Ever have those days when every inch along the way is an uphill hassle? Whatever you want to do, whatever you need to do: you can’t do it without a struggle….
5:30 a.m.: Take the dog for a walk.
5:45 a.m.: She drags us over to the park, where every other doggy-lover in the ‘Hood has already arrived and is traipsing around, some with their dogs off-leash. This means…
…yank yank
…jerk jerk
…pull pull
…yank yank
…jerk jerk…
Cross the street to manage some distance from the Milling Horde. This means…
…dodge oncoming cars
…climb up on people’s lawns along stretches that have no sidewalk
…dodge oncoming dogs and their humans
…yank yank
…jerk jerk…
Haul around the park; enter Lower Richistan.
…drag drag drag drag
…dodge oncoming dogs and their humans…
Pass the pile of rubble that is all that remains of the house where some drug-addled transient woman (she was seen!!) got into the garage and set fire to the house. The insurance company FINALLY seems to have gotten around to paying up: just now a bulldozer is inside the fenced lot, apparently there to shovel up the debris.
Pass the outrageously out-of-place pile of plywood and plaster that is rising on the site of the little house where the poor, beleaguered couple with the mentally deficient son lived. They lost the house, having no way to make a living or pay the taxes on the shack, and apparently were evicted. Whatever: they’re gone and now their house is, too. A gawdawaful McMansion is being inserted onto the lot, its walls about 6 or 8 feet from the neighbors’.
This last detail is, I would’ve thought, out of code. But apparently the neighbors there, suspecting the same, have gone to the City and tried to thrash that issue out…to no avail. This is Phoenix, after all, where money talks.
Hot.
Humid.
Drag drag drag draggety drag drag. Human grows more out of sorts.
6:30 a.m.: Dog and Human pause to chat with a much-favored neighbor, out front puttering in the yard and garage. Her husband died of covid, picked up when he was in the hospital for unrelated surgery. Now she owns a very nice house here, and another place in Flagstaff. And I’ll tellya…if it were me, Flag is where I’d be. The Valley’s heat is already crushing, and it’s just starting.
She’s staying in the Valley because her son is starting a restaurant, in a strip shopping mall that houses the favored Safeway store. With the right marketing and the right food and the right service, he does have a shot at success.
A long shot. All small businesses in this area are long shots. Most of them are very long shots. At any rate, she’s here to help out with that.
****
hmmmmmm….
Is there any question why, at 10 after noon, I’m so damn tired I need to take a nap?
Augh.
Not to say awaaaaaayyyyy!
Hey, at least you’re feeling better. You didn’t mention coughing, so I’m going to take that as a good sign. ;o)
As for humidity, I’m sorry, but you aren’t experiencing anything near as bad as we have it in Arkansas. We are in a heat wave, it got into the upper nineties yesterday with a heat index of 107. In June?!? Day-um!
Did I mention that my car currently has no a/c? It’s 21-years-old, so I’m not sure it’s worth it to try and fix the dang thing. I have no intention of replacing it this year, I better not have to!
The coughing has pretty well died down! Thank Heaven for small miracles, eh? Oddly, most of the covid symptoms pretty much just…stopped! All at once…the fever is gone, the cough is gone, most of the peripheral neuropathy is gone — essentially in one day.
We supposedly reached 112 yesterday. Not a lot of humidity, though. To the extent that the low desert experiences “humidity” (which ain’t much!) it comes in August. As I recall from spending a summer in Georgia, the South gets some serious humidity along about this time of year.
Basically what this kind of weather means for me and the dawg is that if we’re gonna get any exercise, we have to get out of the house by about 5 a.m., or else wait until around 10 p.m., well after dark. The asphalt stays hot for hours after the sun goes down, so much before 10 o’clock I have to pick her up and carry her across the street. And by 8 a.m., it’s getting way too hot to be tromping around outdoors.
What a place! 😀