Coffee heat rising

funny

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Too Gorgeous to be Miserable…

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Seriously, this afternoon — along about 3:00 p.m. — is SO mellow, so soft, so clean, and SO beautiful that even the plague of little maladies fails to make one miserable. Just…incredibly…lovely!

Maladies? Ohhh…just a few…

Peripheral neuropathy: frantic buzzing and burning in the hands, soles of the feet, and lips. Hurts. Makes you crazy.

Fingernails: lifting from the nail beds. No indication of why, or of what one can do about it.

Awful sore and itchy spot on the tail end. Dunno what to do about it. Rubbing in an analgesic does…hmmm…essentially nothing.

As of this morning, the hip pain was gone. But now it’s back! No idea why.

Dared to try to sit out on the back porch to take in this gorgeous afternoon.

B-a-a-d idea!

Place is swarming with mosquitos. Forthwith, had to dart back inside. Slam the screen door. Slam the kitchen door. RUN AWAY!!!

###

Thinking about my father: the jobs he had, how hard he worked to support me and my mother.

He was a tanker captain and, when he worked a shore job, a harbor pilot.

Maneuvering oil tankers across the ocean paid him well. But the job took him away from home for weeks on end. And…y’know…weirdly, the man was basically a homebody. A harbor pilot’s job is dangerous and demanding…he must have been exhausted most of the time during the ten years he did that in Saudi Arabia.

When he finally retired to Sun City, he and my mother had…ohhh…about 18 months together until the cancer sticks she’d smoked in gay, stinking abandon since she was 16 years old ganged up on her and killed her. She died horribly of tobacco-induced cancer shortly after they settled into their Dream Home in the suburbs of Phoenix.

They’re both gone now. The only relative I have left is my excellent son. And…heh…that does put some strain on him, the poor man! 😀

Seriously: he works ferociously for the insurance company that employs him. I would go back to teaching freshman comp if I had to work that hard!!! It doesn’t leave him much time or energy for riding herd on an ailing old bat. So…well…I try to keep from belly-aching too much. But he does know I’m ailing…and that the indications of that ailing do NOT bode well.

Oh, well. The sooner I croak over, the sooner I stop hurting. Right? 😀

EEEEK! Senility Attack!!!

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Well…that was a moment of high terror…

This morning I went to get my laptop so I could take it out on the back porch, there to play with the Internet by the dawn light of a gorgeous morning.

Get computer from bedroom…

Uh…no. Nope.

No computer in the bedroom.

Nor on the bed.

Nor under the bed.

Nor in the bathroom…nor…anywhere. 

Repeat searches. Search and search and search.

No computer.

Must have left it in the car, think I.

But…the car is at M’hijito’s house. He’s decided that it’s unsafe for me to drive (no kidding!!) and has purloined the vehicle. If I’d left the laptop in the car (not impossible: I take it to coffee shops all the time, for loafing purposes), then the computer’s at his house, too.

Shoot off an email to him. You know the variety: the “I’m nuts” type…

This is Sunday. He won’t roll out of the sack for another couple of hours, and probably won’t turn on his laptop for another hour or two after that.

Resign myself to having lost my most precious li’l object. Tromp through the bedroom to the bathroom. Tromp back out of the bathroom…and…wait for it! 

Right: THERE IT IS, sitting on top of the bureau drawers, right there in the bedroom.

Yep.

I must have looked at it three or four times and not even registered it.

WTF?

If I ever had any marbles, I seem to have lost the last of them.

***

Meanwhile: hurt hurt HURT lemme tellya HURT!

The gettin’ old stuff is NOT for the faint of heart. No, indeed not.

This morning a hip joint has gone out of whack. Every. Single. Step is excruciating. So is getting up out of a chair. I hurt so much I can hardly breathe!

All that notwithstanding: with no one here to help, I have to get up and limp around….

And…

And….

GOOD GRIEF!

I’ve limped out to the back patio. Plopped down in a chair. Opened the computer.

Realize that (what’s the matter with the damn computer NOW???) (??? naturally it’s stopped doing whatever it was doing…whaaa?) my coffee still awaits…on the kitchen counter.

O Hell O Damn

Drag myself out of the chair. Limp into the kitchen. Pour a cup of coffee. Limp back out here. Pull a chair up to the table…and find THE PAIN HAS STOPPED!!!

Huh??????

Not to say

WHAAAA?????

No idea why it stopped.

But lemme tellya…

THAT

DID

HURT! 

Argh. 

Now I’m afraid to sit down, lest the pain start up again..

So…

What we have here is one of those days!

Need to walk over to the Sprouts and reprovision a few favorite goods. But I’m kinda scared to try it, lest that pain flare up in the middle of the quarter-mile hike.

Hmmmm….what to do, what to do?

When in doubt, nothing. Right?

***

Yep! That seems to be the correct motto…  Just laid down on the bed. Put my feet up…and…OWWWWWWWW!

Holeee MACKEREL does that hurt!

Hmmmm… Whaddaya bet I ought not to stroll across a seven-lane thoroughfare plus a railroad track with this thing doing…whatever the.hell it’s doing.

Definitely something in the hip joint. But what? I cannot imagine.

Oh, yeah…ONE OF THOSE DAYS! 

Turning the House into Profit…

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So here we are, late in the afternoon: just in from a hot, muggy walk around the ‘Hood.

This neighborhood was one of my luckier finds along the Road of Life. Yea, verily…I do love it here! And surely do hope to pass through old age free of medical and baby-sitting bills right up to the end, so I can hand my beloved house along to my beloved son: lock, stock, and paid-off barrel.

Seriously: Zillow claims the Funny Farm is worth $556,500. M’hijto’s castle: $493,00.

He, however, owes a mortgage , whereas when he inherits this place, he’ll get it debt-free. Then he can sell his place and…who knows? Buy a summer home in Tahiti?

Seriously: he could either turn his house into a rental, thereby generating investment income from it. Or just sell it and invest the cash proceeds in the stock market.

To my mind (such as it is), renting real estate looks suspiciously like more trouble than it’s worth. Dealing with renters — some of them no doubt deadbeats. Paying taxes on the enterprise. Insuring the place. Keeping it maintained, no matter what damnfool thing the renters pull… I dunno. Think I’d rather live in it while it appreciates in value; then sell and collect the increase in property value.

But when the time comes, that will be his decision and none o’mine. Thank goodness! 😀

Of notable interest, though, is the fact that this neighborhood is ballooning in value.

Real estate prices in Phoenix rarely fall, unless a major national recession is under way. So I think it’s safe to guess that this house will continue to grow in value. If he chooses to stay in it or to rent it out, over time he’ll collect a nice increase in dollars.

************
An Hour or So Later
************

Coming on to 5:30 p.m.  And Oh MY, what a gorgeous evening!!! Clear, quiet, deliciously temperate… Moments like this are the BIG reasons I want to be able to leave this house to M’Hijito.

If he likes it here, it’s a joy. And it’s paid for.

If he has other ideas, it’s paid for. And he can turn a nice profit from it.

Either way, he deserves it!

🙂

I do need to get Gerardo’s gentlemen in here to trim up the shrubbery. They haven’t been around for awhile, and the place has gotten pretty overgrown.

Hope they haven’t abandoned the yard care business.

But if they’ve dodged out, that’s OK. This place is over-run with yard dudes.  Gerardo is the Great Yard Dude of the Western World, no doubt of it. But others can do the job.

***
…and movin’ on…

You Want Me to Pay WHAAAT?????

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Statements arrive in the mail, claiming to show what is not covered by Medicare. Alarming, because they don’t really say you have to pay the vendor…these outfits often generate a Medicare bill, send it off, and then refrain from charging the amounts Big Brother declines to pay.  Then the vendor drops the amount the statement says they’re charging, so you don’t really owe that. Quite.

But meanwhile, you also have private insurance, which may (or may not) cover all (or some) of the amounts Medicare declines to cover.

You can’t tell from a given statement what part of that is what! You just have to wait — weeks or months! — until the vendor gets around to generating its most recent coherent bill.

Even then, you’re likely to have to guess what’s owed and what’s covered.

Right now Medicare says it’s billing me $1,057 and $658…for services that I wouldn’t have used if I’d known they weren’t covered.

IF they’re not covered. They actually may be covered, but you can’t tell it from these statements.

Ducky!

What’s Your Favorite Phone Solicitor Bounce?

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EVERY….GODDAM…MORNING the accursed phone solicitors ring up this number. Even though I have the telephone set to ring through only on calls from specific area codes, almost every day at least one nuisance call gets through. Usually more than that.

They spoof area codes as well as local exchanges, trying to trick you into picking up the phone. I, for example, no longer answer the phone unless I recognize the caller’s name or the call is coming from an area where a client might be located. But this means,  of course, that if you do any amount of business over the phone, you really can’t afford to decline to answer the call.

Phone soliciting is a prison industry. So a fair number of the dorkuses who roust you as the sun rises are convicts, working some miserable job as part of their sentence. Others are more ordinary scam operators: crooks of one sort or another who have a special skill at putting on the Dumb and the Feckless.

To my mind, that files the whole lot of them into the category of Crook and Nuisance. So I feel no compulsion to be polite to them.

So…if they’re taking advantage of you (they know it’s 7 in the morning where you are, and you’re running around trying to get ready for work, wrangling the kids for school, or choking down breakfast and coffee), why not have a little fun with them?

Videlicet:

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. {Pronouncing your name wrong…}

You: Hello, dear. What are you up to?

Them: {Launches into sales pitch.}

You: Is that so?!? That sounds very interesting! How long does it take to get {whatever they’re peddling} here to East Thailand?

*******

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. Blah blah bl…

You: Omigawd! EEEEEK!

Them: Huh?

You: HOLEEE SHEEE-UT!  Call the fire department. The kitchen is ON FIRE!!!! 

Them: Where are you?

You: Eeeeeeeek! HAAAAAALP!!!! Ow, ow, ow, nooooooo!!!!! HEEELLLLPPPPPPP!

Them: What’s your address?

You: GAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

SLAMMMM!
(Mark slams down the phone)

****

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. This is Dimwit Dummas calling for Ripoff Industries. How are you today?

You: Just fine, dear. And you? Now the Mark engages the predator in conversation. As the exchange proceeds…

You: By the way, may I ask you something?

Them: Sure?

You: I’ve heard telephone soliciting is a prison industry. What jail are you calling from?

And so on, to infinity. 

As if you had that much time to waste…

What’s your own favorite phone-solicitor revenge? Tell us about it in the comments below…please!

What COULD she have been thinking?

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Or DID she think? 

My great-aunt Gertrude — a kind of amateur intellectual — lived with her mother (my great-grandmother) in a pretty little Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced bungalow in California’s Berkeley foothills. It was such a lovely little house! All wood floors and handsome windows and…on and on.

In back stood a similarly designed garage.

Neither woman had ever learned to drive.

(Can you imagine living in a time when you didn’t have to drive to get around a city?)

So that garage — big enough to hold two cars — served as a gigantic storage bin.

And what did they store in it?

Piles and piles atop pile on pile of old magazines. 

Yes. Gertrude subscribed to National Geographic, and she NEVER threw out a back issue. That garage was chuckablock full of antique issues of National Geographic.

Without doubt, there were other titles, too. But Nat’l Geographic is the one that sticks in my mind. They must have had twenty or thirty years’ worth of issues stashed in that lean-to.

Well. The place would’ve been a fire hazard under the best of conditions. But stacked from floor to ceiling with inky paper? HOLEE mackerel!

Back in the day, when I was a kid, it never occurred to me to ask them WHY they felt they should keep all those old issues, when any public library would have had them. Today, though, I look back on it and wonder were they crazy…or WHAT???

And looking back on it, it surprises me that my father let me and my mother stay at their house for a week or three at a time, while he was off at sea. Though my mother might not have noticed what a hazard that pile of paper presented, he was the kind of guy who would have looked at their proud collection and thought hoooleee sheee-ut! 

Only thing I can figure is that maybe he was never invited back there and so maybe he never saw it. Damned if I’d have let my kid stay for weeks at a time when one spark would set off a conflagration that would burn the house down.

People are strange, aren’t they?