Coffee heat rising

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Colder Than a By-Gawd…again!

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LOL! That was one of my father’s common habitual sayings, come a chilly day: “It’s colder than a by-gawd out there!”

I always imagined he meant “bigod” and wondered how a Norman family name came to signify something extreme. But…hey…oh well.

Truth to tell, this morning it’s really not that cold out on the back porch. But the high overcast is keeping the sun covered, and so…I think it seems colder than it is.

Swiggling coffee that’s gone cold… I suppose one could bestir oneself to stumble across the room and zap a mugful of the stuff in the microwave, eh?

OMG
and
Arf Arf Arfety Arf!

Here’s Pool Dude, deeply beloved of Ruby the Corgi!

I do NOT know how she knows what day of the week it is and that a given day is Pool Dude’s appointed visiting day. But by gawd, she does. On no other day of the week does she sit by the window, watching and waiting for the guy.

That little dog is so in love with Pool Dude. Why, I have no idea: he seems like an ordinary enough kind of a fella. But…???  Something about the man just delights this dog no end. And when he does show up…omigawd, the frenzy of Dawg Joy!

Oh, well. This uproar bestirs me to get off my duff, stumble into the kitchen, and reheat my mugful of coffee, long gone cold.

And that little journey reminds me that I need to get even further off my duff and make a grocery-store run.

…And… How do I not wanna? Let me count the proverbial ways…

Wow! I’m in!!

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Dunno how, but for reasons unknown WordPress just let me back into Funny about Money.

Yeah. Here we are, coming onto midnight. The crazy-making Ailment is kicking up, making every tap on the keyboard HURT. And now the goddamn system goes down.

Yeah. Now I can’t get back into my li’l website.

Wander off. Go over to Dropbox. Mess with Google News. Dodge another gunshot. Wonder where the cops are (they usually show up when the bullets start to fly).

Put the dishes in the washer and turn on the machine. Come back to bed. Lift the dog onto the bed. Climb under the covers. Hear the cop copter returning…hmmmm…he’s a ways to the north.

That means the pistol-waving clowns are probably on Main Drag North.

Charming.

Oh well: at least they’re not in the back yard.

Rub CBD cream into the buzzing hands. Console self with reflection that the pain and tingling actually have backed off considerably.

Seriously: just now only the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands are buzzing like an electric current was flowing through them. Earlier, that buzz extended up the forearms to the elbow, up the lower legs to the knees, over the lips, and through the upper gums.

Palms and soles, I can live with.

Let the dog out. Wait till she does Her Thing and then call her back in — in addition to the melody of gunshots ringing out, it’s also the Coyote Hour. Those li’l pups jump over your backyard wall and will go after your dog if you’re stupid enough to let your dog out.

What. A. Place.

Dog gets on the bed.

Stick the new dirty dishes in the washer. Turn it on. Come back to bed. Rub CBD cream into the tingling hands.

Interestingly — oddly — the buzz of peripheral neuropathy has backed off a little. Not gone, by any means…but just now it’s significantly milder. BUT…whatever ails me is causing my fingernails to lift off their beds. That hurts, but not as much as one would expect.

Just what I need: to have my fingernails fall off!

😀

Ain’t life in Olde Age grand?

Wow! Clo$e call…

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Sometimes you accidentally do things that redound to your benefit….or magnificently against your benefit.

Check this out: I almost bought a condo right in this area. Smack in the middle of rapidly redeveloping downtown Phoenix. Now, our honored leaders are about to insert TEN HIGH-RISE APARTMENT BUILDINGS there.

Can you imagine what a zoo that place is gonna be?

All very stylish, no doubt. But crowded, hectic, noisy, and expensive. Very expensive. If you’ve ever lived in, say, San Francisco’s apartment/condo districts, you know whereof I speak.

Mercifully, just in time I recalled that crowded apartment living is not my cuppa tea (been there, done that!). A zoo like that would drive me out of what little remains of my mind.

So I decided against it…probably one of the smarter moves I’ve made of late. Property values here in the ‘Hood are going through the proverbial roof. Indeed, it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to stay here as the taxes rise. I want to leave this house to my son, but am kind of flummoxed about how to pull it off, especially if I have to go into an old-folkerie.

If the slum apartments across Conduit of Blight Blvd gentrify — as they almost surely will, in due time — property taxes in our neighborhood will hit the stratosphere. Don’t know that I’ll be able to afford that kind of annual hit.

My son has a decent job, so if and when he inherits the Funny Farm, he should be able to afford to stay here. If not, he can sell the place and pocket a nice chunk of dough. Or pay off his own house and move to a better place of his own choice.

He has remarked that he’d like to move to his father’s hometown: Grand Junction, Colorado. It’s the largest…uh…metropolis (heh!) on the Western Slope. And really: it is a pleasant place to live, if you like a slower pace. His grandmother lived in Grand Junction until the end of her life, at an advanced age, and she was very happy there. She lived to be 106.

I’m not sure he understands quite what that means. Small-town life is distinctively different from big-city life…which is what we have here in Phoenix. On the other hand, Grand Junction is not exactly Payson: it is a large small town, no doubt of it. His grandmother managed to keep herself busy all the time I knew her, engaged in state-wide politics. So…I guess if you work at it, you can build an interesting life in a place like that.

At any rate, speaking of “interesting,” I sure am glad I’m not in a downtown Phoenix condo just now. The place is already more “interesting” than one would like. Multiply that times ten and…well…it does make Grand Junction look good!

WHY restaurant food???

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As those who have followed Funny about Money for awhile know, dear Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend (SDXB) is a gifted and renowned cheapskate. The guy doesn’t diddle away money — any money — on much of anything. If the result ain’t worth the price, he ain’t spendin’ his cash.

Early on in our relationship, I learned that this principle applied to eating out. Dear Ex-Husband (DXH) and I ate out all the time, partly because over the years I had  become exceptionally bored with cooking and partly because it was somehow ever-so-much less annoying when the Kidlet refused to eat someone else’s cooking, as opposed to some damfool thing I’d spent half the afternoon preparing.

After I escaped our Home Sweet Home, I landed in an apartment complex where SDXB, his mother, and one of his daughters lived. And that was when I learned, to my astonishment, that he would not go out to eat restaurant food unless there was some dramatic special occasion for it.

Said he:

I cook better than about 95% of restaurants do.

  • Restaurant food is horrifically overpriced.
  • A nice home dining-room beats the ambience of a noisy, crowded restaurant, any day.
  • Why drive across the city when you can fix a better meal in your own kitchen?

Hmmmm… Well, thought I…yeah. But: anything to avoid work, eh?

Welp, over time I came to see the light. In fact, tossing a steak, a few French fries, and a veggie on the barbecue is one helluva lot less hassle than driving across the city to be serenaded by screaming brats, dreary Muzak, and a barrage of chatter while trying to communicate with some poor overworked waitress.

These were all in force the other day, when a couple friends of mine and I went out for lunch in a popular suburban restaurant here. And….

That was when SDXB’s lessons in fine cuisine came back to light and were mightily reinforced.

😀

WHAT a circus.

First thing you’ve gotta say about eating in restaurants: be grateful, be mightily grateful, that you are not an employee of any restaurant, especially not a worker of the “waitstaff” variety.

Migawd! Those women were working like the proverbial horses. Ambient noise was freakin’ unholy. The customers’ squalling, restless brats were terrible. The crowd, amplified by people waiting to be seated, downright defied belief.

Next thing you’ve gotta say: REALLY, truly…most of the time you’d do about 110% better to fix your meal at home. Or at least to buy take-out from a grocery store or maybe(!) a competent restaurant.

Next thing you can say: the food left a lot to be desired. Like…say…food. The mediocrity of what they served up: Good Gawd!

I could have prepared a meal out of a box that would have had more flavor and more interest than the puréed cardboard we received.

So…yeah. It’s true, what SDXB says: Better to eat at your own table, any day, than to trudge to a restaurant for a meal.

Ah, the Good Ole’ Days…

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Well, lookee here. This charming event occurred within walking distance of our beautiful old historic home in the Encanto district — the first house DXH and I owned together.

The Encanto/Palmcroft district really is a lovely area. I miss its pretty streets and friendly neighbors and beautiful park with its lakes, every day. I could walk to the grocery stores and the post office from my house. And did.

Actually…I could do that here, too. Older and wiser, though: I’m not that foolhardy. Today I jump in the car and lock the doors before opening the garage door to travel the few blocks down to the stores and such.

This is, after all, the Big City. A big, crime-ridden city.

Occasionally, I’ll drive downtown and cruise through that area, house-shopping: thinking maybe I’d like to move back. But…

But.. No.

It really is dangerous. Did we ever have some adventures in that house! And that was with 90 pounds of fur and fang as our room-mate….

My present area, while its ambience is a little more repetitively middle-class, is less than REAL safe for a lone woman to walk around in…but it sure ain’t like that place was.

Oh my goodness, so many adventures.

There was the night our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Wilson, awoke, got out of bed to stroll around the house, and spotted some guy sleeping on her back patio. Right outside her living-room door.

The night Greta the Ger-shep awoke in the middle of the night to find a prowler coming up the bedroom hallway. Somehow, she got between him and the door he’d come in. The panic was quite amusing.

The night my mother came down to stay overnight with me while DXH was out of town. We set up the sofa bed for her and get ready to say goodnight, when…she pulls a .38 out of her purse and sets it on the TV table next to her!

The morning DXH pranced out of the house, hopped into his car, and prepared to back out the driveway, step 1 in the journey to his office…. And found some very angry guy in the back seat. The fella was irked that anyone would have such bad manners as to wake him up at dawn!!!

That was life in the Encanto District.

It was so beautiful, so conveniently located, and the neighbors were so grand. But really: I’d never go back there again.

The Cracking of the Dawn

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Good grief. It’s all of 6:37 of a Sunday morning, running up to New Year’s Day.

One could say waaa! i wanna sleep in! Except that I’ve already done that. Went to bed with the sun last night, and now have had some unholy number of hours of uninterrupted sleep. That last adjective — uninterrupted — is the operative term.

When you get old, you can’t sleep at night. A rare occasion it is, when you manage to stay asleep until dawn.

Indeed, it’s not dawn yet, here in lovely uptown Phoenix. Dark as pitch out there, it is. Ruby wants to head on out, but I’m wary of running into a coyote or two at this hour.

That’s exactly what happened the other day: we strolled past a neighbor’s house and Wiley Coyote shot out from under a bank of shrubbery. Fortunately, he took off running down the neighborhood street…if he’d decided to grab a corgi to take to breakfast, there wouldn’t have been much I could do to stop it.

Before that happened, I had no problem taking Ruby out in the dark. The only coyotes that concerned me were the two-legged variety.

Almost 7 a.m. Still dark out there, or at least on the low side of dark. Too cold — in the low 40s — to enjoy a doggy-walk just now. We’ll need to wait until the sun comes up. If and when it ever does. Doesn’t seem to be overcast, so I reckon what we’re seeing out there is the tag end of the usual winter night-time hours.

Ruby, having stuffed herself with doggy breakfast, is again zonkered out on the sack. Wondering if I can manage to turn off the light and climb back under the covers without waking her.

Hung out with some friends yesterday afternoon. We went to lunch(oid) in a coffee shop on the west side.

You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a meal in a restaurant?  A long time, that’s for sure. DXH liked to eat in restaurants — and on a lawyer’s pay, he could afford it. SDXB hated restaurant food, and he resented paying for it. So after a few years in his household, I got out of the habit of eating out.

It was fun. SDXB is right, though: it ain’t hard to cook much better food in your own kitchen, for a whole lot less moolah.

Having picked up a number of his cheapskate habits, I must say that I do resent having to pay a hefty tip to the “wait-staff.” Seriously: if restaurants can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage, then they shouldn’t be in business.

Ruby has insinuated herself back onto the bed. Me, too: it’s cold in here, even with the heat blasting. And I’m sleepy…do not feel like getting up and rassling around. On the other hand…I’m hungry. And no one is going to hustle up some breakfast for me.