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Another Swampy-Dampy Day

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The sky is clear. The air is WET and SOGGY out there. Horrible, horrible place. Almost as miserable as (un)lovely Ras Tanura, the Saudi Aramco encampment where we spent ten unholy years on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Man, do I hate the Arizona desert. If there were any way I could afford it (and…if my son weren’t ensconced here…) I would be SO outta-here!

Ruby and I just came in from the morning dog-and-human constitutional. Ugh! Thought I was gonna melt into the pavement before we got back!

Well…one good thing about it was that there were hardly any other people out there.

Most folks have better sense than to charge out in this kind of sh!tty weather.

Now we’re waiting for the babysitter my son hired to show up. I told him that I am NOT going to opt the daily exercise hike — it’s the only thing that keeps the spavined hip from freezing right up — and so these women either have to show up an hour later than they normally might or they’ll have to wait in their damn car for me.

I did leave the dear lady a note saying we’d soon be back and suggesting she repair to the local supermarket for a nice cup of coffee (they have an awesome coffee bar there!). No sign of her, though.

Awwwwwwwwww…. What a shame, eh?

Whoever was in the house a day or so ago babysitting and puttering ripped off a lot more stuff than I thought. One of the phone’s handsets is gone, as are a few other miscellaneous desk-top items. Plus the entire phone that was in the living-room desk.

Busy folks, eh?

Anyway, now I’ll have to figure out how to get extensions to replace those phones. And that may be a challenge: they were pretty old. I may have to replace ALL the phone handsets. That would be seven of them.

And you don’t even wanna know how much that’s gonna cost.

I sure don’t….

Seriously: it looks like replacing two of them will run around eighty bucks.

No wonder the dear soul wanted to steal mine. 

Babysitter Hell

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My dear son has hired this annoying woman to sit here all day and babysit me.

As though I hadn’t been living alone and taking care of myself and my dog and my home and my yard and my pool all by my little idiot self, for year on year. You wanna talk about annoying?  

Holeeee shee-ut.

She sits there on the phone gabbing with her friends and whomever, yakity yakity yakity yakity yakity yakity…. The endless yakathon devolves into an exceptionally annoying noise. Especially to a person who is used to living alone.

This comes on top of the discovery that some workers he sent over got into my office and stole sh!t to the left of them and sh!t to the right of them. They stole my office phone’s handset, among a number of other things.

Fortunately, I had another phone stashed in a cabinet in another room. But…that means that sooner, if not later, I’m gonna have to buy another handset.

If they even still make that brand and variety. Seems to me at one point a guy at the local phone store said these things are no longer available.

In-f*cking-furiating!

So, back to the original infuriating element of today’s post: I need to decide whether to try to stay here, in my nice little house in my nice bourgeois neighborhood, until I drop dead (good luck with that!) or to move, in the very near future, into one of those horrible prisons for old folks….uhm….”life-care communities.”

The very thought makes my skin crawl.

Back in the day, the University of Arizona (my dear alma mater /eyeroll/ ) required all female undergraduates to live in the dormitories. Well. Unless one was married or living with one’s parents.

That experience left me with a lifelong distaste for institutional living.

Ugh!!!!  I started in that way, and I do NOT want to go back out through that door. Bleayach!

Hotter Than the Hubs…

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Jayzuz, it’s HOT out there!

Actually, it’s not so very hot: it’s kinda humid. In Arizona, humidity makes a warm day feel hotter than a by-gawd. Wunderground says the temp just now is only 94 degrees. Which for an Arizona mid-day is NOT very hot.

We’ve got 25% humidity, though. That’s fairly soggy, as an Arizona day goes.

I grew up in lovely Saudi Arabia: on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Days like this were normal in that garden spot. Seriously: I’ve seen it so humid that rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky.

Kinda doubt that we’ll see that phenomenon here, though. It just ain’t a-gonna get that humid in lovely uptown Arizona: ever.

Ugh! Ten years of living in Arabia must have been an extended species of torture for my poor mother! She was an Upstate New York girl. There, we’re told, summer temperatures range from upper 70s to the mid-80s. I can’t imagine how she survived in the Hell that was Ras Tanura.

Honestly, today she’d be scared to death, what with the threats of war and actual attacks on the refinery. By this point, though, my father probably would have sent her and me back to the States. Probably wouldn’t have left, himself….he earned a stupefying salary and wouldn’t have been quick to abandon it.

At any rate…a hot, muggy day like this reminds me — if distantly — of those ugly days in Saudi Arabia.

One of the best things my father did for me and my mother was to send us back to the United States three months before he left that living Hell out there. We landed in San Francisco, my mother rented a nice apartment in a compound called Parkmerced, and then put me into an excellent public school. I really did enjoy that place…and given a chance and a choice, I’d go back there in an instant!

What a relief, to get out of the Hell that was the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School. Hell populated by nasty little devils led by morons pretending to be teachers….

I loved living in Parkmerced — one of the few things that made me happy at any time during my childhood. And really: given a chance, I’d go back there right now.

San Francisco! That’s the place!

 

 

Scam-a-Rama!

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Am I the only one who tires of being the target of a scam a day? 

Honest to Gawd, sometimes it does feel like some new scam comes in over the transom almost every day. 

How the Hell do these people get enough information about you to concoct a convincing-sounding pitch? The current effort (now consigned to the trash) comes from someone who knows who my (now long former ) mortgage lender was. We’re told I must hurry and call this number and blah blah blah blah….

Well. If I hadn’t paid off said loan some time back, I very probably would have fallen for that one.

This is the major reason I have call-blocking on my phone: the blitz of crooked hustles. I do try to filter the incoming emails, but you can’t strain out every one of them.

And yeah…some of them are amazingly persuasive.

Contemplating Hell in the Afternoon…

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Yes: today’s is an afternoon from Hell. At 4:40 p.m., the air temperature measures a crisp 97 degrees. Brrrr!

Thinking about my poor mother, as I stumbled around the park through the heat. She hailed from Upstate New York, but was raised by her Northern California grandparents — they who succeeded in persuading a judge that the New York set was too immoral to bring up a child.

The California set was pretty wack-sh!t, too: they were Christian Scientists, back in those days a variety of raving crackpots. But despite their nuttiness, they succeeded in getting my mother’s custody…which has gotta tell you something about the New York relatives.

Yipes!

Anyhow…in another lifetime: my mother came to love Arizona, long after she married my ever-so-manly father and launched into living happily ever after with him. He dragged her off to Saudi Arabia for ten years. Then they escaped back to California…and finally, some more years later, he retired to Sun City, here in Arizona. And here, she was indeed very happy.

I do wish she could have known my son — her grandson — as he grew to manhood. She would have thought he is THE business: smart and handsome and successful. Quite the improvement over some of the New York relatives on her side of the tribe. But she died while he was an infant.

At any rate…today’s weather is reminiscent of unlovely Saudi Arabia’s: oppressively hot and humid. Stumbling around the park this afternoon was less than perfectly pleasant…that’s for sure!

Way too hot and sticky to hike to the grocery store…which is what I have to do now that my son has purloined my car and claims to have gotten my driver’s license negated. I do need to get a lawyer and have that mess straightened out…but frankly, I just don’t care enough to expend that much effort. Truth to tell, when you live in my part of town, you really don’t need a car.

No. The train that runs up and down Main Drag West will take you just about everywhere you need to go on the west side of Central Avenue.  Armies of busses run up and down Central Avenue, and another lightrail train serves the central and downtown districts. Plus a cabbie lives right across the street from the Funny Farm.

So I haven’t put up a fight over the idiotic car situation. It’s simply not worth quarreling over.

*** Augh!***

Ruby has taken to HORKING every time she takes a swiggle of water. I guess she’s choking on it.

Doesn’t seem to choke on food, but water gags her.

So…yeah. I need to schlep her to the vet. Again. Somehow. On foot, through 115-degree heat. Whoopeee.

I keep hoping it will pass. But so far, that ain’t happening.

None of the BS is passing, come to think of it….

Another Swampy-Dampy Day

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Yech! Feels like ugly, hot, wet Saudi Arabia out there, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Extraordinarily unpleasant morning for a doggy-walk.

But (ugh!) we’re back. The Human and the Dog are pretty well cooked. Dog is dosed with prednisone. Overdosed, actually: I accidentally gave her a whole pill, when she’s only supposed to get a half. Hope it doesn’t make her sick.

Not many fellow travelers in the park this morning. Understandably: it’s hot, sticky, and ucky out there. Horrible place to live: almost as bad as hideous Saudi Arabia, there by the by the seaside where I grew up. Horrible place!

Feeling on the ragged edge of “I can’t deal with this.” Dunno why…just don’t feel like coping with…anything. Not that there’s much to cope with this morning.

Truly: I hate Arizona.

Where would I rather live?

Mars,  maybe…..  😉

Seriously: San Francisco is where I’d rather be. A thousand times rather be.

It’s where we decamped after my father quit his job in Saudi Arabia and we finally came home. I was sick all the time out there, but that didn’t make much nevermind to the parental units. What finally changed my father’s mind and forced him to take a Stateside job was the amoebic dysentery that struck my mother.

She damn near died of it.

He loved her dearly, and her illness — a direct result of living in an unsanitary Third-World country — was what drove him to quit his spectacularly paying job out there and bring us home. At last. 

After we’d been living in San Francisco for awhile, my father landed a better-paying job, shipping out of Southern California: the land of the stupid and the home of the bourgeois. So it was off to Long Beach, where I’d been born 16 or 17 years before, and where my mother’s dearest friend dwelt.

Awful place! I hated living there. The schools were so backward it felt as though I’d been demoted about two grades. And my dreams of going to school at UC Berkeley went straight down the tube.

Arizona is ten times better….but that ain’t sayin’ much.

Hmmmm….where would I ‘druther be?  Let’s see….

  • San Francisco
  • Berkeley
  • Just about anyplace in the S.F. East Bay
  • New York City
  • Paris
  • London

Heh! Don’t ask much, do I?

Ohhhh well.  Here we are, on the ragged edge of Hell. We ain’t goin’ anywhere. And this is where I’ll be until I die.

Without a doubt.