Coffee heat rising

funny

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Arfa -EEEK!!!

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OMG! Is there a reason I can’t keep track of dates and times?  Some sort of learning disability? WHAT?

Moment of panic just now: Calendar seemed to say I missed an appointment with WonderDentist.

Eeek thrash bang thrash eeeeek!!! Look stuff up. Call the kid. (He plans to drive me over to the doc’s office.) And…and…nope! It’s not until tomorrow.

Personally, I’d prefer not until the next lifetime…but WTF. At least I haven’t enraged that good man. And tomorrow afternoon I can go over to his place to be made miserable.

Goodie.

Y’know…it seems to me that the older you get, the harder it is to keep track of this kind of ditz.

Why?

Do you really get stupider as you age? Or what?

Actually, I think as you age you just plain get sick and tired of it all. The beloved dentist, for example: I would be happy if I never had to see him again!

Well, maybe over cocktails would be nice. But at his office, in his leather chair? Not. So. Much.

Oh well.

So my son was enraged because I interrupted his workflow by calling him in a tizzy. Just you wait, kid! Give yourself another 40 years, and you’ll know how it feels. 😀

 

Lone Wolf Howls at Moon…

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Aaa-rooooooo!  Leave me alone, goddamit!!! SNAP BITE!

LOL! Wednesday: Not sure whether this is a Cleaning-Lady Day. But I don’t think it is. Sure as Hell hope not, anyway.

Talk about your ingrates, eh?! Here I am, loafing in a spotless house, and WHINING because the person who keeps the damn place spotless is likely to show up and interfere with my beloved solitude.

What a nut case, eh?

Ay-yup. I am such a hopeless loner that I even resent having someone around when that someone cleans my house and hauls out the trash and makes my life altogether tolerable.

😮

My son is coming over this morning to drag me to the dentist. 

A crown fell off a molar. In theory, the dentist should have to in$tall another crown. But…waaaaiiit-a-minit here! Look at that tooth and you see nothing wrong with it!!! No cavity. No filling. No busted faces.

The alarming implication is that the dentist installed a totally unnecessary crown, and gouged me several hundred bucks for the privilege. So we’ll be having a little discussion with him today.

And boyoboy, am I ever NOT looking forward to that exchange.

So between the cleaning chaos and the looming dental confrontation, this is not shaping up to be a great day.

Ugh!

Hotter Than a Three-dollar Cookstove!

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LOL! That was one of my father’s favorite sayin’s, usually applied to a car — or to a warm afternoon. And as we lived out in Saudi Arabia, on the arid and fricaseeing shores of the Persian gulf, it was often a particularly germane folk phrase.

He grew up in Texas, though in fact he had been born and partly raised in the deep, DEEP South. So I reckon it’s within reason to guess that turn of phrase could have come out of the South rather than Texas.

Hm. Apparently there’s a version, “hotter than a two-dollar pistol,” that refers to a car — especially a Corvette. But the folk phrase seems to have been born in the Deep South or the Wild West.

Welp, hereabouts the three-dollar cookstove has been simmering away all day long. The sky is overcast and hotter than a by-gawd. 😀

Seriously: for an Arizonan, a cloudy day that’s also HOT signifies a visit to Hell. And that’s just what we have this afternoon: Middling-low cumulus clouds floating in hot, almost damp air. I’d say it was strictly for the birds, but just now the birds have disappeared, presumably taking cover under any shade they can find.  Just now, Wunderground tells us the afternoon’s temperature is 101 degrees, with a 24% of rain.

Hm. Could be, could be… We shall see, in due course. 

And speakin’ of real estate…

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…as we were saying yesterday, briefly, Zillow claims my li’l middle-class house is worth (hang onto your hat) $563,000!  And change.

What????????

Over half a million dollars for an aging tract house within walking distance (easy walking distance) of a dangerous slum? Seriously????

And horrors!

****

I return to the idle thought that maybe I ought to think about moving out to Scottsdale — more specifically, to the district known as McCormick Ranch. Once a very fancy-Dan tract, McCormick ranch is now a mid- to upper-middle-class suburb, filled with ticky-tacky construction set in seas of Bermuda grass. The area is relatively safe. Of course, no place in a big city is “safe,” but McCormick Ranch is far more so than the swaths of North Phoenix that border the alarming Sunnyslope tract, where I live now.

This proposition presents its challenges. The main one: I very much doubt I could get anywhere near that much for this house. And houses out in Scottsdale are pricier by far than the ones here in North Central on the edge of Sunnyslop.

To get into Scottsdale housing, I’d probably have to move into an apartment. And I don’t wanna.  I love my house and all its roominess. I love my swimming pool — my pool and no one else’s. I love the trash pickup service from the alleys. None of these appertain to apartment living.

And another important adjunct to this issue:  unless there’s something I’m misunderstanding, it doesn’t look like it would be worth moving unless I could get into a better area.

McCormick Ranch is not a better area than North Central Phoenix. The two districts are about on a par. Fairly affluent. Relatively low in crime. Close to upscale shopping. Attractively built middle-class homes. Decent schools. Sooo….

Why would I want to live there? 

* It’s ten minutes from the endlessly importuning Mayo Clinic. The gawdawful drives to see MayoDoc would go away, once and for all.

* Shopping is excellent, ranging from the high side of middle class to the high side of very much upper middle class.

* Proximity to lots of great restaurants.

But…but…waitminit here. 

* I don’t go to restaurants. I can cook lots better than that…for lots less change!

* These days I do about 75% of my clothes shopping online.

* I should base where I’m gonna live on the proximity of a doctor’s office? Uhhhh… don’t think so…

* The Ranch is a long way from my son’s neighborhood. If I moved out there, I’d hardly ever see him!

* I dunno if the Cleaning Lady from Heaven would be willing to drive way to Hell & Gone to clean the Funny Farm if it were in North Scottsdale.

***

Hmmmmm….  To my mind, the “Waitaminits” outweigh the benefits by about ten to one. Seriously: there aren’t enough positives to convince me that I should pull up (expensive!) stakes and move to the far side of Scottsdale.

So…one is led to apply that Fine Old Saw: When in doubt, don’t!

  • Doubt, indeed. There’s just not enough there to persuade me that I would benefit from moving. Benefit: in any way…
  • Socially (I know one! person who lives out there.)
  • Financially (Any benefit from moving to a tonier area will be outweighed by the costs of selling, buying, fix-up, and moving.)
  • Comfort-wise (My house is a luxurious palace; noplace on McCormick Ranch is any better, and most are not as good.)
  • Gasoline and mileage savings (I probably drive out to the Mayo Clinic no more than once a month. That’s hardly a motive to pull up stakes!)

So unless my son decides to move someplace else — say, he gets a job in another city — there’s really no reason for me to even consider buying a place in McCormick Ranch.

If he did move out of North Central Phoenix, I might move out, too. Either to follow him or to put some distance between me and the gangs. But as long as he’s in these parts…well, so am I!

Hotter than the Hubs!

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Seriously: hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. At 7:20 in the morning, the shaded(!) back-porch thermometer reads 85 degrees…but you couldn’t prove that by me. Ask me, and I’ll guess 95 to 100.

* Wet.
* Overcast.
* And hot.

A humid day like this is NOT a typical Arizona number. Generally, “it’s a dry heat,” as the locals like to say.

Ruby and I: just back from dragging the human around the park. Sweltered!

This morning M’hijito is dragging me to the dentist, lhudly scream Goddam. A crown fell off a back molar. So won’t THAT be fun!

Frankly, I don’t think it needs any repair work…because when you look closely at it you see it probably never needed a crown to begin with. I suspect a lot of these li’l procedures are actually procedures on your pocketbook.

That is almost certainly the case here. You can see, absent the crown, that the tooth was never cracked and probably never broken, more than at the level of a small chip. If it were up to me, I’d go on about my business and leave it alone.

But when you get old, things are not up to you. The next generation takes over and pushes you around like you were an eight-year-old.

😀  Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. In some aspects, I probably do operate about on the level of an eight-year-old. After a certain number of decades, you lose patience with all the hassles, all the bullshit, all the unnecessary expenses, all the gouges and just let it go. And frankly: I’m long past that point.

LOL! One benefit of living at McCormick Ranch would be that it would be too far from my son’s house for him to justify traipsing across the city to accompany me to every little event and crisis. And you may be sure that if I were out there today, I would not be trudging to the dentist this morning. 😀

I’m IN!

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Geez, FaM’s website let me in!  I lost the log-in data and for awhile thought…well…that’s the end of scribbling blog posts! 

Whether I can get in again remains to be seen. Didn’t think the code I entered would work, so…I didn’t write it down.

Hoping that today will not be another Day from Hell. It’s overcast and muggy…gotta get up RIGHT NOW and take the dog for a walk, if we’re gonna get out today at all.

The hellish illness has eaten away at my nerves and at my son’s nerves to the point where we’re barely speaking. I don’t know what to do about it — never have been good with people, even under the best of circumstances. And what we have here appears to be about the worst of circumstances. Sooo…with social skills that rank among the bottom third, I’m kinda…fu*ked, frankly.

At any rate: awaaayyyyy!  Hope I can get back in…but if not: it was nice knowin’ ya!