Coffee heat rising

funny

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Egad!! No Doggy-Walks Here…

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Get this! Wunderground says today’s high is supposed to be 111 degrees. You saw that right: a hundred and eleven degrees! 

Where does this damn place think it is? Saudi Arabia?

As we scribble, the back-porch thermometer reads 110 degrees…in the shade of the north-facing back porch. A covered porch. A ventilated covered porch…

Holeee sheee-ut!

We do have salmon and shrimp and accouterments that can be cooked up on the barbecue today. But tomorrow…well… Tomorrow I’ll have to walk(!!!) to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts to restock the supplies. And that will be a challenge.

I may see if I can get the neighborhood Uber driver to tote me over there…but…whaddaya bet that guy won’t feel any enthusiasm for getting on the road as dawn cracks?  And I sure don’t wanna be slamming around in the heat.

Let’s see…what time do these worthy retailers open?

  • Albertson’s:  6:00 a.m.
  • Sprouts: 7:00 a.m.
  • El Rancho: 6:00 a.m.

Hmmmm…  The El Rancho is closer. But the Albertson’s is a far better store for a middle-class shopper.

If I leave the house at 5:45, I could get to the store just as they’re opening. Grab the loot. Pay up. Gallop out the door…and maybe get back here by 7:00 a.m.

Or so…

Actually, that might not be too bad. Except that I don’t wanna start charging around at that hour. And toting groceries six or eight blocks through questionable territory doesn’t sound like much fun.

Also, one thing I’ve discovered over the kerjillion years that I’ve lived here: there’s a route through the neighborhood that comes out on the back side of the Albertson’s shopping center. That would allow me to get down there and yet dodge the jerks screaming obscenities at me.

Hm. They open at 6:00…okayyy… I might get back here by 7:00 — surely no later than 7:30. It would still be hot outside, but not yet hotter than Hell.

Dare not walk down there in the evening. For one thing, it’ll be hotter than the Hubs, all right: after a full day of Arizona sun blasting. But more to the point: whatever the weather, it’s just not safe. Too many jerks, assholes, and predators roam around between here and that shopping center.

Been there, done that, ain’t doin’it again!!

Really: what a place to live. If my son weren’t just down the road, I’d pull up stakes and head for either north Scottsdale or (un)lovely Sun City. Sure wouldn’t stay in central or north Phoenix: it truly isn’t safe.

I don’t wanna live in Sun City. Been there, done that, ain’t doin’ it again. BUT…at least in a ghetto for old folks, you don’t have a$$holes screaming obscenities at you as you walk to the nearest grocery store.

Soggy Doggy Day!

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Yuch!!!  It is SO HOT and SO WET out there, it feels like horrible Saudi Arabia, where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Wet, hot, and miserable.

To gild that soggy lily, war planes are busily roaring in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Nevvermind that they’re 20 miles to the west of us. We still get serenaded with the ominous melody of World War III, on its way to us: ggggRRRROOOAAAAARRRRRRR!

My mother used to sit on her patio, partaking her morning coffee to the melody of those damn warplanes. Ohhhhhh, she would coo. It’s the sound of fweedom! 

Yeah, Mom: the sound of Death, comin’ for you.

Why ARE people so stupid, anyway?

Ohhh well.  Ruby and I made it back to the house, finally, through air so thick you could practically swim through it. I’m now so hot and miserable, about all I can manage is sitting down and pounding on a keyboard. Had to put a throw over the back of the chair, to keep from wrecking the leather upholstery with the sweat I don’t feel like washing off myself right this minute.

I never could understand why my mother thought that jet warplane racket was some kind of sweet, patriotic melody.

Never did understand why she didn’t grasp the fact that the “melody” was a funeral ode to every civilian within nuclear bomb distance of our balmy home.

But then…I never did grasp what she thought was soooo wonderful about dreary, racist Sun City. Guess we just weren’t on the same wavelength.

Ugh!!!

Well, I’d better get up and brew a pot of coffee, before I fall down face-first on the tile floor….

Hotter than the HUBS!!!

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…of Hades, of your race-car wheels, of your stove burner! HOLEE maquerel, is it hot out back. Fox 10 News sez it’s 110; Wunderground claims a mere 107 degrees.

You understand: it’s 8:15 at night and DARK out there.

Yeah: 110 degrees by the dark of night…

Wrung the little dog out as fast as she would go…which means she’s likely to roust the human in the middle of the night… 😀  Oh well… At the moment, she’s loafing atop the bed again, as is her pet critter, the funny-looking human. The AC is pounding away….let’s hope it holds up through the night….and that we don’t have to call a hapless repairman tomorrow. Or anytime during this present heat wave.

Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have! /eyeroll/

Hope M’hijito is making out all right. His house was built in the 1950s, back before air-conditioning worked especially well here in lovely uptown Phoenix. The place does have a real air-conditioner these days —  not an old-fashioned and clunky evaporative cooler. The older places, though, were not built for modern ductwork…so it remains to be seen whether his place will be habitable tonight.

This Human, on the other hand, was not built to be awake half the night… And so, awwwayyyy… Off to bed!

And Now…WTF????

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Yesterday was a true, certifiable Day from Hell. Seriously…by bed-time, I knew that if I weren’t trapped here by owning the damn house outright and by the piddling retirement income and by the craving to live vaguely near my son, I would be SOOOO OUTTA PHOENIX!

But now…we have this morning. WTF?????

  • The weather is clear and more or less temperate. On the warm side, but highly tolerable.
  • The peripheral neuropathy: present, but tolerable in intensity.
  • The dawg: prancing along happily.
  • The hole-in-the-ground-into-which-to-pour-money: functioning normally this morning.
  • The toilet: now working normally.
  • The house: spotlessly clean after Wonder-Cleaning-Lady’s ministrations.
  • The laptop computer: apparently working normally again.
  • Outside temperature in the shade of the back porch at 7:30 a.m.: only 100 degrees.

Weird. 

The hound and the human got out the door early enough to circumnavigate the park without melting in the heat.

The babysitters M’hijito hired to ride herd on the Crazy Old Bat have not surfaced (thank Gawd!), or else they came by here while we were doggy-walking and simply ignored the note I left on the door for them, asking them to wait a few minutes until I could get back to the house. Good riddance, say I!

So…I dunno why the Manifestations from Hell have settled down. And I ain’t askin’!  Just hope they STAY settled down for awhile!

WHY do people live here???

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7:38 p.m.  The sun has gone down. And it’s 105 degrees under the ventilated shade structure on the back porch.

Central Arizona. Maricopa County. What a HELLISH place to live! Why do people settle here, anyway?

I got here because my parents dragged me here, when my father attempted to retire. (Failed, thanks to a major recession: he had to go back to work for another couple of years, much to his despair.)

Yeah. They thought Sun City was about the most brilliant village the human mind had ever conceived. Fine ticky-tacky houses. Gravel yards — no grass to water! Kids prohibited: no brats screaming outside your window when you’re trying to take a nap. Blacks prohibited: no negroid types pushing down your property values.

Yech!!!!!

As soon as they got moved and settled into their new brick hovel, they sent me down to Tucson and enrolled me in the University of Arizona. Because I was a National Honor Society scholar, they accomplished this by pulling me out of high school a year early: I never even set foot in a senior-year classroom.

Sun City is grim enough. Central Arizona forms the cake beneath that frosting: hot, intellectually backward, graced with bigotry….what a place! The UofA is a more or less adequate intellectual institution…though nothing like the school where I was set to go: U.C. Berkeley.

So…my arrival in Arizona was an encomium to disappointment.

And I do have to wonder, sometimes: if you don’t have a well-paying job here, WHY would you come here, and why would you stay here? Given that you have any choice in the matter…which I did not.

Why do I stay here? Well…I’m pretty well glued in. Everyone I know these days lives here. My son lives here. My jobs have been here. My paid-off house is here. My freelance business is now based here. Reckon I’m set here.

But it wouldn’t have been my choice….

How Things Work Out

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Stumbling around through the heat this afternoon — without a car now, I have to walk to every local destination — I happened to think back on my parents, and on how much they loathed and detested my college boyfriend.

This guy was more than a boyfriend. We seriously intended to marry. And our relationship comprised all the features of married life, with the exception of the spoken vow, “…I thee wed.”

Why they hated Paul…well…that’s something that’s always flummoxed me to some degree.

I believe it was his ethnicity: he was Eastern European. And as far as my parents were concerned, anyone who wasn’t Us wasn’t quite human. The prospect of my marrying him and supporting him through a career (he became an academic administrator at the University of California, a highly successful line of work) and bearing his quasi-Asian children…well…that was more than they could bear.

They regarded our relationship with horror, and they made that horror as clear as they could.

Our love affair was going hot and heavy when I made the decision to break it off. Paul was shattered. I felt utterly hideous at having faced him down and told him, as he wept, to go away, that we were finished. But…that was what I had to do.

§ § §

I was my parents’ only child. And the knowledge that if I continued with Paul, I would never see my parents again…well…that was more than I could cope with.

It might have been a different matter if they hadn’t done everything a human being could do to love their child, to support her, to guide her to academic and economic success. But it wasn’t a different matter. And abandoning them — which is what I would have been doing — was simply too ugly a prospect to contemplate.

So…instead of saying good-bye to my parents, I said good-bye to Paul.

And…away I went, into the Southern Arizona dust.

Eventually I came north, got a job with a Phoenix law firm, and married a very promising young lawyer. That match lasted a couple of decades and produced an excellent son. Then I wandered off into the sunset again.

Heh! I do rather more wandering than I should, evidently….

But again, things have worked out. I’m dwelling safely and in reasonable comfort. Own my home outright. Have had an entertaining and productive career. Published several books. Nothing to complain about there.

I guess. But…

Sometimes I wonder…

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