Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

FOUND IT! But…..

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So yesterday I was bellyaching because I couldn’t find my gas grill’s outdoor cover — not a cheap item. Figured one of the gerjillion workmen had made off with it.

Nope. That was ungracious of me!

Found it. But…but…

The reason it seemed to be disappeared is that some idiot stashed it away, after he had hauled the grill a good long distance from the brickwork pad where the thing resides. He left it way out on the far end of the backyard. Uncovered and open to the elements…which at this time of year are considerable.

Jayzuz!

So this morning I managed to drag the (heavy!) grill back to the patio by my little girlie self and reposition it on its brick pad. And then…

In the process, I finally found the plastic/fabric cover that goes over it: put the whole lash-up back in place, on its pad outside the fireplace chimney. (Yeah: yesterday I’d had to jury-rig a cover out of black plastic garbage bags!)

Dripping sweat by now: this is a July day in lovely uptown Phoenix. Hot, still, and humid to the point of soggy.

Tape a sign to the brickwork:

PLEASE!!!
DO NOT DRAG THE GRILL 
OFF THE BRICKS AND 
LEAVE IT IN THE YARD!!!!

What the f*ck IS THE MATTER with people? How can you  be so FREAKING STUPID that it doesn’t occur to you that maybe a homeowner placed a heavy appliance in a specific spot because THAT’S WHERE SHE WANTS IT?

Godlmighty, but people are stupid!

Honestly. This kind of sh!t begins to make an apartment in an old-folkerie look good. I’m starting to understand why retirees sell up and move themselves into institutions…where someone else takes care of most of the ditz.

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Okay, if I’m going to stay here (a prospect that begins to look dimmer and dimmer), after this when some workman is bouncing around, I’ll have to go out there and supervise the ba*tard. 

Dayum! Really and truly, I do NOT want to live in one of those prisons for old buzzards. But…it’s beginning to look ominously unlikely that I’ll be able to cope with this kind of BS for many more years. Or even for many more months. 

Glub!

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Hot! AND muggy. What a gummy, awful day! Pushing 90 degrees at 7:15 a.m., in 39% humidity.

Oh! There’s pool dude…speakin’ of jobs you’re glad you don’t have! How he manages to clean pool after pool after pool in this hot, sticky weather, I can’t even imagine. Just cleaning my own pool is almost more than I can cope with: on a cool, dry day.

That guy is one of the crew that makes it possible to stay in my home…and not have to move into some baby-sitting old-folkerie.

Hmmmm….  Let’s see…how many folks DOES it take to keep me here?

1. Pool Dude
2. Cleaning Lady from Heaven
3, 4, 5. Gerardo and his crew
6. Plumber
7. Electrician
8. Uber driver

At least! And that’s not counting my son, who does the work (and the thinking) of about 10 people.

No doubt there are more. Fair number of baby-sitters, eh?

Don’t know when it’s EVER been so hot-and-muggy. What a nasty morning! Definitely not a day that you’d like to spend working outdoors. 

RELIEVED…

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…of running around in the sun!  Whew!!!

WonderAccountant and I planned to get together this afternoon: meeting at her place. This would entail my having to walk over there…through 108-degree heat, according to the back porch thermometer.

Well. Ruby the Corgi and I have already traipsed through the heat, thankyouverymuch, and I can tellya: assuredly I don’t want to walk across even the one blacktop road between here and the WonderAccountants’ place!

Mercifully, when I called to arrange this forthwith, she suggested we put it off to another day.

YES!!!!!

Not to say HOOOOORAAAHHHH!

Yah: this was a chore that I absolutely positively was NOT in the mood for today. Any task that involves anything even remotely resembling math (of any variety) is over my furry little head. That’s why I hire WonderAccountant to handle my books, and it’s why M’hijito rides his stallion behind her to check on it and keep himself aware of what’s going on.

So: that was escaped.

And so was the (very short) trip across the broiling asphalt between our houses. Ugh!

Honestly, I’m coming to dislike living in Arizona more and more as the seasons turn. Spring and summer here, taken together, form a variety of Hell, so unholy is the heat. Just walking across the street entails armoring your feet with thick-soled shoes.

Where would I go, if I could escape this place?

Well. The San Francisco Bay Area would be my first choice. Either Parkmerced, where my mother and I lived when we first came back from Arabia and my father (a Merchant Marine deck officer) shipped out of the East Bay, or Berkeley, where my mother’s family lived.

Of course, I couldn’t afford to live in either of those places…but it’s something to daydream about. 😀

Failing that? Well…here in Arizona: we have Prescott, an upscale college town to the north of us. Or the Oro Valley, a suburb of Tucson.

Otherwise? In general: meh! There aren’t many venues that are better than this place. Summers here suck, but the rest of the year, the climate is lovely. The district where I live is solidly middle-class, ringed with pleasing stores in easy walking distance of my house.

Truth to tell, I’d just as soon live out the rest of my life right here!

Weirdness of Widespread Ignorance

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{Chortle!} After I went on and on yesterday about the silliness of my own stupidity, now it’s my turn to bellyache about others. To wit:

Have you noticed that people no longer can follow directions that include words like “north,” “south,” “east,” and “west”?

No kidding. Many, if not most, people do not know which way those are. If you tell someone to “turn north” at a four-way intersection, they really and sincerely do not know which way to go.

Once again, I explained to some babysitter whom my son had hired to ride herd on me that to get here she needs to come west across Neighborhood Lane, turn south on Innumerable Road, and then come one block down to Erewhon Alley. And by golly…once again the person could not find Erewhon Alley. BECAUSE she did not understand which way is west and which way is south.

Substituting “left” and “right” presupposes that the errant driver is going in a given direction as she approaches the ‘Hood. But…after she gets on the desired entry street, she could be coming our way from any of three directions!

So…once again, yesterday’s babysitter ended up in NeverNever Land. And I never ever did see her.

It can’t be THAT hard to figure out which way is left and which way is right; which way is north and which way is south. Almost all the repairmen find the place with no problem. Then I realized: these women are driving their own private cars. A guy whose job is to drive all over the city, going to addresses where he has to fix air conditioners or barbecues or plumbing, probably has a GPS in his truck.

Questionable whether a woman whose job is to sit in a chair all day and watch you sit in a chair all day is bright enough to learn how to use a GPS. But measurable IQ or no measurable IQ, without a doubt the problem is that most of them don’t have a GPS in their car. 

Geez! Problems of the 21st Century, eh?

Another Swampy-Dampy Day

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Ughghh!!!!!

It is SO SWAMPY out there that by the time the Dawg and I got back from the morning neighborhood stroll, I was just drenched in sweat and dew. What a horrid morning!

Now the question remains: what to do with the rest of the day?

Not much, I’m afraid. My son has purloined my car. He claims my driver’s license has been invalidated, with the collusion of those idiots at the Mayo Clinic. Yeah: the ones who do not or cannot listen to you when you describe what’s going on with a health matter.

So in this heat, I can’t even so much as go to the corner grocery store. It’s just too hot and swampy to walk that far.

Do I want to stay here?

Or do I want to jump the gun and move into one of those horrible old-folks’ prisons before I’m utterly forced to do so?

My son is pushing at the “forced to” just now. But the truth is, no one can prove I can’t take care of my self and my home just now. In another six months or year: yeah, that may be the case. But for the moment, I can effectively fight being dragged out of the Funny Farm. And you may be sure that I will.

The Cleaning Lady from Heaven was here a day or so ago. The place is spotless. So: one thing I need not bother to do is clean house.

Dog and I have already made the daily doggy-walk trip. She’s sitting on the cool (sorta) tiles and panting her little head off. So…clearly…more doggy-walking (or human-walking) is out of the question today.

Strolled past Josie’s place, where SDXB used to live. The city confiscated her previous house to build an airplane runway — she lived right under the flight path at Sky Harbor airport, a huge and busy monstrosity. She must feel like the gods smiled on her (at last!!) when our honored leaders gave her SDXB’s place.

Unfortunately, they didn’t give her the information or the funds to maintain it….

A pipe under the kitchen sink sprang a leak. By the time she noticed it, water had FLOODED not just the kitchen, but also the dining room and the living room. The place was trashed!

So…fortunately, because she’s a welfare case, the city is sending people in (supposedly) to fix the disaster area. But meanwhile…where is she supposed to live? Camping out in the backyard???

SDXB vacated the house when he moved to Sun City. He’s merrily happy out there, having found New Girlfriend and feeling pretty pleased with the tract house he bought.

My parents lived in Sun City. That’s how I ended up in Arizona: they dragged me here when my father retired. He quit his job a year before I graduated from high school, because my grades were so high he managed to persuade the University of Arizona to accept me that much early.

Stupidest thing he could have done for me. I needed that high-school diploma and that fourth year at the prison for teenagers. But Nooooooo…..nothing would do but what I had to drop out of high school, enroll at the UofA, and move to Tucson.

As a person under the age of 50, of course, I was not allowed to live in Sun City. So they told the authorities that I was living in Tucson. Ugh!

Not that I would have wanted to live in Sun City. Sooo totally NOT my style!

But my mother was thrilled. She just loved the place. And…well…unknown to either of them, she didn’t have long to live. The cancer brought on by her obsessive smoking habit did her in shortly. So…despite fuc*ing up my life, Sun City was a good thing for her: gave her a couple of years of happiness before it was time to trudge off to the Next World.

So…here I am in (Un)lovely Uptown Arizona, enjoying another swampy morning and wishing I were…somewhere, anywhere else. But really, there is no “else” anymore. I can’t afford to go back to the Bay Area…and none of my relatives there survive to this day, anyhow. My son is here, and I don’t wanna move away from him. (Lucky him!) The house is paid for, it’s a nice house in a comfortable upper-middle-class neighborhood: it would be insanity to sell and move. I’m stuck here.

In many ways, it’s a nice “stuck.” But it’s still stuck. 

Egad!! No Doggy-Walks Here…

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Get this! Wunderground says today’s high is supposed to be 111 degrees. You saw that right: a hundred and eleven degrees! 

Where does this damn place think it is? Saudi Arabia?

As we scribble, the back-porch thermometer reads 110 degrees…in the shade of the north-facing back porch. A covered porch. A ventilated covered porch…

Holeee sheee-ut!

We do have salmon and shrimp and accouterments that can be cooked up on the barbecue today. But tomorrow…well… Tomorrow I’ll have to walk(!!!) to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts to restock the supplies. And that will be a challenge.

I may see if I can get the neighborhood Uber driver to tote me over there…but…whaddaya bet that guy won’t feel any enthusiasm for getting on the road as dawn cracks?  And I sure don’t wanna be slamming around in the heat.

Let’s see…what time do these worthy retailers open?

  • Albertson’s:  6:00 a.m.
  • Sprouts: 7:00 a.m.
  • El Rancho: 6:00 a.m.

Hmmmm…  The El Rancho is closer. But the Albertson’s is a far better store for a middle-class shopper.

If I leave the house at 5:45, I could get to the store just as they’re opening. Grab the loot. Pay up. Gallop out the door…and maybe get back here by 7:00 a.m.

Or so…

Actually, that might not be too bad. Except that I don’t wanna start charging around at that hour. And toting groceries six or eight blocks through questionable territory doesn’t sound like much fun.

Also, one thing I’ve discovered over the kerjillion years that I’ve lived here: there’s a route through the neighborhood that comes out on the back side of the Albertson’s shopping center. That would allow me to get down there and yet dodge the jerks screaming obscenities at me.

Hm. They open at 6:00…okayyy… I might get back here by 7:00 — surely no later than 7:30. It would still be hot outside, but not yet hotter than Hell.

Dare not walk down there in the evening. For one thing, it’ll be hotter than the Hubs, all right: after a full day of Arizona sun blasting. But more to the point: whatever the weather, it’s just not safe. Too many jerks, assholes, and predators roam around between here and that shopping center.

Been there, done that, ain’t doin’it again!!

Really: what a place to live. If my son weren’t just down the road, I’d pull up stakes and head for either north Scottsdale or (un)lovely Sun City. Sure wouldn’t stay in central or north Phoenix: it truly isn’t safe.

I don’t wanna live in Sun City. Been there, done that, ain’t doin’ it again. BUT…at least in a ghetto for old folks, you don’t have a$$holes screaming obscenities at you as you walk to the nearest grocery store.