Coffee heat rising

Still Kickin’…

…after a fashion.

Nine in the morning:

I’m so tired I can barely hold my head up.

My (elegant! spiffy! beloved!!) walking stick is lost. Must have carelessly left it in the park. Wasn’t there this a.m., so presumably some dear soul found it and made off with it.

Bought that at a crafts fair and have dearly loved it for years. Heartbroken at losing it.

Lo! though… Turns out you can get one like it on Amazon! So…whenever I shake free of my present daze, I’ll order one up.

In other Departments:  They’re jacking up our car insurance. As if it weren’t already stratospheric enough.

If we had decent public transport here, I’d just get rid of the car. But…this ain’t San Francisco, and so no, we don’t have decent public transportation. So I’ll have to draw down money from retirement savings to pay for effing car insurance.

And no: one can’t do without the stratospheric insurance, even if one were foolhardy enough to try that: it’s against the law to drive around uninsured here.

In still other sylvan fields… How glad am I that I passed on buying a fancy new condo in fast-Yuppifying downtown Phoenix? You, too, can live across the street from a pile of po’ folks!

Nothin’ basically wrong with po’ folks, o’course. The problem is, a lot of them are po’ because they’re freshly out of the slam. (Phone soliciting is a prison industry.) Or because they’re too mentally ill to hold a job (and so impose on you for handouts…every time you stick your nose out your door).

***

Today is the Day of Woden, which means we’re comin’ up on Cleaning Lady Day.

And how can I say how much I do not feel like getting off my lazy butt to clean house for the cleaning lady?

Yes: Cleaning Lady Day means you get to clean house:

  • Pick up the litter
  • Clean up after the dog
  • Put said dog’s toys away
  • Find some clean sheets
  • Iron pillowcases
  • Put away make-up, hair stuff, bubble bath, whatnot whatnot and more whatnot
  • Straighten up the office desk
  • Put away the kitchen clutter
  • Move the car
  • Unlock the back gate’s padlock, so she can get in and out with the trash

……gaaahhhhhh!  On and on in that vein….

Hmmm…. Unclear whether she’s over at WonderAccountant’s already. She goes to two or three houses a day, arriving last at my place…the poor creature must be dead exhausted at the end of every workday.

Car in WA’s driveway…but it doesn’t look like the Cleaning Lady from Heaven’s vehicle. It may belong to one of WA’s clients…in which case, I’ll have an extra hour or two to loaf before WCL shows up at my door.

ringy dingy ringy dingy ringy dingy…

Another goddamn phone solicitor. The damn phone jangles with phone pitches ALLLLLL DAYYYY LONG! That’s with the number unlisted, with Caller ID, with Call-Blocking.

I use the Call-Blocking feature to sidetrack calls from California, the East Valley, and various towns around Arizona. This actually helps a lot. But apparently nothing a phone customer can do — short of unplugging the goddamn phone — will block all the nuisance calls.

Apparently the nuisances can communicate with each other, though. I’ve cut a fair percentage of nuisance calls by

SCREEEEEAAAMMMIIIIIING

into the goddamn phone when one of the ba*tards calls. Because they wear headphones to do their job, a whistle or an air horn or even a good long LOUD scream hurts their bastardly ears. They do have lists warning their colleagues off. So if you make it hurt enough to pester you, you’ll get on their do-not-call list.

Unfortunately, there are dozens of those, just as their are dozens of phone solicitors. You have to keep up your blast-the-ears campaign to cut the pestering calls to any degree.

Life in the Time of Nuisancing…

Moonset

Ten after three in the morning: the quiet, dark morning. As we scribble, a brilliant three-quarter moon makes its way down the clear black western sky toward the horizon.

What a thing to see!

It’s sublimely beautiful. Truly: one of the most subtly gorgeous sights I’ve ever seen. Made more so, I’ll say, by knowing this is one of the last times — maybe the last time — I’ll ever see such a thing.

If that’s the last scene I get to see on this earth, well then… Thanks, God. It’s a magnificent gift!

As you may guess, Funny is very, very sick indeed. Beyond “funny,” we might say. The peripheral neuropathy, which never takes  pause, is endlessly painful: hands, feet, legs, lips, teeth: everything hurts. Pretty clearly this ailment is never going to heal: we’re coming into the last stage of a life that does not want to step aside and get out of the way. So the darned life is putting up a fight!

Ohhh well. Nothing I can do about it. Except wait until it goes away.

Meanwhile, in these last burning hours and minutes of life, let us enjoy what we have around us.

  • Let us relish the beauty that immerses us.
  • Let us comprehend the brevity and fragility of that beauty.
  • Let us love those who love us.
  • Let us pray for the future of our species.
  • Let us be grateful for life, for the living, for what has come before us and what will come after us.
  • If there is a God — as some of us believe there must be — let us thank that Creator for the beauty of Creation, for its glory and for its horror, for its intimacy and its strangeness, for its past and its future.

Onward. Ever onward!

Zonked and conked

All of 5 p.m. and the Humann is  falling over face-forward into what passes for its dinner dish.

Which ain’t much, I’ll tellya.

Dunno what the matter is. But I can NOT hold my eyes open. If you’d asked, I’d’ve said I slept well last night. Stayed down til at least 7 a.m.

Loafed all day.

No reason to feel so tired I can barely breathe. But there it is.

Still light outdoors (as in broad freakin’ daylight) and I’m fighting to stay awake.

Nothing much has happened to wear one out. We walked around the park this afternoon: hardly an occasion for much exertion. Came home. Loafed. Loafed some more.

Now: dead exhausted.

WHY?

While visiting the park, we also cruised the Olde Neighborhood in downtown Palmcroft.

Gosh, I do miss that beautiful old place. But not so much as to be willing to shell out an extra couple hundred grand to live there. It’s beautiful, yes. But it ain’t THAT beautiful!

All of which is neither here nor there.

HERE, we have so damn exhausted I can barely gaze across the room!

Why?????

No clue.

***

Along about 5 p.m. now, the human and the dawg are ensconced on the bed. It’ll take little intention and no effort for the human to conker out. Forthwith.

This, of course, will mean the human and her sidekick will wake up along about 11 p.m. … and be up for the Duration. Ugh!

For the nonce, though: amazingly, insanely tired.

 

New Day in the ‘Hood

Come 11:00 a.m. out there on the sheltered streets of the ‘Hood…it’s really quite lovely. Today will tend toward the Warm side…but just now it’s pleasant enough: not too hot. People and their adorable kids are out in their front yards.

Two of the Adorables were attracted by Ruby the Corgi, who’s kinda adorable herself. They had to dote upon her and walk along with us for a ways. 😀  And so another friendship was made in Heaven.

Meanwhile, my calendar is a mish-mash of conflicting notes. At one point, it appears, the ineffable VC and I planned to meet today. Apparently we changed that to tomorrow morning, but I can’t tell from my scribbles whether we’re supposed to meet at 9:45 or at 11:30 a.m. or…what?????

No clue which is correct. I’m sleepy and do not feel like wrestling with the email to get this right. I’ll try to call her this afternoon; failing that, then compose and send a query by email.

Ugh! Don’t get old, whatever ya do!

 

 

 

“The Sound of Fweedom!”

Ugh!  The dog and I: just back from an hour+ perambulation of the neighborhood park. Serenaded every damn step of the way with ROAR ROAR ROAR  blasting out of Luke AFB’s jet planes.

When we lived in Sun City, my mother used to start each day sitting on her screen porch, sipping coffee and listening to the interminable ear-splitting blast from those F-15s, which would start the day at dawn and scream on for several hours.

“Ohhhhh,” she would simper, “it’s the sound of fweedom!”

Uhm…no, muther… That’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way.

Fortunately, it hasn’t arrived yet.

But don’t worry. It will. It will.

That air base is a good 20 miles away from the ‘Hood — or more. But the blast of the jet engines sounds like the damn things are in our backyard.

Anyway, that turned a clear, clean afternoon stroll into something kinda…grody. Noisy. Loud. Threatening. Scary if you have even a clue what those things are intended to do.

                                                       Horrible creature, the human animal…

Real Estate…Run Amok!

!Jayzuz!!!  Just look at the INSANE prices for houses in our old neighborhood! Just a few lots down the street from our place: $1.3 MILLION.

We paid 30 grand for our house there — the first home we co-owned with a bank — and thought that was just outrageous. Lookit that, for 1900 square feet! Our house was 3,300 square feet…

These shacks are all within walking distance of our old house:

Good lord!!

Well, I guess I’m damn lucky to have this house up in a North Central district. And to have it paid off. By the time we’re ready to sell it, the thing will be worth enough to purchase the moon.

Actually, I hope I’m able to stay here until I croak over. Then M’jihito will get the house — and presumably the proceeds of its sale — which will allow him either to pay off his own house or to sell it and move into my paid-off shack. Or to move wherever he pleases.

Not sure he even wants to stay in the Phoenix area. He’s talked about moving back to Grand Junction, Colorado, whence his father emanated. It’s a little hickish for my taste…but if he could get this kind of money on the sale of my house and his, he could live like a king there.