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One of Those Days: Adumbrated

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Hallelujah, brothers & sisters!  

Dunno what brought Ruby the Corgi under the weather last night, but this morning she seems to be miraculously healed! 

Yes. She’s scarfed down the usual dose of 1/3 can of dawg food. She’s patrolled the backyard — twice, come to think of it. Now she’s standing out there waiting for a burglar to chase off.

😀  Funny little beast. 

At any rate, today she’s acting like her old, healthy self, so I assume whatever ailed her must have been something she ate or some very fast-passing bug.

Whenever the human feels like getting off its duff, we’ll go out and patrol the neighborhood. LOL! The locals must be so glad they have a 30-pound protector looking out after them.

It’s a neighborhood that has much changed over the past few years, yet remains weirdly the same. Our dearest neighbor, locally known as The Ole Guy, disappeared with his wife some time back. He had told me he thought he was going to have to lock her up in an old folks’ home. And I’ll tellya: that guy would never imprison her in a place like that and then walk off, leaving her alone. If he put her in an old-folkerie, you can be sure he put himself there, too.

Meanwhile, SDXB has moved to Sun City, where he took up with New Girlfriend. He seems happy enough, though the last I heard old age has caught up with him and he’s been pretty sick.

I’d be sick, too, if I tried to live in Sun City. My parents proudly retired and moved to Sun City when I went off to college. They thought it was just the business. I thought it was abhorrent.

Seriously: you couldn’t pay me to live there: a ghetto for old folks.

But they thought it was The Bidness. His brother, Ed, and Ed’s harridan of a wife moved there. And my parents’ best friends from Saudi Arabia — Ruth and Hollis — joined them. My mother must have been thrilled to see Ruth move in. The in-laws: not so much, though.

But for me, the place had one major trait working against it: a kind of toxic sameness. All the houses looked alike. All the yards looked alike. All the people looked alike.

The people: old, middle-class, and white. Once a black couple dasted to move in there. They literally were hounded out by the locals.

Hereabouts: I haven’t seen an African-American type move in to these parts. Well, no: one bachelor bought a house a block or two away. But he moved on. Hounded? I doubt it: probably found it costs a lot more to live here than one would expect.

Property taxes are surprisingly high in these parts — probably, I suspect, because the houses are over-valued. Truth to tell, these same models occupy a fair amount of Sun City, which was largely built out by the same developer. A few are a little bigger than SC shacks — mine has four bedrooms, which you surely wouldn’t find out there. And the yards have six-foot walls, with city-owned alleys running behind them. (No alleys in S.C.)  But otherwise, the two developments are much the same.

Except…we have kids!

How can one live without the sound of kids carrying on outside?

Seriously: I love the racket of kids playing. Sun City — devoid of anyone under the age of 50 — was silent as a tomb. Well…except for the damn fighter jets blasting over from Luke Air Force Base. That was a racket.

Ugh!

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Quarter to Four….in the morning. The dog is sick.

She’s got sh!t stuck all over her rear end. Cleaned her up as best as I could…which ain’t very. If and when it warms up this morning…if and when morning ever comes…I’ll have to haul her into the bathtub, scrub her down, haul her out, dry her off…a good half-hour or forty minutes of dog-and-human struggle.

Yay. I can hardly wait.

Human is starved. Bolting down some bread and cheese.

Dog is now giving the Human the famous fork it over, you! look.

Oh, good, saith the Human Why don’t I arm you with bread & cheese so you can barf it all over the bed?

Craparoonies! Now she’s laying there moaning softly with each breath.

Puff…ook
Puff…ook
Puff…ook

Please, please dear doggie! DON’T barf on the bed at 3:53 in the effin’ morning!

Of course it’s Sunday, running up to Christmas. Name a vet that’s gonna be open…

THIS is gonna be One…of…Those…Days, isn’t it?

The Ole Guy…The Ole Neighborhood

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Took a hike up to the corner shopping center, there to pick up some not-very-necessaries and socialize with the locals. On the way home, I walked through the  northwest corner of the ‘Hood, an area that SDXB and I used to frequent when he lived here in Phoenix (before he made his escape to Sun City). At the time, I dwelt closer to noisy, crime-ridden Nineteenth Avenue. SDXB and I used to walk all around in that quarter, just about every day.

One house we passed almost every day belonged to a fella we called “The Ole Guy.” What a nice man he was. He and his wife had lived here forever, and by the time SDXB and I came on the scene, they were gettin’ on in years. She was usually indoors, but he liked to putter around in his yard and with his car, and so he would often be out in front. SDXB and I would hang out with him for awhile as we made our rounds of the’Hood.

Well, of course as you know (if you read FaM much), SDXB decamped to Sun City, chased off by the noisy new light-rail and the blossoming crime rate.

My house is far enough from the damn trains that I can’t hear their racket. And as for the murderers, rapists,, and burglars? Make. My. Day, Gentlemen! 

Plus I had lived in Sun City, hated it, and never ever wanna go back there again. Any day I’d rather have crime than stodgey. 😀

So I stayed.

So did the Ole Guy — for awhile. But soon enough, he had to deposit his wife in a nursing home, pretty much trashing his life and his joy. He disappeared from the scene — believe he moved into the same old-folkerie — and the house was sold to some anonymous suburban types. Dunno that I’ve ever even seen the present owners.

If owners they are: they could be renters, for all I know. 😀

But oh my! I do miss the Ole Guy. What a nice man he was: to my mind an emblem of the neighborhood and all that’s good about it.

And I do miss SDXB, who seems to be living happily ever after in Sun City.

Not “happily” enough to lure me back out there. For one thing, SDXB has a lovely new girlfriend, and I surely wouldn’t want to intrude on that relationship. And for another….ohhhhh boy, did I ever hate living in Sun City. And I ain’t a-goin’ back out there, no many how many old friends of mine have decamped to the place.

So…dayum! I feel like I’m the Last Vestige of the Old Neighborhood.

Which is silly, of course. There are no vestiges: just people who move in and people who move out.

But I suppose the ironic and kinda funny thing about it is that nowadays I’m the equivalent of The Ole Guy. Yeah: the ancient resident who’s lived here since the pyramids were built: that one.

Why stay?

* Too much work to pack up and decamp. (Can you spell laziness?)
* Kids. Migawd, I do love the sound of kids playing! Why would you want to live in a mausoleum where no kidlets are allowed?
* Centrality. We are smack in the middle of everything. The main reason I was trotting around on foot is that M’hijito imagines an old bat shouldn’t be bucketing around the homicidal streets of Phoenix (NEVER have a kid who’s an insurance adjuster!), and so he has protectively purloined the Dog Chariot and  locked it up in his garage. B…F…D…, say I: my house’s location is so superbly central that I don’t need a car to get to several grocery stores (one or two of them damn fancy), a doctor, a dentist, a vet a..this, a that, and another thing. A train line and two bus lines go by right up the street. And an Uber driver lives two houses down from me.
* Upper-middle-class upper-middle-itude. The place is upscale but not upscale. Handsome, cleanly cared for, moderately priced. It is, in short: just my speed, when it comes to real estate.

So…really, this is almost as good as San Francisco used to be for me and my parents, where we never moved our car out of the garage more than once or twice a month.

I figure I can live here until I drop dead, or until I simply cannot walk a block or so. Whichever comes first.

LOL!

But it does have to be said: when you’ve lived in a place for a long time, you do miss your old neighbors and you do miss the good-ole-days. Someday, no doubt, someone will miss me and my funny-looking corgis. But until then…

Well. I intend to reign supreme!

😀

 

Does It EVER stop? Or even slow down?

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Goodie Gumdrops! Now we’ve got a  new flu epidemic revving up. And the authorities expect it to be particularly bad in Colorado. That’s just across the state line…  😉

Seriously: if we have a flu epidemic in Colorado, we’ll have it here in lovely (adjacent!) Arizona. Tourists will bring it across the state line, and it undoubtedly will spread across the Reservation, too.

Not like I wasn’t already sick as a dawg, eh?

Seriously: I’m inclined to doubt that I’ll survive a really roaring case of the flu just now. Always have been preternaturally susceptible to respiratory infections — when I was a kid, one evening a doctor told my mother I wouldn’t survive until morning.

Huh. He seems to have been wrong about that. Unless I’m a ghost, eh?

Truth to tell, though, respiratory infections do make me sicker than they do most people. What you think is a cold or a mild case of flu will lay me low for three weeks. And that I would like to avoid just now, what with this current mildly terrifying ailment.

Ugh. I can remember those awful brats in grade school teasing and tormenting me because my mother would keep me home whenever I caught a respiratory infection. GOD, but those kids in Ras Tanura were monsters!!! I learned to hate them even when they weren’t actively tormenting me — most of the time I’d just stay away from the other kids.

This was good, in a weird way, because it gave me plenty of time to study. Hence, lo! those many years later: Phi Beta Kappa. But…I think I would rather have had a few friends than a decorative fake key. 😀

***

So, soooo sick. The peripheral neuropathy, while apparently not especially dangerous, is absolutely crazy-making! To the extent that, as ailments go, it might actually be “dangerous,” it’s because much more of this would indeed make you suicidal.

No, don’t panic, please! I’m not about to throw myself off the North Rim. Yet. But I sure can see how, if this goes on and on and on, a person would be mightily tempted to bring an end to it. It hurts. 

And so I hurt constantly. If there were any way to stop it, I’d be inclined to try that way…even if it meant an end to life. An end to life, after all, means an end to pain.

And please: spare me the advice to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen. Both those nostrums — especially aspirin — cause peripheral neuropathy in me.

No kidding. Take an aspirin, and within half an hour or so, it’s bzzzzzzzz…

Yes, I will use aspirin. But only if I’m in a lot of pain. With the peripheral neuropathy lurking at all times, I figure one of those OTC pills will aggravate the hell out of it. And one thing I do not need to do is to make this buzzing and tingling and burning worse! 

Stop the World!
I Wanna Get Off!

She Would’ve Loved….

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Oh, my goodness! How my mother would have loved this adorable little corgi. Ruby is…

…hopelessly cute(!!)
…sweeter than candy
…doggily persuasive
…richly funny

What a charmer. She surely would have seduced my mother within minutes of their meeting. And they would have been pals for life.

Or at least, for rest of my mother’s life.

She’s long-gone now. My father remarried; then he died in misery. The new wife was merrily ejected from my life…she’d be about 181 by now, I imagine, if she were still living.

My mother was murdered by the tobacco peddlers.

Yeah. If you have a kid…or anyone you care about or who cares about you…don’t get seduced into smoking. It truly is a murderous custom.

She deserved to see her grandson. She deserved to see the cuteness that is the corgi. She deserved to live out her husband’s life. But no. She smoked herself to death, and so never saw any of those things…or any of the other beautiful things that should have graced her later life.

Don’t let them kill you, friends!

But do get a corgi!!!! 😀  Everyone should have a corgi. Right?

Free!! (??) I hope….

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Woo HOOO! It looks suspiciously like this is NOT cleaning-lady day!

The wonderful Luz (Cleaning Lady from Heaven) is not parked in front of my neighbor’s house (she visits those neighbors before descending on me). It’s almost noon!  So…unless that dear woman picked up another client and has enjoyed scrubbing yet another shack before coming here, I’m FREEEEEE from having to pick up the pig-pen.

Mwa ha hah! Sure do hope so…

Isn’t that awful?  SOOOO lazy that I don’t want to be bothered to shovel aside the litter so she can get at a surface or three to clean!

The other day some obnoxious and nosy financial dudes visited the Funny Farm. This, supposedly for a bland chat…and…yeah. Transparently to nose around in my house and see how I live and probably to see if they can get me committed to an old-folkerie if I dwell in stacks of litter.

Fortunately, because the ineffable Luz was slated to come by in the near future, I had picked up the place and put all the dishes in the washer and stuffed the dirty clothes in the laundry and…voilà! It looked almost like someone civilized lived here.

That was lucky!

{whew!}

If I’m going to be spied upon like that, presumably by my son’s hired help, after this I’m gonna have to make the bed and pick up the clutter the minute I roll out of the sack.

Not that it’s a bad thing to tidy up the place the minute your feet hit the bedroom floor. But that it’s a damn nuisance…and an invasion of one’s privacy.

And it makes me wonder, seriously, if I should pack up and move out of the city.

But….where? 

That mystifies me 

First, because this neighborhood is about as ideal a neighborhood as I can imagine. The house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, but THREE major (gourmet-style!!) grocery stores, a veterinary, a computer store, a hair stylist, and a Target.

Seriously: I don’t have to travel more than about five or six blocks to get everything needed for day-to-day living here. Truth to tell, I don’t even need to own a car to live here comfortably and conveniently.

Second, because the neighbors are very nice, very friendly. Even Tony the Romanian Landlord has mellowed out! This makes it a pleasant place to live.

Third, because a major regional hospital is about a four-minute ambulance ride from here. Dial 911, and the rescue guys (and gals) show up forthwith.

Fourth: because the crime level — not nil, of course — is surprisingly low for an urban neighborhood. Yes, of course I have fierce burglar-resistant screen doors on all the entrances, and of course they’re kept locked. But I don’t feel especially at risk, sitting here in the Funny Farm. In another neighborhood where we lived, I surely did.

Hmmmm……

Having those two clowns show up here and nose around was…disturbing, to say the least. I may have to hire the cleaning lady to come by once a week. Right now, I surely don’t do that…can’t afford it.

But…let’s think about that: I can afford weekly cleaning help one whole helluva lot better than I can afford to be locked up in a prison for old folks. That would make it easier for Luz to keep the place spotless, and also I could probably put her up to driving me to various retail stores.

So….

I think I should make a few minor changes to my routine: ones that would create the effect of major changes in my day-to-day lazy lifestyle:

  • Forgodsake MAKE THE GODDAM BED the minute Ruby and I roll out of the sack. Be sure the bedroom and bathroom are all tidied up.
  • Pick up the kitchen and stash the dirty dishes in the washer the minute I finish breakfast. Never leave stuff laying around the kitchen or dining room. {How lazy am I? Let us count the ways…}
  • Get in the habit of picking up the house before going to bed, rather than in the morning.

Hm. That probably would do the job, since I do not habitually lay around like a total slob. If some namby-pamby showed up here, assigned with the task of inspecting my living arrangements, they’d think I live like a cleaning lady. 😀  😀  😀

Seriously: pick up the clutter first thing in the morning, and no one who shows up later in the day will get any ideas about senility affecting my lifestyle.

Is it an invasion of my privacy?

Damn right! But nothing like the invasion of (nonexistent!) privacy that would be inflicted on me in one of those prisons for old folks.