Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

Yucky-Ducky Day

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EWWWWW!  It is SO humid and SO sticky and SO hot outside that it feels like a good old hideous day in Ras Tanura, the seaside colony where I grew up in Saudi Arabia.

Seriously: it feels like it could start to rain out of a clear blue sky…something that, yea verily, I have seen in Arabia. But there’s neither clear nor blue out there: the sky is draped in ugly, thin gray clouds.

Haven’t heard from my son today. Hope he’s getting through this balmy day all right. His house is in a historic district and was built when every home was “cooled” (heh!) with something called “swamp cooling.” This was an early form of evaporative cooling. Worked fine when the weather was dry. Give it some humidity, though, and “swamp” would be the operative term, all right!

Even if you replace the evap unit with a modern air-conditioning unit, the result is not very effective. That, I reckon, has to do with the way the ductwork is built. Or…something.

***

I should call him up and pester him. But frankly, just now I’m reamed steamed and dry-cleaned, and so do not feel like speaking to any human beings. Today the new housecleaners he hired to replace the beloved Luz surfaced. Meeting them and introducing them to the shack and whatnot was surprisingly tiring. I just don’t do well with new people….and when the New Person is expected to work for me (the poor soul!)…well…it’s a trying experience all the way around.

Not sure whether they’re expected to surface once a week….or what. That’s one of the questions I need to pester him with. 😀  Poor guy! He must think I’m totally non compos mentis. And…hmmmm…with every month of advancing age, I seem to drift further in that direction.

Unclear whether that’s really so, or is only a time-enhanced illusion. I asked my beloved Doctor in the Wild about this. (A “doctor in the wild” is one who does NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic). And he insisted that no, my marbles are still intact and I should quit worrying about that.

Nice to think so. But o’course…he doesn’t see me every hour and every minute of every day. This marble-loss business seems to come and go, depending on stress levels, time of day, and whatnot.

Ohhhh well...  The dinner chow is hot! (Hoorayy!) And the  human is ambling off to bed whenever she finishes scarfing up that stuff.

And so, away!

A Rasty-Nasty Day

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Ugh!  This morning: hot, wet, sticky. Reminiscent of an early-morning summer day in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…where I was (un)fortunate enough to grow up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. What a hole! My father called the camp Rasty Nasty: a sobriquet that neatly describes life there.

And Lordie, I did hate living there! Not because of the Arabs or because of the eye-searing, brain-dulling scenery, but because of the nasty brats who populated the camp’s grade school. Ugh! Those creatures were truly little monsters. If you were “different” in any way, they ganged together and worked to make your life miserable.

And they were very, very good at making an outcast kid’s life miserable! If you were a girl who failed to grasp that the sole purpose of your life, other than spawning children, was to stand in the kitchen and bake cookies, you didn’t belong.

I didn’t  “belong,” with a vengeance. Back in the 1950s, when conventionality was the style of the day, I failed to grasp that I was supposed to grow up to cook and to sew clothes. Noooo…stupid me! I wanted to grow up to become an astronomer.

You know: a person with a Ph.D. and a lifetime career in astrophysics.

No. Bad, bad girl!! Females did NOT go into the sciences.

So growing up in Arabia meant nine years of utter misery for me. GOD, how I hated that place and hated those kids! The feeling was mutual on the brats’ part. What an awful time in an awful place!

Finally, when I was nearing the end of the sixth grade out there, my mother’s best friend — a camp nurse — persuaded her boyfriend — a doctor in the camp hospital — to convince my father that my mother had to be sent home, lest she die from the amoebic dysentery she’d picked up out there.

So. That got me and my mother out of that hell-hole and back to San Francisco, whence we had emanated. And it led me into a decent school where my classmates didn’t know I was the Weird Little Kid. So my life kinda sprang back to almost normal. My mother, after some weeks in a hospital, recovered from the amoebic infestation. And so there we were — at least in much better living conditions — until my father’s current contract ended and he joined us in the City.

From there we proceeded to Southern California, where he shipped out of a port down there. My mother’s dearest friend lived in Long Beach, so she — my mother — and I rented an apartment in that dreary garden spot. After several years there, my father retired and they betook themselves to Sun City, Arizona (talk about dreary!!). By then, thank God, it was time for me to enter college. Instead of sending me to Cal Berkeley, where I’d planned to go, they stuck  me in the University of Arizona.

This parked me in Tucson, the home of the bourgeois and the mediocre. But at least it was a good long way from Sun City! 😮

Rehearsing these events…well…it sure frosts my cookies! Where I had a promising start — a strong likelihood of entering UC Berkeley and then going on to graduate school from there — they got rid of that. Instead I got a bachelor’s degree from a third-rate school, and from there proceeded to marriage and graduate studies in an even lesser school.

What kind of people do that to their kid?

Well. Uneducated people, of course. They hadn’t a clue. I think they really didn’t know there was much difference between universities around the country. And they really didn’t know a Ph.D. from some third-rate school in the middle of the Southwestern desert was not the same as a Ph.D. — or any degree — from a four-year California university. And why should they? Neither of them went to college, and I don’t think my father even graduated from high school. From what I can tell, he ran away from home to go to sea before he finished his senior year.

So…yeah. I guess I managed to steer my life in the right direction. But still…I’m not fond of  being reminded of growing up in Saudi Arabia. And a wet, rasty-nasty day like today does exactly that.

Ugh!

Hotter Than the Hubs…Again!

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Or…make that “still.” 

Despite this morning’s mile-long doggy-walk, this afternoon I still craved more exercise. And…I do hafta say: the walking seems to have eased the hip pain. While still present, it’s no longer excruciating…so maybe a few more days of hiking will take care of it, once and for all.

That notwithstanding…dayum! I do hate Arizona!  Especially its brain-banging heat. As we scribble, the thermometer on the back porch registers 110 degrees. 

That’s right: ONE HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES. In the shade! 

Ugh! What a place! 

As you might imagine, I lasted about 20 minutes out there, before heading back to the (refrigerated!) Funny Farm.

So here we are, loafing in front of the computer. Thank the heavens for iced tea!

😀

Honestly. I could kick my father’s ghost for his having dragged us to this unholy place, after we were reasonably well set in Southern California.

Yes, So Cal is expensive: an attribute he loathed. But California is a big state. It has many balmy corners, and some of them do not bankrupt their residents.

Phoenix is Southern California Redux, only parked inside an oven. You don’t even wanna think about what my power bill is gonna look like this month.

Can’t complain too much, though: most of the winter I can leave the HVAC system off. So, off-season power bills are effectively nil.

***

Jeez. Just got something from Amazon that I didn’t order. Looks like they’re gonna gouge me for that.

Soooo….I guess the Amazon trade is done for. After this: get off the duff and walk to a store to get the doodads and the gunk!  110° or not!

 

“Another Beautiful Day in Arizona”*

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It’s a Sea of Cortez day…moisture saturating the atmosphere, making for a swamp-like, Saudi Arabian, horrible morning. Weather is drifting up to (un)lovely Phoenix from Mexico just now…breeding a sticky, icky day.

Dawg and I are freshly(?) back from a swim through that air, as the morning sun hangs over the eastern horizon. This is one of several Arizona phenomena that make me want to brain my father for dragging us here from California.

Well. If he were still alive to brain. 😉

God, I hate this place. If there were a way to get out of here, I’d be soooo long-gone.

But…truth to tell…for me there is no way out. I can’t afford to move. And even if I could, at this age where would I go? Too old to get a job. Not interested in living in a “retirement” community.

Plus my son is here. I’m not about to move away as long as he’s lurking in Arizona. And truth to tell, given that he has a more-than-decent job here, there are not many other places he’s likely to go.

His dad emanated from Colorado, and M’hijito has said that he’d like to repair to those parts. But…in the first place, he’d have to get work there. And the second place, it snows in Colorado. He’s no longer accustomed to snow and ice, and I have exactly zero desire to become accustomed to them!

§ § §

*  “Another beautiful day in Arizona” was the tagline of a locally prominent radio announcer here in Phoenix, back in the day. Every morning he would open his talk-show with “It’s another beautiful day in Arizona. Leave us all enjoy it!”

Way to turn illiteracy into PR, eh?

 

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Yuch!!  Just back from this morning’s (soggy!) doggy walk. What a horrid morning! Gray, wet…yes, SO wet the air actually does feel soggy.

Feels like Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf, where we used to live while my father worked for Aramco — the Arabian American Oil Company. HORRIBLE. One of the nastiest places to live that you can imagine.

Ruby is panting frantically as she lounges on the kitchen floor’s cool tile. I’m covered with sticky sweat…thirsty but too tired and sore to get up and lumber into the kitchen after a glass of water.

WhatEVER possessed my father to move us to this ungawdly place when he retired?

Oh, yah: I know. CHEAP.

Del Webb was practically giving away the houses in Sun City — certainly by comparison with California real estate. But Sun City’s BIG appeal to him, IMHO, was NO KIDS.

Truly: he abominated kids. He hated the sound of kids playing outside. And when he heard of a whole housing development where no kids were allowed, he thought he’d found Nirvana.

He made me drop out of high school a year early, so he could send me to the University of Arizona…thereby getting around Del Webb’s rule that no one under some extenuated age could live in Sun City. If your kid was away at college, you were allowed to move in…even if the brat was under 21.

So that fucked up my education. But why should he care? I was just a girl. What did I need a degree for, since all I was gonna do was take dictation and type? And raise kids, of course.

Y’know, if he’d waited just one more  year, I would have gotten into UC Berkeley, and there I could have landed a decent degree that would indeed have led to an interesting job or a first-rate graduate program. But nooooooo….we had to move to f*cking Sun City.

What a place!

At any rate, here we are, enjoying a classic Arizona late-summer day. Wet, soggy, dark with overcast…just gross. I hate Arizona (in case you hadn’t noticed…). And really…I will resent him for the rest of my life for f*cking up my educational plans (I was lined up for a Ph.D. from Berkeley or UCLA!) and dragging me out to the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

But…yeah. So what? I was just a girl….

Yet Another Lovely Arizona Day….

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Jayzuz!  THIRTY-SEVEN PERCENT humidity! Temp: 111º … “feels like 114º,” saith Wunderground. Supposed to chill down to a crisp 106º some while after 6:00 p.m., after which time we supposedly will get a thunderstorm.

Ahhhh, lovely Arizona! What a garden spot! Just now, over a third of the air out there is…water.

Can you imagine my father dragging us to this place?

Actually, my mother rather liked it. She used to go on and on about how she loved the sound of the accursed fighter jets roaring out of Luke Air Force Base (just down the road from where we lived) and how wonderful the weather was and…yeah. On and on. Which goes to show, I reckon, that some folks can adapt themselves to anything.

If my son weren’t here, I wouldn’t stay in this garden spot. 

Where would I go?

San Francisco, whence my family emanated. My maternal grandmother’s family lived in the East Bay. After my mother’s paternal grandmother, situated in upstate New York, died of diabetes, my mother was shipped to the California relatives.

This was a lucky break for her. The New York set, who had assumed custody of my mother, were dirt farmers. The California clan, though, was fairly affluent. Not zillionaires by any means, but comfortably set.

Getting shipped off to the Californians after the New York grandmother died was one of the great lucky breaks of her life. Suddenly she was riding to school on a school bus (she told me she’d never seen such a thing Back East!) and eating three squares and wearing decent clothes.

Eventually, my mother did come to regard Berkeley as “home.” And though I wouldn’t go that far, I will say…I could happily live the rest of my life there. Well. If I could persuade the son to move up there, too! 😀