Coffee heat rising

funny

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Strange Weather…

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Looks like rain, but doesn’t feel like rain…know what I mean?  It’s a very weird-looking day out there this morning: high overcast. Is it gonna rain? I’d put 50-50 odds on the proposition. Right now, tho’, I doubt that it’ll rain soon.

So…I should get off my duff and walk down to the Sprouts or over to the Albertson’s. Or to some such. Just now, though, I’m a bit too lazy to work up that much ambition. Ruby and I have traipsed all over the neighborhood and the local park — probably a couple of miles. And despite the high clouds, it’s starting to warm up. Do I really want to trade a heat stroke for a handful of chocolate chips?

😀

Well. Possibly. Quite possibly.

My kid has made off with my car (note how tactfully I refrain from saying “stolen”…), and so shopping is restricted to stores within walking distance. Well, unless I want to brave the public transport system.

Believe me: I do not. Been there, done that, ain’t doin’ it again.

Truth to tell, Phoenix has grown into a Big City. And in such a venue, you can usually get most of what you need or want within a reasonable walk from your home. What that means, amazingly enough, is you really don’t need a car. And if you do? The place is swarming with taxicabs, Ubers, and busses. From here I can easily walk to…

* Albertson’s
* Sprouts
* Walgreen’s
* Bookman’s
* Walmart
* a computer store
* several restaurants

Plus a local shoe store, liquor store, coffee store…and on and on.

If I wanted to wait on a bus until after the cows come home, I could even get to the beloved AJ’s car-free. A guy who drives for Uber lives right across the street. He’d probably drive me down to the pricey AJ’s; from there I could get back home by bus and on foot.

The main problem with getting around on foot is that it takes A LOT longer than driving. In a vast, spread-out urb like Phoenix, there is a limit to how much time you want to kill traipsing from Point A to Point B. Same is true with the public transit system here: conveyances don’t come by very often. You can easily stand around a half-hour or forty-five minutes waiting for a bus. And it’s decidedly not safe for a woman to be standing on the street by herself here.

LOL! It ain’t San Francisco, that’s for sure!

When my parents and I lived there during the 1950s, a bus came by our high-rise apartment every 15 minutes or so. I could hop on the bus and ride to a stop within a block of my school. Down the street from the school, you’d find coffee shops, an ice-cream parlor, several decent restaurants, and a variety of nifty stores.

Here in lovely uptown Phoenix, you’ll wait as much as 45 minutes for a bus — any bus — to show up. If you’re female, you’re likely to be harassed as you stand there (and stand…and stand…and stand) on the corner. It decidedly does not feel safe. And that is why I would be willing to pay an Uber driver a fistful of dollars to take me wherever I need to go.

Then, too: it’s about to get VERY hot here. If I left the house right now — 9 a.m. — I could probably get to a nearby supermarket and/or drugstore and then reach home before the heat becomes absurd. It’s overcast today, and so the weather is only supposed to reach 99 degrees. Tomorrow, though, it’ll be 104.

And no, even an old desert rat like me ain’t about to walk across block on block on block of concrete and asphalt through 104-degree heat.

My son is willing to take me to doctor’s and dentist’s appointments…but that presents a monster time suck for him. Paying an Uber driver looks a lot more attractive than having the kid take off from his job every time he turns around. On the other hand…hmmm…he’s the one who ripped off my car.

Maybe he should be paying the Uber guy’s fees. 😀

If only she were still here…

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I wish…i wish…i do wish she were here to see it.

The’Hood, I mean. My beautiful ‘Hood. “She”: my mother, gone these past three decades.

She had seen this tract before SDXB and I moved in here. And she thought it was OK.

Today — oh yeah: I can assure you — she’d think it’s a lot more than OK. This place is right up her alley — the alley we traversed  over 30 years ago, when i was a kid and she was coming to the end of her life.

***

Ian the Great: what a hoot she would have gotten out of him, her fine grandson!

And how proud of him she would have been. She would have thought he was about the best thing that ever trundled up the pike.

If she hadn’t been murdered by the tobacco peddlers, she might still be with us…though she would be older than Methuselah and all his sisters by now.

Women in her family who didn’t drink and didn’t smoke — because they were wacksh!t Christian Scientists — lived well into their 90s with no serious ailments. And no medical care. So…that would have taken her past the year 2000, give or take. Gosh! It’s hard to believe that much time has passed.

LOL! It’s a little hard to believe, too, that I’m still kickin’after all those years and all those relatives have passed. 😀

***

Heh! In its way, it explains why I’m so sick. Who knew I’d be kicking around this earth after 80 years!

Sure doesn’t feel like that long. On the other hand, we live in a culture that despises the elderly, and so we try to put our longevity out of mind. That makes sense.

Though yes, I do feel like it’s time to go (and then some), knowing that my great-grandmother and my great-aunt each still had another 10 years to go at this point in their lives makes me feel…well…strange. On the one hand, sorta encouraged that there may be another full decade left. On the other hand, sorta miserable at the prospect of ten more years to spend feeling this awful.

If there’s a God, I kinda wish She’d set me free, along about now…

Sunday, Bloody (Boring) Sunday

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So here we are with the new computer on our lap, loafing on an easy chair, taking in a lovely morning, watching the pooch celebrate by chewing up a leather fake bone. We have circumnavigated the ‘Hood through the dawn of a gorgeous day. And now, I suppose, all we really need to do is loaf some more.

Loafing: the highest calling in life…  😀

Car? We Don’t Need No Steenking Car…

So at my son’s behest, I’ve been without a car for upwards of a week. I thought this would be a vast inconvenience and PITA, but…y’know what? It’s not. 

Weirdly, a week on foot has demonstrated handsomely that in a highly urbanized area, most of the time you really don’t need a car.

Contemplating this weird twist on the present weird state of affairs, I recalled that when my mother and I lived in San Francisco, we hardly ever used the car she had. Really, the only time we needed it was when my father’s ship (he was a Merchant Mariner) came into port in the East Bay. Then we would drive over there to pick him up and bring him home, where he rested until his ship set to sea again, when we would drive him back out to the Union Oil docks. Otherwise, we used the public transit: busses and streetcars.

Phoenix ain’t San Francisco. However, it has little mini-boroughs made up of what one might call clotted neighborhoods. And right here in my mid- to upper-class ‘hood, I can get everything I need on a day-to-day basis on foot!

Yeah. I can easily walk to an Albertson’s supermarket, a Walgreen’s, a Sprouts, a Target, a UPS store, a computer retailer and repair shop, a Hobby Lobby, a Family Dollar, a Walmart, an El Rancho, a 24-hour emergency doctor’s office…and more.

Hey! What else is to be desired? If I need to go somewhere else, I either mooch a ride from a friend or hire a cab.

And y’know…you could rent a whoooole lotta cab rides for what it costs to own, maintain, gas up, insure, and pay taxes on a car of your own.

It gets better: one of the neighbors has gone into the Uber business. If I need some sort of custom ride, I could hire him to tote me wherever my li’l heart craves. And let him pay the maintenance and taxes on his car.

Think about that. Does it not strike you that under those circumstances owning a car amounts largely to an unnecessary expense? A huge unnecessary expense, by the time you account for routine maintenance, repairs, gasoline, insurance, taxes, shelter, and whatnot.  Is there really a good, a practical reason to keep a rolling hole in the ground into which to pour money?

Frankly….I begin to think not.

She’s b-a-a-c-k again…for the nonce

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The li’l computer is back online…just now. We’ll see how long that lasts. /eyeroll/

Several hours of galloping from pillar to post finally brought us to a store that could fix it: not surprisingly, an Apple store. This one, in a large shopping mall on the northwest side. So now this unit is operative.

When we got back to the Funny Farm, though, the big old desktop was acting up.

My son sat down to it and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it….  Several hours of working on the damn thing left us both short of temper. The upshot of that: a fine shouting match.

Once that got started, we both started getting madder and madder. He just roared out the door in a raging fit of high dudgeon. I, meanwhile, sink into a slough of stupidity…nothing I say helps, because I’m incapable of saying anything that helps.

The laptop still isn’t working right. I have no car, and so I can’t take it out tomorrow. There’s a computer store about six blocks away — my son abominates the place. Abomination or no, I guess I’ll have to take the thing there, even though my son has forbidden me to do so. (He hates the place, because it’s a hole-in-the-wall into which to stuff money.)

Without a car, I’m pretty helpless: if a destination isn’t within a couple of miles, I can’t get there.

What to do next?

 

A WTF Week…

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I’d say this is One of Those Days…except that doesn’t do the current three-ring circus justice. One of Those Weeks?  Lordie…just hope “week”is the right term…

Actually, it started out several weeks ago.

What IS the matter with me? No IQ, maybe? Presumably what IQ points I had have rolled out my ears and skittered away down the gutter.

The fun began when a friend — a guy I’ve known for years through a business group we both belong to, an apparently lovely man given to a kind demeanor and an intelligent air — asked to borrow my laptop computer. Thinking he’d return it in about a week, I said why sure. 

Don’t do that, folks.

😀
Not to say
😮

He made off with my computer and…ghosted into the distance, leaving nor hide, nor hair, nor email message.

Time passed.

After nary a satisfactory reply from my alleged “friend,” my son swaggered around a bit and finally got the computer back. Very fine, thank you Dear Son.

But…turn it on and come to find out IT’S BROKEN!

For the luvva gawd!

The perp is not responding to emails asking WTF happened to it. Surprise, eh?

We took it to my favorite computer fix-it and sales store. Their staff said they couldn’t fix it: beyond their skills.

So now M’jito hauls the thing to another store, where they tell him it needs to go back to the Apple store.

Ohhhh…kay….  He takes it to the Apple store in Ritzy-Titzyville, a spectacularly expensive shopping mall in Phoenix’s Biltmore district. They now have it, supposedly fixing it…and nor hide nor hair has been heard again. My guess is they can’t fix it and that’s why we’re not hearing from them — whaddaya bet?

My computer has now been gone for weeks, and we have no word as to if or when the Apple St0re will get it fixed. Now I’m sitting before my desktop Mac, perched in a hard wooden chair in front of a conference table converted into a desk.  And that pose HURTS.

Replacing the computer will cost about $2,000. I can’t afford that.

***

Okay…over in the next circus ring…

Months ago — many months ago, nigh unto a year or so — I was involved in a fender-bender. It was raining, dark, and in a bad part of town. The woman in front of me jammed on her brakes the instant a red light turned at the intersection. I jammed on my brakes…but my car skidded on the wet, oily pavement and rear-ended her car.

As is customary in those conditions, I got a ticket for causing a wrecky-poo. Hereabouts, it’s assumed that if you rear-end someone, you’re driving too close…and nevvermind about the slippery pavement.

Months pass fairly uneventfully.

Now I’m at MayoDoc’s office with my son, and he tells the doctor about this episode and that it was all my fault.

This is accepted as evidence that I’m non compos mentis and should not be driving at all. So she writes an order that the state must rescind my driver’s license!!!!!

So now, I cannot drive legally and my son has dutifully confiscated my car.

Phoenix is an L.A.-style city — vast, spread-out, and frantic. You can’t even get to the local grocery store without being able to drive, to say nothing of a doctor’s or a dentist’s office.

So this really puts me over the barrel.

Probably I can get around, to some degree, by hiring Uber cabs. But just imagine what that will cost!!!!

****

Fortunately, there’s an Albertson’s about five or six blocks to the south of the Funny Farm; a Sprouts right across an eight-lane thoroughfare and set of lightrail tracks, and a Fry’s supermarket a few blocks to the north.

Grand fun, walking to these establishments in 100-degree heat.

This morning I started out around dawn — opening time — to visit the Albertson’s and the Sprouts. Fortunately, I have a rolling cart, which will allow me to haul a week’s worth of groceries from these fine establishments to my house.

Unfortunately…the route between my house and those fine establishments is littered with stoned-outta-their-heads bums. A lightrail train comes up that main drag and drops these fine citizens off in our neighborhood, where they can panhandle and burgle to their crusty hearts’ content. This makes the trek from the Funny Farm to either of those stores…well…shall we say “less than pleasant.”

§

The journey to the Fry’s is not quite so…umh…daunting. You can reach that shopping center by a shorter route and then dart into a stretch along a sidewalk passing a number of small stores that are usually open. If anyone starts to pester, you can whip into one of the stores, and that invariably chases them off. But of course it means you have to hang around the store until they’re gone, and hope they’re not lurking down the way, waiting to snab you again.

Complicating that option: said Fry’s is an ethnic store, the neighborhood to the north of us being a barrio. The emphasis, then, is on Mexican food…which is really kinda cool. It would be a whole lot better if I knew anything about Mexican cooking.

My good Latina friend who used to live around the corner from the Funny Farm has moved away, settling in an upscale suburb. Actually, I once thought about buying a house there, but…well, it’s quite a distance from M’jito’s house, and the other folks that I used to know over there have died or moved away. So…that kind of obviates opportunities to learn la comida mexicana.

Speaking of the which, it’s almost noon. Already too hot to walk to the grocery store. But WTF…it’ll be even hotter in an hour or two, and I do need some chow items. And so…awaaayyyyy….