be among them, if it weren’t so nerve-gratingly close to Gangbanger’s Way. The traffic racket there would be just unholy! It’s a drag strip for the local delinquents, so all night you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the brats. And it’s a main drag into town from the west side, so every rush hour you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the unholy mobs of commuters trudging to work. And let’s not forget the hospital up the road on Gangbanger’s, bringing you WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO from the ambulances racing toward the emergency room.

{sigh} I do miss Marge, who had become my morning walking buddy. I’m afraid she probably fell — or else had a heart attack or stroke — and ended up in one of those horrible prisons for old folks. She dreaded that fate even more than I do. Truly: I would so rather be dead. If she had passed on, surely her son would have sold her house by now (he lives in some other part of the country). She probably landed in an old folks’ slam and asked him to hang on to it lest she somehow manage to escape.

Oh well.

The spectacularity of the sunrise has now passed, and what we have are high, pale gray clouds. Not the rainy type…just the humid type.

What do I hafta do today?

* Pick up the office.

* Call Cox. Demand that they send paper bills. (They’re shifting to “paperless bills.” No, thank you!!)

*Figure out, come to think of it, whether Cox is auto-paid now, or whether I have to send the ba*tards an e-payment or check every month. I think the latter, because I don’t trust Cox.

* Make a grocery store run.

* Argue with my son over medical bullsh!t.

Hmm…. Actually, I could physically go to the credit union and have one of their staff check on the autopays for me. This, while it entails an annoying drive, would take me past THE best Sprouts store in the Valley. And that would allow me to stock up on a pile of outstanding foodoids.

***

Cleaning out the e-mail in-box. OVER 500 NUISANCE E-MAILS, just in August!

Can you imagine? Hope I’m not deleting anything important. I just don’t have the patience to check every goddamn one of those things — not even looking at the email but just checking the subject or sender line. So WHAM! They all get deleted.

But even that is a nuisance. After hitting mass-delete after mass-delete, there are still A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SIX junk-mail messages sitting there waiting to be sent to trash. And that doesn’t count all the real messages from outfits like Amazon and from my client whose work I’m not in the mood to do…

Crazy-making!

Heah Come De Rain!!

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Wow! The Ruby and I just dodged inside in the nick of rain-time!

Failing to realize how fast the storm to the north was barreling our way, I fired up the ‘Cue and stacked my dinner on the grill.

Not one of my smarter moves.

Pressed for time, we got the chow inside — Ruby darting back and forth through the wind and around the lightning and thunderclaps.

Bolted (heh!) dinner.

Back outside: the grill was JUST….BARELY cool enough to close and cover with its plastic veil.

I hope…

But oh my… SO hot! SO humid!! So windy!!!

Something evil this way blows….

….

…and now the wind has stopped.

All is still.

Thunder rolls in from the north.

When you are a small dog. you hunker on the human’s bed and pretend you have no clue anything is up. When you are a small dog’s human, you hunker on your bed and hide under the covers.

😮

And the thunder rolls again…

“Another Beautiful Day in Arizona…”

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“…Leave us all enjoy it!”

LOL! That was the radio signature of a long-time talk-show host here in the earlier times of Arizona. He would sign on to his program and then crow,

It’s another beautiful day in Arizona!
Leave us all enjoy it!

LOL! Right: if 100 degrees and humid is beautiful, this morning is just GORGEOUS. 😮

Actually, it’s only 81 out there just now, at 7:20 ayem. So it’s not very hot at all. Objectively speaking. But it’s so damp that after circumambulating the park, my hair is wet!

That little jingle was the signature doodad of Jack Williams, who became mayor of Phoenix and then governor of Arizona. He was a pretty amazing guy, all things considered.

Arizona is — always has been — a strange place. Strikes you most when you look at its history and consider the characters who feature in that history. Jack Williams…good grief! Barry Goldwater…he actually was a pretty interesting guy, in person. Bruce Babbitt was cool — we knew him and his wife, Hattie.

Oh well. If hot, partly overcast, and muggy are characteristics of “another beautiful day in Arizona,” it must be pretty spectacular out there.

Let’s see…it’s mid-August now. So we’ve got another month or six weeks of this stuff. Ugh!

Gaaahhhh!

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One of the problems w/ being unemployed…uhmm, “retired”…is that your schedule (such as it is) is out out whack with everybody else’s.

11:30 a.m.

JUST ready to draw a bath, get dressed, and head out for errands. This, after loafing all morning playing computer games.

Arise from my leather throne. Stumble toward the back bathroom, reach for the tub faucet. And…

RRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

WHIRWHIRWHIRWHIRWHIR!!!

RRRR  RRRR RRRR!

oh holee sheeut!

Gerardo’s guys are out there cleaning up the unholy mess that is the yard.

Could he have told me they were coming today? Maybe even have let me know they were on the way?

Course not. What else does the Li’l Retired Woman have to do but sit around and twiddle her thumbs?

So now I can’t jump in the shower and get dressed.

Because as you know, the minute my clothes are off and my hair is sopping wet, it’ll be BING BONG!

Now I can’t prepare for the meeting I have with a client, because RRRR  RRRR RRRR! BLAST BLAST BLAST! THUMP WHUMP THUMP! is remarkably counterproductive to thinking through a problem.

Now I won’t have time to run by the store before the client gets here, because I’ll need to sit here and wait till the boys exit, stage left.

Now I’ll have to think through the stuff Client and I need to discuss…to the symphonic roar of weed whackers and leaf blowers.

Now I won’t have time, on the way to the grocer’s, to go by the office complex where the dermatologist’s office supposedly resides and try to find his place. (Yesterday’s expedition was a FAIL!)

LOL!

Isn’t it wacky that all it takes is ONE thing like that to dork up your entire damn day? At least half the things I needed to do this afternoon are not gonna get done.

😮  huh  o-:

Y’know, it doesn’t seem to me that, when I was younger, I used to have this problem. Yes, I would be annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of something I’d planned to do. Yes, it would (or at least could) dork up my schedule. But it didn’t bother me all that much.

It didn’t leave me feeling inconvenienced and pi$$ed.

Strange that I’d feel that much different about it, now that I’m old.

😮

Ohhhhhh sheeeUT! They had to replace a strip of piping: $120!

And, trotting around and inspecting, I see they had to replace a bunch of smaller stuff, too. Ugh!

That whole irrigation system needs to be rebuilt. I had it installed when I moved in here…what? Ten years ago? More than that???? And now, it all being plastic, it’s pretty well shot.

Question is: is it worth having the system dug up and replaced? That will be a several-thousand-dollar job.

And…well…y’know… I’m probably not gonna be here that long. Surely not long enough to recoup the cost of digging up and rebuilding the whole system.

One of three things is gonna happen:

  • I’m gonna drop dead (if I’m lucky).
  • I’ll survive a stroke or a heart attack and end up rotting away in some care home.
  • Or decrepitude will force me to sell the house and move into an old-folkerie.

Arrrrghhhh! What a golden, shining future!

Seriously…

If I were certain my son would move into this house when I’m gone, I’d have that system replaced right now. Then it would be a gift to him (of sorts…paid out of his future inheritance…). It would keep the yard running smoothly, and that would be one fewer headache he’d have to attend to when he moves in here.

Or sells it. If you know the irrigation system is cattywampus, you’re pretty well gonna have to get it fixed before you put the house on the market.

But…the future. Ahhhh the future. How DO you plan for something you can’t really know?

If I dropped dead tomorrow, my son could figure these things out at his leisure, and pretty easily. He being one of the brighter pennies in the Coin Collection of Humanity.

But dontcha just know that ain’t a-gonna happen? Women in my family who haven’t fu*ked themselves to death or smoked themselves to death have lived well into their 90s…with no medical care! They were Christian Scientists! Since I don’t smoke and I don’t frolic with strange men, the chances that I’ll last well into my dotage are pretty good.

Better yet: my Berkeley relatives stayed in their homes right up until the end.

Well, no; that’s not correct: my  great-aunt allowed her son to persuade her to move to an apartment in downtown Berkeley. Smart move, that: the cute little Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff house she lived in was infested with termites. Even though the neighborhood was still a galloping fine investment, it was one that would cost homeowners more and more as those houses aged, aged, and aged some more.

But…but…ahem! About those termites….

WHY DIDN’T GREAT-AUNT OR COUSIN KNOW ABOUT THEM?????

Possibilities:

* Good cousin told his mother to have the place inspected, and she blew him off with a fib to the effect that she had the job done and no termites were found.

* He clued her, but she blew him off with “yes, dear.”

* She had it inspected and got a “no bugs” report.

* She had it inspected, was told it needed an exterminator, and blew it off.

* Neither one of them thought of having the place inspected.

See what I mean about “GAAAH”?

Just stop the damn world so we can get off.

Seriously: I don’t want to leave conundrums like this to M’jihito. Not even one just conundrum.

Soggy Doggy Day

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Musical Instrument in the Sound of Freedom Band

Seven ayem: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch. Overcast. Humidity: 34%.

UGH!  Feels just like (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.

This kind of weather, right on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was typical summer weather. It rarely got as hot as Arizona does, but on the other hand. Arizona rarely gets as humid as Ras Tanura did.

Rasty Nasty, as my father called it. Aptly…

Just back from the mile-long perambulation around the park. Not too bad, thanks to the Rasty Nasty weather: relatively small Dog Parade. Most people who have any sense refrain from walking their dogs (and themselves) through this stuff.

Didn’t count…but I’d guess we passed about eight or ten dogs, all of them surprisingly well mannered. No lunge-fests. No attempted fights. So that was OK.

Thinking about my mother, as we strolled about. My. but she loved Arizona!  She even loved the roar of fighter jets training at nearby Luke Air Force Base.

My father loved Sun City: NO KIDS!!!!

LOL! He really disliked kids, especially those under about 15. How she persuaded him to let her have one escapes me.

But he loved her. He adored her. She was the center of his universe — seriously. And if she wanted a kid, she could have one.

Fortunately for him, because of her childhood malnutrition she couldn’t hold a pregnancy. I came along after half-a-dozen miscarriages. And I guess once she’d managed to go through one entire nine-month pregnancy, she figured enough was enough.

She spent TEN YEARS in Saudi Arabia, in monstrously uglier weather than we have here. She thought Arizona weather was balmy.

No kidding.

Heh! Most of the time it is, actually. This kind of humidity is rare in Arizona. .

Boyoboy, am I glad we’re not out there in Araby now, with the Arabs and the Israelis having at it full-bore. The Arabs, who identified us whiteys with the Jews, just hated Americans — they tolerated us because our thirst for oil was making their royal family very rich, indeed. But most of them would kill the average Aramco employee in the street, if they dared.

And with that conflict going on, they’d be a lot more likely to “dare” than normal.

All that notwithstanding: this balmy day is the type that makes me long for San Francisco.

When my mother’s upstate New York grandmother died of diabetes, the bereft widower shipped the kid off to the California Bay Area, whence her trampy mother had come. She was taken in by her grandmother, a lovely old gal who was smart, hard-working, and incredibly unlucky to have given birth to a daughter who had some sort of mental or sexual disorder that turned her into a nymphomaniac. Said daughter went on about her trampy business, and my mother was cared for by her truly wonderful grandmother and her widowed aunt.

In a lucky break for my mother, her mother’s astonishing sexual adventures led to an astonishing case of uterine cancer — so we’re told. She died — so we’re told — when my mother was in her mid-teens, and my mother was left in Berkeley to be raised by said grandmother and aunt.

Truth to tell… I’ve found convincing evidence that her mother — my grandmother — did NOT die at that time. Apparently she put on a melodramatic show, the purpose of which was to convince the unwanted daughter that she had passed on to another plane…when in fact, the plane she passed onto was high society in San Francisco. She married an influential businessman in the City and apparently, like all the other women in the family who refrained from digging their own grave with a cigarette butt, survived well into old age.

Oh well.

My mother loved to pile up the day’s first mound of cigarette butts sitting on that back porch in her beloved Sun City house, listening to fighter jets roar in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Yes: incredibly, she liked the sound of F-16s.

Those things are SO LOUD we can hear them here in the ‘Hood, over 20 miles away.

And apparently sound carries better through humid air. On a day like today — damp, overcast, and hot — those planes sound like they’re just down the road.

Which, I suppose, they are…in relative terms. Soggy terms.

Cruisin’ and Musin’…

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Cruisin’: yes. Cruising through classic North Central neighborhoods, eyeballing the real estate: the big old classic ranchers on their half-acre+ lots, admiring how handsome they are and remembering what it was like to live in Phoenix’s version of Upper Richistan…

Musin’: ohhh yeah! Thinking about how I just did NOT fit in with Phoenix’s upper middle-class strata. How after all the time we lived on East Hayward, a block off the famous and ritzy North Central, I’d made one (count her: 1) friend, a woman who’d come from the same direly deprived middle-class social strata as I had. Remembering how much I loathed the snobs who lived in that neighborhood, and how much they seemed to disdain me.

As handsome as those big old 1950s ranch houses are, how beautiful their emerald-green irrigated lawns, I would never want to go back there to live.

Still…it was entertaining to wander through the old neighborhood, eyeballing those big old houses (and thinking “thank God I’ll never have to clean that thing, or get someone else to clean it!”). The places were, after all, handsome 1950s and ‘6os mini-mansions in the “ranch house” mode: sprawling one-story affairs, each in the middle of a vast yard. Any way you look at it, 3000+ square feet is a lot of real estate to keep clean, whether you push that vacuum cleaner yourself or whether you supervise someone else at the job.

Living in North Central wrecked our marriage. Though I was already a bit bored with married life by the time we moved there, I surely wasn’t ready to fly the coop. A couple years of being made to feel like Poor White Trash, though, did indeed push me over the border…into the Never-Never Land of Singletude.

It’s surely fun to drive around and look at real estate, though. Lately, I’ve been thinking more of going back and getting a Realtor’s license — as my mother did. But instead of trying to sell houses, as she attempted, my thought would be to write about real estate.

Even without a license, back in my Young Journalist days I was able to get a passel of assignments to write about the subject, mostly for the local city magazine and a local business journal. An old crony of mine was editor of a national real estate magazine, and he would give me assignments, too.

I think that rag is justly out of business — and he has retired. But there are other real estate rags. And if you’re not trying to make a living from journalistic writing, it doesn’t really matter much where you publish. What matters is wringing interesting assignments out of the editors. Take a look at these, for example. It’s not a bad market. Looks like there’s plenty of room to pick up fun and interesting projects. And being able to claim a license would make that pretty easy.

***

Time having passed…

Cruising the real estate ads, ogling houses in Tucson. That town has its own distinctive character…I could live there happily, if only my son weren’t way up here.

My best friend and her husband bought a house down there, after he got a job with VisionQuest, a nonprofit that wrangled junior delinquents. The architecture and interior design of Tucson real estate is distinctive…and it’s something I do rather like. If I’m to retire and leave lovely Phoenix — i.e., L.A. East — that would be one place I’d consider.

But the evening grows late. I tire. More real estate dreamin’ (or something!) tomorrow….