So my son asked me to delete this post.
Noooo problem!!!
Such is the power of one’s excellent son! 😀
funny
Wetter than a By-Gawd!
Yech! This has got to be one of the nastier mornings I’ve had the privilege of living through. By the time Ruby and I got back from circumnavigating the park, I was SOAKED with sweat and, presumably, dew. She’s still swilling water, poor li’l thing.
Ugly weather! Sticky, gray, and overcast.
Ohhhh well. At least that meant fewer dog-lovers to have to get around.
WHY are people so stupid about their dogs??? If I hear one more idiot coo, “Ohhh, don’t worry…they just want to pwayyyyyy,” I’m going to wring the turkey’s neck. And maybe his dog’s neck, too.
{Nooooo, stupid. She just wants to remove your dog’s head…}
Anyway, we made it around the park without having to dodge the usual complement of those clowns, mostly because of the icky weather.
Walked past the house where the scion of the family got caught fu*cking some girl who was a few days below the age of consent. He went to jail. His parents went bankrupt. Their once-handsome home is now a decrepit wreck. What a disaster…all the way around!
Something similar happened to a friend of mine. She managed to escape bankruptcy and hang onto her home. These folks seem to have lost the house.
Wow! If you’ve got a teenaged son, be sure and teach him the meaning of the word “jail-bait.” Yes, sexist, yes nasty term…but it’s the dead-on truth. Get caught diddling an under-age girl, and the government will destroy you AND your family. No kidding.
Hot. Wet. And soggy out there. Mighty glad to get back inside the Funny Farm.
Let’s check the calendar…what new horrors today?
Not many: that’s for sure. Too hot for horrors, I guess!
😀 Seriously: it is too hot to go abroad. So you can’t get into very many shenanigans. Alas.
Okay, I give up….
Tooling along halfway through today’s FaM post, when WordPress CRASHED the post. Can’t find it. Can’t reconstruct it.
AAAAARRRGHHHH!
Like we don’t have enough frustration in our ordinary boring lives?
So: toss it all, forget it all, start over from scratch and f*ck it all. Especially the latter. Grrrrrrrrr!
My son having purloined my vehicle, I need to walk through the 100-degree heat to the nearest grocery store to get food and treats for the Queen of the Corgis. Either that or pay an Uber driver to tote me over to the store.
LOL! Speaking of frustration…
It looks like he has also purloined whatever wine or beer remained in the house…though truth to tell, I think the stock has been low or empty for several days. The main issue is dog food. But…we have half-a-dozen cans hiding on the shelf, and about a third of a bag of kibble. So it looks like I can wait until tomorrow morning and hike down to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts to get that stuff, rather than hiring Uber to drive me right this g.d. minute.
As for the beer…meh! That can wait until tomorrow, too. Or until someday.
LOL!
Y’know, this situation gets eye-openinger and eye-openinger. What it reveals, incredibly, that if it were not for the heat, I would not need to own a car at all.
No kidding! Not to say Can you imagine?
This house is within a few minutes’ walk of two major supermarkets (Albertson’s, Fry’s), a gourmet hippy-dippy store (Sprouts), a community clinic (in the Albertson’s shopping center!), a car rental lot, a computer repair shop, a clothing store, a veterinary, …one can go on and on. Between those and Amazon, there’s really no need to leave the neighborhood, except maybe to make a run on the doctor’s or the dentist’s office…for which you can rent a cab or an Uber. Add to that the train running up and down Main Drag West and the busses on Main Drag West, Main Drag East, Main Drag North, and Main Drag South…and…well…
Seriously: why own a car at all???
Think of the sheer volume of cash you could save by using the public transit and the local taxi services…only when you need them? Between the taxes and the upkeep and the fuel, a car really is a hole in the ground into which to pour money. If you organized your local travel needs logically enough, you really would not need to own a vehicle.
And dayum! If the roads here were safe for the purpose, a good bicycle would almost eliminate the need for any gasoline-powered chariot.
Well, of course: they’re not safe for that (or any) purpose. But that notwithstanding, the proximity of so many stores and services here cuts out the need for a good 90% of gasoline-powered transit, here in the ‘Hood.
Seriously: I’m thinking I may not buy another car. And I’m beginning to wonder WHY that hasn’t been obvious to me before now.
Interesting, isn’t it? You get so much in the habit of doing things in thus-and-such an established way, that you don’t think of the alternatives.
And further(glub!)more….
As we were saying about what a fine, wet, HOT soggy morning this is…BE GLAD, BE VERY GLAD that you are not a lawn dude.
Oh aaaaagh! What a job!
It’s 11:30 in the morning. Hotter than the Hubs outdoors. Ninety-five degrees, 15 percent humidity. Coming on to noon, and I’m sitting here exhausted from the strenuous job of loafing that has soaked up most of my morning. Just about the time I decide believe I’ll take a li’l nap, what do I get but
brrrrrrrraaaaaahhhhhblassssstttwrrrrrrrrr!!!!….
ohhhh shit!
Gerardo’s guys!
They roar around. They blast around. They fling around. They charge around…on and on and on.
No nap for the lazy one! 😀
Now I’ll have to wait for them to get done so I can give them a check.
I should whine, right?
Honestly, I do not understand how those guys hold up in this unholy heat! Slamming around and banging around and roaring around and hauling around: Augh!
About 15 minutes of that job would kill me.
Which, o’course, is why I hire them…. But selfishly, crabbily, old-bitchily…I sure wish they’d time their visits outside the napping hour!
😀
OMG! Lookit that: he’s cleaning stuff out of the freakin’ pool!!!! I can’t believe it.
I mean, how awesome can these guys get? <3
***
Forked over a hundred bucks to them. Kind of a stiff bill, until you think…uhm,,,,how would I like to be out there slamming around in 100-degree heat? And how many lawn dudes would skim the floating stuff out of the pool???
My heroes!
Actually, they’re Ruby’s heroes.
She sits and lurks and waits for them. And when they finally show up, she goes in for the attack and loves them into submission.
My gawd, that dog loves those lawn dudes!
I don’t know how she knows it’s Lawn Dude Day, but she surely does. And she IS waiting for them.
Weird.
Life is weird. Dogs are weirder.
Glub!!!!!
You thought Arizona has “a dry heat,” right? HAR HAR!!! Just now it feels like Ras Tanura did, when we lived there on the shore of the Persian Gulf: HOT and WET, WET, WETTER THAN WET.
Ugh. Ghastly morning!
Ruby and I: just back from circumnavigating the hood, through this very soggy doggy day. Ugh! Indeed.
M’hijito is gallivanting around the Midwest on business. No idea when he’ll be back: presumably in a couple of days. Looking forward to his return…and am curious to learn how things went for him there.
Traipsing traipsing doggy-traipsing...around the park. Past the house that’s having to be completely rebuilt after the previous owners trashed it. Through the ‘Hood: a pretty place to live.
Every time I walk around this place, I thank my lucky stars that I stumbled upon a Realtor named John Shackleford. He’s the one who brought me to this place, when I was looking for a house of my own after having escaped marriage. It really is a nice area; North Central but not North Central: therefore not North Central prices. That’s how I was able to afford to move here.
My first house here, which I shared with SDXB, was less than a block from the dratted light-rail line. That thing made a lot of noise and, not surprisingly, imported a less than desirable population. SDXB eventually moved out, but bought a house in the neighborhood — actually, just a block from my present palace.
Eventually, I decided to move out of the place we’d occupied — after our idiot city fathers installed that light-rail up Conduit of Blight Blvd, the noise and the human trash from the thing made for an unpleasant place to live. I’d planned to move out of the neighborhood — probably to Scottsdale, East Phoenix, or back to the Encanto district. But this place — a block from where SDXB had moved, came up…far enough from the horrid light-rail to be reasonably quiet, just a block from Lover-Boy, and handsomely renovated by the sellers.
SDXB subsequently moved to Sun City, where — being a stodgy sort — he’s very happy. I’d lived there with my parents and just hated it, so refused to follow him out there.
Soooo…here I am, ensconced happily enough on the edge of unholy Sunnyslope (you don’t wanna know!) and within a few short minutes’ drive of my son’s house. It’s incredibly convenient:
- 3 major supermarkets (one of them a Sprouts) within easy walking distance
- a doctor’s office, in the same realm
- a Walgreen’s: same precinct
- a veterinarian within walking distance
- a train running up a main drag, but far enough from the house to avoid noise
- armies of busses running up the two main drags to the east
One thing is for sure: you don’t need a car here. And that’s good, since my son filched mine…for my own good, dontcha know.
😀 I don’t happen to agree with him that I shouldn’t be driving — that’s BS. But truth to tell, in this location I don’t have to drive! Everything I need is within easy walking distance, even including a doctor and a vet. To gild that lily, a guy across the street is driving an Uber cab.
Seriously: if Uber stays in business, it will be several years before I’m forced to move into a horrible old-folkerie. With any luck, indeed, I’ll die before that happens. And so I will live out most or even all of my last few years in my own calm, quiet and pretty little place. With my own swimming pool, my own yard, and my own funny little dog.
What more could one ask?
Round and Round She Goes…
And where she stops, nobody cares…
😀
My son alleges that he managed to get my driver’s license invalidated. Which is to say, it is now illegal for me to drive. (Thus his excuse for hijacking my car, right?)
Well. Ohhhhkayyyy.
Who can tell us whether that’s true? Who can say whether this little plastic-coated document is good for anything other than decoration?
Well: the Department of Motor Vehicles, of course.
I can’t easily get myself down to DMV in this unholy heat: certainly not without a car of my own to navigate the insane traffic.
Ohhhhkayyyy….
So I got the bright idea to go into a store or business that COULD check whether a document that you use as ID for check-cashing and the like is actually valid. Seems like that oughta work, right?
😀
It gets better and better.
First store I went into, they didn’t know how to call up your driver’s license and confirm it.
Got that? They were accepting checks, but they didn’t know how to tell whether the checks were valid! Or even whether you’re the person whose name is on the damn check!!
Hmmmmm….
Moving on: Didn’t get much further with the other places in that shopping center.
None of them said my driver’s license was invalid. That was good. I guess.
But none of them could really confirm that my driver’s license could safely be used as ID for check-cashing. Or not.
Sooooo….. I still don’t know a damn thing. To confirm or deconfirm, somehow I’ll have to get out to the credit union where my banking account resides: on the Arizona State University West Campus, a half-hour drive on the other side of the freeway from here!!
My son has grabbed my car, and so getting over there is darned near impossible. Tomorrow I’ll try calling them on the phone…but doubt that I’ll get far with that.
Otherwise..I’ll either have to hire an Uber to drive me out there and back, or try to mooch a ride with a friend.
{chortle!}
Entertaining as Hell, isn’t it?
Didnja just know Hell is endlessly hilarious?
***
Phoenix is an LA-style city, meaning that you need a car to get around — whether it’s across the city or a few blocks up to the local grocery store.
This, I can cope with by hiring the Uber driver who lives across the street. But really…that IS a PITA, and I’d sure rather not be bothered with it.
***
What if I rent or buy a car, park it in a rented space in a nearby garage (where my kid can’t find it), and go on about my business? Remember: my driver’s license is hidden in my own car, where I normally store it so I don’t have to carry a purse with me everyplace I go.
Conundrum: That notwithstanding, I haven’t asked whether that license is still valid, or whether the kid has contrived to quash it. To do that, I’ll have to traipse to the DMV office and stand in line till every cow in Arizona comes home. So…it could be that even if I get it back or get another copy, it may be worthless.
LOL! This is getting so ridiculous that even I think it’s kinda funny.
So, y’know what I think is the best thing to do?
Nothing.
Yeah: nothing.
Let him keep the damn car. He can pay the insurance and the taxes on it. (These, lemme tellya, are freakin’exorbitant!)
Between Uber, regular taxicabs, and public transit, it’s not that hard to get around this city car-free. In fact, if and when I get the car back, I may sell it: just to be rid of it and all its panorama of expenses. Now that I’ve learned to get around without it, why the hell do I need it?
Ahhhh to be in Berkeley, where you can live comfortably without a car!
No kidding! My great-grandmother and her daughter, my great-aunt, lived on a hillside in Berkeley, about a block below where the train from San Francisco passed through a tunnel into Kensington, the suburb where my cousins lived. But you could clamber up a concrete staircase to the top of that tunnel, where you’d find yourself on the neighborhood street that led to the cousins’ house. Great-Grandmother and Great-Aunt lived in Berkeley for year after year after year…and never owned a car!
Can you imagine?
Well. You couldn’t do that here; not and retain any grip on your sanity. You’d melt into the pavement. 😀
***
Mumbling on in that precinct: y’know… I suspect it would not cost much more to drive a rental car than it does to own a car and pay the taxes, insurance, and maintenance.
DXH and I did that: he preferred to rent a car rather than own it. Accordingly, for year after year, the car at our house was NOT our car: it belonged to a rental company. If there was a logic behind that preference, I never understood it. Probably it had to do with the fact that he was deducting it from his taxes for his law practice. It was, in theory, a business expense, not a personal vehicle.
I think. But couldn’t swear to that. All I know is that we didn’t actually own the car parked in our driveway.
Sooo…do I need to “actually own” the car parked in my garage? Would it be more advantageous to rent it?
Something to look into.