Coffee heat rising

funny

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Glorioski!

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What a GORGEOUS morning!!!  High, thin clouds gently floating overhead. The blue sky peering through them. And splendidly temperate, inviting you to park yourself on the back porch, crunch a cookie, and guzzle black coffee.

Truth to tell, for all its eccentricities Arizona really IS a splendid place to live. Don’t know how my father found out about Sun City, but somehow he did…and forthwith he and my mother retired to those stodgy environs.

They hadn’t been there more than a year or two when a monster recession hit. My father, who had invested all his savings in the stock market, lost his proverbial shirt.

So, he had to pack up and go back to sea, the poor guy. Shipped out as first mate for a company that ran oil tankers out of southern California.

In the interim, my mother sat in front of the TV and smoked…and smoked…and smoked…and smoked herself into a fine case of cancer.

It didn’t make itself obvious until after he had swung his second retirement, and to his infinite delight had quit his job (again!) and gone back to Sun City to spend what he expected to be the rest of his years with the Love of His Life.

Staunch right-wingers, neither of them believed any of the maunderings that came out of the federal government. So, they were kinda blindsided when my mother’s non-stop smoking habit did indeed lead to an inoperable case of cancer, just as Big Brother said it would. As she died horribly, he never left her bedside, but took care of her, the house, the car, the shopping, the cooking, the finances…and the doctoring.

After she died, he couldn’t bear to stay in the place they’d dreamed would be their retirement haven and happy home. So he sold it and moved to an old-folkerie in Phoenix. And…a sad story attaches to that….

In short, though: that she killed herself with cancer sticks meant that she killed any chance for a contented retirement for him. If I’d been him, I’d have taken a long leap off the side of the Golden Gate Bridge. But…he was made of stronger stuff than I am.

He was an exceptionally handsome man…and the instant he walked into the old-folkerie’s dining room, he was, shall we say, noticed.

Forthwith, one of the inmates ambushed him. He was flattered — this was a guy who never looked twice at any woman other than his wife. That meeting led to an exceptionally unhappy marriage — one he refused to dissolve because he imagined “she’ll get all my money.”

And also because he had a daughter who was too stupid and too naive to say “But Daddy: your son-in-law is one of the most powerful lawyers in the Southwest. She’s not gonna get all your precious money!”

So…he was stupid and I was remiss and the new wife was a witch. Between the three of us, we concocted a fine unhappy passage through the end of his life.

If there’s anything to learn from that escapade, it’s…what?

When you experience a major life change (such as the death of a spouse), don’t make any sudden moves. 

If he’d waited just six months before jumping into marital “bliss” with the Dragon Lady, he no doubt would never have married her. He would still be lonely, but he would not have been freaking miserable.

When you plan ahead for the major passages of your life — retirement, for example, or marriage, or the rearing of children — think of and plan for ALL the contingencies. Not just the things you imagine will happen or hope will happen. But for the catastrophes and the fu*k-ups, too.

If money or major commitments are part of a “major passage” of your life, consult a lawyer and a financial advisor before jumping into anything.

******
arrrrghhhh!!!

Here’s the Cleaning Lady from Heaven, at the front door. It’s MUCH later in the morning than I imagined!!  LOL! I thought it was about 9 a.m.

Uhhhm…welllll… No. It’s damn near 11:30! She’s already cleaned the WonderAccountants’ house, straight across the street. And now here she is, ready to work her magic on the Funny Farm.

Seriously: this lady is about the most wonderful human being you could ever have working for you. If I ever took it into my feeble little mind to start a cleaning service (what, me? work???), she would be the one I’d hire as its manager.

Well…let’s wrap this up… ONWARD!

Congregate Living???

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Jeez. Here’s an update on the latest hoodlum fiasco in downtown Phoenix. Horrors!

I almost bought a condo right across the street from this happening. Very nice apartment, centrally located, excellent public transportation, right down the street from two major regional hospitals, and no further from my son’s house than this place is. If I’d gone ahead with that plan, I’d have been right in the middle of that mess.

Fortunately, I had better sense. On reflection, I saw that…

* The place was a hive: you’d be living right on top of the neighbors. And right underneath them. And right next-door to them. The noise would be constant.

* You had to park your car in a public garage. Likely it wouldn’t last long there…

* If they let me keep Ruby the Corgi, chances are that wouldn’t have lasted long, either. She does bark. And bark. And bark. Every time she heard someone coming up a hallway or banging around in their kitchen, you can be sure she’d want the world to know about it.

* Far as I could tell, it was a LONG way from any grocery or drug stores. Here, we have three major supermarkets and a Walgreen’s within easy walking distance.

….and, apparently, you’d be at risk of getting shot! 😮

Wrangling a four-bedroom house with a yard and a pool is no picnic: it does make the prospect of a nice high-rise apartment look pretty good. But boyoboy! Am I glad I decided against making that move.

The hired help here probably costs no more than the overhead in one of those fancy high-rises would. I have to pay Pool Dude, Gerardo the Marvelous Lawn Dude, and Luz the Ineffable Cleaning Lady. But none of them is breaking me up in business. And together they maintain the house handsomely, so I hardly lift a finger to take care of the place.

Now that I’m getting older (and older…and older…), I worry that I won’t be able to stay in a free-standing house much longer. But…but…why? Whence that worry?

It costs no more to hire people to come in and take care of the place than it would cost me to live in some holding pen for the elderly — probably less, come to think of it. My father moved into one of those places, and they took everything he got from the sale of his nice two-bedroom home in Sun City…and then some. He had a little left to will to me…but one helluva lot less than he would have had if he’d stayed in his sweet little house.

That’s what I figure: with the house paid off, living here doesn’t cost that much, even with the pay for the pool guy, the yard guys, the cleaning lady, and the various occasional repairmen. And barring a major catastrophe, I should be able to hire someone to come in and babysit me as I journey toward decrepitude.

And, with any luck at all (pray for a lightning bolt…), I’ll be able to leave this house, lock, stock, and paid-off barrel, to my son.

Morning in Arizona…

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Ahhhhhh! Is that coffee good, or IS that coffee GOOD?

Waiting for Wonder-Cleaning Lady to surface…if she’s gonna surface. It’s 9:40 in the morning now, and she hasn’t appeared at the Wonder-Accountants’ house — she goes there first; then comes to the Funny Farm. Sooo…I think (hope!) it’s safe to assume this isn’t one of her work days.

Oh! Yes: of course it’s safe!!!!  This ain’t Monday, folks...TODAY IS SATURDAY!

😀

Who’d’a thunk it? 

😀  😀

Man! I am in so much pain this morning, I can’t even tell what day of the week it is!!!

Put my back out a day or so ago, and just now it’s trying to remind me that I’m crippled. Doing a pretty good job of that, too….

Oh well. This means I don’t have to tear around the place picking up things and shoveling junk out of Wonder-Cleaning Lady’s way. That’s a relief!

Figured to take the Savage Corgi for a walk this morning, after it warms up a little. Just now, Wunderground says it’s 60 degrees out there. Which ain’t that cold…my guess is Wunderground is wrong and my back porch thermometer is right: 60 degrees. Ooops!!

😀

Reading was never one of my strong points.

😉

A-n-n-d… LORDIE! Did you see the news reports about the fire in that Swiss ski resort’s bar? Dear God!

Y’know, THAT is why I won’t go into those places. Never make a big deal of it…just always have something else to do or some other idea for amusement when friends want to spend the evening bar-hopping. Take yourself to a popular one and look around you… It’s pretty obvious: if you needed to get out in a hurry, you could find yourself in big trouble.

Kinda tells you something, right? Stay home to get snockered! 

We used to stop in Switzerland — occasionally — along the journey between New York and Dhahran. This was during the ten years my parents and I spent in (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Every two years, they had a long leave…three months off(!!).

We would fly into New York, buy or lease a car, and shoot cross-country as fast as my father could manage: first to his brother’s place in Texas; then to my mother’s best friend’s place in Southern California; then up to the San Francisco Bay Area to hang out with the relatives for a short while; then like a rocket back to New York. Thence to Beirut, en route to Dhahran.

What a life. Ugh! 

Some of the American ex-pats out there would use their leave time to travel around India, Pakistan, Lebanon, and waypoints. My father, being a tanker captain, had his fill of travel and wanted nothing more than to get back to the U.S. and hunker down with friends or relatives.

At any rate, Switzerland was one of the favorites for the ex-pats. I think some folks spent their entire long leave there. It is a pretty place. Especially if you’re not dodging burning roof beams…

Reel Estate…

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Good lord! Looking at the local real estate ads is like watching a horror movie! 😮  Prices have hit the stratosphere and are headed into orbit.

Here’s an aging tract house in my son’s neighborhood, nothing special: $389,000. What the hell do they think it’s made of???? And…have they ever heard of “taste”?  That orange and black in the bedroom: eeeek!!! Wait wait! check out the blood-red bedroom!!!

Zillow thinks my son’s house is presently worth $498,000!!!

Let’s see what the prices are here in the ‘Hood…

One house for sale, right on a truly gawdawful main drag: 3 bedrooms, $420,000. And…1300 square feet; doesn’t even have a pool. WTF???  Here’s one up for auction(???!!!): it’s the same model as mine, $477,000. 

Wow!

Now we begin to ask, am I going to be able to stay in my home? Because the taxes are gonna go into the stratosphere.

That’s what happened in Southern California when real estate prices went berserk. I had a cousin — an elderly woman who had lived in the same place for-freaking-ever — who lost her home because she couldn’t afford the taxes.

THIS is not good.

Oh, jeez! Here’s one right up the street from me…matter of fact, it seems to be the same model as mine: $635,000!!!!!!

Uhm…I may not be able to pay the taxes, either….

 

Pain Pain Pain!

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Augh!!!!  WHAT a way to start the New Year!

My left hip hurts SO much — for reasons that frankly, I do not understand — that I can barely stand up from a chair or hobble across a room. Amazing pain!

Apparently I spavined a hip joint — how, I do not know. The result: pain, pain, pain, and more pain. And no, aspirin doesn’t do a damn thing for it.

Soooo….  I assume that this will go on for at least a couple of weeks — that assumption, based on experience. If it’s not gone after about three weeks, then it’s off to the accursed Mayo Clinic again! 

Ohhhhh my gawd, do I ever hate traipsing to Scottsdale to go to a doctor!

Young Dr. Kildare, that adorable young fella, closed his office up the street here and moved his practice to fukkin’ Sun City. And lemme tellya…

After the monstrous experiences my mother had with her Sun City quack, you could not pay me to go to a doctor out there. Not even YDK. That he opened a practice there does not tell me it’s possible for a Sun City doctor to be competent; it tells me that YDK is very probably incompetent.

The Mayo, as we know, is supposed to be the best. They certainly think so… And bein’ better than anyone else, docs out there peer down their noses at you, condescend to you, and treat you as if you had an IQ in the negative numbers.

But with YDK now ensconced as far on the west side as the Mayo is on the east side, there’s hardly any point in traipsing halfway to Yuma to get care that’s no better than you’ll get halfway to Payson.

We thought medical care in this country left something to be desired, yea verily back in the day? Little did we know! We had yet to experience medical “care” that does not come up to the level of care. 

I suppose I could decamp to Canada, where the socialized system is supposedly somewhat better than ours. Or somewhat worse, depending on your point of view. But…I have an allergy to snow! 😉

{sigh}  My poor li’l dawg! I was going to take her for a walk this afternoon. But…just now I can barely walk across the room…to say nothing of the mile or so around the park.

This hound is not gonna be happy with me when she sees me dodder back into the bedroom and climb into the sack. But…tough nugies, dawg! I couldn’t walk her to the end of the block, much less on her usual park-encircling route.

Outta here!

BANG! BANG!! BANG-A-DA-BANG!!!

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Eight-thirty of a New’s Eve! And everyone within (and beyond) earshot is celebrating: BANG! BANG!! BANGA-DA-BANG!!! 

Amazingly, Ruby the Corgi is taking it all in…very relaxed stride. Really: I would have expected her to be all nervous and jumpy and spooked.

But nay! She seems to realize all that racket is coming from somewhere else: somewhere a fair distance from the Funny Farm. Not only is she NOT spooked, just now she’s flopped on the foot of the bed, loafing!

How weird is that, I hafta ask you?

LOL! This evening the brain-pan filled with memories of a very weird experience...one I never really have been able to make much sense of.

My father, you need to understand first-off, was a very macho sort of guy. Anything that smacked of “queer” would set off his rage genes. He hated queers (so he said), and would launch into paroxysms of disgust on the subject if given half a chance.

Sooooo….  It struck me as VERY weird when one time in a balmy Arizona season, he took it into his head to gather a bunch of Boy Scouts to go out on the desert and shoot at stuff. Target shooting.

Not too weird, until you learned that — hang onto your hat — he proposed to stay out there overnight with the passel of teenaged boys. All of them ejaculatedly revved up by shooting guns into the night air.

Yeah.

Whaaaaa???????

To my astonishment, my mother said nothing to try to derail this plan. Probably, I imagine, because she couldn’t think of anything…or maybe she just didn’t want to get into a quarrel with him.

So he rounds up a troop of senior Boy Scouts, and off they go into the desert night.

No other adults with them: just my father and a half-dozen or so teenage boys.

Uhhmmm…..

Since I wished to continue living, I, too, said nothing about this…but thought any number of unmentionable thoughts.

Well. OK….

Off they went, into the desert and the dark. Far as I know, nothing much transpired — or if it did, you may sure none of them mentioned it.  They drove off, set up camp somewhere, and spent the night shooting their bang-bangs and sittin’ around the campfire.

You understand: my father wasn’t given to that kind of thing. By and large, he didn’t much like kids — these were not kids, though, but teenagers. And this was the ONLY time in my life that I’d ever heard of him or seen him go camping. Not that he couldn’t: he grew up out in the Texas boondocks. But he didn’t subject me or my mother to it.

So…when I hear the BANG BANG BANG of fireworks or firearms echoing through the night, that’s what I think of: my father out on the desert with a passel of teenage boys, shooting off their guns into the dark.

Or whatever.

And that makes these firework-accented holidays feel…weird, to me. Very, very weird. 

***** GODAMMIT!*****

Now we’ve got idiots out there shooting off fireworks over the tops of the palm trees.

I’ll have to go out there and keep an eye to be sure the damn trees don’t catch fire.

WHY ARE WE SURROUNDED BY MORONS?