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Can a day REALLY be this gorgeous???

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Okay, okay…I do understand that some (benighted!) folks fail to recognize that a rainy day coated in pearl-gray skies is fukkin GORGEOUS. But… {sigh} their loss.

My goodness, it’s beautiful outside those big sliding glass doors.

Yes, the sky really IS the color of pearls: gray and glowing and effing’ gorgeous.

A sweet and gentle rain sprinkles briefly and intermittently, warm and lush and amazingly dog-friendly.

{When you are a dog, you are a bit ambiguous about certain meteorological phenomena, such as …hmmm… rain.}

Yes, even though Ruby strongly disapproves of water falling out of the sky, she has cheerfully trotted outside to patrol the yard through the…urk!…water falling out of the sky. And now she’s back in the house, where she has taken up her post on the end of the bed, guarding the backyard through those heavy sliding glass doors.

My goodness, this has turned into an astonishingly gorgeous day. We had a spectacular sunrise…but that’s not so unusual for Arizona.

Rain, however, surely is. And gorgeous rain, beautiful rain: that most certainly is.

Surely, when you’re not a dog, you’re inclined to imagine that a day like today IS gorgeous. And yep: if you asked me, I’d tellya it’s a freakin’ gorgeous day.

Vaguely, it reminds me of certain days in Saudi Arabia.

NO, no…I’m afraid I do not miss (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Yeah: I do miss my parents, who dragged me there as a toddler. Uh huh. And I do miss my crazy little friends. And ohhh yeah, I do miss our cats. (We weren’t allowed to have dogs: rabies, y’know. So we had cats. Cats and cats and cats…) Sooooo glad not to be in Saudi Arabia! S0 haunted by weather that brings back memories of that place.

If you’ve lived in Hell for awhile and are sent back to Earth for another lifetime, do certain kinds of weather remind you of Hell?

Whaddaya bet?

Ruby-doo is conkered out on the sack. The human is sipping wine… but not guzzling it, because it’s too darned wet out there to walk up to the store to retrieve another bottle of the stuff.

Just as well, one supposes. God tryin’ to tell you somethin’ no doubt. Eh?

LOL! I do wish my excellent son were here to socialize with. But…well…yeah: he’s working. 

Remember that? Work? 

How outrageous!

It’s still the middle of the afternoon, so his phone is at his ear and his nose is on the grindstone.

How happy ARE some of us that we don’t hafta do that anymore?

Tried to lure him in the direction of dinner out this evening, but he seems magnificently uninterested in any such scheme. For that, he can hardly be blamed. Venturing out in this weather is hardly worth a restaurant dinner. To say nothing of risking your life… I suspect what he looks forward to this evening is quiet and a peaceful mound of chow of his own making.

This is a guy who CAN make chow. Yeah: he really is a superb cook. So it’s kinda silly to invite him out to a restaurant. 😀

 

It’s Taken Me 60 Years to Figure It Out??????

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Dear God!! It just dawned on me — here in 2025 — how my mother got herself and me out of Hellish Saudi Arabia. Only now,  lo! these many gerjillion years later!

Jayzuz! WHY did I never see this before? It was so obvious…

She and her best friend, Angie — a nurse in the camp clinic — convinced my father that I was too sickly to stay out there. That I needed to come back to the United States and be cared for by a stateside doctor at a stateside hospital.

That, my dears, was unadulterated bull puckey.

I was sick, all right: with social problems that made it virtually impossible to get along with the little sh!ts who were my classmates out there. Not that I wasn’t a little sh!t myself, after all. What kind of eight- or ten-year-old girl dreams of growing up to become an astronomer (no kidding! in the 1950s!!) and fantasizes that she lives in the jungles of India with Mowgli, Bagheera, and Akela?

Nope: I was never a normal little girl. But then, I was never treated like a living, feeling human being, either: not by those idiot teachers nor by the brats in their classes.

So…yeah. I was SO miserable in the fine Ras Tanura Senior Staff School that I dreamed up every ailment I could invent. And my mother bought just about every one of them. She let me stay home…and stay home…and stay home. When we left Arabia and took up residence in San Francisco, I was YEARS ahead of grade level, mostly because I spent most of my time reading and playing scientist.

I believe that she and Angie worked together to persuade my father that he needed to quit his job with Aramco and take me and his wife home.

Which, eventually, he did: He shipped out of the San Francisco Bay Area on tankers owned by Standard Oil — which was affiliated with Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). Eventually, he got another deck officer’s job working for Union Oil out of Southern California, and that’s where I escaped from high school a year early and made it into college at the age of 16.

Thank the heavens and all the Moslem angels above…

Eventually, as it developed, my mother and Angie did come up with a scheme to convince my father — and probably at least some of the doctors out there — that I really was SICK and needed to come back to the States to be treated. And eventually my mother managed to pile herself and me into an Aramco plane and head back to New York.

They did it by insisting that I was too sick to go to school. By keeping me out of class, claiming I was sick. SICK sick Ohhhh gawd, SICKER THAN SICK. 

Apparently my father fell for it. Either that or he didn’t want a divorce. WhatEVER.

And thank God!

What a horrible place. What a gawdawful childhood. What a joy to hit that grade school in San Francisco!

Gronk! Spare Me, Lord!!!

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Even if were not pouring rain, this is NOT something  would wanna do tonight.

Dammit!!

Dear Son called a few minutes ago to remind me that, ohhhhhh joy! We have to traipse to the physical therapists’ gym and blow away the whole evening going HUP HUP HUP…

What a freakin’ bore!  What a freakin” waste of time!

Frankly, I don’t see that hup hup hup does much for the spavined hip. Doesn’t make it worse. That’s something.

But doesn’t seem to do a whole lot to make it better,

Well. It may help a little.

But not so much that I wanna charge out into the rainy night to diddle away three hours going hup hup hup. 

Maybe I shoulda made up some sorta story to weasel my away out of tonight’s allegedly therapeutic antics. Alas, though, I didn’t think that fast. Sooooo…he’ll be along in a few minutes to drag me over to their gym.

What. A. Bore.:-D

For reasons unknown, I am sleepier than all my tribe. Won’t THAT add to the fun tonight, eh?

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BACK at the House!

Yaaayyy! Survived another evening of brain-banging exercises.

 

Lock It Down!!!!!

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Arghhhh!  I have GOT to get special training on not answering the door, on not speaking to strangers, and on uttering the sound N-N-N-N-O-O-O-O!

Crimineee! The crooks are storming me from all directions.

Did I tell you about the Tree Dudes?

A crew of guys showed up at the front door saying they were here to trim the overgrown eucalyptus-like monster in the west yard.

Uhhhh….ooohkayyyyyy……

{huh?  Did I hire these guys??}

So they bang around and thud around, getting ready to assassinate my huge west-side tree, the one that keeps the air-conditioning bills down on that side of the house

About then, my son calls on the phone. I tell him what’s up. He says GET RID OF THEM!

So I end up having to toss that bunch out in the cold (or rather, the heat), just as they’re gearing their saws to chop down everything in sight.

Good riddance to that bunch.

Here’s the problem with Old Age: you can’t remember what you did ten minutes ago, much less a day or three ago!

I cannot remember whether I agreed to hire these guys to prune that gigantic tree. My son says I did not. Just in time does he say that: minutes to spare before they started to assassinate my trees. And my bank account.

My neighbor has (I think) a camera by her front door. She does NOT answer the door, no matter who’s out there. If she can see an image of someone she’s willing to talk to, she’ll open up. Otherwise, you and your fellow scam artists can stand there till the snow falls.

I think I’m going to install one of those. Hers allows her to see who’s out there without having to open the door. I can do that, too, by looking out through a window…but that allows the “guest” to see me, too. In Terri’s case, she can see who’s out there, but they can’t tell whether anyone’s home. So they can ring the doorbell to their idiot heart’s content, get nowhere, and let Terri go out in the back yard until the ring-fest ends.

We seem to get more and more hustlers showing up at the door, trying to peddle this junk or faze that scam past you. So…a way to see who’s out there without them seeing me would be MOST welcome. 

What happened next…

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Yep: that appears to be what we have next on the agenda. My son is on his way over here to pick me up and drag me to the physical therapist’s gym, there to be pestered and exercised no end.

UGH!  How could I do without it??????

Well. Actually…I have no business bellyaching about this routine.

The spavined arm hurts like the dickens just now — and has done so all afternoon. Some supervised exercising should loosen up that shoulder and, with any luck at all, ease the hip pain, too…ohhhhhhg helle’s belles!!!!  Here he is!

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WOW!!!!!
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Did that PT guy make a difference?  Or DID he make a DIFFERENCE????

Oh, my goodness. It feels like I have a whole new body!

Well…not quite that far out in Left Field, but close. Very close! Seriously: the pain is SO much better, it’s hard to believe!

My splendid son has been schlepping me over to the therapists’ gym: a MAJOR hassle for him, as he has (of all things!) a job. Now that we’re home and back in the house, the hip pain is almost gone, and the shoulder pain: on the high side of tolerable!

WOW! This is the first time in weeks that I’ve been able to walk around without hurting!

By golly. Now I’ll have to stop bellyaching about these procedures. (Never can have any fun, can I? 😮  ) Seriously: if this kind of improvement continues over the next few weeks, before ya know it I’ll be walking around normally…and getting up from a chair without groaning in agony.

Really: I seriously DO hope this improvement continues. If it does, it’ll be some kinda miracle!

Well. If this is what you get from an evening in Hell…BRING IT ON!

Another Evening from Hell, Comin’ Up!

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Yep: that appears to be what we have next on the agenda. My son is on his way over here to pick me up and drag me to the physical therapist’s gym, there to be pestered and exercised no end.

UGH!  How could I do without it??????

Well. Actually…I have no business bellyaching about this routine.

The spavined arm hurts like the dickens just now — and has done so all afternoon. Some supervised exercising should loosen up that shoulder and, with any luck at all, ease the pain…ohhhhhhg hellle’s belles!!!!  Here he is!

DAYUM!