Coffee heat rising

Loafing: The Impossible Dream…

87 gerjillion things to have to do before leaving for the dentist this morning:

Clean teeth
Wash face
Paint face
Comb hair
Make bed
Put dishes in washer (= take clean dishes out of washer & put away)

Hip hurts. What have I done to myself this time????

Pick up DR table (= put away piles of junk
Pay pool guy
Call AC guy: water leak
Track down new lawyer (mine just died) to review deathbed transfer of property and financial instruments to M’ijito
Shovel off kitchen counter

Hip hurts.

Beep beep! Microwave nagging.

Problem: short on patience for doing things that really DO need to get done. Now.

Frustrating to have to fart with all the little stuff when you’re in a hurry…my son is on his way over here…get stuff together for dentist, find shoes, get into shoes, heat mug of cold coffee, find purse, find wallet

Hip hurts.

Beep beep!

Copy and paste a line into this page

Beep beep!

Rinse out coffee pot.
Pour coffee grounds on plants outside.
Rinse again.
Pour out more coffee grounds.

Hip hurts.

Rinse again

Beep beep!

Pour rinse water on plants outside

Beep beep!

Hurt.
Hurt.
Hurt some more.

STOP THE FUKKIN’ WORLD! I WANNA GET OFF!!!!!

And the morning is just getting started. My son is on his way over here to drag me to the dentist. How can I count the ways I can hardly wait for that encounter?

Soooo…. THAT is what my poor son has to cope with, when he shows up at the door ready to trot me out into the wilderness. CAN you imagine? Poor guy!!

RINGY DINGY!

Leap up, run across the room, grab the phone.

Nuisance phone solicitor. To get rid of the  nuisance message they left, you have to click through FOUR stages on your phone.

Oh damm. Here’s the kid! Prepare for more fun!

Now for some serious loafing…

Out the door, an hour or so ago. It being Thanksgiving Eve, none of the hired help is around: no sign of Gerardo the Great, no sign of the Luz the Ineffable Cleaning Lady.

Our neighbor and wonder-accountant reached Luz, whom she also hires. Luz is NOT working today, thankyouverymuch.

To which we say: hooooraaaaayyyy!

Ruby and I shoot outside, to perform a pleasantly loafifarious stroll: around the park, through the Richistans…what more could one crave on an exquisitely beautiful afternoon?

M’hijito and I…well, between the time I started this sentence and right this minute (a few seconds later…)…are at each others’ throats, arguing and slinging insults back and forth over the phone. {sigh}

Just what we needed to make a nice “vacation” day, eh? In a matter of minutes, we’ve turned a beautiful afternoon into a nightmare. And y’know…I’m pretty much beyond being able to handle that stuff. Tired, lonely, need a friend…do not need a slew of insults shoved in my ear.

Welp, I can’t handle this stuff just now. So in a couple of minutes, the dog and I will set out again, for an endlessly long journey to…who knows where?

Outta here!

Mayo-Trapped!

So here I am stuck inside one of the Mayo Clinic’s many blood-sucking rooms. Sunday morning again: once again.

Just asked my son why these appointments are always made on Sunday — one of the reasons I dropped out of choir. Got a crabby answer…but apparently he’s the one who’s been doing this. Like…he didn’t KNOW I had a standing activity on Sundays?

Innaresting.

***

Now they’ve got me trapped in a treatment room with a needle stuck in an arm, pumping some sort of gunk into me. The kid and I have been fighting — jolly fun — and so (reasonably enough) he has taken his computer and stalked off to the lobby, leaving me to sit here all alone with a needle stuck in my arm.

Dare not readdress the question of who repeatedly schedules these accursed appointments on Sunday mornings, guaranteeing that I can’t go to choir. That’s OK, I guess, because I dropped out of choir awhile back — for other reasons. But if that were not the case, by now I’d be outta there once and for all.

At any rate, I’ve come to hate this place with a passion — altruistic and marvelously scientific as it is. Actually, it’s a  sentiment that has a long backstory:

While I was growing up in Saudi Arabia, Aramco employees families and their families had to take rafts of shots every six months. None of those were pleasant, but some were notably painful — particularly typhus, typhoid, and cholera. The latter two REALLY hurt! So I learned to fear and hate clinics, hospitals, and medical staff.

That kind of prejudices me against this place, and against this seemingly ENDLESS stint of sitting here with a needle stuck in my arm, even though the treatment is pretty much painless.

Seriously: the infusion takes an hour…and that only covers pumping the gunk into your arm. Doesn’t count the hour’s driving time or any time spent sitting around in waiting rooms. Theee pitz! 

We squabbled on the way out here, so my invitation to take him to a late lunch/early dinner was rejected. Ohhh well: a lovely steak is sitting in the fridge, waiting to be barbecued.

But it’s only 1:30 in the afternoon, leaving a good hour (or more) to go. And GAWD, do I hate this place!

Glub!

Yeah, verily: It’s a glubifarious morning. You should see that rain pouring down out of the skyfull of dark gray clouds! Thank Gawd for coffee, that’s all I can say!!

It obviates my plan to traipse to the grocery stores this morning. What with my honored son having persuaded the stump-dumb doctors at the Mayo to cancel my driver’s license (!!!!!!), I can’t get to a store except on foot or by paying through the schnozzola to hire an Uber cab.

Our beloved Uber driver lives right across the street…and I can assure you that he will not want to be rousted out to schlep the Little Old Lady six blocks to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts. Fortunately, there’s enough Dawg-and-Humann food in the house to sustain Ruby and me for a few days. So whenever the rain stops, I can run (literally!) to the nearest shopping center and grab enough chow to tide us over until the weather clears.

Wow! What an ugleeeee morning! Wunderground seems to have missed the boat (heh!!) by predicting a mere 30% chance of rain today. Asleep at the switch, eh, folks?

Today, Continued….

Oh, my! It is POURING out there!  Seriously and no exaggeration: water dumping out of the sky by the bucketful.

Aaahhhh well… So much for the plan to walk to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s and retrieve some food and some wine. Ain’t doin’ that, not in the stuff that’s falling out of the air. 😀

Fortunately, Ruby the Corgi has plenty of dawg food: ten cans, each of which will last a day and a half. So…we’re good for the Important Stuff!

We also have enough human food to last a week or more.

And this being Arizona, you may be sure the rainfall in question will NOT last a week. At all.

Wasting some time by way of perusing the present real estate prices. HOLEE mackerel! This place is Californicating fast!

As we scribble, Realtor.com claims my shack is worth $538,426. I paid $232,000 for it and thought that was overpriced…just a few years ago!

Uh oh…system crash!  Let’s see if I can get outta here without losing every character I just typed…  Bye!

 

Today…

Today while the horrors
Still cling to your vines…
I’d taste your strawberries if I could get to a store to buy some…
I’m not allowed to drink your sweet wine…

😀   Not to say “LOL”….  

Continuing in general misery this morning. Maybe, though, not as bad as it has been the past weeks. The gawdawful peripheral neuropathy is still present, but it seems a little milder than in past weeks…or maybe I’m just getting used to it.  Ear-whistling is torture. Lip-burning hurts, hurts, and hurts some more. Afraid to take an ibuprofen or aspirin for it, because we’re told that those fine nostrums can cause neuropathy.

Who knows, then? Could be I’ve brought this particular aspect of the ailment on myself, madly gulping down pain-killers. Wouldn’t that be par for the course?

Computer says today is Saturday. Who knew?  If you’d asked me, I’d have said it was mid-week.

Learned, by chance, that the old-folkerie where my son would like to consign me will send a worker to your home to babysit you.

!!!

Turns out Wonder Cleaning-Lady used to work for them, doing exactly that!

So, this presents two possibilities:

One is to call the old-folkerie and ask what they offer in-home, for how much money.

The other is to ask WC-L if she will come over on a regular basis — at least several times a week — to oversee me, drive me to grocery stores, help prepare a few days’ worth of food…and whatnot.

The latter…I think not. I’m still radically pi$$ed off at her for snapping a photo of me when I’d laid my head down on the dining-room table after a meal, because I was so, SO sick. With a wine glass standing by the dinner plate, that picture made me look like I was passed-out stone-cold drunk.

Ha hah, very funny, eh?

To add to the humor, she e-mailed the thing to my son! And “passed-out stone-cold drunk” is exactly what he thought. 

This threw a monkey-wrench into the mother-son relationship. Big time!

Things have never really gotten better: he’s now convinced I sit around getting snockered all afternoon, and nothing will persuade him otherwise.

Do I indeed sit around getting snockered all afternoon?

Not so much. As in “not at all.” I have one (count it: 1) glass of wine with my big meal of the day, which I take at mid-day. At an American’s evening dinner-time, I have what you would think of as a light meal or a snack.

Back in the Dark Ages, when I was at the university in Tucson, I had a boyfriend who did indeed start to drink around lunch-time and continued merrily through the afternoon. And I did indeed keep up with him. He, too, ate “dinner” at mid-day. So we were taking in a lot of food as we were swizzling away after our morning classes.

But in fact, I eventually tired of these shenanigans — and my parents just hated the man. When it became clear that I had a choice — him or my parents — I decided that my parents were the best bet…and so sent him on his way, weeping into the night.

Life: one little drama after the next, eh?

At any rate, the Internet reports that he seems to have had a successful career as a university administrator and to have spawned three kids through a long-term marriage. So apparently he wasn’t much harmed by my giving him the parental heave-ho.

Unfortunately, though, the habit that he had instilled — starting in with the wine at noon, along with a full-course dinner — stuck with me. I passed it along to DXH, and he and I were in the habit, through two decades of marriage, of swizzling wine around every major meal.

Bad habit, apparently. Especially when that major meal takes place in the early afternoon. 😀

These days I refrain, if for no other reason that I’m just too sick to enjoy a nice glass of wine. And of course, because I suspect the alcohol may have something to do with the peripheral neuropathy.

You’d think if it did, after a few weeks or months on the wagon, the PN would go away. But it hasn’t. So either the wine has nothing to do with the ailment, or I’ve poisoned myself permanently and am headed off to the Other World with a constant buzz in my ears.

Oh, well…  Just now it’s time to head off for a Doggy Walk!