Coffee heat rising

funny

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Heah Come De Rain!!

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Wow! The Ruby and I just dodged inside in the nick of rain-time!

Failing to realize how fast the storm to the north was barreling our way, I fired up the ‘Cue and stacked my dinner on the grill.

Not one of my smarter moves.

Pressed for time, we got the chow inside — Ruby darting back and forth through the wind and around the lightning and thunderclaps.

Bolted (heh!) dinner.

Back outside: the grill was JUST….BARELY cool enough to close and cover with its plastic veil.

I hope…

But oh my… SO hot! SO humid!! So windy!!!

Something evil this way blows….

….

…and now the wind has stopped.

All is still.

Thunder rolls in from the north.

When you are a small dog. you hunker on the human’s bed and pretend you have no clue anything is up. When you are a small dog’s human, you hunker on your bed and hide under the covers.

😮

And the thunder rolls again…

“Another Beautiful Day in Arizona…”

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“…Leave us all enjoy it!”

LOL! That was the radio signature of a long-time talk-show host here in the earlier times of Arizona. He would sign on to his program and then crow,

It’s another beautiful day in Arizona!
Leave us all enjoy it!

LOL! Right: if 100 degrees and humid is beautiful, this morning is just GORGEOUS. 😮

Actually, it’s only 81 out there just now, at 7:20 ayem. So it’s not very hot at all. Objectively speaking. But it’s so damp that after circumambulating the park, my hair is wet!

That little jingle was the signature doodad of Jack Williams, who became mayor of Phoenix and then governor of Arizona. He was a pretty amazing guy, all things considered.

Arizona is — always has been — a strange place. Strikes you most when you look at its history and consider the characters who feature in that history. Jack Williams…good grief! Barry Goldwater…he actually was a pretty interesting guy, in person. Bruce Babbitt was cool — we knew him and his wife, Hattie.

Oh well. If hot, partly overcast, and muggy are characteristics of “another beautiful day in Arizona,” it must be pretty spectacular out there.

Let’s see…it’s mid-August now. So we’ve got another month or six weeks of this stuff. Ugh!

Gaaahhhh!

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One of the problems w/ being unemployed…uhmm, “retired”…is that your schedule (such as it is) is out out whack with everybody else’s.

11:30 a.m.

JUST ready to draw a bath, get dressed, and head out for errands. This, after loafing all morning playing computer games.

Arise from my leather throne. Stumble toward the back bathroom, reach for the tub faucet. And…

RRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

WHIRWHIRWHIRWHIRWHIR!!!

RRRR  RRRR RRRR!

oh holee sheeut!

Gerardo’s guys are out there cleaning up the unholy mess that is the yard.

Could he have told me they were coming today? Maybe even have let me know they were on the way?

Course not. What else does the Li’l Retired Woman have to do but sit around and twiddle her thumbs?

So now I can’t jump in the shower and get dressed.

Because as you know, the minute my clothes are off and my hair is sopping wet, it’ll be BING BONG!

Now I can’t prepare for the meeting I have with a client, because RRRR  RRRR RRRR! BLAST BLAST BLAST! THUMP WHUMP THUMP! is remarkably counterproductive to thinking through a problem.

Now I won’t have time to run by the store before the client gets here, because I’ll need to sit here and wait till the boys exit, stage left.

Now I’ll have to think through the stuff Client and I need to discuss…to the symphonic roar of weed whackers and leaf blowers.

Now I won’t have time, on the way to the grocer’s, to go by the office complex where the dermatologist’s office supposedly resides and try to find his place. (Yesterday’s expedition was a FAIL!)

LOL!

Isn’t it wacky that all it takes is ONE thing like that to dork up your entire damn day? At least half the things I needed to do this afternoon are not gonna get done.

😮  huh  o-:

Y’know, it doesn’t seem to me that, when I was younger, I used to have this problem. Yes, I would be annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of something I’d planned to do. Yes, it would (or at least could) dork up my schedule. But it didn’t bother me all that much.

It didn’t leave me feeling inconvenienced and pi$$ed.

Strange that I’d feel that much different about it, now that I’m old.

😮

Ohhhhhh sheeeUT! They had to replace a strip of piping: $120!

And, trotting around and inspecting, I see they had to replace a bunch of smaller stuff, too. Ugh!

That whole irrigation system needs to be rebuilt. I had it installed when I moved in here…what? Ten years ago? More than that???? And now, it all being plastic, it’s pretty well shot.

Question is: is it worth having the system dug up and replaced? That will be a several-thousand-dollar job.

And…well…y’know… I’m probably not gonna be here that long. Surely not long enough to recoup the cost of digging up and rebuilding the whole system.

One of three things is gonna happen:

  • I’m gonna drop dead (if I’m lucky).
  • I’ll survive a stroke or a heart attack and end up rotting away in some care home.
  • Or decrepitude will force me to sell the house and move into an old-folkerie.

Arrrrghhhh! What a golden, shining future!

Seriously…

If I were certain my son would move into this house when I’m gone, I’d have that system replaced right now. Then it would be a gift to him (of sorts…paid out of his future inheritance…). It would keep the yard running smoothly, and that would be one fewer headache he’d have to attend to when he moves in here.

Or sells it. If you know the irrigation system is cattywampus, you’re pretty well gonna have to get it fixed before you put the house on the market.

But…the future. Ahhhh the future. How DO you plan for something you can’t really know?

If I dropped dead tomorrow, my son could figure these things out at his leisure, and pretty easily. He being one of the brighter pennies in the Coin Collection of Humanity.

But dontcha just know that ain’t a-gonna happen? Women in my family who haven’t fu*ked themselves to death or smoked themselves to death have lived well into their 90s…with no medical care! They were Christian Scientists! Since I don’t smoke and I don’t frolic with strange men, the chances that I’ll last well into my dotage are pretty good.

Better yet: my Berkeley relatives stayed in their homes right up until the end.

Well, no; that’s not correct: my  great-aunt allowed her son to persuade her to move to an apartment in downtown Berkeley. Smart move, that: the cute little Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff house she lived in was infested with termites. Even though the neighborhood was still a galloping fine investment, it was one that would cost homeowners more and more as those houses aged, aged, and aged some more.

But…but…ahem! About those termites….

WHY DIDN’T GREAT-AUNT OR COUSIN KNOW ABOUT THEM?????

Possibilities:

* Good cousin told his mother to have the place inspected, and she blew him off with a fib to the effect that she had the job done and no termites were found.

* He clued her, but she blew him off with “yes, dear.”

* She had it inspected and got a “no bugs” report.

* She had it inspected, was told it needed an exterminator, and blew it off.

* Neither one of them thought of having the place inspected.

See what I mean about “GAAAH”?

Just stop the damn world so we can get off.

Seriously: I don’t want to leave conundrums like this to M’jihito. Not even one just conundrum.

Soggy Doggy Day

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Musical Instrument in the Sound of Freedom Band

Seven ayem: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch. Overcast. Humidity: 34%.

UGH!  Feels just like (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.

This kind of weather, right on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was typical summer weather. It rarely got as hot as Arizona does, but on the other hand. Arizona rarely gets as humid as Ras Tanura did.

Rasty Nasty, as my father called it. Aptly…

Just back from the mile-long perambulation around the park. Not too bad, thanks to the Rasty Nasty weather: relatively small Dog Parade. Most people who have any sense refrain from walking their dogs (and themselves) through this stuff.

Didn’t count…but I’d guess we passed about eight or ten dogs, all of them surprisingly well mannered. No lunge-fests. No attempted fights. So that was OK.

Thinking about my mother, as we strolled about. My. but she loved Arizona!  She even loved the roar of fighter jets training at nearby Luke Air Force Base.

My father loved Sun City: NO KIDS!!!!

LOL! He really disliked kids, especially those under about 15. How she persuaded him to let her have one escapes me.

But he loved her. He adored her. She was the center of his universe — seriously. And if she wanted a kid, she could have one.

Fortunately for him, because of her childhood malnutrition she couldn’t hold a pregnancy. I came along after half-a-dozen miscarriages. And I guess once she’d managed to go through one entire nine-month pregnancy, she figured enough was enough.

She spent TEN YEARS in Saudi Arabia, in monstrously uglier weather than we have here. She thought Arizona weather was balmy.

No kidding.

Heh! Most of the time it is, actually. This kind of humidity is rare in Arizona. .

Boyoboy, am I glad we’re not out there in Araby now, with the Arabs and the Israelis having at it full-bore. The Arabs, who identified us whiteys with the Jews, just hated Americans — they tolerated us because our thirst for oil was making their royal family very rich, indeed. But most of them would kill the average Aramco employee in the street, if they dared.

And with that conflict going on, they’d be a lot more likely to “dare” than normal.

All that notwithstanding: this balmy day is the type that makes me long for San Francisco.

When my mother’s upstate New York grandmother died of diabetes, the bereft widower shipped the kid off to the California Bay Area, whence her trampy mother had come. She was taken in by her West-Coast grandmother, a lovely old gal who was smart, hard-working, and incredibly unlucky to have given birth to a daughter who had some sort of mental or sexual disorder that turned her into a nymphomaniac. Said daughter went on about her trampy business, and my mother was cared for by her truly wonderful grandmother and her widowed aunt.

In a lucky break for my mother, her mother’s astonishing sexual adventures led to an astonishing case of uterine cancer — so we’re told. She died — so we’re told — when my mother was in her mid-teens, and my mother was left in Berkeley to be raised by said grandmother and aunt.

Truth to tell… I’ve found convincing evidence that her mother — my grandmother — did NOT die at that time. Apparently she put on a melodramatic show, the purpose of which was to convince the unwanted daughter that she had passed on to another plane…when in fact, the plane she passed onto was high society in San Francisco. She married an influential businessman in the City and apparently, like all the other women in the family who refrained from digging their own grave with a cigarette butt, survived well into old age.

Oh well.

My mother loved to pile up the day’s first mound of cigarette butts sitting on that back porch in her beloved Sun City house, listening to fighter jets roar in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Yes: incredibly, she liked the sound of F-16s.

Those things are SO LOUD we can hear them here in the ‘Hood, over 20 miles away.

And apparently sound carries better through humid air. On a day like today — damp, overcast, and hot — those planes sound like they’re just down the road.

Which, I suppose, they are…in relative terms. Soggy terms.

Cruisin’ and Musin’…

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Cruisin’: yes. Cruising through classic North Central neighborhoods, eyeballing the real estate: the big old classic ranchers on their half-acre+ lots, admiring how handsome they are and remembering what it was like to live in Phoenix’s version of Upper Richistan…

Musin’: ohhh yeah! Thinking about how I just did NOT fit in with Phoenix’s upper middle-class strata. How after all the time we lived on East Hayward, a block off the famous and ritzy North Central, I’d made one (count her: 1) friend, a woman who’d come from the same direly deprived middle-class social strata as I had. Remembering how much I loathed the snobs who lived in that neighborhood, and how much they seemed to disdain me.

As handsome as those big old 1950s ranch houses are, how beautiful their emerald-green irrigated lawns, I would never want to go back there to live.

Still…it was entertaining to wander through the old neighborhood, eyeballing those big old houses (and thinking “thank God I’ll never have to clean that thing, or get someone else to clean it!”). The places were, after all, handsome 1950s and ‘6os mini-mansions in the “ranch house” mode: sprawling one-story affairs, each in the middle of a vast yard. Any way you look at it, 3000+ square feet is a lot of real estate to keep clean, whether you push that vacuum cleaner yourself or whether you supervise someone else at the job.

Living in North Central wrecked our marriage. Though I was already a bit bored with married life by the time we moved there, I surely wasn’t ready to fly the coop. A couple years of being made to feel like Poor White Trash, though, did indeed push me over the border…into the Never-Never Land of Singletude.

It’s surely fun to drive around and look at real estate, though. Lately, I’ve been thinking more of going back and getting a Realtor’s license — as my mother did. But instead of trying to sell houses, as she attempted, my thought would be to write about real estate.

Even without a license, back in my Young Journalist days I was able to get a passel of assignments to write about the subject, mostly for the local city magazine and a local business journal. An old crony of mine was editor of a national real estate magazine, and he would give me assignments, too.

I think that rag is justly out of business — and he has retired. But there are other real estate rags. And if you’re not trying to make a living from journalistic writing, it doesn’t really matter much where you publish. What matters is wringing interesting assignments out of the editors. Take a look at these, for example. It’s not a bad market. Looks like there’s plenty of room to pick up fun and interesting projects. And being able to claim a license would make that pretty easy.

***

Time having passed…

Cruising the real estate ads, ogling houses in Tucson. That town has its own distinctive character…I could live there happily, if only my son weren’t way up here.

My best friend and her husband bought a house down there, after he got a job with VisionQuest, a nonprofit that wrangled junior delinquents. The architecture and interior design of Tucson real estate is distinctive…and it’s something I do rather like. If I’m to retire and leave lovely Phoenix — i.e., L.A. East — that would be one place I’d consider.

But the evening grows late. I tire. More real estate dreamin’ (or something!) tomorrow….

Retiring to the Life of Riley?

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Gettin’ old…gettin’ old. 

My son is beginning to fret, far more vocally than before, about my staying here alone in my middle-class four-bedroom house. Quite reasonable is his fear that I’ll trip (AGAIN!) and fall (AGAIN!!), but this time inflict some much more serious harm (breaking a shoulder was quite enough…) or even kill myself.

So he’s begun lobbying for me to sell this place and move into one of those horrid holding pens for old folks, like the one my father went into.

Now…my father went to sea all his life. He ran away from home at the age of 17, lied about his age, joined the Navy, and never looked back. And it was a good life: he earned a good living without a college degree (in fact, I don’t think he even graduated from high school). He saw the world — big time — there are not many countries outside the Soviet Union that he didn’t visit. And he landed a harbor pilot’s job in Saudi Arabia that, thanks to the hideous living conditions, paid enough for him to retire at the age of 50.

He did, eventually, have to go back to sea — he didn’t understand about inflation and so found himself short of enough to support himself and my mother for the rest of their lives. But it was only for a year or so.

After my mother died, he immediately moved into an old-folkerie — uhm, “life-care community” — where he lived out the rest of his life in brain-banging misery. No, not because of the institution, called Orangewood, which treated him well — after 30 years on tankers, he was used to crowded living conditions and bad food. But because he stupidly remarried and ended up stuck with with a harridan. He probably figured he could rebuild his former life by replacing my mother with another old gal. But…oh, my….

So my view of old-folkeries is tainted by his remarkably unpleasant experience…which admittedly was tainted not by the old-folkery itself but by the bitch he married.

Let’s suppose I were to give up on staying in my own place and succumb to my son’s demands that I move into an institutional setting…

What would you need to know about a place to live in your dotage?

  • What services and physical amenities would be needed for one to live on one’s own?
    • Meals (served in a student union-like setting)
    • Cleaning services
    • Repair services
    • Chauffeuring (in a limited way)
    • Power bills
  • Could you provide them for yourself?
    • I’m already doing that, except for the chauffeuring…and we do have plenty of those services hereabouts
  • How much would providing them cost?
    • Certainly not as much as your entire net worth, which you pay to get entry to one of those places

What attracted my father to the whole idea of Orangewood, at the outset?

  • He didn’t want to deal with the work of maintaining a house, i.e.,
    • yard work
    • repairs
  • Utility bills were probably included as part of the monthly Orangewood bill
  • Meals were provided
    • He didn’t have to make regular or large grocery-store runs
    • He didn’t mind institutional cooking
  • Orangewood staff would drive inmates to doctors & other destinations
    • In fact, I think they had a bus service that would tote the inmates to grocery stores. Yea verily…I do remember he and Helen ended up sitting for hours in some doctor’s waiting room until the OW bus showed up to drive them home. Hardly ideal!!!
  • He was used to living in an institutional setting, and did not mind cramped, noisy quarters

The fact is, he probably would have been fine there if he had not become involved with Helen. This hints that trying to replicate what made you happy in your previous life is not a good idea.

  • There was no way another woman could replace or duplicate my mother
  • The apartment quarters were too cramped for a couple to live in comfortably unless they were hardly ever home.

If this observation is accurate, then it would seem you have two choices:

  • Don’t remarry or otherwise try to rebuild your prior lifestyle. Engage the new life and do as much as possible in new ways and different ways.
  • If you just must remarry, do not imagine the new married life will be anything like your prior lifestyle. ENGAGE CHANGE and build an entirely new outlook and lifestyle in the new married life.

Why did my mother not want to move to Orangewood?

  • She loved that house in Sun City. She repeatedly told me how much she loved the house and liked living there.
  • She had dear friends out there.
  • She had no desire to leave those friends or build a new social circle
  • After a lifetime of major moves, she probably had figured the move from Long Beach to Sun City would be the last household move she would have to make, and she didn’t want to do it again.

Why might she have been willing to move?

  • Orangewood was within walking distance of my house (but she couldn’t or wouldn’t walk that far)
  • Luke Air Force Base generated a LOT of noise (although she was not bothered by it)
  • She might have felt safer, given her burglar paranoia
  • She would have been closer to fancy shopping centers
  • Although probably unaware of this: she would have had access to better doctors and medical facilities

None of these were strong enough motives to make her want to move.

 What are the pro’s & cons of my own place vs an OldFolkerie? Can these be weighted for comparison?

Pro’s

Staying here:

  • Maintain independence
  • Yard
  • Private pool
  • Spare room for guests
  • Quiet: privacy
  • Full kitchen
  • Separate freezer
  • Indoor, private garage for car
  • Own washer & dryer

OldFolkerie:

  • Communal living: meet new friends
  • Communal living: authorities keep eye on you
  • Relieves my son of responsibility
  • Bus to take you places

Is there a way to replicate the benefits of an old-folkerie?

Along those lines, note this site: https://my.aarpfoundation.org/ Many resources that could help you stay in your home.

Weighted value of pro’s & con’s:
(Sorry: WordPress will NOT let me format this table sanely…and just now I’m not in the mood to retype the whole thing…)

Issue/item Cons, my pl Pro’s, my place Cons, OW Pro’s, OW Real & potential drawbacks
Independence 2 10 1 2 Risk of fall
Yard 3 10 10 0 No yd @ OW
Private Pool 3 8 10 0 Expense, risk
Privacy 5 10 8 1 Limited, OW
Full kitchen 0 10 9 1 OW: no full kitchen
Sep freezer 0 10 10 0 OWs: none
Private parking 0 10 5 5 OW: none
Own w/d 0 10 10 0 No w/d in apt.
Hired workers 2 10 5 5 n/a
Taxi/Uber 3 10 3 10 T/U: about the same
Trans included 0 10 8 8 Slow, PITA; no transit officially “included” at my place
Meals 8 10 8 5 OJ food was awful! Limited mealtimes
Frees Son 10 2 2 8 Need to find services to help when he is unavailable
Social life 8 2 3 7 Need to reach out to make friends here
Sum above 54
Cons, my place
 112 Pro’s, my place
 92
Cons, Orangewd
 52 Pro’s, Orangewd

 

If this list is reasonably complete (is it??), from my point of view: the pro’s of living at my place outweigh the pro’s of Orangewood by more than twice; the con’s of living at Orangewood outweigh the cons of staying here by almost twice.

If fear of a catastrophic fall or a sudden health emergency is the main motivator for institutionalizing oneself, would it not make as much sense to ALWAYS CARRY A CHARGED-UP PHONE or one of those call-for-help buttons?

Either of those is infinitely cheaper than forking over the value of your home plus still more of your assets to some institution. And, IMHO, infinitely better  than consigning yourself to a prison for old folks.