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August 5 Heat, Continued…

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So the day that I began describing this morning has trundled on. And on. And on.

Now it’s late afternoon. Hotter than a two-dollar cookstove out there. No kidding: As we scribble, the back porch thermometer registers 110 degrees in the shade of the back porch overhang!

Yeah: that’s 110 in the shade! 😮

WHAT a place, eh?

Today has been quiet…probably because it’s too damn hot for anybody to get up to any hijinks. 😀

But I’ll tellya: the hijinks of recent days are still eating at my nerves. Enough, I might remark, that for brief periods I seriously consider piling my stuff and the dawg in the car and driving outta here.

Where would “outta here” be?  

I dunno. Grand Junction, Colorado, is a pleasant enough venue. A little cold in the winter. A little hickish. But a LONG way from here, and in another state. Presumably out of Arizona’s jurisdiction.

That those two social-worker women who showed up here had, in hand, a record of the night that SDXB and I got into a fight and I stalked off down an alley, ending up at a neighbor’s place…WOW! 

Sorry, folks, but THAT scares the Hell outta me. That little flap happened years ago! How much else does Big Brother have on me? And what can be done with that “else”?

Jayzuz!

Haven’t yet decided what, if anything, to do about this. I don’t want to leave, for two reasons:

* Most important, I absolutely don’t want to leave M’Hijito behind. I love my son, relish his company, and do NOT want to sever relations with him…or even to put any distance between us.

* And I love my home. It’s perfect for me and the dawg, probably the most pleasant place I’ve ever lived in, and you may be sure I do not want to leave. This place is where I want to live until I die.

Which I expect will not be soon!

Seriously: That sounds overweening. But I’ve known several women who have lived here in the ‘Hood, all by their little old selves, dwelling in these houses well into advanced old age. Most notable was my first neighbor here. She was in her 90s when her son carted her off to an old-folkerie — WELL into her 90s. And going strong.

But after her, I’ve also known several others who’ve been able to stay here into their dotage, as the young pups have moved into these houses, fixed them up, and jacked up the property values. A-n-n-d…

…I love young pups and enjoy having them as neighbors.
…As they upgrade the houses, they jack up property values all around them, which means that…
….When I croak over, my son will inherit a house worth A WHOLE LOT more than I paid for it, and a whole lot more than one would expect inflation to increase that value.

I want him to get the benefit of that sharp increase in value. And that’s one reason (far from the only one!) that I hope to stay here through my dotage and until I die: Money, honey! 😀

The cost of locking me up in the desired old-folkerie would absorb every penny we get from sale of this house…and then some. The longer I survive to take up space there, the more of my savings will be taken away from me.

And, at the risk of repeating myself: I want those savings to go to my son, not to some damn depressing institution!

Tired of Stupid!!!!!!!

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So a few minutes before 8 a.m., Ruby the Corgi and I get back to the house after an hour’s trudge through unholy heat and humidity. ALL I WANT is to get back in the house, back in the air-conditioning, and sit down with a glass of water in my paw.

But nooooooo….NOT A CHANCE!

As we approach the front yard, we find a dog-loving moron standing there, with her own overheated hound. She awaits our approach, simpering inanely.

Dammit. If you’ve lived with a dog longer than six months you should know: Dogs are NOT your little “furbabies”! They’re CARNIVORES. Tribal carnivores, whose instinct is to defend themselves and their fellow pack members against all comers.

No matter how pea-brained the comer!

Problem is, city folk tend to confuse dogs with kids. They think their dog is on a par with their eight-year-old. And they imagine you think the same. Gawdlmighty, these people are stupid!

So we try to go around the front-yard visitor. This doesn’t work. She and her dog come to greet us.

GO! AWAY! YOU IDIOT!

No amount of attempted mental telepathy or body language helps. She comes bounding over to us. And yeah…right off, the two dogs go at it!

Jayzuz, am I tired of stupid!!!!!

We — Ruby and I — manage to get inside the gate without bloodshed. But it was close. Very close.

Can’t say this kind of stupid stuff happens every time Ruby and I go out for a walk. If it did, we wouldn’t go walking. But it surely does happen enough to annoy the Hell outta you.

Actually, it happens enough to lead me to think maybe I shouldn’t go out walking with Ruby. At all.

Hate to do that! Ruby needs the exercise. And so do I.

But jeez. One of these days, somebody — canine or human — is gonna get hurt!

Another Beautiful Day in Arizona…

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“Leave us all enjoy it,” as one long-gone local radio personality used to intone, every morning.

Ugh! I’d like to leave it, all right. 

But with M’hijito living here in town, I’m ain’t about to go anywhere.

Leave us all enjoy it. Sure. Right now it’s a chilly 95 in the shade of the back porch overhang. That’s at 8:05 in the morning.

Ruby and I just got back from circumambulating the park: an hour’s walk through the swampy morning. Ugh!!!

Oh well. At least we both got exercised.

Speaking of sons (as M’hijito happens to be, of mine), we walked (again) past the house where the couple’s son got caught in some sort of hijinks and was shipped off to the state prison.

They lost their home. The sleazy investors who glommed it have never tried to rent or sell it. It just sits there, deteriorating: falling apart. Neighbors must have complained, because now they’ve beat back the weeds and they keep the rotting wood picked up. More recently they did some repairs and painted.

But it’s still an eyesore.

In a fancy neighborhood of million-dollar homes. Right on the park.

Ruby-doo is still COOKED. She sitting here on the tiles, panting.

One of the advantages, I reckon, of not being covered in a coat of thick fur is that the fans in the house can cool you off.

Just now, though, I’m feeling kind of advantageless.

Those terrifying “social workers” who showed up here yesterday and gave me the third degree left me very scared. And by damn, I’m still scared.

Whatever they wanted, whatever they were up to: it couldn’t have been good for me.

This morning I tried to call a lawyer…and discovered my guys have evaporated into the fog! One has died. One no longer practices where he used to, and that place is not handing out his new phone number…if he even has one.

And..well…  I must say, I am SO alarmed by the “social worker” visit, wherein a couple of officious types tried to quiz me and extract a bunch of private information from me, that I seriously do think I should pack up my car, throw the dog in it, and drive away.

Now, not later.

Frankly, if I had someplace to drive to, that’s exactly what I would do.

But…WHERE?

My California relatives are all either dead or gone. No refuge in those parts.

Reasonable out-of-state venues are in New Mexico, parts of California, Colorado, and maybe Texas. But…the Texas relatives are dead. I can’t afford so much as to camp out in California. And New Mexico? What would I do there and where would I go???

************
Later

Well…for one thing, calm the hysteria. 😀

No, I’m not real pleased with the visit from the “social workers,” or whatever-the-hell they were. And I’m concerned that they’ll descend on my son in the middle of his very busy workday.

He does work out of his home — on his employer’s dime, which fits out a nice office and electronics and phones. So if they show up there and start pestering him, they’ll chomp big bites of paid time out of his day.

Hm. If he tells them to get lost, that no doubt will be counted against him. So he’s in the damned-if-do/damned-if-don’t trap.

****

Lately, I’ve found my daydreaming moments haunted by my late mother.  She smoked herself to death, y’know.

No kidding: the poor woman hardly passed a conscious moment without a cancer stick in her mouth. The first thing she’d do in the morning, the instant she woke up, is light a cigarette. The last thing she’d do in the evening, as she was turning out the light by her bed, is smoke a cigarette.

In between, she puffed away pretty much nonstop.

She must have been so dependent on the nicotine that she had to have a fix before any period that was likely to pass without a cigarette. And the damn things killed her.

Not a pleasant way to go, we might add.

***

In even flakier precincts, I find myself irresistibly wondering WHO sicced those flakey social workers on me.

If social workers they were. I suppose they could’ve been some kind of private snoops that someone sent over to poke into my business.

But I don’t think so. Probably they really were what they said they were: state workers sent to snoop.  But WHY? And sent by WHOM?

Those are the nervous-making questions.

****

Welp…no point in obsessing about it. But…I’ll tellya, if I could afford to pack up and move outta here, I’d be on my way to Colorado as we scribble.

 

 

 

In the Land of Looney Toons…

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Welp, speaking of Looney: I’ve lost the post I was writing. In it, I went on at length about an alarming incident: a surprise visit from a pair of social workers, who apparently were trying to elicit evidence that some of my marbles have rolled out my ears.

Luckily, Wonder Cleaning-Lady had just been here, so the house was spotless. Presumably, then, they did not conclude from a slovenly mess that I’m too marble-free to take care of myself. 😀

At least…I hope not.

Lemme tellya: these folks are REALLY scary. A significant part of their job appears to involve deciding whether you’re well enough to live in your home and take care of yourself. From what I can tell, when they show up, you’re at some risk — very possibly significant risk — of being declared non compos mentis and locked up in a facility.

One of the alarming characteristics of such folks is that they have no sense of humor. They seriously can not distinguish between something you say in jest and something you really mean seriously.

One of my schticks, for example, is the very silly proposition that I’m a-gunna throw myself off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

I have to ask you: How silly is that? And…if a person were really going to do such a thing, do you seriously believe they’d babble on about it in a casual conversation? Holy sh!t. Obviously, if I were going to kill myself by leaping into the air and plunging several thousand feet down a cliff, I wouldn’t tell you about it first. Would I?

So without thinking, I let part of this joke out, and HOLEEEE SHEE-UT! You’d have thought I took out a pistol and stuck its barrel in my ear.

Okay, after I calm the two down a bit, the conversation devolves into a discussion of a silly incident that followed on a quarrel SDXB and I had while he still lived in the ’Hood — years ago!

I don’t even recall what we squabbled about. But in a fit of pique, I stalked out of his house and charged off down the road, figuring to take a walk and burn off some rage.

For reasons that I also do not recall, I took it into my pea brain to walk up an alley. I think the deal was that this alley went straight from the residential street where I was walking to the street just south of my house, effectively creating a short-cut home. In stomping up this alley in the dark, I got turned around, and….eeeps! I got lost! I couldn’t tell which way was north and which way west, the directions I needed to know to get back home.

A party was going in one of the back yards, so I stopped there and asked if they could tell me which way I needed to go to reach Main Drag West. For reasons I do not know, this bunch now calls the cops, telling them a disoriented woman is wandering loose in the alley.

When the cops arrive, they quite reasonably think I’ve lost a few marbles.

You can see which way this is going, right?

I got them to take me back to SDXB’s place, where together we were able to persuade the cops that I was not stoned and not crazy, and that SDXB would take care of me for the rest of the evening.

And so it went: he drove me home; I went to bed; and that (I imagined….) was the end of that.

BUT… Apparently this escapade went into my permanent record. 

Yes. Did you know you have a record, whether or not you’re a criminal type? Be aware that whatever shenanigans you get into, even the most innocent, go into this record…

Now — several years later! — when these social workers show up in my living room, they know all about this long-ago escapade, and they suspect it’s evidence that my marbles are loose.

No kidding. 

  • Have I ever been arrested?
  • Have I ever gotten into any trouble with the cops, with my employer, at the church, with my fellow crazed drivers?
  • Am I stone cold sober at the time?
  • Do I act like I’m crazy with these women?
  • Am I coherent and level-headed?

Forgodsake: the correct answers to these questions are no, no, yes, no, and yes. I emit all of these correct answers, and prove those answers by my behavior.

Nevertheless, they decide I’m nuts and file a report with their agency to that effect. So now I have an official record as a nut case, and as far as I can tell there is NO way to change that.

Hafta tell you: I don’t know what to do about this episode. Obviously, I need to call a lawyer. But my lawyer recently died! I called his office and got no answer there. So I have no idea which way to jump.

Monday, I’m gonna have to get on the phone and start calling lawyers, at random, until I can get someone to talk with me. And hope I can get them to position themselves between me and the Authorities.

Really. This is scary enough that if my son didn’t live here, I’d pack up my house and leave the state, right now. But he is here. So I’m staying…very possibly to end up in some institution.

Quite some society we live in these days, eh? Orwell set 1984 about 41 years too soon. 

Delivery? HOT diggety!

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Eight o’clock in the morning and already hotter than the Hubs of Hades outside. Without a car, I need to get going RIGHT NOW to hit the Sprouts, the Albertson’s or the Fry’s to buy the groceries I need.

But…but…I also want breakfast. More than I want to go grocery shopping. By far…

The coffee is steeping. What passes for breakfast is ready to come out of the microwave. So…noooooo. Nope: not traipsing to a grocery store at crack of dawn.

And…LO!!!  Here’s a REAL good excuse not to do any traipsing at any time.

Albertson’s, Safeway, and Sprouts will deliver groceries!

Who knew??? 

Now that I know…we’ll be trying that out.

I’m dubious, though. My diet tends to be heavy on fresh produce. And in my experience, Americans know amazingly little about selecting and preparing fresh fruits and vegetables. So whatever those stores deliver is likely to be catch-as-catch-can.

But it’s worth a try.

Imagine! Never having to trudge to the store again!!!  

Woweee!

If one or more of those fine establishments can manage to deliver decent produce, I actually might not need a car. My son could be right!

Even if their staff can’t select decent produce, an Uber guy lives right across the street. He can deliver me over there, maybe for an extra fee help me gather the groceries, and haul the stuff back here. I mean…WOW!

Talk about the lap of luxury, eh?

An alternative might be to pay the Cleaning Lady Par Excellence to drive me to the store. That would work better, because then I could select my own groceries. But it would add to her workload and probably not ingratiate her. Not one…little…bit… 😮

Y’know… When we lived in England, we didn’t own a car. 

In London, a car wasn’t necessary. An unholy number of locals had them and trudged around in them…but…even more rode the Underground or the surface-street busses or…hang onto your hat..walked. 

What if…what if you thought like a Londoner? and behaved like one?

  • You wouldn’t own a car, partly because you couldn’t afford it and partly because you wouldn’t need one.
  • You would ride the busses and trains to and from work.
  • You would stop by a lovely little grocery store on the way home from the transit station; there, you would buy the makings for dinner, plus a bottle of wine.
  • You would eat like royalty, because virtually all of the food you bought would be sterling FRESH.

Well…o’course, we have no Underground. But we DO have the new fancy-dan streetcars, Hot diggety!

And we DO have Uber. The whole damn city is infested with Uber drivers. Hot diggett dawg!

Hmmmmm….. Intriguing!

The only time this would be impractical would be right now: in the dead of summer. Hiking around in 110-degree heat is not the best of all possible strategies.

However, the stores in question open as dawn cracks and stay open until well after dark. You could either start out at six or seven in the morning, or simply ride Ubers during the summer and shift to healthier (and cheaper!) walking when the weather cools.

Huh.

Today, I think, I’ll try the Albertson’s or the Sprouts delivery services. Let’s see how they do.

If they can select decent produce (and I’ll betcha Sprouts can)…well…

If they can, mirabilis! I’ll have groceries delivered here. Once in a blue moon I’ll visit the stores, explore their current offerings, and adjust my delivery lists accordingly.

First, though…I believe I’ll go back to bed for a nap. Was sleepy when I woke up at dawn’s first crack, and now am zombified.

Beloved Contract Workers….

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Bein’ an old lady alone with a 25-pound dog in lovely Phoenix, well…natcherly I have a swimming pool, right? And natcherly it takes up about a third of the back yard.  And, it bein’ a swimming pool, natcherly it has to be kept clean.

In lovely Arizona, maintaining a pool involves much more than a weekly brush-down and a slug of chemicals.

Much, much more.

It really needs to be swept down every day. And it certainly needs to have its chemicals kept current…that would be acid, chlorine, and whatnot.

It’s not very hard, and as a matter of fact this ole’ lady can do the job just fine.

Problem is, a pool requires daily maintenance, not — as some would think — weekly maintenance.

And that causes the ole’ lady to become surprisingly bored with the job. 😀

Just in from the backyard, about five minutes ago. Looks good out there. Thanks to Pool Dude, the guy who comes around once a week and beats back the algae, the water is just plain pristine. No kidding: downright crystal-clear.

Everything else is crystalline, too: the equipment is in good shape, the system’s working fine…nary a glitch in sight or hearing. YAY!

This state of affairs is not because of a busy ole’ lady but because of the Beloved Pool Dude.

Lemme tellya: THAT is a guy who earns his keep. In spades! 

He comes around early in the week to clean, service the pump and filter, and apply chemicals. Today, incredibly, is Saturday and that thing is still crystal-clear. He is making it possible for this ole’ lady to stay in her house. Because at this age? NOT A CHANCE would I be able to keep that hole in the ground even half as clean as he does. To say nothing of keeping the equipment running as though it were brand-new.

The pool and the backyard are, taken together, a main reason I absolutely do not want to move into an old-folkerie like the Beatitudes.

That water out there? It doesn’t have anyone else’s germs in it but mine. Well…and a few birds’. 😀

That fencing out there? It keeps the Ruby Doo out of the drink. (Ever had to jump in the pool to rescue a dog? Innaresting experience…) And it serves nicely for the occasional bird to perch on.

That equipment out there? It runs seven days a week, nooo problem no trouble no hassle. Once a week, Pool Dude checks it and administers whatever maintenance is needed.

He’s not the only guy who comes around to keep this place running. We have Gerardo and his crew, about whom you read every couple of weeks. Those guys…ohhhhh Lordie! WHO would want their jobs? Talk about working like horses…  They not only beat back the weeds and maintain the desert landscaping in 110-degree heat, they keep the watering system working, trim the voracious trees and shrubs, and control the vines that pile up along the back and east walls. The thorny vines… The ones that keep the prowlers, peeping Toms, and cats out. There’s a reason they’re called cat’s claw vines.

Then we have the watering system guy, who (along with Gerardo) keeps that large and complicated system running. Properly.

And Wonder-Cleaning Lady, who kindly absolves me from housework. Just about all housework, short of dropping the dinner dishes in the dishwasher.

And the electrician, who is certifiably smarter than the average cat. By about 1000 percent…

And the plumber, who understands products and systems that date back to the early 1970s…

How do I love Gerardo and his colleagues? Let me count the ways…  WAIT! I can’t count that high! 

😀  <3  😀