Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

Car Hijinks: Is this even possible?

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Y’know…   It’s kinda embarrassing to have a son (even a magnificently grown one) who’s a lot smarter than you are. Eeps!

The other day, my son purloined my car out of my garage. He refuses to bring it back. So here I am: carless in Gaza, having to do errands on foot and hire an Uber driver for more involved appointments.  I thought the car-grabbing maneuver was just a moment of nastiness, or else the kid was trying to pull some sort of demented power play.

Uhmmm…. Not too swift on the uptake, am I???  :-

In fact, what he has been doing is demonstrating that he’s about 50 times smarter than his agèd muther!

Here’s what has happened since we took that car out of my garage:
* Not a dime has been diddled away on gasoline, car servicing, or anything else of a vehicular nature.
* The guy who lives catty-corner across the street revealed himself as an Uber driver.
> No kidding!!!! He uses his personal car as a taxicab…and he lives all of 30 seconds away.
> Took a ride with him: He appears to be a good, safe driver, and the inside of his chariot is spotlessly clean.
* I have not tried to kill a single one of my Fellow Homicidal Drivers.
* I did NOT, as had been planned, schlep the tank to the Ford dealer for updated maintenance work. $$$
* With the car locked up my son’s house, I’ve no concern about the passing burglars visiting my garage.
* The garage has been incredibly easy to keep clean (who knew???)
* Walking to the Albertson’s, Sprouts, or El Rancho provides a highly satisfactory amount of mild exercise.
Who knew, indeed? In a highly urban environment, the benefits of going car-free outweigh the benefits of owning a car.
That’s assuming you don’t use your car for regular commuting and you don’t have to drive to any destination every day.
Y’know what? I’m thinking we should get rid of that car altogether. Sell it and bank the money. Then I get M’jito or the Uber dude to drive me to the (relatively few) destinations I need to go to these days.
Whaddaya think? Am I crazy?

Inauspicious Morning

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Ugh! Not 7:30 yet, and we’ve already had one Drama of the Day. More to come, no doubt…

Ruby and I were headed homeward from the morning walk, when we came upon a favorite neighbor. This lady lives alone. She’s very smart and very charming and just the sort of person you enjoy having as a neighbor.

As we greet each other, she trips on a heaved slab in the sidewalk…and DOWN SHE GOES.

She whacked the heck out of her head. I wanted to go get my car and drive her up to the ER. She declined. Which was good, because in the heat of the moment I’d forgotten that my son has stolen my car.

Another neighbor came along. She also proposed that we take our friend to the ER. Again, Friend declined.

Reluctantly, we complied (what were we gonna do? Tie her up with a clothesline??). And our group dispersed.

***

And this is why I need my car. You never know when some emergency, small or large, will arise.

If my son persists in refusing to return it, I’ll have to go rent a car. And I may report him for stealing my car, which will cause him to lose his job. I hope the principle of the thing is worth it to him.

***

Ugh. Hot and humid out there: 99% chance of rain.

I should get off my duff and walk to a grocery store, since a few things are needed…and I sure don’t want to be prancing around in 100-degree heat…or 100% rain.

But ohhhh…how I am not in the mood! 😀

***

Reminded of where we lived in San Francisco, a sprawling middle-class apartment development called Parkmerced. Loved living there!

One of the amenities was a huge underground parking garage. My mother would park our car in its slot on the 6th floor (that’s 6 floors down), and we would rarely use it unless my father was in port. (He went to sea; we had to pick him up when his ship docked in the far East Bay, but otherwise, we had no real need for a car).

Frankly, it was cool not to need a car. Well: not “cool” in a social way but in a day-to-day lifestyle way. We could walk to the grocery store. My mother’s job was within easy walking distance. The city busses had a stop right outside our building: I could jump on a bus and ride to school.

If we were going anywhere outside of Parkmerced, my mother would drive us. But that amounted to surprisingly few trips! Mostly, the car sat in the parking garage…day in and day out.

Wish we could live that way now.

A Plan!

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So…here I am, stuck in the house with no car in the garage and 112-degree heat outside. I need groceries. But ain’t about to get them in this weather.

Ooohkayyy…. So what AM I gunna do?

Welp, truth to tell, of late I’ve come up with a New Plan.

The basis of this Plan is to limit the number of times a week that I need to go to a grocery store or a pharmacy. With a set number of junkets for any given period, I should be able to arrange with a local driver to pick me up on specific days at a specific time. Say, Tuesdays at 10 a.m. for a trip to Sprouts. Wednesdays at 2 p.m. for a trip to Albertson’s.

And so on.

Not very much so on, I hope.

That way, I would know what I can buy, where, and when. And also have a pretty fair idea of how much it’s going to cost. If the trips are arranged with Uber (or some such), then I would always know when I’m gonna head to a store and always know approximately when I’m gonna get back.

If we discover that the local car-for-hire drivers are reliable (yeah…big “if”), so that they show up about when they say they will, it would be very easy to keep the pantry stocked. And I wouldn’t have to trudge through the heat, dodging panhandlers and sh!theads, to get to the store. Let’s say, at 10:00 on Monday morning, the Uber driver who lives across the street will pick me up and take me to the local grocer. He’ll wait till I’ve loaded up the groceries, and then he’ll bring me and the loot back home. Voilà! Chore done!

With any luck: chore done in ONE trip per week!

How awesome would that be, eh?

Hotter ‘n the Hubs…again

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Not even 7:30 a.m. by the time the Ruby and I stumble back to the house. We left at dawn.

The SMOG! My gawd, the SMOG!

At first I thought it was fog. Seriously: it looks like a San Francisco morning out there. Doesn’t feel like it. It’s 95 in the shade of the back porch. The sky: yellow with crap floating in the air.

Horrid, horrid place.

If my son weren’t here, I’d be soooo gone!

Where would I go?

Berkeley, where my relatives lived for decades. Gawdlmighty, I do miss Berkeley.

The foothills of Tucson. Clean air, relative quiet, fairly upscale.

San Diego, in its more upper-middle-class incarnations.

Paris…parts of it.

San Francisco, where I belong…

oh, Hell: ANYWHERE! Anywhere but here!

Wunderground, that eminent weather-reporting site, predicts 112 degrees with a 6% chance of rain. Hm…observant of them.

Local weather reporters claim yesterday was Phoenix’s hottest July 30 on record.

Uhhh…sure. Yeah. Must be mighty boring to be a weather reporter. 😀

Walking home, Ruby and I passed a house on the little pass-through street bordering our slab of the ‘Hood. And by golly, out in front watering his yard was one of the handsomest Black men I’ve ever met. Quite possibly one of the handsomest of all possible men.

Not only that, but he was friendly. And he had a big ole’ black lab named Olive.

Hilariously, Olive was my maternal grandmother’s name.

Must be Fate, eh?

Olive. She died horribly: uterine cancer as a result of her lively sex life. My poor mother had to take care of the woman on her deathbed (Olive’s, that is…not my mother’s… 😀  )

Seriously: imagine inflicting the care of a wild-assed chippie on a teenaged girl, as said chippie lay dying. What a horror show!!

And what the HELL possesses people?

There’s some question about that episode, though. Years later, I found evidence that Olive had not died when my mother was 16 years old, but in fact was living in the Santa Barbara area at the time my own son was born. Never tried to track it down, though: pisseth me off too much.

Still. Sometimes I do wonder if my mother knew her mother was still living. Or if the crackpot family told her she’d died, either by way of freeing Olive from responsibility for her illegitmate daughter or by way of freeing my mother of having to interact with her…uhh…”racey” mother.

What a bunch!

Report from the Department of Weird Experiences

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Good grief! If it hadn’t been so funny — so goofy — I’d be hiding under the bed right now.

Did you know there are people in this world who cannot imagine why anyone would want to buy a chilled bottle of white wine? Some of those folks reside behind the customer service desk in a certain beloved nearby liquor store.

No kidding!  Hey!  What’s wrong with this fine room-temperature swiggle of white???

This has been one of those days when your fellow citizens are SO goony, SO ignorant, SO far out in left field that you simply have no clue how to respond.

Seriously: Every which way I’ve turned, lurking there has been another wacksh!t experience, another goofball customer “service” clerk, another inexplicable weirdness…to the point where it all comes out kinda hilarious.

But y’know…you hafta love them all! Think how boring this world would be without them! 😀

This morning I hit my favorite local strip mall, right up at the corner of Conduit of Blight and 19th Avenue.

And yeah: you DO have to love Latino culture to love that mall.

Yeah, you DO have to be White Trash yourself to appreciate how cool, how fun, how slippery, how smart the merchants up there are. Yea verily, you need to be such WT that you wish your Daddy were here to blaze the trail through that place for you. Ohhhhh dayum, do you wish your Daddy were here!! And would you love to hear the (hilarious) opinions he would’ve formed, after a day among the locals.

I’d love to be able to say I’d be as entertained as Daddy would’ve been by today’s antics of the locals. But you know…when he was alive I couldn’t read his mind. Now that he’s deader than a doornail, I have no idea whe he would’ve thought.

Well. I have an idea. But I sure as hell could have not been able to guarantee he would’ve thought that.

But ohhhhh… Yeah. He would’ve been…

amused
pissed
wilied up
out of patience
and telling his daughter to get the f*** outta there.

😀

But when you’re my daddy’s daughter, watching a$$holes dig themselves into a$$hole ditches is…well…damn funny.

 

Life with…Other Humans

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See…this kinda thing is THE reason I do NOT wanna live in an old-folkerie, elbow-to-elbow with my fellow senile humans, taken care of by folks who can’t get a better job anywhere else:

Apparently, WonderCleaningLady unplugged the microwave, which resides in the garage.

Unplugged it…WHY???? Gaddamm it.

This a.m., I go out there to heat some potatoes for breakfast, and find the damn thing doesn’t work.

Moment of panic: hooooleeee sh!t!!! Do I have to run out and buy a new micro today? And then tote it home or have it delivered…and then get it set up and working right?

AAAUUUUGH!

Well…I finally figured out that WCL must have pulled the plug and then never plugged it back in. Okay. Problem fixed.

But…goddammit! What IS the matter with people?  If you’re going to sabotage something in the course of doing some chore, f’rcrapsake UNsabotage it before you wander off!

grrrrrr grrrrrr grrrrrr grrrrrr grrrrrr

My problem is, I just don’t get along all that well with other humans. I have next to zero patience with Humanity, dammit!

And THAT is why I don’t want to spend the last months or years of my life locked up in an institution with a bunch of other old buzzards.

* * * * * 

Argha. It’s after 7 a.m. Before it starts to get hot, I need to get off my duff and walk up to the stores on Main Drag North by way of buying a few more cans of dog food for Ruby, snabbing some more fresh berries and melon, and roping in some bread and bacon. Blech! Just what I wanna do, the first crack off the bat in the morning.

Well: the second: Ruby and I have already circumnavigated the ‘Hood.

* * * * * 

One thing I need to do — well, plan to do more than need, actually — is to hop on the lightrail train and ride down to 19th and Glendale, where I can visit and explore the dreaded Beatitudes old-folkerie.

That’s the place where my son would like to foist me. The place where, thankyouverymuch, I do NOT want to live out the last months or years of my life.

My father consigned himself to one of those places. It was called Orangewood. And it was a pleasant enough place. It’s just that…well…it ain’t home, folks. It’s like living in a motel.

And no. No, I do NOT like motel living. No, I do NOT want to spend the final slab of my life in a prison for old folks, eating bad food turned out of cardboard and plastic packages onto steam tables.

Ugh, ugh, and ugh. Not to say UGHHHH!

The Beatitudes, in addition to multi-story structures filled with motel-like rooms, also has free-standing, single-story patio homes. These might be tolerable, primarily because they do provide a little space between you and the neighbor.

Whether these little castles are reserved for married couples or whether they’d let an old bat and her little dog occupy one, I dunno. Pretty quick, though, I intend to ask.

oooohhhhh gawd. 
The horror!

The HORROR of having to move into one of those warehouses for old folks!! I just do NOT want to live like that.

Ohhhhhh well…  It’s after 8 a.m. I’d better get a-hiking if I’m gonna get up to the grocery store before the morning gets unnavigably hot. Blech!

And so…AWWWAAAAAAAYYYYY!