Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

April 22

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Ungodly racket from the damn air base, way on the FAR side of Sun City. At least a good 29 miles away: roar roar roar roar ROAR. Don’t understand how people living out there can tolerate it, even for a few hours in the morning.

My mother used to sit on her back patio there in Sun City, serenaded by those blasting plane engines. She would simper over her morning coffee, “Ohhhhh, it’s the sound of fweedom!” 

Right, Mom, I dared not say: It’s the sound of World War III coming your way. 

Oh, well. At least we got Ruby’s doggy-walk out of the way, and before it has started to get hot out there. She’s gone off to the back bedroom, there to loaf. And…I suppose blogging is a form of loafing, too.

The (very sweet!) lady who inherited SDXB’s house by welfare-agency fiat is enjoying a fine predicament: The plumbing under the kitchen sink busted open and flooded the house!

Lordie! WHAT a mess.

So she and a daughter were trying to mop up, and trying to get the City to send a repair crew. One of those fine nightmares that none of us needs, eh?

Before SDXB came along and bought the place for a song, it was owned by some very flakey, very feckless folks who let the place go to rack and ruin. He fixed it up handsomely…and then practically gave it away as he fled our quarrel with Tony the Romanian Landlord.

Actually, he had lobbied me earlier to move out to Sun City. I’d lived there before with my parents, and wasn’t bloody well about to go back. So when things intensified here and I still refused to move out, he just sold up and headed west, leaving me behind.

Whatever excuse you need, eh?

Shortly, the Tony quarrel settled down, and now he and I are actually rather friendly — walked around the park together just the other day.

Must decide what (if anything) to do today. The dawg and I are in full-out Lazy Mode: it’s too damn hot out there to do much hiking, and without a car, I can’t even get to the grocery store without hiking through the heat.

Actually, I can: ask the guy across the street who drives an Uber. But…what? Pay someone to drive me 8 or 10 blocks? Gimme a break!

😀

There’s a corner shopping center much closer, I must admit. But the neighborhood over there is a little shadier: you’re likely to get hustled, and as a woman alone I don’t feel very safe in those conditions.

So…yeah: maybe I should have followed SDXB out to (un)lovely Sun City. But….no. Nope I truly hated living out there with my parents.

Been there.

Done That.

Ain’t doin’ it again. 

Hubs of Hades Central….

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Well…no. It’s not exactly hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there this morning. More like the outer fringes of that garden spot.

Dog and Human flew around the park, shortly after dawn: best time of day to be there.

Ruby dearly loves the feel of grass under her little doggy feet. The human loves the openness of the place and the young parents rolling their beautiful little babies around in strollers. What fun!  {heh!} Especially when you don’t have to get up at dawn to feed the cute líl things!)

So that’s always a pleasant excursion.

Contractors are working like proverbial horses, rebuilding a corner house that went to wrack and ruin in the hands of the previous residents. Rebuilding the pool. Installing a block wall around the back. Endlessly wrestling around inside.

It is, without a doubt, going to be converted from a “nice” house to a “wow!” house. It has even occurred to me to covet the place…briefly.

Very briefly. When common sense creeps back in…of course I would not want to live in a house that backs onto a public park and stands on the corner of the neighborhood’s main feeder street and a busy cut-through. Darn!!

That main mini-drag pumps commercial traffic through, plus all the local residential traffic, workmen’s cars & trucks…on and on. During the rush hour, drivers in the know use it as a short-cut between two seven-lane commuter roads, dumping a ton of traffic in there and serenading the locals with noise.

So. No. Pretty as the house is and kewl as the neighborhood is: not even faintly interested in buying it.

Lately, as I may have noted here (don’t recall exactly where & ain’t lookin’ it up right this minute), I’ve contemplated following SDXB out to Sun City, a senior citizens’ ghetto on the west side of the Valley.

But no. Don’t think so.

First off, because I happen to like the sounds of kids playing and teenagers carrying on. We get plenty of those, right here in the ‘Hood.

And second off, because I do hate the roar of F16s charging in and out of Luke Air Force Base: a serenade that starts every morning at 6:00 sharp. Luke is just a few miles down the road from Sun City.

LOL! My mother used to revel in  that racket. She’d sit on her back porch as the planes thundered back and forth, swilling coffee. “It’s the sound of fweedom!” she’d coo.

How could I have inherited a 160-point IQ from a mother who had damn near zero common sense????

Anyway, where it comes to that blasting racket, here in the ‘Hood we’re pretty well out of range. That’s one of the reasons I stay here.

Whew!!!!

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BACK ONLINE!

We’re in one of those idiot moments. You know…when you can’t remember your name, to say nothing of your website’s password?  😀   Yeah: like that.

Fortunately, this isn’t my first Senior Moment. By way of heading off these events, I kept a record of the site’s password…and stored it on MY OTHER computer!  So…,mirabilis! Here we are back in Funny about Money.

How long this will last remains to be seen…

Hotter than the Hubs outside. Just came in from hiking through sweaty, nasty heat. For reasons unknown: wired to the teeth. 

Think it’s because my car has been kiped, thanks to the idiots at the Mayo Clinic.. That plus absolutely positively NOTHING that I need to get done works! 

The MayoQuacks put the eefus on my driver’s license, at my son’s behest. Note that I have not been in an accident in years — and that one wasn’t my fault. Nor have I had any tickets. Or any complaints about my driving. Or…whatnot. What I do have here is a royal screwing…the upshot of which: my son came down here, snatched my car out of the garage, and drove it off. I now have no car and no sane way to get around town.

And in a Los Angeles-style city like Phoenix, that IS a problem. Yeah: a BIG problem.

Apparently it’s a Hexed Day for everyone. 

Josie, the lovely lady who glommed SDXB’s house from the Welfare folks when he moved to Sun City, is having one of those, too.

Ohhhmigawd, Josie!  In a highlight of her day, apparently the kitchen plumbing jammed and…basically exploded, from what I can tell. Pipes leaking all over the place. Nothing working. And yeah: just TRY to get a plumber over here on short notice.

Last I saw, she’d managed to shut off the water into the house and was trying to mop up the tidal wave. What a horror show!

Yeah: every time things are bad for you, remember: they’re worse for someone else!

Hotter than the Hubs…

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Along about 7:15 in the evening: that’s where we are. And where we are is HOT and Humid. Feels like accursed Saudi Arabia used to feel.

Well. Almost. No humidity is dripping off the eaves, anyway. That was a frequent occurrence over there.

Still, it’s hot and sticky out in back. The grill is running and in a couple of minutes I’ll toss on a blob of hamburger. Hungry, but not hungry enough to feel like eating on this damp and gummy evening. Still: gotta stuff some food in.

Or else.

Friends and relatives have absented themselves: probably no more anxious to cavort around in this weather than I am. Jeez….I don’t even hear the neighbors’ cute li’l kids frolicking the the backyard tonight!  THAT is somethin’!

LOL! I do love the sound of their adorable young voices and their crazy carryings-on. Nothing like little kids to make a neighborhood….a neighborhood! 

Seriously: that’s a major reason I do NOT want to be locked up in a prison for old folks…uhm, I mean, a retirement “home”: I do love the music of children playing!

We have a nice tribe of kids here on the street: three houses nearby have little ones living there. And often the families bring the kids’ friends over, so we’ll have a whole circus going on out there. 😀

More fun than Carter has oats…

Seriously, I never could fathom why my parents — or SDXB — wanted to live in dreary, mausoleum-silent Sun City. Well…for my parents, I did know: fundamentally neither of them liked kids. Why they had me, I never understood: think my mother’s grandmother nagged her into it.

Anyway, as soon as I was old enough to shovel out the door and send down to the university in Tucson (a year before I graduated from high school), they moved right into Sun City. They liked it. Dreadful place, to my mind. But whatever lights your fire, eh?

The ‘Hood is reminiscent of Southern California: warm year-round (well…most of the time); a spread of single-story homes, grocery stores and other incidental shops within walking distance. I feel incredibly lucky to have found this place — brought here years ago by a savvy Realtor. And can’t imagine living anywhere else. Not in the Valley, anyway.

* San Francisco: yeah.
* Berkeley: yeah.
* Paris: maybe.

But what the heck: this place suits the ole’ lady just fine!

Another Day, Another…????

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GORGEOUS morning. Sky is clear, if a little fuzzy. Ever-so-slightly fuzzed-up dawn sunlight glows down into the back patio. Temperature is cool and soft…. Just wanna take the dawg and go for a walk.

Actually, what I want to do is finish this mugful of coffee and go back to bed. Preternaturally sleepy this morning…for reasons unknown. Slept well last night: no excuse for feeling like I’ve been up for the past 12 or 14 hours.

‘Tother thing I’d like to do is stroll across the street and ask our excellent new Uber driver if he’d like to Uber me to my favorite grocery store — some miles on into town. But that does seem like more trouble than it’s worth.

The theft of my car (by an honored family member…/eyeroll/ ) means I have to walk everyplace I need to go: to the grocery stores, to the veterinarian, to the Walgreen’s, to the…on and on and endlessly, painfully on.

In theory, I could walk to the nearby Albertson’s, Sprouts, or El Rancho. It’s a gorgeous morning, a perfect day for walking a couple miles.

But…I spavined a foot, and truth to tell, it hurts just to walk around the house. Sure don’t want to take a chance on getting a mile or so from home and finding, all of a sudden, that I can’t put any weight on that paw.

My son stole my bike, too: so that obviates bicycling to the store. In that department: thinking about buying another one from the second-hand store up the road, and then asking said neighbor to store it in his garage or backyard. Problem there, of course, is that any time I need to use it, I’ll have to roust him out of the house and retrieve the thing from him. If he’s not home, I ain’t goin’ anywhere.

*****

{chortle!}

JUST got sat down in the front patio and it’s

BRRRRRRRBLAAASSSTTTTBRRRRRRR!

Neighbor’s yard guy out there with his weed-whacker.

One should know better, right? What on earth would make me imagine I should be allowed to enjoy a gorgeous, cool, sunny morning? How stupid of me, eh?

So…Dog and Human are back in the house, barricaded in behind heavy steel doors, closed tight.

Y’know, this is when (& where) I need SDXB in his (former) abode a block up the street. He would keep my bike at his house, no question of it. He’d probably keep it some place where I get at it even if he weren’t at home. So at least I’d have been able to get to the grocery store this morning.

How stupid IS this stuff, anyway?

It’s looking more and more like SDXB was dead right about moving to Sun City — where the Younger Generation cannot follow you. That makes it about 110% more difficult for them to try to run your life.

Really, I do appreciate the many, many things M’Hijito does for me. But that appreciation fades at the line where I get told what to do and when to do it, told what not to do, dragged to doctors I don’t like…on and on.

Nothing that I need to do this morning is gonna get done, because while confined to the house I have no way to get those things done. Well…no practical way. Yes, I could walk a mile each way to a grocery store, there and back, dragging a roller cart to haul my purchases. But…well…not right this minute, eh?

If I hadn’t already spent several years in Sun City when my parents were out there, I’d be out there with SDXB right now. But…

My goodness, how I detested living in that place!!

The attitude might be different now that I’m an old bat, not a college kid. But even still…it would be hard to shake off those negative feelings, and even harder to force myself, like my mother, to pretend I like the roar of fighter jets blasting overhead from dawn to noon. Horrid!!!!!

It’s so much better here on the north end of North Central Avenue. Gotta find a way to stay here, have what I want, and not be pushed around….

Why Didn’t I….?

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Ever find yourself wondering What the dickens was the matter with me that I didn’t {do X, Y, or Z} instead of the stupid thing I did do? 

Afraid that’s not a rare occasion for Funny. Honest to Gawd. I’ve done and said the stupidest things over the years…when if I’d kept my mouth shut at the time — even for a few minutes, to say nothing of a few days — things would have turned out much for the better.

Case in point: My father & his bitch wife.  If, that time when they came mincing up to me and said “ohhhh we want your permission to get married,” instead of uttering a slack-jawed “well, o’course!” (while thinking these idiots are grown adults: why do they imagine they need their kid’s permission to get married?), I had said “Are you kidding? You’re sixty-some years old, not sixteen years old. You don’t need my permission to do anything,” things might have turned out a lot better for them.

Why?  

Well, this is just a guess. And that guess is: if they had stopped and thought about whether they really wanted to marry, rather than getting a kid’s imprimatur, they might have thought twice about it. Or who knows? even three times… They might have slowed down enough to give themselves several weeks or, better yet, a couple of months or three before they waltzed into marriage.

A marriage that turned out to be flickin’ miserable. The LAST thing those two needed to do was get married.

Living in sin would have been infinitely preferable: at least they wouldn’t have had to navigate courts and laws to get un-hitched.

Simply proceeding as girlfriend and boyfriend — keeping their own apartments at the old-folkerie but acting as grand friends — would have more than infinitely preferably. Then they would have no hitching to un-do.

Like all of us, I’ve occasionally made spectacular mistakes. Some of those have had less than sterling results.

The upshot of these adventures, over the years, has been one crucial rule of thumb:

When in doubt, don’t. 

Sounds glib, but it ain’t. Seriously: if you’re not sure about some decision you’re about to make, don’t proceed with it. 

STOP!!!

Stop and wait. Nine times out of ten, you will indeed have time to wait long enough to think things through; maybe to discuss with a trusted friend or advisor, or just to put it all off until your head clears.

And that, my friends, is what you most need to do before making any key decision.