Coffee heat rising

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WEATHER! WE’VE GOT WEATHER!!

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WOW! It’s 111 degrees in the shade of the back porch, and POURING rain.

No kidding! We’re in the middle of a gray, windy rainstorm, water gushing off the roof, and the thermometer out there literally does read 111 degrees.

WHAT a place, eh?

Well. When this kinda thing happens, it usually causes the searing summer heat to cool down into the 80s or so. And…well…that’s an improvement.

Whether the rain will stop enough to let Ruby the Corgi go out after she scarfs down her dinner remains to be seen. But we have an hour or two before we need to consider that eventuality.

If the rain stops, we can take her for her usual walk and dump her here and there around the ‘Hood. But if not, she’ll be doing her Thing in the backyard.

Which is fine: one way or the other, the Human has to pick it up.

But…oh, my! What a storm. The wind is carrying on like a banshee.

Welp…tomorrow we’ll have a fine mess to clean out of the pool. It’ll be several days before Pool Dude is due, so the Human will have to skim and vacuum up the debris.

Yay. I can…uhm…hardly wait. 

…and we did this…WHY????

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Chortle!  Today’s Moment of Stupidity seems to take the proverbial cake.

What on EARTH possessed me? 

Come about 1:40 in the afternoon, I took it into my feeble little mind that nothing would do but what I should take a little walk around the neighborhood.

Yeah. That’s the neighborhood where the back porch thermometer just now registers 115º in the shade. Don’t ask what that translates to when you’re out in the direct sun!

Okay…so, bein’ stupid as a post, we don’t ask that key question, but just pull on a shady hat and trundle on off down the sidewalk.

Extraordinarily bad idea. Got about a block before I smartened up, turned around, and came back to the house. Made it before we fainted and plopped face-down on the sidewalk….

Holeeee maquerel! It’s almost hot out there!

Welp...tomorrow’s exercise will have to occur at dawn. Again. And probably (again!) without our furry friend’s company. If the heat is still this fierce, outdoors will be no place for Ruby the Corgi.

What a gawdawful place!  WHY did my parents drag me here, lo! these many years ago?  

I should have headed back to Northern California on my own, the minute I graduated from the University of Arizona with the low-rent B.A. This was not the place for me to have stayed put!

Swamp?? Make That Quagmire!

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Wow! What an AWFUL, wet, swampy morning!!!

Ruby and I just returned from our daily circumnavigation of the neighborhood park. MISTAKE! We should never have started out on that venture!

At 7:45 in the morning, it’s 100 degrees out there, with 40% humidity. So saith Wunderground.

If anything, that’s an understatement. It’s as hot and as soggy out there as anything we used to see on the shore of the hideous Persian Gulf, when we lived there in Saudi Arabia. And believe me: that is NOT a place where you would want to live!

Dawg is flopped on the kitchen tiles, having swiggled a raft of water. I’m flopped in a leather chair, its upholstery covered with a cotton throw in an effort to keep the sweat from wrecking the thing.

Horrid morning in a horrid place. If I had any choice at all, I’d be living soooooo far from here!

Where would so far be? Probably the San Francisco Bay Area, whence my mother’s family emanated. Yes, the air gets wet there, too…but at least it’s COOL air!

Our relatives lived in Berkeley, then a middle-class to upper-middle-class district sprinkled over rolling hills. Such a pretty place! I sure do miss it!

What possessed my parents to move to Arizona…well, I can’t say that escapes me.

Yeah, I know what called them:

Money. At the time, the cost of living here was so much lower than California’s that my father figured he could afford to retire. And…yah: quit his job and knock off working was what he most craved in life! At least, at the time that was so.

Politics. Arizona is as far to the right as you can get outside of the Deep South. People’s hearts are filled with hate here. Especially in regard to anyone who is not white and middle-class. My parents made an Alabama politician look liberal.

Weather. Yes, summers here are gawdawful. But the other nine or ten months of the year are pretty lovely. In the low desert: temperate days, no snow, rare rainy days.

Cost of living. You can buy a house in Sun City or Youngtown for a fraction of what a similar place costs in California, whence we emanated. True: it’s not a place you’d like to live year-round: summers here embody Hell. But air-conditioning makes it possible to survive.

Cheap tuition at the state university. I got into the University of Arizona at the end of my junior year in high school. After we’d lived here for a year, the cost of “education” (as it were) in Tucson was a fraction of what any California college or university charged state residents there.

Well. My son is well established here, so I’m not about to leave the state. Where be my son, there be I.

That doesn’t make me like this place a helluva lot more, though….

😉

Summertime, and the livin’ is…EGAD!

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7:05 in the evening and, as we scribble, the thermometer in the shade of the back porch reads A HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES!

Egad! CAN you imagine?

It’s hard even for me to imagine…and I’m livin’ in it.

What an awful place. 

Wunderground tells us it’s actually 112 degrees out there. Supposed to chill down to a crisp 104 by midnight.

This is one of many factors that make me want to move back to San Francisco. And believe me: if I could afford it, I sure would!

Speaking of Balmy Heat….

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As in You’d have to be balmy to live in this place…. As we scribble, it’s 115 degrees in the shade of the north-facing back porch.

Holeeee maquerel!

Welp…that takes care of the Evening Doggywalk. Even after the sun goes down, the pavements will be too hot for Ruby’s little feet.

Guess I could go out for a Solitary Humanwalk….but yea, verily: even after dark, the heat will be oppressive.

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And speaking of balmy…. My son has hired a babysitter to watch me during most of the daytime hours!

As insulting as that is — what does he think I’m gunna do? Set fire to the swimming pool? — it’s actually rather pleasant to have the company. She’s a very nice and compatible lady. Not all that spectacularly educated…but hey! Focused enough and ambitious enough to build a reliable way to make a living despite limited formal education and second-language skill in English. I do like her, and hope to build some activities we can do together to build some serious rapport.

So I do hope she stays around, at least for some months or a year.

We shall see, though.

Swampy Dampy Day!

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Whew! Just back from an early-morning doggy walk, over to the park and through the ‘Hood.

We cut it a bit short: the weather is so hot and so wet that strolling around out there is a miserable experience.

More miserable? Blue-collar working in this gawdawful heat.We passed a few guys getting set to start banging around: painters, carpenters, and them-such. Man! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have!!! 

So gross is the weather this morning that I was reminded of our life on the shore of the Persian Gulf, out in (un!)lovely Arabia. My father dragged me and my mother out there when he got a shore job with Aramco, and we spent nine horrible years out there. GAWDAWFUL place.

My mother and I escaped when she came down with amoebic dysentery, after a moron neighbor who had  us over for dinner failed to soak the lettuce in Clorox before tearing it up to make a salad. She — mother, that is —  was in the hospital for some three weeks before she and I were shipped back to the States.

My father stayed out there till the end of his contract; then came back to the States and got a Merchant Marine job shipping out of Northern California. Disappointing for him, but probably saved my mother’s life and certainly saved my sanity.

Yeah. Being an astronomy buff, I was the Weird Little Girl out there: tormented nonstop by the horrid creatures who were my contemporaries at the local school. Dare to be different in any way, and you were gonna suffer for it!

And suffer for it, I most surely did….

Ugh! What an icky day!  

Arizona certainly would not be my choice of places to live…if I’d had any choice, it would have been the San Francisco Bay Area, where my mother’s relatives lived. Cool, beautiful, and urbane. Here? Hot, tacky, and reactionary.

Really: most of the time, I do dislike living here. The summer heat is oppressive. The city’s style is grodiest Southern California: crowded, bourgeois, and politically to the right of Adolf Hitler. Traffic: crazy-making. Newspaper reporting: not worth paying for. On and on….

But I ain’t moving, not as long as my son is here.

If he were to take a job in California or Colorado, I might follow him. Anywhere else: probably not. More likely I’d move to Southern Arizona, to the cooler and more sophisticated environs around Tucson. The University there supports a real cultural life — a rarity in most of Arizona.

Ohhhhh gawd! The woman my son hired to baby-sit me just showed up at the door. DAYUM! There goes privacy….