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funny

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Glub!

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Rain all night, letting up  by light of day.

We still have high clouds, and the pavements are all soaking wet. But…it looks suspiciously like whatever this is will blow away.

Hmmm….  Reading the local news leads me to think I ought to blow away, myself. Good GAWD, has this place LosAngelized!

Cops shoot a sh!thead who was spraying the streets with bullets in our old neighborhood. This incident began in front of the Basha’s and Safeway stores where I used to do all my grocery shopping. Sixteenth Street and I-10 is right down the road from the first apartment I rented in Phoenix.

Phoenix “braces for fiscal challenges”: read “expect still higher taxes!”

Do I really wanna keep living here???

Hm.

Offhand, I can’t see anything better that I can afford. Scottsdale is outta my price range, by a long shot. Tempe, Mesa, Chandler: not my style. Sun City/Youngtown: been there, done that, ain’t doin’ it again. Other towns around the state: Boondock living is decidedly not my style.

Even when we had the ranch, up on the Mogollon Rim, we would drive into the city to do the shopping.

{sigh} I guess gunshots, stick-ups, and burglars are just part of Life in the Big City.

Sometimes I do find myself wondering, though: who needs it?

 

 

Gray Day Redux

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Another spectacularly, tropically rainy gray day. Weirdly beautiful. Ruby and I would be out traipsing through the ‘Hood if I could move my hip without eliciting a shriek of pain.

Alas, I can’t. So…instead, we loaf upon the bed, gazing out the big bedroom windows onto the cloudy skies and the burbling pool.

Dayum! If I didn’t hurt so much, I’d be out there paddling around in the drink.

Truth to tell, though, I’m afraid that if I got into the pool, I might not be able to climb out by myself. Would need to have a phone out there, to dial 911 if I couldn’t haul myself upright. And…

How do I not WANT to call 911 to drag me out of the drink? Let me count the ways….

My GAWD does this thing ever HURT!!! And there seems to be no position in which it hurts less.

***

The Haunts of the day take the form of memories of Saudi Arabia, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

My gawd! What a hellish place!

Even as a little kid, I think, I realized how horrible it was.

Well…that’s not quite the whole story. For me, as a kid resident of (un)lovely Ras Tanura, the horribleness was embellished by the fact that I was a weird little kid, whose eccentricity brought down on her all pure nastiness that grade-school children are capable of coughing up.

GOD, but those brats were monsters. And boyoboy, did they pour the hate on the weird little girl who imagined she wanted to grow up to be an astronomer. You just can’t even picture what nasty little horrors those junior Ras Tanura expats were. Evil, evil brats.

Now, in old age, one wonders where the moron teachers were. How come the idiot who ran the 2nd grade didn’t put a muffler on her little darlins’ mouths? How come the bitch who ran the 4th grade couldn’t bring herself to behave like a decent human being? How come my parents had to take me out of the school in the 5th grade so I could/would address the academic work and get through a whole day without collapsing into a nervous pile?

How did I hate that school? Let me count the ways.

And yes: the problem was the school and its monster brats and its idiot teachers. As soon as we got back to the States, I dived into the sixth grade in a San Francisco public school.   And weirdly, I did just fine there.

More than just fine, as a matter of fact. I thrived. In the California public schools, I hit the National Honor Society. And my performance excelled to such a degree that I started at the university at the end of the 11th grade — skipping my senior year in high school.

Must’ve been because I was a crazy nut case, right?

Oh well. Think about something else, f’r godsake!  

Clouds.

Rain.

Overgrown hedge.

Strange orange flowers.

Funny little dawg.

Sooooooo glad to be as far on the other side of the globe from Saudi Arabia as it is possible to get!

😀  😮  😀

And Another Evening at the Gym

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The plug I just posted, a few minutes ago, covered yesterday’s antics. 😀

Now we have today’s…   Which includes, as its high point, this week’s junket to the physical therapist.

Can’t complain about these safaris. After all…

* The therapists are beyond awesome. They clearly know what they’re doing (and then some!). So an evening spent exercising with them and being massaged by them and on & on DOES produce a marked improvement in the pain.

…a-n-n-d…WordPress just deleted about 3/4 of this post. It’s getting late and I am NOT up for trying to remember and rewrite that stuff. And so…

…awayyyy!

Can a day REALLY be this gorgeous???

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Okay, okay…I do understand that some (benighted!) folks fail to recognize that a rainy day coated in pearl-gray skies is fukkin GORGEOUS. But… {sigh} their loss.

My goodness, it’s beautiful outside those big sliding glass doors.

Yes, the sky really IS the color of pearls: gray and glowing and effing’ gorgeous.

A sweet and gentle rain sprinkles briefly and intermittently, warm and lush and amazingly dog-friendly.

{When you are a dog, you are a bit ambiguous about certain meteorological phenomena, such as …hmmm… rain.}

Yes, even though Ruby strongly disapproves of water falling out of the sky, she has cheerfully trotted outside to patrol the yard through the…urk!…water falling out of the sky. And now she’s back in the house, where she has taken up her post on the end of the bed, guarding the backyard through those heavy sliding glass doors.

My goodness, this has turned into an astonishingly gorgeous day. We had a spectacular sunrise…but that’s not so unusual for Arizona.

Rain, however, surely is. And gorgeous rain, beautiful rain: that most certainly is.

Surely, when you’re not a dog, you’re inclined to imagine that a day like today IS gorgeous. And yep: if you asked me, I’d tellya it’s a freakin’ gorgeous day.

Vaguely, it reminds me of certain days in Saudi Arabia.

NO, no…I’m afraid I do not miss (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Yeah: I do miss my parents, who dragged me there as a toddler. Uh huh. And I do miss my crazy little friends. And ohhh yeah, I do miss our cats. (We weren’t allowed to have dogs: rabies, y’know. So we had cats. Cats and cats and cats…) Sooooo glad not to be in Saudi Arabia! S0 haunted by weather that brings back memories of that place.

If you’ve lived in Hell for awhile and are sent back to Earth for another lifetime, do certain kinds of weather remind you of Hell?

Whaddaya bet?

Ruby-doo is conkered out on the sack. The human is sipping wine… but not guzzling it, because it’s too darned wet out there to walk up to the store to retrieve another bottle of the stuff.

Just as well, one supposes. God tryin’ to tell you somethin’ no doubt. Eh?

LOL! I do wish my excellent son were here to socialize with. But…well…yeah: he’s working. 

Remember that? Work? 

How outrageous!

It’s still the middle of the afternoon, so his phone is at his ear and his nose is on the grindstone.

How happy ARE some of us that we don’t hafta do that anymore?

Tried to lure him in the direction of dinner out this evening, but he seems magnificently uninterested in any such scheme. For that, he can hardly be blamed. Venturing out in this weather is hardly worth a restaurant dinner. To say nothing of risking your life… I suspect what he looks forward to this evening is quiet and a peaceful mound of chow of his own making.

This is a guy who CAN make chow. Yeah: he really is a superb cook. So it’s kinda silly to invite him out to a restaurant. 😀

 

It’s Taken Me 60 Years to Figure It Out??????

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Dear God!! It just dawned on me — here in 2025 — how my mother got herself and me out of Hellish Saudi Arabia. Only now,  lo! these many gerjillion years later!

Jayzuz! WHY did I never see this before? It was so obvious…

She and her best friend, Angie — a nurse in the camp clinic — convinced my father that I was too sickly to stay out there. That I needed to come back to the United States and be cared for by a stateside doctor at a stateside hospital.

That, my dears, was unadulterated bull puckey.

I was sick, all right: with social problems that made it virtually impossible to get along with the little sh!ts who were my classmates out there. Not that I wasn’t a little sh!t myself, after all. What kind of eight- or ten-year-old girl dreams of growing up to become an astronomer (no kidding! in the 1950s!!) and fantasizes that she lives in the jungles of India with Mowgli, Bagheera, and Akela?

Nope: I was never a normal little girl. But then, I was never treated like a living, feeling human being, either: not by those idiot teachers nor by the brats in their classes.

So…yeah. I was SO miserable in the fine Ras Tanura Senior Staff School that I dreamed up every ailment I could invent. And my mother bought just about every one of them. She let me stay home…and stay home…and stay home. When we left Arabia and took up residence in San Francisco, I was YEARS ahead of grade level, mostly because I spent most of my time reading and playing scientist.

I believe that she and Angie worked together to persuade my father that he needed to quit his job with Aramco and take me and his wife home.

Which, eventually, he did: He shipped out of the San Francisco Bay Area on tankers owned by Standard Oil — which was affiliated with Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). Eventually, he got another deck officer’s job working for Union Oil out of Southern California, and that’s where I escaped from high school a year early and made it into college at the age of 16.

Thank the heavens and all the Moslem angels above…

Eventually, as it developed, my mother and Angie did come up with a scheme to convince my father — and probably at least some of the doctors out there — that I really was SICK and needed to come back to the States to be treated. And eventually my mother managed to pile herself and me into an Aramco plane and head back to New York.

They did it by insisting that I was too sick to go to school. By keeping me out of class, claiming I was sick. SICK sick Ohhhh gawd, SICKER THAN SICK. 

Apparently my father fell for it. Either that or he didn’t want a divorce. WhatEVER.

And thank God!

What a horrible place. What a gawdawful childhood. What a joy to hit that grade school in San Francisco!

Gronk! Spare Me, Lord!!!

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Even if were not pouring rain, this is NOT something  would wanna do tonight.

Dammit!!

Dear Son called a few minutes ago to remind me that, ohhhhhh joy! We have to traipse to the physical therapists’ gym and blow away the whole evening going HUP HUP HUP…

What a freakin’ bore!  What a freakin” waste of time!

Frankly, I don’t see that hup hup hup does much for the spavined hip. Doesn’t make it worse. That’s something.

But doesn’t seem to do a whole lot to make it better,

Well. It may help a little.

But not so much that I wanna charge out into the rainy night to diddle away three hours going hup hup hup. 

Maybe I shoulda made up some sorta story to weasel my away out of tonight’s allegedly therapeutic antics. Alas, though, I didn’t think that fast. Sooooo…he’ll be along in a few minutes to drag me over to their gym.

What. A. Bore.:-D

For reasons unknown, I am sleepier than all my tribe. Won’t THAT add to the fun tonight, eh?

*********

BACK at the House!

Yaaayyy! Survived another evening of brain-banging exercises.