The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
funny Some hours have passed since this morning’s post. My excellent son is presumably on his way over here to pick up the shopping list he asked for when he volunteered (!!!!!) to make a grocery run for me. How cool IS that, anyway?
Now I won’t have to hike to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s to pick up a few provisions. Since summer is y’cumin’ in, this is a BIG help.
And…here he is!
Dayum, but Olde Age has its compensations. 😀 The biggest is NOT HAVING TO GET DRESSED AND TRUDGE OFF TO WORK!!!
Wheeee! Here we are, dawn’s early light cheerily glowing in the window. The Dawg and the Human stuffed with breakfast. Human lingering over a cup of hot coffee.
Beloved Pool Dude has been here and gone, leaving the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money spotlessly, sparkling clean. Bless that wonderful man!
Ruby thinks he IS wonderful. And weirdly, she seems to know what day of the week it is. On Pool Dude Day, she lurks by the back door, waiting…waiting…waiting for the Moment of Joy when he shows up.
And yea verily, on that morning he does show up. Then we have a Magnificent Moment of Doggy Joy, after which Ruby must tear outside and stand there at the pool fence’s gate, admiring his magnificence.
Apparently many of these guys are ex-convicts. Pool cleaning is one of the…uhm…trades for which Arizona prisons train inmates. So, theoretically, when they get back on the street they’ll have some other way to earn money than by stealing your car, eh?
At any rate, I have no idea what about the guy makes him seem so splendid to a corgi. But without doubt, she thinks he’s about the best Human ever to stumble across the surface of the earth.
Whenever I get off my duff, I do need to trudge down to the neighborhood clinic to…uhmmmm…. wwwaaaaitaminit!
I wuz about to say, to try to get the doc to do something about the constant maddening ITCH in my feet and legs, and as the computer cruises happily across the Internet it lands on a page that tells us...
Vitamin B12: Common Side Effects (Oral Supplements and Injections)
And which Vitamin B-gulper do we know who has a mad itch and crazy-making tingling in the hands and feet?
For.
The.
Luv.
of.
GAWD!!!!!
Manufacturers of OTC nostrums should be required to list ALL a drug’s potential side effects on the label! In 14-point type!!!
Man! I just stumbled across that li’l blurb. Wasn’t looking for it. And now know why my hands and feet and lips and gums feel like an electric current is buzzing through my body.
GodDAMMIT. I wish I’d known this two weeks ago.
Ugh!!! Wonder how long it’ll take for this stuff to wear off… Bare minimum two or three days, whaddaya bet? More likely a week or two.
Wouldn’t you think that by now, having arrived in the middle of Olde Age, I would KNOW BETTER?????
Yea verily, by now shouldn’t I have figured out that just about every damn pill I drop down my throat has some untoward side effect?
Argh!! My Christian Scientist crackpot relatives may not have been crackpots, after all. Maybe they had somethin’ there…
Seriously: WHERE do these incredible mornings come from?
Back in the house from a pillar-to-post trek: local doctor (no one home), Sprouts, mysteriously emptied store in the Sprouts shopping center, computer store, Albertson’s, on and on and unendingly on. Ruby was with me, so some of these stores did not welcome our custom. Which was fine: I wasn’t ready to drop a lot of money there, anyway.
Right hip hurts so much I could cry. No sign that it will quit hurting soon. This was what I wanted to chat with a doctor about…LOL! To no avail, eh? That which you want, you cannot have!
But hey! What’s a little pain & agony when you have a SPECTACULARLY gorgeous day and a funny little dog?
Too bad Americans don’t follow the customs of their British cousins where dogs in stores are concerned. In London, for example, you’ll find people with their dogs at their side in most stores and many restaurants.
This morning I could not bear to leave Her Cuteness behind as I traipsed through the neighboring commercial district. So along she came. This meant, to probable loss for an occasional merchant, that we couldn’t go into some stores and therefore I did not buy some goods from those stores.
Ohhhh well. A couple bucks not spent, a couple bucks saved.
Meanwhile, this morning’s weather is BEYOND spectacularly gorgeous. High -flying thin clouds stained the dawn sky with orange streaks, then settled down into white fluff over blue background.
Corner doctor’s office was closed. So…heh! We’ll just have to traipse on through the pain.
Seriously: it can’t be that bad; otherwise I couldn’t possibly have made today’s little trek. Yes, it hurt…but not enough to keep the Dog and the Human inside.
Passers-by simply DOTE on this little corgi! My, do they admire Ruby. And (one presumes) covet her. She’s well behaved and trots along minding her own doggy business, so the waves of admiration did nothing to submerge us.
And now the Human is walloped. Dawg is already snoozing at the foot of the bed. Let us turn out the light and absent ourself…
Happy November 3!
Seriously, this afternoon — along about 3:00 p.m. — is SO mellow, so soft, so clean, and SO beautiful that even the plague of little maladies fails to make one miserable. Just…incredibly…lovely!
Maladies? Ohhh…just a few…
Peripheral neuropathy: frantic buzzing and burning in the hands, soles of the feet, and lips. Hurts. Makes you crazy.
Fingernails: lifting from the nail beds. No indication of why, or of what one can do about it.
Awful sore and itchy spot on the tail end. Dunno what to do about it. Rubbing in an analgesic does…hmmm…essentially nothing.
As of this morning, the hip pain was gone. But now it’s back! No idea why.
Dared to try to sit out on the back porch to take in this gorgeous afternoon.
B-a-a-d idea!
Place is swarming with mosquitos. Forthwith, had to dart back inside. Slam the screen door. Slam the kitchen door. RUN AWAY!!!
###
Thinking about my father: the jobs he had, how hard he worked to support me and my mother.
He was a tanker captain and, when he worked a shore job, a harbor pilot.
Maneuvering oil tankers across the ocean paid him well. But the job took him away from home for weeks on end. And…y’know…weirdly, the man was basically a homebody. A harbor pilot’s job is dangerous and demanding…he must have been exhausted most of the time during the ten years he did that in Saudi Arabia.
When he finally retired to Sun City, he and my mother had…ohhh…about 18 months together until the cancer sticks she’d smoked in gay, stinking abandon since she was 16 years old ganged up on her and killed her. She died horribly of tobacco-induced cancer shortly after they settled into their Dream Home in the suburbs of Phoenix.
They’re both gone now. The only relative I have left is my excellent son. And…heh…that does put some strain on him, the poor man! 😀
Seriously: he works ferociously for the insurance company that employs him. I would go back to teaching freshman comp if I had to work that hard!!! It doesn’t leave him much time or energy for riding herd on an ailing old bat. So…well…I try to keep from belly-aching too much. But he does know I’m ailing…and that the indications of that ailing do NOT bode well.
Oh, well. The sooner I croak over, the sooner I stop hurting. Right? 😀
Well…that was a moment of high terror…
This morning I went to get my laptop so I could take it out on the back porch, there to play with the Internet by the dawn light of a gorgeous morning.
Get computer from bedroom…
Uh…no. Nope.
No computer in the bedroom.
Nor on the bed.
Nor under the bed.
Nor in the bathroom…nor…anywhere.
Repeat searches. Search and search and search.
No computer.
Must have left it in the car, think I.
But…the car is at M’hijito’s house. He’s decided that it’s unsafe for me to drive (no kidding!!) and has purloined the vehicle. If I’d left the laptop in the car (not impossible: I take it to coffee shops all the time, for loafing purposes), then the computer’s at his house, too.
Shoot off an email to him. You know the variety: the “I’m nuts” type…
This is Sunday. He won’t roll out of the sack for another couple of hours, and probably won’t turn on his laptop for another hour or two after that.
Resign myself to having lost my most precious li’l object. Tromp through the bedroom to the bathroom. Tromp back out of the bathroom…and…wait for it!
Right: THERE IT IS, sitting on top of the bureau drawers, right there in the bedroom.
Yep.
I must have looked at it three or four times and not even registered it.
WTF?
If I ever had any marbles, I seem to have lost the last of them.
***
Meanwhile: hurt hurt HURT lemme tellya HURT!
The gettin’ old stuff is NOT for the faint of heart. No, indeed not.
This morning a hip joint has gone out of whack. Every. Single. Step is excruciating. So is getting up out of a chair. I hurt so much I can hardly breathe!
All that notwithstanding: with no one here to help, I have to get up and limp around….
And…
And….
GOOD GRIEF!
I’ve limped out to the back patio. Plopped down in a chair. Opened the computer.
Realize that (what’s the matter with the damn computer NOW???) (??? naturally it’s stopped doing whatever it was doing…whaaa?) my coffee still awaits…on the kitchen counter.
O Hell O Damn
Drag myself out of the chair. Limp into the kitchen. Pour a cup of coffee. Limp back out here. Pull a chair up to the table…and find THE PAIN HAS STOPPED!!!
Huh??????
Not to say
WHAAAA?????
No idea why it stopped.
But lemme tellya…
THAT
DID
HURT!
Argh.
Now I’m afraid to sit down, lest the pain start up again..
So…
What we have here is one of those days!
Need to walk over to the Sprouts and reprovision a few favorite goods. But I’m kinda scared to try it, lest that pain flare up in the middle of the quarter-mile hike.
Hmmmm….what to do, what to do?
When in doubt, nothing. Right?
***
Yep! That seems to be the correct motto… Just laid down on the bed. Put my feet up…and…OWWWWWWWW!
Holeee MACKEREL does that hurt!
Hmmmm… Whaddaya bet I ought not to stroll across a seven-lane thoroughfare plus a railroad track with this thing doing…whatever the.hell it’s doing.
Definitely something in the hip joint. But what? I cannot imagine.
Oh, yeah…ONE OF THOSE DAYS!
So here we are, late in the afternoon: just in from a hot, muggy walk around the ‘Hood.
This neighborhood was one of my luckier finds along the Road of Life. Yea, verily…I do love it here! And surely do hope to pass through old age free of medical and baby-sitting bills right up to the end, so I can hand my beloved house along to my beloved son: lock, stock, and paid-off barrel.
Seriously: Zillow claims the Funny Farm is worth $556,500. M’hijto’s castle: $493,00.
He, however, owes a mortgage , whereas when he inherits this place, he’ll get it debt-free. Then he can sell his place and…who knows? Buy a summer home in Tahiti?
Seriously: he could either turn his house into a rental, thereby generating investment income from it. Or just sell it and invest the cash proceeds in the stock market.
To my mind (such as it is), renting real estate looks suspiciously like more trouble than it’s worth. Dealing with renters — some of them no doubt deadbeats. Paying taxes on the enterprise. Insuring the place. Keeping it maintained, no matter what damnfool thing the renters pull… I dunno. Think I’d rather live in it while it appreciates in value; then sell and collect the increase in property value.
But when the time comes, that will be his decision and none o’mine. Thank goodness! 😀
Of notable interest, though, is the fact that this neighborhood is ballooning in value.
Real estate prices in Phoenix rarely fall, unless a major national recession is under way. So I think it’s safe to guess that this house will continue to grow in value. If he chooses to stay in it or to rent it out, over time he’ll collect a nice increase in dollars.
************
An Hour or So Later
************
Coming on to 5:30 p.m. And Oh MY, what a gorgeous evening!!! Clear, quiet, deliciously temperate… Moments like this are the BIG reasons I want to be able to leave this house to M’Hijito.
If he likes it here, it’s a joy. And it’s paid for.
If he has other ideas, it’s paid for. And he can turn a nice profit from it.
Either way, he deserves it!
🙂
I do need to get Gerardo’s gentlemen in here to trim up the shrubbery. They haven’t been around for awhile, and the place has gotten pretty overgrown.
Hope they haven’t abandoned the yard care business.
But if they’ve dodged out, that’s OK. This place is over-run with yard dudes. Gerardo is the Great Yard Dude of the Western World, no doubt of it. But others can do the job.
***
…and movin’ on…