Coffee heat rising

aging

Glorioski!

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Truly: what a GLORIOUS afternoon!  

Weather:

cool but not too cool
sunny but not hot

Neighbors:

Sittin’ around their front yards with the kids out
Kids: cuter than cute, having a great time running around

Ruby the Corgi:

Snoozing in the back bathroom
NOT lost, after all!

😀  As you may have deduced: a small surge of panic. Dog disappeared. Dog declined to come to call. Human could not find Dog anywhere in the house. Human about fainted in terror.

But eventually said Dog did materialize: yea verily, from the back bathroom where she likes to loaf, and where I didn’t see her while I was banging around looking for her.

If I had a little more ambition (and if my right hip weren’t quite so spavined), Ruby and I would walk over to the park, explore a bit, and then wander home.

This is the sort of time when I most miss the ineffable SDXB. He, as you may recall, moved to staid and stodgy Sun City, where he took up with the lively and charming New Girlfriend. 😀 I’ve lived in Sun City, thank you — that was where my parents settled after my father retired, dragging me there with them.

It’s really not my style, and truth to tell I hated being stuck out there during the four years of my university sojourn. So…soon as I finished school and got a job in Phoenix, I moved into town. Never EVER to move back to Sun City.

SDXB, himself the staid and stodgy type, bought a place and decamped out there a few years ago. He tried to get me to go with him, but…been there, done that, ain’t a-doin’ it again! He loves it, though, and shortly took up with a very nice New Girlfriend…for whom, quite frankly, I wish the best.

WhatEVER. Moi, I dearly love the kids playing outside in front. Just came in from a stroll and a visit with parental set: the young people and the toddlers and the dog or two…what more could one want?

😀 Really, it is a lovely neighborhood.

Why on earth would you want to live someplace where no kids are frolicking around?????

Spavined!

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OUCH! Ouch ouch ouchety-ouch OUCH, does that damn hip HURT!

Stupidly, the human took off for the park this afternoon with the corgi leading the way. We got about halfway around when I realized I was damn near crippled! 

Didn’t seem to hurt THAT much when we started out. But it just got worse and worse and worse as we proceeded.

This evening, in a couple of hours, M’hijito schleps me to the hated physical therapy studio. GAWD, but I loathe that stuff. An hour or 90 minutes of hup-hup-hup-hup-hup-hup, most of it hurting with every move.

It does seem to help though. Some. Trouble is. the “some” part doesn’t last any length of time. By the next morning (these sessions take place in the evening), once again I can barely limp from the bedroom to the bathroom.

A dose of ibuprofen seems to help. Some…. Trouble is, it seems to make me kinda sick, too. Which would you prefer:

*Can’t crawl across the room”?  or
“Get into that damn bathroom before you barf all over the floor”?

Ibuprofen makes my ears whistle, too. And just now, they’re wailing like an air-raid siren: WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Jeez! Stop the world! I wanna get off!

Doggie Resistance

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Ruby is lobbying to head on out of the Funny Farm and go for a good long walk around the ‘Hood. Her human, however…not so much. The human doggedly resists…

Cripes. I’m so crippled I can barely limp from the dining table into the kitchen. Why?  Dunno.

Best guess is I must have slept in an odd position. A fine jab of pain hit the minute I woke up and tried to climb out of bed. So…about the most reasonable explanation is a cattywampus position in the bed.

Or…last night my son dragged me to the physical therapist. I suppose some of his hour’s worth of manipulations could have spavined some muscle or tendon. But you’d think I’d have noticed that at the time.

At any rate, just now I’m in no shape to trek around the neighborhood behind a lunging dog.

Whatever. It sure does HURT.

And y’know what? I am tired of hurting!

Owwwwww!!!!

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Was it REALLY only a day ago that I was whinging on and on about the pain in the hip?

Feels more like about a year. HURT? Hoooleee Gawd, does it HURT! To get up the hallway from the bedroom to the kitchen & front of the house, I have to stick out my arms and balance myself on the walls, s-l-o-o-o-w-l-e-e-e limping along. Every step — every s-l-l-o-o-w, interminable step — HURTS. 

M’hijito will soon be on his way over here to tote me out to the damn Mayo Clinic. Is there a REASON we couldn’t first (pleeze!) visit one of the nearby hospitals?  Hell, no! Nothing will do but the (putative) best: the Mayo.

The Mayo is in Scottsdale. On the freakin’ far side of Scottsdale: a good half-hour trek each way. And that’s just to get there and back. I can’t drive in the state I’m in (even had he not purloined my car some time back). And so now he has to take a half-day off work — which he sure as hell can’t afford to do — to drag me across the city.

What a fukkin’ waste of time and gasoline!

Young Dr. Kildare used to practice right up the road. He, however, fled our sylvan dales to take up his career in Sun City: halfway to California from here. So it’s as far to YDK’s office as it is to the Mayo…and M’hijito does NOT trust any doctors other than those at the Mayo.

Myself, I can’t tell much difference. A good doctor is a good doctor. A narrow-minded dimwit is a narrow-minded dimwit. Doesn’t much matter where they practice.

{sob!} What a gorgeous day. This is the time, this is the day to be walking with Ruby the Corgi from one side of Timbuktu to the other.

But nooooo. Here I am, barely able to hobble across the room, waiting for my excellent and long-suffering son to come pick me up and drag me out to the far side of Scottsdale.

Just the gawdawful drive out there and back eats up over an hour of his work day. And that doesn’t count trudging through the garage and across the grounds and around the clinic to get to the doc’s office. So that means any time he drags me out to the Mayo, he gets in trouble with his employer

Legally, an employer is not allowed to fire you for taking time off to go to a doctor — or, interestingly, for having to drive a sick relative to the doctor. So…he’s not likely to get canned for today’s excursion. But you can be sure he’ll be swamped with fell-behind work and nagged interminably by the bosses.

I probably could get the Uber driver who lives across the street to schlep me out there — to the tune of about a million bucks. But (he being no fool) M’hijito likes to be present at the pow-wows with the docs. Which is good: years of unpleasant experience have left me aversive as hell where doctors are concerned. And no doubt I often barely hear what they say…in my eagerness to get out of their office.

GOD, I hate going to doctors!

When I was an infant — this was a year or two before we went out to Arabia, and I just turned three when we arrived in those sandy realms — as an infant I almost died at the hands of a brilliant doctor. One evening, hospital staff told my mother I would be dead by morning.

Can you imagine?

Well, they seem to have been wrong. I’ve 0utlived her, the poor woman. And she lived almost to a ripe old age. Would have made it ripeness if she hadn’t smoked herself into the grave.

Tobacco manufacturers and vendors should be prosecuted as the murderers that they are…

Oop! Sorry: sidetracked!

But seriously: if you smoke, quit. Someone is getting rich on your dying. A number of someones, actually. Cut the ba*tards off in their tracks!

Oh well: speaking of tracks, I seem to be easily sidetracked this morning.

Ohhh damn. Here he is!

 

YOWCH!!!!

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Ouch, every which way from Sunday! In the hip. In the feet. In spavined fingers… Every goddamwhich way from Sunday!

Thank HEAVEN for Amazon! Honestly: I have NO idea how on earth I would cope if somehow I had to traipse to the store for everygoddamthing the dog and I need. Just walking up the hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen hurts, HURTS, and then HURTS some more!

At any rate, now we have a new bag of dawg food ordered. Yes: WITHOUT having to pay for an Uber ride, WITHOUT having to hike four blocks (+++) to the stores, WITHOUT damn near crippling my idiot self to retrieve a couple of ordinary, boring daily items.

So, now we’re set for several more days. Much is it to be hoped that by then I’ll be recovered enough from whatever ails me to negotiate the neighborhood shopping.

We can’t easily get fresh food by ordering it on Amazon. But…really, that only needs to be purchased about once a week. And we’ve discovered a fine GODSEND here in the ‘Hood: a guy directly across the street(!!!) is driving an Uber cab!!!!

Wow: what incredible luck, eh?

At any rate, now all I have to do is stumble over to his house and beg him to schlep me around, and voilà! Problem solved.

Great galloping ZOT, am I tired of hurting. 

Long as I’m laying on the bed, the body seems sorta OK — but o’course, wouldn’cha know: that’s an illusion. The instant I get off the sack...ohhhhh my gawd! The back hurts. the hip hurts, the feet hurt, the…everygoddamthing hurts.

Well…it doesn’t seem to be terminal, anyway. With any luck, in a few days Whatever This Is will settle down, and then the Dawg and I can go on about our dog-‘n’-human business in our wonted fashion.

In the meantime… Kid, don’t get old. Gettin’ old freakin HURTS!

Gorgeous Evening!

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Five-thirty…and oh! What a gorgeous, beautiful evening. 

The magical corgi and I loaf on the back porch, beneath a sky richly decorated with fluffy clouds:  High gray clouds reflecting the orange sunset, so beautiful!

Just back from the Albertson’s shopping center, down on the corner of Slum Drive and Commuter’s Way. The crummy apartments across the way are unusually quiet and even look almost tidy. The trains ramble up and down Slum Drive, bearing commuters and tired panhandlers. Cars and busses shove their way across Commuter’s. And I wish my mother were here.

Oh, my! How she would have enjoyed this evening’s ramble!

She wanted me and SDXB to move into those apartments, when we first decided to shack up together.

I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy. Instead, we went in together to occupy one of the pleasant, middle-class block houses that make up the single-family housing here. And I’ve never regretted it.

Truly: I do love this place. You couldn’t get me out of here, not unless it’s to cart me to the mortuary.

SDXB thought Sun City was about the best thing he’d ever seen. The endless roar of F-16’s didn’t bother him: he was an Air Force boy and frankly, I think he rather liked that racket.

Once he got ensconced out there, he took up with New Girlfriend: also about the best thing ever to come along…or rather the Best Human. She is a lovely person…and truth to tell, her personality is such that she’s perfect for him. And her advent relieved me of feeling guilty about letting that damn-near-marital relationship wilt on the vine. Thank you, Lovely New Girlfriend!

He’s not so well anymore: stumbling along under the weight of the years. How much longer he’ll last is anyone’s guess. Will he outlive N.G.? Uhm…could be. But then what? Unclear to me.

I’d kinda like to cultivate a stronger friendship with her, so as to be here for her when SDXB’s end arrives. And yet…and yet…no, that doesn’t seem quite right.

Maybe, somehow, she and I will become 24k friends after he’s gone. I dunno. Unfortunately, Sun City is so damn far away from the Funny Farm that it would be hard for us to get together often enough to build such a friendship. But…well… I do wish her a future of strength and happiness.

Long may she thrive!