Coffee heat rising

Icky Sticky Day!

What a nasty Arizona summer day!

So humid that it’s overcast. And hotter than a three-dollar cookstove, as my father used to say: at 4:15 in the afternoon of a summer day on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Feels a whole lot like that, right now.

Just back from a brief perambulation of the ‘Hood. It was WAY too hot for that stunt! Whatever possessed me to go out strolling around in that swamp?

Gosh, how do I miss San Francisco?  Let me count the ways….

Wait! I can’t count that high!

Well, thank goodness for Amazon! They carry the type of crunchy brown sugar I like. Like it or not, you may be sure that I do NOT feel up for trudging through this heat and humidity to buy it at the grocery store.

Ordering it online, of course, means I have to wait for it. But that’s unlikely to kill me. The stuff is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Somehow I guess I can survive that long! 😀

Seriously: this is one of the ickiest days I’ve seen here. Back porch thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of an overcast day. Not all that hot, for Arizona — far from it! But sticky and gray and gummy. Just ugly weather.

Not fond of Arizona, really. If Ian the Great didn’t live here, you couldn’t drag me across the state line…  For sure, I’d be…where…?

* The San Francisco Bay area
….or
* Western Colorado
…..or
* Parts of Nevada
…..or
* Mars…

Anyplace but here, really.

Honestly! I thought my parents had lost their collective marbles when they moved to Sun City and dumped me into school at the University of Arizona.

Forgodsake, I was set to go to UC Berkeley! I assumed that was where I would go to undergraduate school and possibly grad school.

But oooohhhhh no. It was off to, forgodsake, Tucson for their little darlin’.

Okay, they weren’t educated or sophisticated people. To my father, a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. He surely would have understood the quality of a degree from Harvard or one of the elite women’s schools. But otherwise: there wasn’t much difference. Not in his mind.

Certainly not enough difference to pay a ton of money to get a degree from a decent public university.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up with not one, not two, but three degrees from Arizona universities. Because I myself, lacking close family with degrees from private schools — Cal Berkeley was our highest mark — I had no idea what the gradations between degrees from public schools might have been. If I’d known, of course, I’d have insisted on going to a California undergraduate school. Or to a private college. But…well…I hadn’t a clue. No more than my parents did.

In-freakin’-infuriating!

Jayzuz! Finally got the grill operating and the associated stuff organized. What a PITA!

And now I should hike down to the Albertson’s (my son kindly having purloined my car) to restock and to replace stuff that was stolen. Not up for that just this moment.

The barbecue grill has been dorked with. Think I got that un-dorked…but we shall see.

What kind of people do that kind of thing?

Right now, I’m under the weather and too sick to traipse from hither to yon to replace and repair things. So most of this stuff will have to wait a day or two.

But we ARE left with the “what kind of people” question. Should I fire my cleaning lady? There really isn’t much of anyone else who could have fiddled with this stuff. So it’s probably safe — or at least in the ball park of “safe,” — to assume that she’s responsible for these handy-dandy PITAs.

Yea, verily: there’s no question that somebody has been in the yard, and they dorked things up with élan, Whoever came a-visiting did so with the purpose of making trouble.

And make trouble they did.

What with the spavined hip, I am in too much pain to hike to any of the nearby supermarkets. Guess I should ask the neighbor — Mrs. WonderAccountant — to drive me to the store the next time she goes. That would be a lot less hassle than wrangling with Uber.

Still….that feels like an imposition on her.

What a mess!!!

Hmmmmm….?

Idly reviewing recent posts here and…well…thinking holeee shee-ut! 

Pretty clearly, I’ve got somebody working for me who is not my friend. Some of the things that have happened lately ring of plain old-fashioned vandalism. 

Which one of my honored employees has been up to this stuff? Don’t know and, short of setting up an army of cameras and paying someone to review their films, I cannot imagine how to find out. Just now it looks like I have three choices:

* Sell the house and move into an old-folkerie
* Fire everyone who’s working for me now and start all over again
* Select one person that I imagine I can trust (which one???) and fire all the rest of them.

What a f*ckin’ nightmare!

And what kind of person deliberately torments a sick old woman?  

Forgodsake, it’s not like we have that much more time left for me to annoy you and make you miserable. Just because you don’t like me is no excuse to behave…well…downright immorally. If you hate me, fine! Quit you’re f**kin’ job and go to work someplace else!

ENOUGH, Ladies!!!!

Grrrrrr!  In the latest episode of the Funny Farm Drama, turns out some dear soul has stolen ALL of my hair bands.

No kidding. Ripped off every one of them.

We wouldn’t want her to run short, would we?

Fortunately, I still had a couple residing in the nightstand’s junk drawer, next to the bed. Otherwise, I’d have no way to pull my hair out of my face. And…now I’ll either have to order some more from Amazon (surprisingly cheap!) or traipse down to the Albertson’s to buy them.

Hm. Amazon is practically giving the things away. A package of them is only about three bucks. Probably couldn’t get them any cheaper here in the ‘Hood. Supposed to arrive tomorrow.

And that, folks, is a bargain for this old bat: a bat who does NOT wanna fly around the neighborhood for a package of elastic bands.

So…the bitch who stole them needn’t feel very guilty, eh?

***

Think o’ that. Here in MY OWN HOUSE, I have to hide things or lock them up to keep the hired help from stealing them. 

A Miracle! It Works!!

Puttering around the backyard just now, I idly attempted to turn on the kaput gas barbecue. And…

A MIRACLE! The thing came on!!

It was dead as a doornail when last reported on here.

My guess is that my excellent son probably came around and quietly fixed it, without pestering me.

Whatever the explanation, it’s working now. Or at least, it was five minutes ago.

Thank the heavens! I do most of my cooking on that grill…not fond of cleaning up the kitchen after meals and projects.

So: come dinnertime we shall see. An attempt to grill a slab of fish or piece of steak will tell the rest of the story.

The question now is who busted it and why. I’ll have to ask the cleaning crew what they got into, and hope they’re at least moderately honest in replying. But really….there isn’t anyone else who would have had access to it. So one of them must have dorked it up.

Next Step Along the Way?

Gawdlmighty, what Looney Toons around this place!  It’s beginning to look more and more like I’m going to have to move into one of those horrible holding pens for old folks. I’m not going to be able to live in this house or take care of the property without having someone HERE, with me, to deal with the unending slew of stupid little crises.

Now the barbecue is on the fritz, apparently as a result of some bird-brained cleaning lady’s ministrations. Naturally, today is Sunday, so I can’t get anyone out here to work on that.

And if that weren’t enough, something on the roof — presumably one of the whirling vents — is going BANG BANG BANG BANG…. 

Don’t want to ask my son about that, because I really don’t want him climbing around the roof.

Ohhhh Gawd!

I’m afraid it’s time.

Time to move into the old-folkerie. 

What a horror. 

Few things do I abominate more than institutional living. Just HATED living in the dorms at the university. And that is NOT how I want to spend the last few months or (God forbid!) years of my life. Frankly, before things reached this point I hoped I would die — of a natural passing; don’t panic, I’m not talking suicide here.

Jeez. I just CANNOT BELIEVE one of those nitwit women wrecked my barbecue. What the f*ck is the MATTER with people?