Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

The Times (and the Demographics), they are a-changein’

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Sorta…

Spent half the afternoon (and more!) puttering around the Old Neighborhood where DXH and I lived for the first fifteen years or so of our married life. My goodness, I loved that area, with its elegant historic houses and its big beautiful park and its…well…let’s face it: its whitey-white neighborhoods.

Yep. It was (and is) as whitey-white as you can get and still be on this planet. If anyone of dusky complexion moved in there, they were likely to be pressured out…in any number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

My mother would never have tolerated having me and the spouse dwell in an integrated neighborhood. She and my father lived in Sun City, which was (and is) as segregated as human habitation can get. Friend of mine — dusky persuasion — bought a house out in Sun City a few months ago. And “a few months” was as long as he lasted. Less than that, actually. Didn’t take the gracious neighbors long to harry the poor guy out.

Yes, my friends: Arizona IS a Southern state….  What a place!

Oh well.

So I killed the better part of the afternoon cruising the old neighborhoods. Missing old friends, missing old scenery, remembering old adventures. My…what good times we had. How beautiful those historic houses were. How fun the young and the upwardly mobile were. How grand the park with its lakes and grass and trees. How adventurous the burglars and the rapists. How terrifying the German shepherds and the Doberman pinschers. 😀

No kidding. Greta, our GerShep, chased one poor fella off after he’d snuck into the house in the middle of the night. He’s still running…said to be approaching Lake Titicaca.

That factor notwithstanding, I do miss it.

Welp. Where I live could be called “the New Encanto.” Our houses are damn near old enough to be dubbed “historic.” The ‘Hood calls in the young, the affluent, and the upwardly mobile (to say nothing of the crooked, the greedy, and the thieving…). We are now “centrally located” in much the same way as the Old Neighborhood was. And the place is prized because of its style, its locale, and its demographic…

Plus ça reste le même…

KEEEERIMINEY!  WordPress just crashed….  Managed to to get the program back online, but this post would only come up in “text” style: basically unreadable and uneditable.

LOL! What on earth did I do to pi$$ off the gods like this? 😀

Oh…how nice. Just to make the wee hours more entertaining, some young (I assume) sh!thead is charging back and forth across Main Drag North, his engine roaring and backfiring.

Well. I assume the bang! bang! bang! is his car backfiring. Could just as easily be a pistol firing. And nooooo, that would NOT be much of a surprise in these parts.

Honest to Gawd. Sometimes it actually does make Sun City look good….

Ohhhh well. At least WordPress seems to have come back online. Now to see if its “Publish” function works..

😮

One Ringy-dingy, Two Ringy-dingies…

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Rousted out of the sack before dawn this morning: another goddamn phone solicitor!

The jerk companies that hire these folks recruit them out of the Far East: Philippines and waypoints. It’s broad daylight where the scuzzes are calling from…here, it’s still pitch black out.

This does not elicit a polite response from me.

:-/

But now its after dark again — evening dark, that is. Dawg and I are loafing on the bed. The kids across the street have been called indoors, interrupting their delightful play.

Yes: one of the ‘Hood’s finest attributes is the sound of children frolicking.

WHY would anyone want to live in a Sun City mausoleum when you can hear the music of kids playing, come evening?

 

And Another Lovely Evening…

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THIS evening made all the lovelier by the absence of perps fleeing cops in helicopters. 😀

Ruby and I perambulated our part of the Hood, plus Lower Richistan and Upper Richistan. What a hoot, right before Christmas.

The locals LOVE to decorate these old houses and their half-acre yards with their mature, beautiful trees. Kids are playing outside. Parents are puttering. Trees and shrubs and eaves and roofs are gussied up with colored lights for Christmas. It’s just a delight to walk around here at dusk.

A December evening in central Arizona really is lovely, except in the (unlikely!!) event of rain. The dusk sky glows in radiant shades of blue and orange. The air is sweetly temperate. The old 1950s houses are graciously handsome. And the kids are….

OHHHH! CORGIIII!!!!!

LOL! Here comes another kid!

My goodness, how the local urchins adore short, plushy, pointy-eared little dogs! Fortunately, she adores them back. So an evening walk can easily morph into a 45-minute love-fest.

That’s life in the ‘Hood. 😀

Sittin’ on the dock of the…uh…pool…

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Staggeringly gorgeous weather. This is one of the best times of the year in Phoenix…and most times of the year are exceptionally good. 😀

Thinking about…

* My father retiring.

He figured he had it made: their little house paid off plus enough in savings to carry him and my mother through the rest of their lives, even after they paid for my college education.

Heh…he didn’t understand about the vagaries of the stock market.

Poor man! He about had a coronary when the market crashed. As far as I could tell, he didn’t understand that if he just held steady, eventually the market would rally and all would be well. And yea verily, that did happen…but not until after he’d expended a great deal of adrenaline. And lost quite the pile of cash.

* The Mayo Clinic and how much I’m coming to distrust it.

They do a blood test on me; then come back to me (and the highly vulnerable son) squalling EEEK EEEK!! You have diabetes! EEEK!!!!!

No, I don’t. Been here, done this…let’s do it again…

Now I present myself to another doctor. “Will you please check me for diabetes? It’s in the family.”

JAB! STAB!! Test test test…

“No. You don’t have diabetes. You have prediabetes, which may possibly some day evolve into diabetes. Or not. This is why you should have annual physicals and they should indeed include testing for diabetes. But so far, you’re not very close to Death’s door.”

Uh huh. Same wind I’ve heard blow before.

* The beloved Young Dr. Kildare

Awww, poor babe. He’s fled the profession again. Come to find out, he’s no longer at the practice where I found him most recently, just up the road in suburban Sunnyslope. They ain’t a-tellin’ about where he’s gone.

My guess is, it’s far, far from the practice of medicine, and pretty damn far from Phoenix, too.

*****

Time passes a bit

****

It’s only 6:00 p.m., but my! What a beautiful — even glorious — evening.

A beautiful and gracious dusk elides into darkness, the room-temperature night air holding steady through the hours.

Arizona: what a place!

 

Gorgeous Morning

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The sun has risen on a magnificent clear day. Ruby the Corgi and I have circumambulated the ‘Hood, and now we’re back in the shack waiting for the water to heat so as to make a pot of awesome coffee. And I think…

I’m thinking about a friend of mine and his wife, who was one of my graduate students…

…he used to get up in the morning and walk to work, while she got up and made trouble. And oh, my goodness! Could that lady make trouble! She went to graduate school to learn the best techniques. Seriously: she had taken an M.A. and then pursued a Ph.D. in political science. 😀

They lived in a handsome patio home within walking distance of a prominent horse track, where he had a moderately prestigious job.  Meanwhile, her day job was to make trouble in the condo association. She was very good at it.

When they started finding death threats taped to their front gate, they decided to sell up and move to a house in a nearby development called Moon Valley. And that place was a piece of junk!

I know, because I helped them repair and paint the interior before they moved in. The south-facing wall was so flimsy and so spectacularly uninsulated that the tile floor was actually hot under my bare feet for a good yard inside the building. And flimsy indeed: you could take your fist and punch a hole through the outside wall. Reach inside, unlock the front door’s deadbolt, and let yourself in.

No kidding: it did happen.

He came down with cancer and died, not at all pleased with his wife’s behavior. She shifted around to a few condos and apartments here in the Valley; then moved back to the Midwest, where her family lived. Can’t find her online, so I figure she must have passed away by now — she was no spring chicken when I knew her, and that was some years ago.

Ah, the thoughts that occupy one’s mind on a gorgeous morning….

Argh! With the Perps on Our Tail

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Lordie! Ruby and I, winding up this evening’s dog-and-human walk, shoot up the street, across the yard, and into the house, cop copters hot on our tail. Dunno what’s goin’ on out there, but whatever it is, it’s got the cops all riled up.

Dart in the house. Check the exterior doors:

Front door:

Screen door secured.
Heavy interior door locked, with deadbolt.

Side door:

Screen door flimsily locked
Sliding glass door securely locked (we hope)

Back door:

Screen door securely locked
Interior door securely locked.
Butcher knife in hand

Dog door(s)

Interior and exterior doors secured
Doors hidden behind outdoor chairs

Bedroom door

Securely locked

Dog on full alert
Human on full alert

Dog & human climb onto bed to sorta relax
Cop helicopter flies off

What
A
Goddamn
Place

Does start to make Sun City look good, hm?

Well. Actually, no. IMHO nothing makes Sun City look good. BUT….it does make Fountain Hills look good. It makes Moon Valley look sorta good. It makes the Biltmore district look real good, if only one had a few million bucks to drop on real estate.

Why, again, are we still bere????

S