Coffee heat rising

funny

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A Hundred WHATS????!!??

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HOLEE DOGGEREL!

Gerardo the Lawn Dude’s guys just finished blowering and raking the front and back 40. His head dude knocks on the Arcadia door and asks to be paid.

“How much?”

“$100.”

HOLEE SHEE-UT!

That’s up from the $80 they usually charge. Forgodsake: we’re not talking about any extra work here. Nothing special. Just blower up the leaves and wind-blown debris and trim whatever few plants need to be trimmed.

Once again: here’s a “house” thing that makes life in a high-rise apartment on North Central Avenue look a whole lot better.

Well.

It would look better if I didn’t have the dog.

Ruby would have to be paper-trained or litter-trained (did you know you can train a dog to use a cat-box?). That amounts to more hassle than I care to engage. For what?

For a box in the sky. No yard for Ruby to run around in. No peace and quiet for me. No private pool where I can go skinny-dipping…

Barf. 

Okay, okay…settle down! And let’s consider the things we imagine DO make the proposed Box in the Sky look good.

Bear in mind: I have lived in high-rise apartments, and in fact rather enjoyed them. But..that was a long time ago and I was a lot younger and my parents dealt with the management and they paid the rent and…. Today, to tell the truth: I don’t wanna. 

{sigh} Well…unless you’ve got someone to run interference with Life, The Universe, and All That, you’re always gonna have these hassles, right? And you’re always going to be paying for the hassles.

So…quitcher bellyachin’ … right?

Heh…  Another thing “I don’t wanna” is to take care of that damn yard in this heat. Gerardo’s boys earn their pay and earn their pay and earn their pay some more. A hundred bucks — let’s get real — is a bargain to get four guys slamming around in the heat for an hour.

Because he’s not just paying them for an hour of work. He’s paying for an hour of work x 4 … that would be FOUR hours of work. And he’s paying for the gas to run his truck over here (and the wear & tear on the truck). And for gas to run the blower and the mower and the tree trimmers and the shrub trimmers and the weed-whackers…. Arrrghhhha!

How am I glad I don’t own a yard-care business? Let me count the pestiferous ways…

****

On the ‘tother hand…

What with my son having purloined my car, I was gonna walk over to one of the nearby stores — maybe the Sprouts — and pick up some chow and assorted junque. That ain’t a-gonna happen now.

It’s 102º in the shade just now. And I’ll tellya…that does NOT inspire me to hike 8 or 10 blocks (x 2: make that 16 or 20 blocks, round trip) for the privilege of buying lunch and some ice cream!

The local grocery stores have recently announced that they’ll deliver. I haven’t looked into this offer yet…but need to do so.

In the Department of the Stuff of Nightmares…

Last night I found myself dreaming of visits to the terrifying Mayo Clinic. Auuugh! Arrogant doctors who presume that because you’re old you must be stupid. Endless waits in dreary waiting rooms. More waits in the doctor’s office. Wasted breath trying to explain yourself to said doctor, who’s only half-listening to you. And when a visit or three has happened recently, it’s a challenge to tell the difference between a memory and a nightmare.

Spare me, Lord!

It’s a bit of a drive over to the Mayo from the Funny Farm. Must say: more of a drive than I’d like to make. But the doctors and the facilities closer to home? Huh-uh!

My relationship with the adorable Young Dr. Kildare came to an end when I went over to his place shortly after a visit to the far, far-away Mayo Clinic. Figured I could get what ailed me treated there without having to drive halfway to Nevada for the privilege.

Yeah…I could. If I didn’t mind having him treat me for the wrong ailment! 

Hilariously so: he misdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and misdiagnosed with élan. Understand, this was something that not only had been seen by the Mayo but also by the high-powered St. Joseph’s, in mid-town Phoenix, added to a couple of lesser issues about which he simply made mistakes.

YDK has now moved to Sun City. The medical care out there is one of the main reasons you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City. My mother’s terminal illness was horrifically mismanaged by the quacks out there.

No doubt she wouldn’t have survived the cancer that was filling up her innards. But she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Telling her it was all in her fuzzy little head increased her suffering massively. And my father’s: he was at home trying to treat her as she lay dying of her “imaginary” ailment. And that IS the specific reason I would never buy a house in Sun City or Youngtown. Horrible!

One would like to hope that medical care out there has improved. But get real: we know what Americans think of the elderly. We know how elders are treated in this country. Why take a chance when you can stay in town and at least have a shot at decent care?

BBBRRRRAAAAAAAACCCCKKKKK!

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LOL!  Here’s something you need to learn to do in your dotage:

Get used to people (what sometimes feels like mobs of other people) roiling around in your space and in your face, making a racket and making a nuisance of themselves.

😀

Usually this nuisanceferizing happens with THE best of intentions. Your grousing about it because their presence/uproar/demands for payment does not change the facts that they’re doing their job, the job is something you often can’t do without, and about 98% of the time they’re doing a better job than you could do.

Just now, here I am practicing my new skill — loafing — when in fly Gerardo and his boys. And what do they do?

Roar.

That’s what they do.

Just now they’re out in back with their arsenal of gasoline-powered blowers and trimmers and whatnot, going R-R-O-A-R-R.

This is the noise you make when you blast dry leaves and debris into the freshly cleaned pool water, right?

😀

Oh…there’s one of the boys…he’s purloined the pool leaf net and is trying to fish out the junk he just blew into the drink. 😀

How glad AM i that i’m not a lawn dude? Lemme count the ways….

Why?

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I do believe that she knew what she was doing.

She knew smoking causes cancer. That revelation was in every print and broadcast medium in the English language.

She knew what dying of cancer was about. She had watched her mother die of it as she attended the woman on her deathbed.

She knew her sidestream smoke was making her little girl sick. And sick. And sicker.

She knew her effing cigarettes infested every air-conditioning system, from the car’s to their apartment’s to her new home’s. She knew the car stank and her home stank to high heaven because of her smoking habit.

If you knew your toxic habit was making your kid sick…if you knew it was stinking up your home and your car…if you knew it was killing you…WHY would you keep on with it?

Seriously: no matter how much your smelly habit pleased you, no matter how much it distracted you from the petty miseries of everyday life, no matter how much you loved the stink of burning tobacco…WHY would you stick with it when you knew it was poisoning your child? The child you wanted so much that you went through three failed pregnancies to get her?

That just mystifies me. She couldn’t NOT have known. And so the only conclusion you can draw is that at some level she was doing it on purpose. She wanted to die.

She smoked herself into the grave because she welcomed the grave. 

She welcomed it so much she didn’t care whether her daughter went there with her. Hey—maybe so much the better, eh? She wouldn’t be lonely there…

Seriously: I was sick all the time I was growing up, living in the stinky houses where she poisoned the air with her stench.

There really is no other explanation than that, at some level, she welcomed death — the death she knew those fukkin’ cancer sticks would bring her. Why she would put her beloved daughter and her fine husband at risk, too: that mystifies me. Suicide is one thing; murder is another.

She did succeed in killing herself. She died of a tobacco-induced cancer.

She seems to have failed at doing me in, too. So far, I haven’t developed a terminal cancer. That we know of…

***

I never could understand the stupidity of it. But I never did well at understanding stupidity in general.

Seriously: she wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew her habit would kill her and, at best, make her child sick. So…why??????

What on earth possessed her?

Yeah, I know: addiction.

But she was amply endowed with psychological resources. She was smart — you can be sure she knew what she was doing to herself. She was capable of making up her mind to accomplish something and then doing that something. She doted on her child and surely didn’t want to make the kid sick on purpose.

She was aware that I was sick all the time with chronic respiratory ailments. The connection between the mom’s cancer sticks and the kid’s constant coughing was obvious.

We live in a society that criminalizes self-harm by addiction to various drugs. Why do we tolerate self-harm by nicotine addiction? Why do deliberately harming children by choking them with toxic smoke?

Oh yeah. Why did I need to ask?

$

 

 

Soggy Doggy Day

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7:34 a.m.   Another soggy-doggy day in (un)lovely Arizona.

Just back from the morning stroll around the neighborhood with Ruby the Corgi.  Ugh!!!!  It’s sooo hot and sooo wet out there it feels like a seaside morning in accursed Saudi Arabia.

Not quite that soggy, though. There, you’d wake up to clear skies in the morning to see water dripping off the eaves like rain. By the shore of the Persian Gulf, the air was so wet that literally you could see it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. The morning drizzle, though, wasn’t rain. It was just humidity. So humid was the air that water would coalesce on the eaves and drip off in a nearly convincing simulation of rain.

Horrible place!

Arizona has its moments of horribleness, too. Fortunately, those don’t occur year-round. In another couple of weeks, the current damp spell will have dried out, and even at 80 degrees or so, an early-morning walk will be just fine.

Contemplating the fact that our corner of the ’Hood was built by the same company that built out Sun City, where my parents dragged me when they retired early. What a place!

No one under 50  was allowed to live there. But because my parents had enrolled me in the University of Arizona a year before I finished high school, technically I didn’t live there. I lived in Tucson. Right?

Far as I know, no complaints were lodged. I was a bookish kid, very quiet, so presumably none of the neighbors were discommoded. And yes: I spent 9 months out of 12 in Tucson; make that 11 months after we’d been there for awhile and I’d learned I could extend my escape time through summer school.

Anyway, my present house is remarkably similar to the tract shacks that filled Sun City. Ours are a little better than those — by the time Del Webb got to the Sun City phase of his career, he’d learned all the corners to cut. My house, for example, has a garage.

Yeah. You know: a place to park your car, with walls and a ceiling and a door that opens and closes?

Their house had a carport: an open shade structure with only enough space for one car. Mine holds two, in theory.

But the overall appearance is similar: low-slung single-story tract houses built with gray cinder-block walls and gray asphalt roofs. Ugleeeee.

But affordable. WTF.

Anyway, the dawg and I have circumnavigated the’Hood. That, at least, was a halfway decent way to start the day.

This is not a day I’m looking forward to. M’hijito is dragging me out to the Mayo Clinic this afternoon: a trip I hate for another visit I will hate. The doctors there are wonderful, of course. But my gawd! That drive!!! And doctors are not folks I wish to spend a lot of time with…they make me want to run away! 

The Mayo is almost an hour’s drive from here, through horrible traffic. Hit the road at the wrong time of day, and you’ll be plodding along for a lot longer than an hour.

My local “doctor in the wild,” as  the elite set at the Mayo calls doctors with their own practices, has moved to freakin’ Sun City! That’s an hour’s drive in the other direction from the Mayo. And…well…  Lemme tellya: the horror show that we experienced with my mother and the damned doctors out there left me convinced that I would NEVER, EVER go to another doctor who practices in Sun City.

The quacks who attended my mother as she was dying of (obvious!) cancer were so incompetent, so lazy, so arrogant…  The quacks out there are such ba!tards that…well… The medical “care” is among the top reasons that you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City.  Horrible beyond horror.

So my son and I go just as far in the opposite direction. Certainly the Mayo is one helluva lot better than anything in S.C. But I’ll tell ya: overall, the Christian Scientists have got somethin’….

Anyway, just now the Out of Doors is hot, wet, icky. Pool Dude was just here slaving in the backyard: another of many jobs I’m glad I don’t have. Forked over $150 to him, for the privilege of not having to do that damn job for another month.

Honestly. If I weren’t pretty certain my son wants this house, I would sell it right now and move to a nice high-rise apartment on Central Avenue.

Heh! Or at least buy a house here in the ’Hood that’s free of a swimming pool.

After several years in apartments in San Francisco, I’ve had my fill of high-rise apartments and garden apartments and…whatnot. Gotta have SOME space between me and the clowns next door.

😀

At any rate, in a block house on a quarter-acre lot, Ruby the Corgi can bark merrily and not bother the neighbors. So for the nonce, that makes this house worth the hassle of pool care and yard care.

ARF!

 

Back at the Hubs…

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Quarter to eight in the morning. Hot. Sticky. Yucky out there.

The balmy weather blocks all but the balmiest of dog owners from circumnavigating the park, so Ruby the Corgi and I had the place almost to ourselves.

Traipsed down Main Drag Central. Eastward across Fancy-Dan Street South. Back north along Palm Row…passed the lady who HATES me because I asked her to please quit shoving junk-food “treats” in Ruby’s mouth.

Some people just flat refuse to believe you. Ever notice that?

Gosh, but humans are stupid. As animals go, that is.

The house once occupied by the young guy who got in trouble with the law and bankrupted his parents with legal bills (he still ended up in the slam) is vacant. Those poor folks lost their shirts!

Apparently a speculator bought the house. The pool is all torn up and it looks like the same is true of the interior. But then whoever got the place abandoned it. So it just sits there. Hideously.

The neighbors must just love it.

Eastward, eastward…that street reminds me of the exceptionally tony Palmcroft district, one of the Fanciest-Dan neighborhoods of Phoenix.

We used to live in a lesser neighborhood just to the east of Palmcroft — I could walk over with the dawgs to that park and its surrounding Richistan, and did. Still very nice. Still highly unaffordable for the likes of moi, today.

We moved out of our beautiful historic house there just in the nick of time. About six months after we escaped, the city bought a house right behind ours and turned the damn thing into a FIRE STATION!

Yeah! WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEE-UUUU…all hours of the day and night.

Couldn’t believe it…y’know, there were plenty of commercial slots on the surrounding main drags where the city could have parked that thing. And the huge regional hospital with a gigantic parking lot that could have accommodated a fire station. And a defunct shopping mall with its own huge parking lot: perfect for a fire station. But ohhhhhhh no! The city has to stick the thing next door to or across the street from NINE residential lots!

Natcherly.

Honestly, I really think the City Fathers deliberately work at downgrading the quality of living in the beautiful old central neighborhoods. My guess is, the developers who build out the surrounding suburban tracts fund election campaigns for their stooges, to get them on the City Council and into county government. Once there, these sleazeballs work actively to trash centrally located neighborhoods, so they can be converted to commercial properties and generate $$$ for their sponsors and emptied of less-profitable private households.

I love my present neighborhood, though. And would like to stay here until I die.

Exactly how to pull that off kinda escapes me. 

My son wants to consign me to a high-rise old-folkerie called The Beatitudes. Ugh!!! Just the thought of it makes my skin crawl.

I hate, loathe, and despise institutional living. 

* No, I do not want to listen to your effing TV blatting away all day and half the night.

* No, I do not want to eat disgusting foodoid dumped out of cans and boxes into steam tables.

* No, I do not want to have to pretend to be nice to you as I hover, disgruntled, over a plate of disgusting foodoid.

* No, I do not even faintly care about your Ailment of the Day.

* Yes, your bird-brained politics make me want to bite you.

One thing is for sure: I wouldn’t last long in a place like that. I would die of depression, if nothing else.

Speaking of the Joys of Old Age, my son is dragging me out to the damned Mayo Clinic again this afternoon. Why, I do not recall. Just now, whatever Blessing of Age was afflicting me seems to have gone away. And frankly, I don’t even remember what I might have been whining about that would have led him to make an appointment.

Ugh!

Arf, we say. ARF!!

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Too, too WONNERFUL!  

M’jito brought his beautiful new puppy over this afternoon! The little gal is a lovely little white golden retriever, fluffy all over and cute as can be.

Friendly. Cute! Unfazed by Ruby. Cute! Full of ginger. Cute!

Everyone needs a puppy. All. the. time. Right?

This little pooch will be a worthy successor to the illustrious Charley the Golden Retriever, who recently passed on to his furry fathers.

Charley was an old man. I sure hope this pup lives to a ripe old age, too. Can’t see any reason why she wouldn’t: she looks healthy, happy, and NO ONE can take care of a dog the way M’hijito does.

Charley in the car