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Argha!

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GOOD MORNING, AMERICA!

Ruby the Corgi greets a cold daybreak with a frantic attack of reverse sneezing. This is a dramatic, noisy episode of choking and gasping for air. Apparently it’s not life-threatening, but I’ll tellya: it’s terrifying for a human to watch and hear.

***

She seems to have calmed down now. That’s good.

I guess.

Was going to traipse to the grocer, now that the rush hour is more or less over (it’s quarter to ten a.m. just now). But…hmmmm….  Hesitate to leave her alone until it’s undeniably clear that this episode is over and done with.

awwwww she-ut! There she goes again.

Am I really going to have to tote her to a vet?

watching….waiting…

Thinking vividly — for reasons I cannot even begin to divine — about my college boyfriend (scroll down in that page). Oh, my! How my parents hated him! Never did fully understand why, other than to assume it was some kind of racist thing. He was white…what WAS their problem? Apparently eastern European doesn’t count as “white” in the minds of Texas nationalists.

Ugh! Humanity: what a critter!

**********

And speaking of critters, the Corgi has quit wheezing and gagging. Soooo…i guess it’s off to the grocery store with me! {sigh}

Colder ‘n’ a Bigawd

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Jeez! It’s 42 degrees out there on the back porch. But for some reason it feels a lot colder than that. No doubt because it’s overcast — Arizona doesn’t do overcast well. 😀

Gray and a little damp.

Reckon that’s going to moot this morning’s doggy-walk. We’re already running way, wayyy late — it’s quarter to nine now. The human has gotta eat. And..and…??? Then what????

***********

And now it’s the next day. Clear and cold outside. The dog and I loaf in the bed, the Human knowing it needs to get up and get going but…well…too lazy to engage in any such ambitious throwings-around.

Diddling away time by looking up an old boyfriend on Internet, a gent named Paul Prokop. Mygawd, but you can find out a lot about people on the Web!

On the other hand…after a long series of come-ons, the damn site wants me to pony up cash to disgorge the information they claim to have on him.

😀   😮   😀

Forget that, White Folks!

Hilariously, my parents’ objection to this guy was that they evidently didn’t regard him as quite white. They were rabid bigots: no one who wasn’t white and Anglo-Saxon quite came up to their elevated standards. Nevvermind that my father’s grandmother’s people were Choctaw Indians… You never met a man who could hate with my father’s flair for hating.

Anyway, they hated Paul, I think because he was Bohemian by origin. Nevvermind that his skin was as white as mine. Nevvermind that he was born in the U.S. and grew up  in Chicago. Nevvermind that his parents and brother were born in the U.S. Nevvermind that he was busily getting a degree in public administration.

Indeed, he ended up going into academic administration…and, to my astonishment, here I learn that while I was running an academic publication at the Great Desert University, he was working in the university president’s office!

I had no idea! We must have crossed paths on campus many times, yet I never recognized him. I wonder if he recognized me?

O’course, by then I had a different name. A different major. Two advanced degrees. A kid. And fifteen or twenty extra years added to my face.

Eventually he resurfaces in Chicago, whence he came and where his family lived. Apparently he married and continued happily ever after. I surely hope so.

Life. Strange, isn’t it?

Gorgeous Day!

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The Corgi and the Human dawdled a bit this morning. It’s already 9:20, and we only just walked in the door from the a.m. perambulation.

But what a GORGEOUS morning! Clear and cool, free of visible smog, most of the bird-brained dog-lovers already back in their homes.

The dog-lovers. /eyeroll/  They all assume your dog LOVES their dog, and they wanna drag their fur-baby over to yours to socialize.

Why are people so stupid, anyway?

We walked by the late Jerry Jacka’s house, up on the north end of the ‘Hood. Jerry was, among other things, a professional photographer of significant stature. I met him while I was working for Arizona Highways, which filled its pages with his spectacular scenic photos. What a lovely man he was: the definition of talent and grace.

Jerry and his wife, Lois, owned a berzillion acres of ranch land halfway between here and Prescott, acre after rolling acre stretching west from the I-17. What a place!

They also had a pretty house in our neighborhood, just south of Dunlap: now a noisy main drag, but then a quiet two-lane country road passing through acre after acre of citrus orchards. The house is still there. But they, alas, are long gone.

So is the quiet rural character of their neighborhood. Now it’s on the northern border of North Central, beneath the flight path of helicopters ferrying patients to a huge hospital a couple miles away. Noisy! Hectic! Crowded! Crime-ridden…

LOL! You can bet that if I owned a few hundred acres out in the boondocks, you’d never see me in this place! 😀

My, how I do miss the Arizona Highways crew! It was so much fun to work there: so much talent came in through the doors. Not just the photographers and the artists and the writers: the editorial staff was outstanding, too.

Ohhh well. They’re gone, most of them. I’m probably one of the few members of that staff who are still living.

Life is short, my friends. Enjoy it while you can!

Just a LITTLE peace and quiet, puhleeze?

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Uh huh... 7:46 p.m…. and it’s

ROAAAAARRRR roooarrrrr buzzzzzzzzzzz whizzz roar buzz…

Cop helicopter overhead. Dayum! Am I tired of this routine or tired of this routine?

He buzzes around in circles over the northwest section of the ‘Hood: right above the house where SDXB and I lived together for a couple of years before parting ways, then buying our own shacks here in the neighborhood.

Lovely: I guess I should be glad we split up and moved away from that corner.

SDXB, I’m sure, is very glad he moved to Sun City, where the local crooks rarely feel it’s worth the effort to stage a home invasion.

Not altogether, though.

LOL! I can remember the panic my mother enjoyed when they had a couple of guys who would climb up on top of a car in a carport (there were no enclosed garages in that garden spot), slide open the ceiling hatch, climb into the attic, make their way across the rafters to the area of the living room, cut a hole in that ceiling, and hop down into the living room. Yes: dwelling in the land of the somnolent and the half-dead did not guarantee freedom from burglars.

😀

Hm. Sounds like the cop copter has already flown away. Must have chased our boys on down the road.

We live directly south of one of the highest-crime ZIP codes in the state. Every now and again the action spills over into the ‘Hood, which provides us a little entertainment.

Ruby will bark at our guests, but weighing only abut 20 pounds does naught for her potential as a threat. Really: one does need to be armed in these parts.

Arizona. What a friggin’ garden spot!

Howling Wind. Howling Flames…

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Gosh, am I glad we don’t live in Southern California anymore. Looks like the whole damn place is burning down.

My father, a Merchant Marine officer, used to ship out of Long Beach. That’s where I was born, before we moved to Saudi Arabia.

Twelve years later, we came back to the States. He took a job with Standard Oil. Settled in San Francisco: a variety of Nirvana. Unfortunately, though, he decided he could make more money working for Union Oil, shipping out of grody Southern California, than shipping out of ritzy-tizy Northern California.

{sigh}

That’s how we ended up back in Long Beach: chez pitz.

Couple years ago, friends La Maya and La Bethulia bought a cool trailer home down the Coast, practically on the ocean and surrounded by forest. They haven’t said that they’ve been moved out — they do, after all, retain a place in the Valley. But…just now you couldn’t pay me to stay there! In California, I mean. Those fires can move with the speed of a rocketing baby. You get out of the way now, or you may not be able to get out of the way.

At any rate: mighty grateful just this moment not to be in California. The wind is WHALING in out of the west…that’s after it’s crossed hundreds of miles of barren desert and a forested mountain range. You don’t even wanna know what it must be like in the southern California as we scribble.

Lessee what Wunderground sez here:  Phoenix temp: 63. Feels like: 60. Wind: 19 miles an hour.

hmmm…. I’d be surprised if the wind speed were only 19 mph just now. But I don’t have a windsock out back. So: dunno. The thermometer says it’s 55 degrees out there: almost 10 degrees lower than the Weather Service claims.

{sigh} Welp, I’d better get off my duff and venture out into the stormlet. The Queen of the Universe is running low on dog food, so the Human needs to traipse down to the local gourmet grocery store and buy up a stock of canned doggy-gourmet food.

Ugh! How can I count the ways….? Well, the rush hour is over, anyway, so I can turn left out of our neighborhood to go in the direction of the Royal Grocer’s. During the rush hour, you can’t do that and so have to go north in order to go south. (Yeah: That’s right turn/left turn/right turn; left into the parking lot.) At least that wind isn’t carrying flames. Just now.

STOP THE WORLD!

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I wanna get off!

LOL! It’s 8:30 in the morning; breakfast is not made, coffee is not made, California is burning down, and the world is going to Hell on a proverbial handcart.

SOMETHING is wrong with the pool, but I’ll be dayumed if I can figure out what it is. Calling Pool Dude has involved not one, not two, but three telephone runarounds. And now the damn thing seems to be working all right, so when he shows up here, having made a special trip in response to my squawking, he will find exactly NOTHING wrong with it.

The phone company has dorked up its service, so trying to find a phone number through Directory Assistance entails a hair-tearing runaround. When you do reach a person, either they don’t speak English well enough to understand what you’re asking or they’re so plug-stupid you can’t MAKE them understand.

Well…Pool Dude shouldn’t be too infuriated. He forgot to pick up his check last time he dropped by. So even if nothing gets done or fixed, at least he’ll walk away with a hundred-and-a-quarter in his hand.

But now I can’t take poor l’il Ruby the Corgi for a walk, because we’ve gotta wait around all morning for Pool Dude to show up. If he ever does.

huh!  Y’know…you don’t think (well, at least I don’t think) about how much of your day’s organization depends on the stack of chores you have to do first thing in the morning. Dork up even one of those, and your whole darned day is likely to be dorked!

Hmmm… Ever think you went into the WRONG BUSINESS?

Pool Dude gets $125 to come once a month and maintain the Hole in the Ground Into Which to Pour Money. He’s here…oh…maybe half an hour.

Consider that. If he has a half-dozen customers a day, AND he only works five days a week, then…hmmmmm…. 6 customers x 5 days/week = 30 customers a week.

So… 30 x 125 = $3750 a week.

LOL! Can that be right?

Naaaahhh…couldn’t be. It’s English-Major Math.

First off, snabbing six customers a day would be quite a marketing trick, especially since the woods are full of pool dudes AND cleaning your pool is not very difficult — a large proportion of pool owners take care of their holes-in-the-ground themselves.

But…but…even if he had only half that many customers, he’d still be making over $1800 a month. That would put a few McDonalds’s on your table. Especially since you could get away with not reporting whatever was forked over to you in cash. Hmmm…

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…  The deadbolt on the east side gate is busted.

Hooo-raayyyy! Now I get to sit around all day waiting for the locksmith to show up and fix that.  He’ll prob’ly show up around 4:40 this afternoon. Right?

Jeez. Makes living in a Box in the Sky look good.

****

Trash hauled to alley.

Deadbolt dorked with: still busted. So yeah: sit around all day waiting for the locksmith.

Colder’n’aBygawd out there.

Well. No: not really. Surely Bygawds make frost and snow. Cars on the street are not even slightly frosted. But…presumably for arcane reasons, it SEEMS preternaturally chilly outside this morning.

Hm. We’re told, via Google Gnus, that Southern California’s wind is expected to come up again today. That usually means we get some wind, too…but just now the air is still as Death. Dunno what’s up…and probably don’t wanna know what’s up.

The side gate to the backyard is busted. Well: its lock is busted. That means somehow I’ve gotta get Lock Dude over here to fix it. Which means I can’t go to the grocery store at my convenience.

LOL! Ain’t life rough?

Two careers I’m secretly glad I couldn’t even begin to qualify for: Pool maintenance dudette and locksmith.

****************

Gadzooks! It just goes on and on!

Stupidly, I got it into my little pea brain to toss the pooch in the car and take a li’l sight-seeing drive. Maybe go down to Encanto park…get out, explore around, chase a few ducks…i dunno. Just pass some time with relatively little annoyance and hassle.

Dumb, huh?

The result of this little fugue was that we spent the whole damn afternoon piddling around.

If Pool Dude showed up, I missed him (he seems not to have left a bill).

Deadbolt never got fixed or even looked at.

Wonder-Cleaning-Lady showed up at the door along about 4:30, just as I was about to plop my exhausted a$$ in an easy chair.

Well, I sure as heck can’t complain about this wonderful woman. All I can say is i can’t believe that woman cleans not one, not two, but THREE houses in one day!

Augh, is all I can say to that.