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Doggy-Walk in the Time of Alzheimer’s…

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Heeeeee!  Or is it Alzheimer’s in the Time of Doggy-Walk? Darned if I can tell! 😀

Ruby and I charge out the door about the time dawn cracks. Soooo hot and humid out there, it feels like Saudi Arabia in the summertime…. except here we don’t have a Persian Gulf three blocks from our house.

Seriously…think I remarked once before that lovely Araby was so humid that sometimes you could be standing outside under a clear blue sky and it would start to rain on you. Not a bit would I have been surprised to see that happen this morning, as we circumambulated the park

Only seven dogs were out for walks this morning, and it was too hot for Ruby to do much lunging at them. So that was…refreshing.

Clothes drenched by the time we get back…jeans soaked with sweat. Now I’ve gotta do ANOTHER load of laundry this morning. Washed all the laundry y’day, which took half the day. Sure could do without a second act of that play!

Ohh well.

Also now, I’ve got to traipse back down to the grocery store. Tried to evade the long trek to AJ’s by shopping in Trader Joe’s yesterday.

BUT

Ringy-ding ringy-dingy ringy-dingy!!!!

Computer tech on his way over here.

Sumbiche.

This requires me to remember why I called. And y’know what? I don’t!

The laptop is running fine.

So is the desktop.

WTF?

Just as I was about to go out the door!

And…THERE we have our memory problem!

I have no clue why I called those folks.

Hmmmmm…. Need to make an AJ’s run…not that I can remember what I needed to buy…ohhh well.

Did you know you can buy these things on Amazon?

Got a distraction goin’ on. Outta here!

Quack Day

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A-n-n-d…speaking of doctors, as we were yesterday…in a few minutes I need to head off to a dermatologist. One of my fingernails is lifting right off its bed — for, as far as I can tell, no good reason. I haven’t hurt my hand, and none of the other nails are doing that.

Well…no: not so. You could argue that the thumbnail is starting to do the same thing.

Hmmmmm…. An infection, maybe? Far’s I can remember, I haven’t stuck my paws in any caustic solutions. If I had, you’d think all the nails on that hand would be acting the same way.

This guy is a partner of the beloved Young Doctor Kildare, who once again has left the practice of medicine to take up the leadership of a charitable organization. I hope he and I get on (I adored YDK!), because these are my “doctors in the wild,” as the Mayo calls them. That is: doctors who do NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic.

😀  The Mayo is truly wonderful. But their doctors’ offices are located halfway to Payson. No kidding: they’re on the far northeast side of Scottsdale, almost an hour’s drive from here.

So I’m not inclined to safari all the way out there for just any li’l ailment that I don’t consider life-threatening.

***

So it was over to said local doc. No satisfactory explanation or diagnosis was given. But they want me to go to a neurologist.

And of course, getting in to see this worthy entails a whole new set of endless hoop-jumps! Goodie!

How do they get people to go to doctors at all, these days?

I am JUST NOT UP for this kind of hassle now.

So instead of hurrying home and making a new appointment with the new guy, I cruised up behind YDK’s offices, into a sprawling middle-class housing development of ticky-tacky stick-and-plaster homes.

My dear (late, absconded) friend Elaine and her (now late) husband lived there. I helped them fix up and paint the house when they moved in, which was how I got a good, clear, horrifying look at the place’s construction. What junk!!!! 

And when you drive around (and around and around and around and…) in there, what you see is square mile on square mile of junk.

How the Hell do developers persuade Americans to buy this stuff?

😀

In theory, it ought to be a nice place to live...but…but… Heh: but if you happen to look closely enough to see how the houses are built, you want to RUN away. The structures are as flimsy as flimsy can be. Really: if you’ve ever done any work on one of them, you know that “flimsy” overstates the quality of the construction out there.

So what you have in lovely Moon Valley is mile on square mile on square mile of tossed-together ticky-tacky. Expensive tossed-together ticky-tacky.

Well. Not spectacularly expensive — most of it isn’t, anyway, though there are some fancier(-looking) areas. But these are people’s houses. Houses that are supposed to last a generation or three.

Some of them, you’d be amazed to see last a decade, to say nothing of a generation.

****

Ohhh well. Here’s a rather interesting passage about a new theory of Alzheimer’s, speaking doctoring. It appears rather little is really understood about the condition…and it’s a condition that’s spreading to drastic proportions.

****

Tuesday
August 20

And now it’s quarter six, after several more sleepless hours. Might as well get up and walk the dawg before it gets hot.

What a life! Such as it is…

Fears

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What are you scared of?

We’re all scared of something, whether it’s a real something or a something we blow up all out proportion. Most of the time, the more we think about it, the more we scare ourselves. 😀

Me, I’m scairt of…what?

  • The local burglars. We live…what: about a mile?…south of a dire, drug-ridden slum. On the east, the ‘Hood runs adjacent to an aging, crime-infested apartment shambles. So we have a pretty high crime rate. Everyone here lives behind deadbolts and burglar alarms and steel security screens.
  • Crazies on the road. Every now and again, some hapless driver gets shot because they annoy a fellow homicidal driver. People carry guns around in their cars, and when they get mad, they break the things out and use them.
  • Along the same lines: crazy traffic. You have to stay alert every second you’re behind the steering wheel. If you don’t, you will get into a fine crash. Even if you do stay as alert as a cat after a bird, eventually you probably will be rear-ended or side-slammed anyway.
  • The vicissitudes of old age. Just now I hurt. Have developed some new ailment that I never heard of. It does hurt, yes. And no one seems to have clue to how to treat it or whether it will go away. The Mayo has suggested a drug that will make me sicker than the disease…so…yeah.
  • Doctors. Not my favorite species. And speaking of “just now,” well…just now I’m having wayyy too many dealings with them.

LOL! So it goes.

My mother was scared. Of everything. In particular, she got it into her head that a perp was going to climb up on the roof of their car (which in Sun City was parked under an open carport), open the hatch to the attic, jump up into the attic, walk across a beam to the living room, cut a hole in the ceiling, and jump down into the house. Apparently this actually did happen out there, at least once. It must have been reported in the Sun City newspaperoid.

But….but…if she was so scared of the bogeyman jumping down into the living room from the attic, why not install a burglar alarm in the attic? It would’ve been easy to do.

Weird, though, that I never thought of that until just this minute. Why don’t people think of the obvious?

Probl’y she was afraid my father would pooh-pooh her, tell her she was a lunatic. He was an artist at little-womaning. But if she could show him a news story proving it had happened, surely he could’ve been persuaded. Maybe.

Even SDXB, the Man of Steel, carried a loaded pistol in his car’s glove compartment. Just in case, y’know. And he slept with a shotgun right at hand.

A good thing, despite the implicit paranoia. He needed that shotgun when he got up at 2 in the morning to find a pair of perps had sliced out a window pane and were climbing through the gap into his living room.

Ohhhh well.

I was gonna drive downtown to the Cathedral this morning — it being Sunday — in hopes of picking up old friendships from the choir and…maybe???…even seeing if I can get back on the choir.

Here at the church in uptown central Phoenix our choir director retired. His replacement changed the gist of the choir’s offerings — as was his perfectly reasonable right. The new repertoire was — and is — way, WAY over my head. We had no music teaching where I grew up, in Saudi Arabia. So…I can’t read music unless I can hear it.

That makes it impossible for me to perform with the New! Improved! All Saints choir. Had to drop out.

As it develops, a lot of the folks on the choir did the same: they ended up on the choir at the downtown cathedral. So…I’ve been thinking I would drive down there, sit through the service, and try to schmooze with the choir members a bit. Maybe even get back on the choir.

But…hmmmm….  Maybe not today. Given my current state of decrepitude, it’s just too dangerous to cruise the homicidal streets in the rain. It’s been pouring all night; no sign of a let-up.

Therein lies the barrier to following fellow ex-choir members downtown: “just too dangerous.” You have to park in a covered garage…and I do NOT feel safe there, not even in broad daylight. Certainly would not feel safe walking around there at 10:00 p.m., after choir rehearsal. Maybe if someone would go with me — I could park my car at their house, say — but to go down there alone? Not. So. Much.

So…yeah. An aspect of living in Phoenix scares me so much, I’m afraid to do something I miss terribly and very much want to do.

Scairt!

Soggy Doggy Day II

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Ick! It is SOOO HUMID out there at 7 in the morning that by the time the pooch and I got home from a leisurely mile’s stroll through the ‘Hood, I literally had to peel my jeans off my legs!

NASTY weather, hideously reminiscent of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…only without the beautiful beaches on the Persian Gulf. Just desert, repetitious middle-class tract housing, and swampy heat.

At the crack of dawn.

Garden spot, this….

Actually, it is a garden spot! 😀  Irrigated lots sporting bright green lawns; big ol’ 1950s ranch houses; huge and ancient shade trees; citrus trees abounding.

As we perambulated through the lower reaches of Upper Richistan, we passed a young dad pushing a pair of twins in a double stroller. Dad: white. Kids: brown. Cutest li’l thangs you ever saw in your life…and evidently adopted.

A couple of families over there have taken in youngsters from duskier races. A house on the main road into U.R. is home to two teenaged boys of the African-American persuasion; all the adults in the house are whitey-white. The young fellas like to practice basketball in the front yard, which is grand fun to watch.

As the sun has climbed into the sky, humidity is a balmy 30%. Clouds and haze lurk overhead. The AC labors mightily, groaning to keep the indoors moderately livable.

Loafing, I daydream about the Old Neighborhood, where DXH and I lived for well upwards of a decade after we were married. Loved that place!

It was so beautiful. Here’s the old house. It was so beautiful — even more so inside than outside. Built in 1929. Zillow claims it’s worth something over $1.2 million.

Yeah. Well…whatEVER.

It is a LARGE place, in a famed historic neighborhood, smack in the middle of the city. If you worked downtown, your commute would essentially be nil. Same if you taught at Phoenix College or worked in any of the gerzillion office buildings up & down Central Avenue.

I loved that house. Didn’t want to move. But…

We moved because we didn’t feel safe. The transients and the crime level in those parts will take your breath away. After a couple of hair-raising incidents — German shepherd notwithstanding — we moved to get away from the bums and the crime.

{sigh} I miss it, and I miss our classy neighbors.

But I don’t miss feeling scared half to death at night. Don’t miss the guy who broke in one night, chased off by said German shepherd. Don’t miss the guy who tried to break in, another night, but couldn’t get past the deadbolt. Don’t miss the bum who took up residence in D-XH’s car one night…he flew into a rage when D-XH had the nerve to climb in, start the engine, and begin to pull out of the driveway, headed to work.

No. Encanto is a beautiful historic district. But if you have any common sense, you don’t wanna live there.

Morning in Lovely Arizona…

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A Day Later…A Dollar Shorter

And now it’s 7:20 of a hot, muggy Friday morning. Just NASTY out there!

Ruby and I are back from this morning’s doggywalk, having dodged…well…not TOO many (for a change) “fur-babies” and their non compos mentis humans. Only two dogs were running around (illegally!) off-lead — we managed to stay out of their way. But OH!!! It’s SO HOT out there!

Well, I hafta admit, it’s not as miserable here as it was in Arabia at this time of year. Along about now, rain could coalesce out of a clear blue sky — that’s how humid it was. And every morning water would drip off the eaves as though it had rained…which it had not. But I will say…this morning it was soooo soggy and sooo hot out there that I was dripping wet before we got back to the house.

Sometimes, honestly….I would just like to move away from Arizona.

But where would I go?

Can’t afford the Bay Area, which I regard as “home.” So that’s out.
Loathe Southern California: it’s worse than here, not because of the weather but because of the bat-brained natives.

Not fluent enough in Spanish to move to Mexico.

Canada: tooooo bloody cold.

New Mexico: don’t know anybody there…too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. And effete.

I dunno…frankly, Arizona is at once the best and the worst of all possible worlds. Sometimes I wish I could have brained my father for dragging us here (it’s only 30 years too late for that!  😀 ) My mother loved it though, so Sun City was a nice way to wind up her life. He didn’t seem to mind the weather, but between Texas, Saudi Arabia, and the high seas, he didn’t know much of anything that was any better.

That poor man! After 30 years of hard, HARD work, penny-pinching every minute along the way, he finally managed to retire. Moved them to their dream home in Sun City, figuring to live out their lives in peace and quiet, parked contentedly in front of the TV.

And…yeah…  Within a few years, she’d killed herself. Puffed herself to death with her tobacco addiction.

Seriously: the woman was almost never without a goddamn cigarette in her hand. She would smoke while we were eating. Smoke and smoke and smoke in front of the TV. Smoke at restaurants. Smoke cleaning house. Smoke while she was cooking. Smoke while she was driving. Smoke in the bathtub. Smoke in the shower. Smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke…all the way to the grave.

I can’t even imagine how he was able to sell that house in Sun City: it stank so much of cigarette smoke! Presumably whoever bought it must have been rabid smokers, too. Or else not very bright. What. A. Stench!

Sometimes I wonder if she deliberately killed herself. By the end of the 1950s, it was widely known that tobacco smoking would give you cancer. Having watched her mother die hideously from a reproductive cancer, she lived in terror of the disease. But…apparently that didn’t scare any common sense into her head, not where the effing cigarettes were concerned. Really: she wasn’t stupid. Quite to the contrary. The only thing you can think is that she knew what she was doing and she did it on purpose.

My father smoked…but he sure didn’t smoke like that!

****

Cop helicopter circling overhead interrupted that grim little reverie. Grim to grim, eh?

He just took off to the west. Presumably either the perps escaped or the cops on the ground caught them. LOL! Why we always keep our doors and windows locked, here in lovely uptown Phoenix. What a place!

****
And, for the life of me, I canNOT make WordPress do what I want it to do. So this post is going online weirdly formatted. Sorry about that.

SURGE of Panic

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😀  Gosh, what could be better than starting your day with an adrenaline rush?

As dawn cracks, it’s off to the grocery stores and waypoints. Right?

R-i-i-g-h-t….

Get dressed.

Get the dog settled.

Load the car with iced water.

Find the shopping list.

Get the…

uh…

get the...

get the…KEYS!

uhhnhhhh…

Keys…NnnnnOo.

No, no, and no.

Jayzus. And that, my friends, was the high point of the day. Which tellsya something about how boring it is to live in a place where daytime temps exceed 100 degrees.

😀

The keys, the keys…where were they?

Stashed in the office deadbolt…where I always put them.  I must have looked right at them three times? Why didn’t I see them?

ohhhhh forgodSAKE! Wyrdpress has screwed up the formatting on this thing. Won’t let me fix it. Won’t fix it by saving to Word and copying back into WordPress.l Ohhhh SCREW IT!!!!!!!!!

Got other things to do than dork with computers. Posting…if the result is a mess, out it goes. If it’s more or less legible…good luck to ye, dear reader!