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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.

***

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….

Who’s That Knockin’ at My Door?

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Just realized…. These days, I never answer the door when somebody comes a-knocking. Or a-doorbell ringing, either.

Seriously: it used to be — back in the Dark Ages — that when you went to someone’s house and rang the bell or knocked on the door, they answered by opening the door(!!) and greeting you. Today, I won’t open the door unless I know who’s out there.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. My front door is secured by a heavy-duty prison-like screen door, on the outside of the usual decoratively wooden door. So, the exterior door — the real one — has a set of bars and outside that, a thick sheet of solid metal screen. Getting through that would not be easy!

My next-door neighbor has a camera installed above the front door. It relays an image of any caller to a screen inside the door. And no, she won’t answer the door unless she knows who you are and why you’re there.

Awful that we have to be that scared, isn’t it?

One might say times have changed and so our door-answering customs have changed…the implication being that in the good ole’ days you didn’t have to worry about who or what was out on the doorstep.

But no. I don’t think the folks who show up at your door are any different than they used to be. If they’re not a friend or neighbor, then they’re trying to sell you something or (of late) they’re census takers, surveying the locals. It’s a rare bird that poses a real threat.

That notwithstanding: These days I peer out a window before I go to the door. If I don’t recognize the person, I don’t answer. Or else I holler through the window to ask them what they want — and nine times out of ten, send them away.

Now I will say: I don’t want to be hustled by some door-to-door seller. Period. So one reason that door doesn’t get answered is to make it easier to repel those jerks. As for census takers and the like: they need to show me a mighty authentic-looking ID to get me to the door.

Fine times we live in, eh?

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Ugh!!!!!  Don’t know when I’ve seen a day this soggy since we lived in Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf. What a horrid swampy morning, under the glow of the morning sun!

Seriously: one wonders how the air could be this wet without clouds and rain. But…having lived by that gulf shore, one does know it’s possible. Horridly possible.

Out there, I’ve seen it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. No: no exaggeration. I’d be looking out my bedroom window, the swamp cooling that passed as air-conditioning pounding away, and all of a sudden water would just start to pour out of the air. No clouds. No sprinklers going. Just rain condensing out of the humidity.

That’s central Arizona for you!

Dawg and Human: just in the door after a stroll around the neighborhood, through the late pre-dawn hours. Made it back to the house before too much damage was done…though my hair is still wet from sweat and damp air.

Honest to gawd, WHAT possessed my dear parents to drag us to this Hellish place?

Oh, yeah: Sun City. No kids screaming outside your window when you’re tryin’ to take a nap! 

No joke: My father hated kids. And he especially hated them when they were set loose to play outdoors.

When he and my mother discovered Sun City as we were driving across the country one time, he thought he’d found Nirvana: NO KIDS!

Ugh.

So as soon as he could afford to retire, he quit his job, and they packed up and moved to beautiful (childless!!) Arizona. They got me into the University of Arizona a year early — I hadn’t yet graduated from high school, and no one under 19 is allowed to live in (un)lovely Sun City, unless they’re enrolled in college.

Anyhow…that’s how I got to this charming venue, stuck in Arizona when I should be living in the San Francisco Bay Area…where I belong.

Yes, I do hate it here. But my son is here. He has a job here. And I’m not about to leave where he’s living.

🙁