Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

If you want a job done right…

by

…DO IT YOURSELF, dammit.

The problem with cleaning ladies is that when they don’t know what to do with something, they take it upon themselves to invent something to do with it. And that invention is rarely anything you or I would think of.

I like to hide a front door key outside, in a truly weird place, so that I can get into the house if I lose my regular keys. This has saved my tuchus twice in the years that I’ve lived here, and I have NO reason to want to change that.

Well, apparently Wonder-Cleaning Lady thinks that’s just silly. By this morning’s early light, I discovered she took the front door key out of its hiding place — inside a hummingbird feeder — filled up the feeder with sugar water, hung up the feeder, and put the key….WHERE??????

When I got home w/ the dog this a.m. I couldn’t find my key ring. So I went to look for the key in the bird feeder…and…NOPE

Holeee shee-ut!  Now I couldn’t get into the house, not for love nor money.

Eventually I did find a key. Not THE key, but at least one that works. Later on today, then, I’ll have to drag this key over to the hardware store and have a couple of copies made. Find new hidey-holes for them where the burglars and the delinquents across the street can’t find them. That’ll soak up half the day.

Why would you think a person would put something in a specific place unless the person WANTED the thing in that place?

This will form a nice little distraction from lunch with my son, as planned. Don’t know what time the hardware store opens on Sunday…probably not before noon: whatddaya bet? Maybe not at all, on a Sunday.

****

Next week’s Project from Hell will be to find out if I can get my parents’ “cremains” away from the mortuary in Sun City where the Evil New Wife’s relatives deposited them — without bothering to consult me.

These urns of ashes, I would like to move to the close in the church that I attend, where I wish to get myself deposited.

Turns out the rip-off artists in Sun City CHARGE YOU TO MOVE YOUR DECEASED PERSON’S ASHES out of their effing mortuary! It’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars just to get them out of there and move them down to the church.

I may be talking with a lawyer about that.

My father died of a stroke that turned him (briefly) into a vegetable. Between the time the stroke hit and the time he died, he had no consciousness of anyone around him.

Meanwhile, the hag that he’d married after my mother died was THE single nastiest person I have ever met. He was miserable with her. A number of tartly funny stories depend from those circumstances…among them his strategy of going out into the parking lot and sitting in the car all day long to get away from her, and his secret flight to another old-folkerie, where he contrived to rent a studio on a month-to-month basis, equip it with a TV set, and sit there all day in front of it.

He would tell the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be worked on. Day after day…. Incredibly, she was SO astonishingly stupid that she believed it!!!

Well.

She did...until some mutual friends came over for bridge one evening. As they sat there, the “friends” announced they had discovered THE MOST AMAZING COINCIDENCE!!!

They’d been over at the other old-folkerie to visit a friend, and while there had seen a list of residents’ names…that had my father’s name on it!

Ohhhh boy oh heee hee, wasn’t that the most AMAZING coincidence!

Pissed, my father growled that it was no coincidence: he had a place there.

😀

As you can imagine, this cast a bit of a pall over the bridge evening.

Incredibly, it did not bring an end to the miserable marriage. He was afraid to divorce her because, wailed he, she’ll get all my money!

Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to re-earn the $100,000 inheritance his own mother had squandered on spiritualists and on building a mansion in Ft. Worth. So…money was a bit of an obsession for him. So, incredibly, he was willing to spend the last years of his life in misery if that was what it took to hang onto the precious money.

She had inherited that amount from her father, who was a buffalo hunter, trading hides out of Oklahoma and Texas. Apparently a LOT of money was to be made in exterminating the native wildlife, especially when that wildlife’s hides could be turned into hats and coats. She herself was mostly Choctaw Indian…apparently one with no compunction about clearing the plains of her people’s livestock.

A hundred thousand dollars at the turn of the twentieth century would be like about a million dollars today.

Now….if I’d possessed even half a brain, I would have said to him, “Daddy, she’s NOT going to get your money. I’m married to a lawyer who’s with one of the most powerful law firms in the state — quite possibly in the Southwest. She will have no claim on an estate that you owned before you married her.”

But no. Of course not. Proof positive that I do NOT possess half a brain. It never entered my mind to ask the then-husband about this. It never entered my mind to ask him to assure my father that the Dragon Lady was not going to clean out his savings.

So, he stayed miserably married to her until a stroke carried him away. He managed to transfer most of his life savings to me, which is why I own my home outright and why I will have something to leave to my son.

Ugh. What a way to earn a living, eh?

😮

Ohhh well. When I talk with our priest next week, I’ll ask how I can extract their Cremains from the Sun City rip-off artists, and also arrange to have myself disposed of down at our church.

This is not very respectful to my father’s memory: he hated loathed and despised organized religion. But…he ain’t here, folks. I am. And I hated, loathed, and despised living in Sun City. I ain’t about to be disposed of out there. But since I have no other family but my son, I do want their remains with me.

It’s the principle of the thing.

Southern California Dreamin’

by

{Chortle!} I was gonna title this post “Memories of the Ridiculous and the Weird.” 😀

Idly daydreaming, I happened to cast what remains of my mind back to the time when my mother and I moved from San Francisco (where I went to junior high school) to Long Beach, California (where a change of jobs meant a change of seaports for my father).

My goodness. What a weird time.

When we got back from Arabia, I was in the sixth grade — and literally years ahead of my new San Francisco classmates, who themselves were in a pretty tony, pretty high-octane school.

At Ras Tanura’s American school, there were only about 15 kids in my grade — give or take a couple. Stuck on the shore of the Persian Gulf, we didn’t have a lot to distract us from our studies, and even if we did…the studies were pretty darned basic.

After my mother persuaded my father to let her and me go home (the excuse being that I was too sickly to stay out there any longer in Hell By The Seaside) (sickly: yes, that was pure, handsomely engineered bullshit), we settled in San Francisco, within walking distance of a California State University campus. This university prided itself on its college of education, and in connection with that august institution, it ran a K-6 school in Parkmerced, the apartment development where we settled.

What incredible luck!

The school was well in advance of most American public schools — at least, of those in California — and not only did I have the head start of spending six years in the high-test grade school in Ras Tanura, I also got several years of private, one-on-one tutoring on the theory that I was too sickly (heh!) to continue going to class with the little beasts that inhabited the company school.

By the time we got back to the States, I was far ahead of my contemporaries in the Parkmerced school (who were far ahead of their own stateside contemporaries), so I happily loafed my way through the last vestiges of grade school and then bounded into a more-than-half-way-decent San Francisco junior high school.

It was there that I got it into my pea-brained little head that I must grow up to be an astronomer.

* Nevvermind that girls did not go into science in the 1950s.

* Nevvermind that math was not my thing.

* Nevvermind that language and writing absolutely, obviously, spectacularly were my thing.

No one cared, because girls didn’t need any of those things to cook Jell-O, raise kids, and sew shirts. So I proceeded toward my destiny.

Nevertheless, I did insist in taking what was then called “five solids”: five courses with actual substance, rather than a combination of things like dance, P.E., sewing, cooking, and whatnot with the non-negotiable required courses in math, foreign languages, and English.

*****

After a couple years, my father changes jobs, and now he’s sailing out of Southern California. My mother and I move to Long Beach (don’t ask!) so as to be closer to where he came in to home port.

Turns out the public schools in San Francisco were superior to those in Long Beach by HUGE orders of magnitude.

Suddenly, I hit the National Honor Society without bestirring my little brain. My grades were in the stratosphere. AND…and I was fluent in French, the language I’d chosen as part of my high-school requirements.

Fluent, that is, compared to the teacher in the new high school.

No kidding. The poor woman was trying to teach French, but she didn’t speak French!

heeeeeee!

Before long, she figured out that I did…and before long after that, she had me teaching the class!

No kidding. At the age of about 14, I’m teaching sophomore-level French to my astonishingly ignorant little contemporaries in a Southern California high school!

Ahhh, the state of American education.
What a place!

This went on for two or three years, until my father had a brilliant idea: he could use my cleverness (and six years of REAL basic education in Saudi Arabia) to get himself out of his hated job and into retirement in low-rent Arizona, where he figured he and my mother could afford to live even if he retired early.

So they break out the typewriter and shoot off a letter to the University of Arizona (no, they didn’t know where that was, other than that it was in the state where their coveted destination of Sun City existed), suggesting that the UofA should accept their brilliant child a year before she finished high school.

To their astonishment, forthwith came a reply: Why shore! Send her right along!

Sheee-ut!

Sooo, it was off to Tucson, wherein resided the University of Arizona…without ever having dipped a toe in a calculus class or in whatever California taught in fourth-year high-school math and science classes or in a final year of French or…godlmighty.

Next forthwith: a Phi Beta Kappa key. (eyeroll) Ohhhh well. WhatEVER.

Meanwhile, my mother’s lifetime best friend, a lumbering 300-pound woman named Anna (no kidding: Anna’s real weight was unknown because no scale would measure that high) resided in Long Beach, overseeing the rearing of her semi-delinquent grand-daughter. This — the overseeing — because her own daughter, Ingrid, was not at all up to raising kids.

Ingrid was…well…stupid. Yes: that’s the only word for her. I think, in retrospect, she was probably mentally retarded, to coin an offensive old-fashioned term. She was, however you want to put it, non compos mentis.

Her daughter grew up batsh!t crazy, probably because Ingrid had no clue how to bring up a child. Why? I cannot imagine…other than that poor Ing was none too bright.

Her daughter — Roberta — was quite bright, though. Bright and mightily deprived of the advantages that somehow I contrived to get. So…as she surfed into adolescence, she ran amok!

You can imagine the opportunities for smug gloating this predicament afforded my mother. 😀 Gawd help us.

***

Anna: she was no mere ordinary woman. She was a wonderful woman.

A trapped woman. As working-class women were, in that generation.

What possessed America to waste SO much human potential?

 

Losing What Little Remains of My Mind…

by

At this rate, it doesn’t take long to lose it all….that’s f’r sure!

GAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! 

How can I say how baroquely I have had it, had it, HAD IT with life in the fu*king 21st century?!???

* How do I hate the electronic detritus?

* How do I hate spending day after day after day without seeing another live human face?

* How do I hate wrestling with hardware — of all varieties?

* How do I hate wrestling with software — of all varieties?

* How do I hate struggling with chores that used to be done routinely by workmen?

* How do I hate having the car’s mechanical work done by some chain-store operation, instead of at the defunct small-town-style Chuck’s Garage, with the trusted, reliable, and faithfully HONEST Chuck in charge?

Gerardo (Yard Dude) and his guys trimmed the effing palm trees that some idiot prior homeowner planted around the effing pool.

Every time they do that, they dump equipment-busting detritus into the drink. It takes a good hour to fish it all out and vacuum the leaves and grit off the bottom of the effing pool. In 110-degree heat. The result: I’m not only at the end of my rope just now, I’m far, far beyond it.

That is literal truth. Just now I’m sitting in the family room, sweat rolling off my face and soaking into my shirt, YELLING at the goddam computer because my fingers will NOT hit the keys and all I want do is MAKE IT GODDAMN STOP!!!!!!!!!

arrrrrrrhhhhhggggg

I need to run down to the Sprouts and pick up something to eat. But honestly…I’m afraid I’ll kill somebody (possibly myself included) if I get in the car and drive off down the road.

grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I ask you. What kind of MORON plants PALM TREES around a flicking swimming pool?

An Arizona gringo moron (probably imported from Ohio), that’s what kind.

Mr. & Mrs. WonderAccountant had their accursed poolside palm trees cut down. No doubt…uh oh. ….Ohhhh shee-ut. Has the accursed pool pump cut out? Hold the phone…

*****

Nope. It’s still running.

Why does it look, from here, like it’s stopped dead?

Optical illusion, apparently.

If only all of life in the desert were an optical illusion…..

Daily Doggy-Walk

by

6:15 a.m.: Just back from a mile+ doggy-walk. Hot and humid: 98 degrees with 22 percent humidity.

The weather kept most the stupes inside this morning, though. So…that was nice.

We walked across a southerly street populated with big old classic North Central houses on big old classic irrigated lots. Whew! I am sooooo glad I no longer have to take care of one of those places! Even with a cleaning lady coming on once a week, keeping everything clean and running was a bitch of a job.

Here — in a house half the size of our li’l mansion and absent the kid, the husband, and the large dogs — the house stays pretty clean even with a cleaning lady surfacing only twice a month.

At any rate… We saw a white golden retriever over there, the spitting image of the Late, Great Charley the White Golden Retriever.

I don’t know if M’hijito is going to try to replace Charley with another golden...or with any other dog. He works out of his house, ever since his employer discovered how much moola is to be saved by shutting down the big offices and parking workers in front of their home computers.

That would, in theory, allow him to snab a puppy. Except…a puppy demands time, and all of his time is occupied with office work. In theory, it ought to be possible to socialize a pup to Life with Humans when you’re working from home…but…nice theory! He can’t be jumping up every half-hour to attend to a puppy while he’s supposed to be engaged in company work.

Welp…I’d better get up and get something to eat. Or…something…

And so, away!

MAKE IT STOP, LORD!

by

7:14 a.m., and it’s already ONE OF THOSE DAYS!

Out the door with the dog as dawn cracked. We try to get an early start by way of avoiding the Dog Parade: everybody and his little brother, sister, cousin, aunt, and uncle is out by dawn at this time of year. Especially on a day like this: it’s hot, humid, incredibly muggy.

Around the circuit we go, dodging dogs as we trot along. Hotter. Muggier. Ickier. After an hour of trudging, we round the corner up the street from our house, and….

DAMN!!!!!

There’s Gerardo and his guys up in the palm trees, hacking out dead fronds and dropping them into the pool.

The pool that was just cleaned the day before yesterday, to the tune of a bracing bill.

Heh! Today the tune is ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROOOOOOOAAARRRR: blowers and gasoline-powered saws going full-tilt.

Now I’ll have to call Pool Dude and pay him AGAIN to clear that mess out of there. Gerardo’s guys will try to clean it out as best as they can, but they don’t have the equipment to really do the job.

Fine way to start the day, hm?

Already tired, hot, sweaty, frantic-made, and depressed.

Walked by my friend Marge’s house while we were out. Pretty clearly she’s no longer there: either she’s passed, or they’ve dragged her off to the dreaded old-folkerie.

It’s kind of a cute house, in a bourgeois way: classic Southern California tract house. The neighborhood is nice, occupying what once were horse pastures and cotton fields. This area was all rural when I used to drive through it on the way from my parents’ house in Sun City to my job in downtown Phoenix. Now: all Mittel-America.

Marge had paid off the house, figuring to leave it to her son when she died. But he pre-deceased her. So presumably it will go on the market in the near future.

It’s a ways from the Bosnian Empire. But…frankly, I wouldn’t want to live there, even though the street itself is extremely pleasant.

* It’s just a block from Main Drag North, once a country lane…now more like eight lanes. It’s a major commuter thoroughfare in from the west side now, just PACKED with traffic during the rush hours, and pretty frantic any other time of day. Too much noise, to much carbon monoxide, too many fruitcakes.

* The houses are pretty old, and so require constant maintenance and repairs. My house is expensive enough in that department…and in comparison to Marge’s place, it’s a mere youth.

* Speaking of expense, all those houses up there are on irrigated lots. While this keeps the water bill down — flood irrigation doesn’t use city tap water — it means you have to maintain a third of an acre (or more) of grass. You don’t even want to know what Gerardo is gonna charge for working on those damn palm and citrus trees this morning. And I have gravel landscaping…so he and his guys don’t have to mow every week or two.

With increasing frequency, I contemplate where I would like to move, if I could get away from here.

SDXB and NG are in Sun City — last I heard from him, he appeared to be about on his last paws. He’s not answering the phone and not returning calls…so I figure if he’s still living, he’s probably in a hospital or old-folkerie.

Personally, I’ve lived in Sun City, and I ain’t a-doin’ that again.

Truth to tell, there really isn’t anywhere I’d rather be than here. And…for what it costs to get yourself into one of those warehouses for old folks, I could hire someone to come in and take care of me.

With the Baby Boom Generation entering senilitude, there are more and more businesses and organizations that will come to you and keep you going until you’re on your last paws. Recently learned about an outfit that will come to your house and bring food to you. Plus we have an army of freelance cab drivers out there in the form of Lyft and Dial-a-Ride — on top of the traditional taxi services. Frankly, I think if you know what you’re doing, you probably can arrange to get all the services that you’d need delivered in your home.

Now, I expect, is the time to find out about those businesses and create a list of them, with contact info.

Saved! In one small way…

by

So, as I was bellyaching earlier this morning, some idiot dumped a haystack outside my back gate into the alley, meaning I have to haul my trash around Robin Hood’s Barn to reach the designated garbage barrel.

But lo!!! Times change fast!!

The City just sent a giant garbage truck up the alley, accompanied by a bull-dozer. Dozed the debris pile into the truck. And off they went!

So now I’ve called off Gerardo (or tried to: he’s not answering his phone). He would’ve socked me with a nice bill for hauling all that stuff off to the dump.

Sorta amazing, because I thought the city trucks weren’t supposed to pick up loose trash in the alleys. In some neighborhoods that don’t have alleys (usually in tonier precincts), people put out trash at the curb in front of their houses, and the city sends around bulldozers and trucks. But if you have an alley (as we do) you can’t just toss loose trash out there.

Huh. One of the other neighbors must have called and complained.

Ohhhh well…$50 plus the cost of the county dump’s entry fee that I didn’t have to pay Gerardo. Yay!

A-a-a-a-n-n-d…

HOLY Doggerel!

Glance up from this blog squib and see, through the back patio door, dear Ruby out there, INSIDE the pool fence! She’s prancing along the edge of the drink.

Jayzus! Does this stuff never stop?

Take a deep breath. Fake placid calmness. Stroll outside. Wave a doggy-treat. Call the dog.

Mercifully, the doggy-treat works. She comes a-running.

Mercifully, she does not slip and fall into the water.

{sigh}

So I suppose we’re actually saved in TWO small ways.

Stop the world!
I wanna get off!