Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

Arf! We say…ARF!

by

Back again from traipsing around the neighborhood: pillar to post to pillar. Dawg and I marched from here to the shops east of Main Drag Central; then home and into the Shack.

Dawg takes up her post on the doggy bed, in the lovely air-conditioning. Human goes back out to hit the Sprouts and waypoints.

Human has gotten surprisingly skilled at repelling panhandlers. Hot diggety!

Sprouts: amply supplied with nummies, and — more importantly — with beer. So now we’re handsomely armed for dinner.

***

Ahhh, Little Dog! What a lovely little dog. 

In hideous Saudi Arabia — where the Human grew up — we weren’t allowed to have dogs. Rabies, y’know.

Actually, the jackals (which invaded the camp after dark every night) carried the rabies. But if your dog got into a squabble with one of those canine intruders, your dog was gonna be exposed to rabies, and that was gonna be the end of your dog. And you were going to enjoy THE most gawdawful round of anti-rabies shots you can imagine.

Pain, pain, and more pain: from every direction.

So we didn’t have dogs out there.

And therein lies one of the chief of the many reasons you couldn’t pay me to go back to that place. 😮

***

So here we are, loafing in the living room…again. Ruby and I have become quite expert at loafing!

It’s a warm but not a hot day. Tolerable enough for traipsing. School has come and gone, so kids are outside playing: more than tolerable enough.

Sometimes I think I would like to move…

But where to?

Well: first choice would be to a neighborhood closer to M’Hijito’s house.

Heeeeee!  Wouldn’t he be pleased?

Well, before I chase him off to Payson, we’d need to rethink that idea.

Another possibility would be into the residential area adjacent to the area occupied by the Beloved AJ’s Fancy-Dan Grocery Store. Just imagine being able to walk to the best grocery store in the city! Whenever you feel like it!!

That also would be, in theory, within walking distance of M’Hijito’s house.

The location, though, is near one of the busiest intersections in the city, and right up the street from a complex of not one, not two, but three high schools. So…well…you can imagine the noise level!!

Don’t think I wanna move there.

So…ya look around and ya look around and ya look around…and eventually you think I don’t wanna move anywhere away from here! 

Yea verily: by sheer, raw luck, you happened to buy a house in THE ideal corner of the city. Truth to tell, there is no “where to” to move to.

What luck, eh!?

Ahhh! And now to LOAF!

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Dayum, but Olde Age has its compensations. 😀  The biggest is NOT HAVING TO GET DRESSED AND TRUDGE OFF TO WORK!!!

Wheeee! Here we are, dawn’s early light cheerily glowing in the window. The Dawg and the Human stuffed with breakfast. Human lingering over a cup of hot coffee.

Beloved Pool Dude has been here and gone, leaving the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money spotlessly, sparkling clean. Bless that wonderful man!

Ruby thinks he IS wonderful. And weirdly, she seems to know what day of the week it is. On Pool Dude Day, she lurks by the back door, waiting…waiting…waiting for the Moment of Joy when he shows up.

And yea verily, on that morning he does show up. Then we have a Magnificent Moment of Doggy Joy, after which Ruby must tear outside and stand there at the pool fence’s gate, admiring his magnificence.

Apparently many of these guys are ex-convicts. Pool cleaning is one of the…uhm…trades for which Arizona prisons train inmates. So, theoretically, when they get back on the street they’ll have some other way to earn money than by stealing your car, eh?

At any rate, I have no idea what about the guy makes him seem so splendid to a corgi. But without doubt, she thinks he’s about the best Human ever to stumble across the surface of the earth.

Whenever I get off my duff, I do need to trudge down to the neighborhood clinic to…uhmmmm…. wwwaaaaitaminit!

I wuz about to say, to try to get the doc to do something about the constant maddening ITCH in my feet and legs, and as the computer cruises happily across the Internet it lands on a page that tells us...

Vitamin B12: Common Side Effects (Oral Supplements and Injections)

  • Headache
  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Mild diarrhea
  • Itching or a skin rash/acne
  • Dizziness
  • Tingling sensation in hands and feet (peripheral neuropathy)
  • Weakness or fatigue 

And which Vitamin B-gulper do we know who has a mad itch and crazy-making tingling in the hands and feet?

For.
The.
Luv.
of.
GAWD!!!!!

Manufacturers of OTC nostrums should be required to list ALL a drug’s potential side effects on the label! In 14-point type!!!

Man! I just stumbled across that li’l blurb. Wasn’t looking for it. And now know why my hands and feet and lips and gums feel like an electric current is buzzing through my body.

GodDAMMIT. I wish I’d known this two weeks ago. 

Ugh!!! Wonder how long it’ll take for this stuff to wear off… Bare minimum two or three days, whaddaya bet? More likely a week or two.

Wouldn’t you think that by now, having arrived in the middle of Olde Age, I would KNOW BETTER????? 

Yea verily, by now shouldn’t I have figured out that just about every damn pill I drop down my throat has some untoward side effect?

Argh!! My Christian Scientist crackpot relatives may not have been crackpots, after all. Maybe they had somethin’ there…

Too Gorgeous to be Miserable…

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Seriously, this afternoon — along about 3:00 p.m. — is SO mellow, so soft, so clean, and SO beautiful that even the plague of little maladies fails to make one miserable. Just…incredibly…lovely!

Maladies? Ohhh…just a few…

Peripheral neuropathy: frantic buzzing and burning in the hands, soles of the feet, and lips. Hurts. Makes you crazy.

Fingernails: lifting from the nail beds. No indication of why, or of what one can do about it.

Awful sore and itchy spot on the tail end. Dunno what to do about it. Rubbing in an analgesic does…hmmm…essentially nothing.

As of this morning, the hip pain was gone. But now it’s back! No idea why.

Dared to try to sit out on the back porch to take in this gorgeous afternoon.

B-a-a-d idea!

Place is swarming with mosquitos. Forthwith, had to dart back inside. Slam the screen door. Slam the kitchen door. RUN AWAY!!!

###

Thinking about my father: the jobs he had, how hard he worked to support me and my mother.

He was a tanker captain and, when he worked a shore job, a harbor pilot.

Maneuvering oil tankers across the ocean paid him well. But the job took him away from home for weeks on end. And…y’know…weirdly, the man was basically a homebody. A harbor pilot’s job is dangerous and demanding…he must have been exhausted most of the time during the ten years he did that in Saudi Arabia.

When he finally retired to Sun City, he and my mother had…ohhh…about 18 months together until the cancer sticks she’d smoked in gay, stinking abandon since she was 16 years old ganged up on her and killed her. She died horribly of tobacco-induced cancer shortly after they settled into their Dream Home in the suburbs of Phoenix.

They’re both gone now. The only relative I have left is my excellent son. And…heh…that does put some strain on him, the poor man! 😀

Seriously: he works ferociously for the insurance company that employs him. I would go back to teaching freshman comp if I had to work that hard!!! It doesn’t leave him much time or energy for riding herd on an ailing old bat. So…well…I try to keep from belly-aching too much. But he does know I’m ailing…and that the indications of that ailing do NOT bode well.

Oh, well. The sooner I croak over, the sooner I stop hurting. Right? 😀

Doggy-Walk from Heaven

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INCREDIBLY gorgeous morning! Cool but not cold. Clear skies. Lovely, low morning sun. Neighbors out walking their dogs and taking the early air…  What a fantastic neighborhood we live in.

Ruby and I circumnavigated the park. Said “hello” to half-a-dozen other dawg walkers. Soaked in the gorgeous morning air.

Walked past the house where the family’s son f*cked some teenaged girl and got arrested for the favor. He went to jail. They lost their home. It’s been a wreck for awhile.

But now someone has bought it and fixed it up. Looks like about all that’s left to do is to repair (rebuild??) the swimming pool.

We hang a left onto that neighborhood street: a lovely upper-middle-class neighborhood of handsome, big houses, irrigated lots, and general toniness. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.

Shortly, we bear north, ever north…again past the lovely park with its expanses of green grass (!!!) and its handsome, mature trees, and its 87 gerjillion other dawg-walkers. 😀

What a place to live!

I hope I can hang onto my home until I croak over. Partly because I do want to live here for literally the rest of my life. And partly because I want to leave it to my son, so he can either move into this beautiful little house or sell it for enough to decamp to Tahiti.

No kidding: this place is Yup Central, the younger generation of the upwardly mobile having discovered it. So by the time I pass on to my furry fathers, the house should be worth a ridiculous amount of money. He’ll be able to sell his house and bank the cash income, or sell both places and move to Upper Richistan.

If things work out the way I hope, it will be a lovely gift to leave him, and something that has the potential to profit him seven ways from Sunday.

Yea verily: the thoughts that preoccupy you as you and the Killer Corgi stroll past a fine green park and piles of fancy houses and little patches of local history. Onward!

Life in Lovely Uptown Phoe…DUCK!!!!!

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LOL! Here we go again. 

JUST got my fanny sat down in a big comfortable overstuffed leather chair when ROOOAAARRR whirrrr whirrr whirrr… Yet another goddam cop helicopter soars over the house. 

Naturally, Ruby is peregrinating around the backyard, whither she wandered through the open back door.

Set aside the coffee. Leap up, race through the kitchen. Call the dog…..

Call the dog….

Call the dog….

Obedient beast ambles idly across the yard and in through the door.

Good daaawg!

Slam the back screen and kitchen door shut. Lock the deadbolts on both. Amble back to my easy chair, next to which a cup of (cooling…) hot coffee resides.

What.
A
Place.

And why do I persist in living here?

Well…I’d say because I’m here and I ain’t movin’. But the truth is, I do like it here in the northerly reaches of North Central Phoenix.

For one thing, there’s never a dull moment around this place. That’s f’r sure!

It’s centrally located but out from underneath the flight paths of the jets that roar in and out of Sky Harbor Airport all day and night.

We’re in a decent school district, which means the neighborhood hosts legions of laughing, cavorting kids. Not to be missed!!

It’s populated enough to support not one, not two, but three high-quality grocery stores within an easy stroll, plus a large bookstore, a nice hair salon, a computer store…and more that I have yet to explore.

Up at the corner, we have a superior car mechanic’s garage. Don’t have to get the clunk towed far to deliver it to those guys.

The city has installed a train that now glides back and forth between ASU West (on the west side) and the Tempe campus (on the east side). Truth to tell, for most purposes, you don’t have to own a car…or even borrow one.

The place gets more and more like a real city as the years slide past. In San Francisco, my mother and I didn’t even need to own a car: we could get everyplace we wanted to go by bus, by trolley, or on foot. Same in London. Same in Paris.

While that’s not true of everyplace in the L.A.-like Phoenix area, public transit here is already pretty good, and it’s continuing to evolve apace.

As a result, I no longer hate living in Phoenix (as I did in my early years stuck in this place). Matter of fact, I’m coming to rather like it. In another few years it will be a real city. And a pretty livable one, at that.

So that’s a good thing.

Then we have the ever-burgeoning crime level. The bloating cost of living. The mobs of people, people, and more people….

Oh well. You can’t not have everything, right?

Glorioski! Glorious Day, Glorious Future

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Wow! What a gorgeous morning. Intermittent overcast with big, fluffy, cottony clouds. Cool but not cold. The sky wants to rain, but can’t work itself up to that much effort.

Ruby and I frolicked through Upper Richistan, as usual admiring the big ole’ expensive houses and their big, expensive irrigated lawns. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Ours isn’t “gorgeous,” but it’s adequately pleasant. Mid-middle class homes on lots that put enough space between neighbors.

Ruby loved up some workmen…cuteness is like some kind of joy drug for most people. We went on our way eventually. Now we’re back at the house.

And the Human finds itself wondering what next? 

Despite the family track record for longevity, we can pretty safely bet that I don’t have all that much longer to go. Relatives who have lived into their dotage have uniformly been Christian Scientists…tee-totalers, that is.

I ain’t no tee-totaler and never have been. My first boyfriend introduced me to wine when I was about 17, and I’ve been lapping up the stuff ever since. As we know, anything alcoholic is a handy device for shortening your life span. So I think it’s safe to figure I’ve got maybe about 10 years left — at most. Probably a little less than that.

The best I can hope for, I think, is to drop dead…and thereby avoid ending up in some nursing home or prison for old folks. That’s not outside the realm of possibility — as I say, the forebears who dropped dead in their late 90s didn’t drink. I do (with élan!), and so it’s safe to assume I’ve probably cut a good 10 years off the inherited lifespan. But that still would leave me another 10 years. Ten years that I do NOT want to spend in an old-folkerie!!!!

And therein lies the challenge: How to stay out of one of those horrible places. 

They soak up your life savings…and I want my savings to go to my son. Not to a holding pen for old bats. But….

But I have yet to figure out how to protect those savings for him, especially if I live much longer. Even more especially if I live much longer and get sick. How to evade those eventualities, though, does escape me.

If I manage to stay healthy into my dotage, though, M’hijito should inherit enough to retire in comfort…forthwith. By then, it’ll be time for him to figure out how to evade life in the old-folkerie…  😀