The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
7:05 in the evening and, as we scribble, the thermometer in the shade of the back porch reads A HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES!
Egad! CAN you imagine?
It’s hard even for me to imagine…and I’m livin’ in it.
What an awful place.
Wunderground tells us it’s actually 112 degrees out there. Supposed to chill down to a crisp 104 by midnight.
This is one of many factors that make me want to move back to San Francisco. And believe me: if I could afford it, I sure would!
As in You’d have to be balmy to live in this place…. As we scribble, it’s 115 degrees in the shade of the north-facing back porch.
Holeeee maquerel!
Welp…that takes care of the Evening Doggywalk. Even after the sun goes down, the pavements will be too hot for Ruby’s little feet.
Guess I could go out for a Solitary Humanwalk….but yea, verily: even after dark, the heat will be oppressive.
***
And speaking of balmy…. My son has hired a babysitter to watch me during most of the daytime hours!
As insulting as that is — what does he think I’m gunna do? Set fire to the swimming pool? — it’s actually rather pleasant to have the company. She’s a very nice and compatible lady. Not all that spectacularly educated…but hey! Focused enough and ambitious enough to build a reliable way to make a living despite limited formal education and second-language skill in English. I do like her, and hope to build some activities we can do together to build some serious rapport.
So I do hope she stays around, at least for some months or a year.
We shall see, though.
Ugh!!!!! Don’t know when I’ve seen a day this soggy since we lived in Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf. What a horrid swampy morning, under the glow of the morning sun!
Seriously: one wonders how the air could be this wet without clouds and rain. But…having lived by that gulf shore, one does know it’s possible. Horridly possible.
Out there, I’ve seen it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. No: no exaggeration. I’d be looking out my bedroom window, the swamp cooling that passed as air-conditioning pounding away, and all of a sudden water would just start to pour out of the air. No clouds. No sprinklers going. Just rain condensing out of the humidity.
That’s central Arizona for you!
Dawg and Human: just in the door after a stroll around the neighborhood, through the late pre-dawn hours. Made it back to the house before too much damage was done…though my hair is still wet from sweat and damp air.
Honest to gawd, WHAT possessed my dear parents to drag us to this Hellish place?
Oh, yeah: Sun City. No kids screaming outside your window when you’re tryin’ to take a nap!
No joke: My father hated kids. And he especially hated them when they were set loose to play outdoors.
When he and my mother discovered Sun City as we were driving across the country one time, he thought he’d found Nirvana: NO KIDS!
Ugh.
So as soon as he could afford to retire, he quit his job, and they packed up and moved to beautiful (childless!!) Arizona. They got me into the University of Arizona a year early — I hadn’t yet graduated from high school, and no one under 19 is allowed to live in (un)lovely Sun City, unless they’re enrolled in college.
Anyhow…that’s how I got to this charming venue, stuck in Arizona when I should be living in the San Francisco Bay Area…where I belong.
Yes, I do hate it here. But my son is here. He has a job here. And I’m not about to leave where he’s living.
🙁
Woo HOO! Thank the hevvins for Amazon and its insane home delivery!
As that paeon hints, their deliveries aren’t always perfect. But…in 110-degree heat, they sure do beat hiking down Main Drag West to the Sprouts, running around the store grabbing this, that, and the ‘tother; and then charging back through the heat to the Funny Farm!
My GAWD, it’s hot out there!
The back-porch thermometer says it’s only 105 in the backyard (with high, thick clouds in the offing…). Wunderground claims it’s 107. WhatEVER. It’s too hot and humid for human life, IMHO.
Anyhow, Amazon’s delivery guy just showed up with the pool floater I ordered. Didn’t bother to ring the doorbell, but fortunately I spotted his truck when he pulled up to the house. So now we can re-load the chlorine in the backyard drink–without having to hike halfway to Timbuktu to get to the pool store.
My son’s having kiped my car is…well… I can think of a number of terms, all of them highly unflattering. But the long and the short of it is…UNHOLY INCONVENIENCE. When you live in an L.A.-style city like Phoenix, you NEED a car to get around, even to the most minor and relatively close destinations. Especially in 110-degree heat.
The Uber guy across the street would have charged me through the wazoo to drive over to the pool store and back. So…at least now we have the chlorine floating gadget. And we’re not bankrupted. Quite.
That’s something.
I guess.
But at least VEERING toward hot as the Hubs of Hades. Outdoors: hot, sticky, gummy weather. Indoors: sticky and gummy.
July is the time of year when you do NOT want to be killing time in Arizona. The heat is fierce, and no, it is most surely not a “dry heat.” It’s as humid and sticky as (un)lovely Saudi Arabia used to be when we lived out there. Yuck!
Wunderground claims it’s only 94º outside. Supposed to get up to 107º during the day. If you asked me, I’d say we’d reached that goal already! At ten in the morning…
Ugh. If my parents were still living, I’d brain them both for dragging me to this hellish place.
They thought Sun City, over on the far west side of Phoenix, was just loverly.
Yeah…
No accounting for taste, eh? If you love the sound of fighter jets roaring up and down, starting along about 5 in the morning: just loverly. If you love folks who hate kids and wish to live in a place where no such critters exist: loverly. If you love folks who hate people whose skin is darker than theirs and wish to live in a place where no dusky types reside: loverly. If you love grocery stores that sell nothing more exotic than a T-bone steak: loverly.
Ye gawds, did I hate living out there!
Finally got a job in town, one that supported a studio apartment’s rental. So…was able to escape loverly Sun City.
Now in my old age: here I am, parked in North Phoenix….most certainly not in the retirement environs of Sun City. To this day, the appeal of that place escapes me. Reckon it must be….what? ….
The whitey-whitness (No kidding: just a few months ago an African-American friend of mine bought a house out there. Within weeks he was literally HOUNDED out of the place!)
The ultra-tidy sameness of the architecture and of what passes for the landscaping. (Nothing like a gravel lawn to stay nice and neat, eh?)
The relative cheapness of the houses. (A comparable house in town would cost half again as much…or more.)
The remoteness from the rough-and-tumble noise of a big city. (Sun City is characterized by the silence of the tomb….when fighter jets aren’t blasting back and forth.)
One could go on and on, I suppose….but one would prefer not to.
Never was so happy as when I got into graduate school and made my escape to a university campus.
Ugh!!!
If there was ever any question of whether I’m nuttier than a fruitcake, we just resolved it.
For the love of GAWD! I just stumbled in the house after walking home from the shops down on the corner of Main Drag South and Lunatic Road West. Whatever was the MATTER with me that I betook myself on a safari like that????? In the freakin’ middle of the afternoon???!?
Whatever marbles I might have awakened with this morning apparently rolled out my ears by the time I took off on that expedition. When we say “stupid,” we mean STUPID.
Hey. All I wanted to do was go into my favorite cheap liquor store and buy a bottle of more-or-less palatable cheap white wine.
Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
Even on a hot afternoon… Forgodsake, it’s only 105 out there just now. And for lovely uptown Arizona, that ain’t very hot.
Thought I was gunna DIE by the time I staggered in the front door!!! HOLEEE mackerel, is it hot out there!
Wunderground tells us it’s NOT that hot: only 102º….and no, for Arizona, that ain’t very hot. BUT….we’re also informed that we have 15% precipitation. And yeah…that is fairly damp for lovely uptown Phoenix.
Y’know…. If my son weren’t here, I’d be in San Francisco — where I belong — right this very minute.
And really: when my idiot parents decided to move to Sun City — dragging me into Arizona with them — I should have had enough sense to say Hell No I Won’t Go!!!! And if I’d had that much brainpower, chances are very high that yes, I’d still be home in the Bay Area, whither my maternal relatives emanated.
But no. I didn’t have that much sense. And so now I’m paying the Stupidity Tariff.
So…yeah. Where did my marbles go?
I dunno.
If I knew where they went, I would dig them out from under the bed…or wherever they rolled. But…they don’t seem to be there. 😮
Marbles….marbles… Well, with them or without them: I hate Arizona!!! And if I could find a way — any way, anyhow — to get away from this place, by damn! I surely would!