funny

Our honored website LET ME IN!!!  At least, it appears to have done so. Haven’t tried to hit “Publish” yet.

Mwa ha ha! That’ll be the acid test, I reckon. Or the beer test. Or something.

Gray and rainy out there: really a gloomy day! But here in Arizona, we don’t bellyache about rain. We’re thrilled out of our hot little minds to see water falling out of the sky.

At any rate: good thing I darted out the door this morning, en route to grocery stores and the like! Got there and back before the skies clabbered up. The spavined hip is fast  getting better: hardly hurt at all to walk up to the store. In another day or so, I imagine, the pain will be about gone.

Meanwhile, I’m finding that having an Uber driver live right across the street from me(!) is JUST THE BUSINESS. Seriously, having this guy and his colleagues in the offing will keep me on the road to all the destinations I’m used to visiting, and probably will rescue me totally from the busses and the streetcars. The Uber guys’ vehicles are clean and seem to be well maintained. And they show up forthwith, whenever you express a desire for a ride. Better than London taxicabs, even!!

My plan now is to hire these folks more often and maybe to have little gifts on hand for them. Tips, of course, are in order. But some other small lagniappe also will help to ingratiate them, over time.

Y’know…when we lived in London, we never kept or rented our own vehicle. Same was true during the entire ten years we lived in Saudi Arabia. We never owned a car! Wherever we went, we got there by cab or bus.

Soon enough, experience will tell us whether hiring a 21st-century American cabbie will do the same for us. Sincerely it is to be hoped: with any luck, most people will never need to own a car. Or want one!

Well. Hmmm….  You might want or need one if you have to ride someplace every goddam day. Going to work, for example.

But maybe not. When we lived in San Francisco, I rode the city bus to school every day. And as a practical matter, it was easier and faster than putting up my mother to hauling the car out of the garage and driving me up to the campus. My father went to sea, of course, so the home-to-work commute was moot. But my aunt, who lived in Berkeley, commuted by train five and six days a week to her job at the Crocker-Anglo National Bank, in downtown San Francisco. And she never owned a car. Or expressed any interest in having one. If they needed to go to a doctor or some such, they called a cab.

So…I’m thinking my son’s car-snatching caper may be one of the biggest favors he’s done for me in a long time. Imagine the amount of money I will NOT have to diddle away if I don’t have a car to diddle it away on!

Seriously: no gasoline, no maintenance, no parking charges, no repairs… Geez!

Meanwhile…heh! Contradictorily enough, today probably would not be the best of all possible days for public-transit commuting. It’s been raining all day. Not hard: just drizzle drizzle drizzle: endlessly soggy.

But it used to be like this in San Francisco about half the time…and it never bothered me. This is why you have a thing called an umbrella. And a raincoat. 😀

Wow! What a beautiful morning!!!

The Hound and I perambulate our favorite slabs of our pretty little neighborhood. Oh, my goodness: did we fall into it when I bought my first house here!

We rolled out of the sack at the crack of what can only be called a GORGEOUS dawn. Garbed the human. And shot out the front door. Silken high clouds float in a turquoise sky against the orange morning light. Other humans are out strolling around with their own funny-looking little dogs. Everyone behaves as though they’re friendly and pleased to see you.

{chortle!} People are just enchanted  by the mere existence of a corgi: a walking bundle of cuteness. They come over and admire. They dote. They want to  pet. Sooo funny!

Ruby is happy to accommodate their worshipfulness. She grins, she wags, she leans on her Cuteness button. Hilarious!

At any rate, we have fully loved up the neighborhood and been loved up by anyone who was conscious. And now we’re back at the Funny Farm, swilling coffee and munching chocolate.

And cruising the Internet, trying to find out more about my father’s Deep Southern roots.

That’s what my mother said about him: that his family came from the Deep South. The only representatives of that family that I ever met — besides my father — were his two brothers (and the wife of one). That: briefly. By then, these worthies were living in Texas. One eventually ended up chasing cows in New Mexico.

As my father used to say, the best thing about being from Texas is being FROM Texas: as far from it as you can get! 😀

He fled as far as he could flee, first by joining the Navy; then the Coast Guard; and then building a career as a deck officer on commercial tankers and freighters. Far as I can tell, it appears that his forebears came out of Western Europe — the Low Countries or possibly Germany — and arrived in the New World among the first waves of European escapees.

Apparently he also bore some Native American genes: Choctaw, from what I’m led to believe. That notwithstanding, in appearance he was about as Gringo as you can get. Which was as he preferred…

Well. Except for the black hair… 😀

Sniffing around the Web, one finds a surprisingly large number of people who bear his (odd!) last name. Dozens and dozens if them! So either his forebears were richly fertile, or a fairly large clad of them crossed the Atlantic over time.

Or a bit of both.

LOL! He didn’t care for children. Not at all! But my mother wanted kids.

He doted insanely upon my mother. Nooo way was he about to tell her “NO” in response to her craving to create a clan.

Luckily for him, because of her malnourishment as a child (and probably some physical abuse), she could  not hold a pregnancy to term. From what I understand, she did manage to launch several pregnancies. But — except for me — they all self-aborted.

Poor gal!

Oh, well:  All the more for me, eh?

She produced me on the last day of World War II. Coming out of the anaesthesia she’d been doped with, she heard yelling and partying in the street below her hospital room: and imagined that all those folks were celebrating because she’d had her baby!

😀  Seems reasonable, eh?

Shortly my father landed a shore job as a harbor pilot for ARAMCO — the Arabian American Oil Company — and we left Southern California to spend ten years by the (hellish!) shores of the Persian Gulf.

The misery entailed in that produced a neurotic, strange little girl who didn’t make friends easily (because little kids don’t like other little kids who are weird) and who imagined she wanted to grow up to be an astronomer (not understanding, you see, that girls were not allowed to be scientists…).

Horrible place. Horrible people. Horrible times.

Mercifully, my mother developed a roaring case of amoebic dysentery, which led her best friend — a nurse in the camp clinic — to persuade her own boyfriend — a doctor at that clinic — to announce that my mother had to go back to the states to be treated for that potentially fatal infestation,

And that gave my mother a chance to say “Hell, no! I won’t go!” to any future entreaties from my father that they spend another five or ten years in that garden spot.

So it was that we arrived back in the United States — in San Francisco, no less — and I ended up in one of the best public grade schools in the country. Whew!

It always struck me as kinda odd that she married him. Think it was because she had already been married & divorced, and in those days that meant she wouldn’t be able to remarry easily. And in those days, it meant she also wasn’t going to have enough income to live on: because women did not earn a living wage in those days.

Today…well. it would depend on what kind of job she could get. In those days, you were a secretary, a cleaning lady, or a housewife. Nowadays, she MIGHT be able to get work that would support her. Especially if she could have completed an A.A., preferably in some employable subject.

It’s always seemed to me, though, that she had an unduly difficult life. And…that makes my unduly easy life look even better than it is. Which is plenty fine.