Coffee heat rising

aging

Another Gray Day in Arizona…

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Leave us all enjoy it!

LOL! A Phoenix radio station, extant some years ago, used to have a talk-show announcer who would start the day with his trademark greeting:

It’s another beautiful day in Arizona!
Leave us all enjoy it!

This particular illiteracy was apparently some sort of Midwestern dialect.

Today is another muggy, damp day in Arizona. No clouds to speak of, but the air is just plain soggy.

Just back from trudging around the park with Ruby the Corgi. Absolutely positively NOT in the mood for a morning stroll through air as thick as Jell-O. But now we’re home (at last!). The coffee is steeping. The dog is flopped on the hallway floor; the human is flopped in its favorite easy chair.

My son wants me to compile a grocery list for him. He doesn’t get the picture — and won’t, no matter how desperately I try to explain. To wit: I don’t do grocery lists! 

Nope. I know what I need, and when I get to the store, I patrol the aisles…grabbing whatever I see that needs to be replenished. Ask me face to face what those needs are, and…I dunno. 

So that will start the day with an annoyance, both for me and for my excellent son, who proposes to haul me to said store. Pore guy!

Day-dreaming while hiking this morning: remembering the Moon Valley home of a now long-gone friend. When she and her husband moved into the house, it needed a lot of superficial fix-up work. I went over there to help them: paint, drywall repair, window caulking…

It was kinda fun, though it quickly devolved into boring work, and more work than I’d had in mind doing.

Work! It’s bad for your health!

 

Robin Hood’s Barn: Round & Round!

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Hotter than the hubs outside. Ruby and I have circumnavigated the’Hood…and circumnavigated it…and circumnavigated it…and….WHEW! 

We’re finally back at the Funny Farm. The Human is pooped. Apparently the Dawg is, too: she’s flopped on the cool tiles, looking like she figures it’s nap-time.

Thinking…thinking…thinking of long-lost friends who are SO missed.

Really, Your Godship, did you have to arrange to leave me to last, for the great exodus to the sky?

My friend Jo-Ann: oh, how I do miss her! We met in the church choir and held forth there until we had nothing left to hold…  After we each left that group, Joan and her husband Lee moved to Colorado, where her daughter lives. And that was about the last I heard from her.

Recently, we got word that Lee had passed away. Not surprising: he was a superbly elderly man. But sad: because he was a wonderful man.

So apparently Joan must have moved in with the daughter. Which would be good: very good. I gather the daughter has a spacious home in a pleasant area. And nothing could be better for Joan than to be close by a family member.

Hm. That kind of defines life, eh? You start out, trot along the path. and ultimately (if you live long enough) go round and round and round…often coming back to where you started from. Or mighty close to it.

GET’em!!!

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Boyoboy, would I love to be able to GET them: the bastards who start blitzing me with phone soliciting around 7 a.m., and on into the morning.

Phone soliciting should be illegal.

Yeah, I know: freedom of speech and all that. Sure… But you can be free of speech at a decent hour of the morning.

Yeah, I know: they’re trying to catch you before you leave for work.

But freedom to hustle people is no excuse for driving the marks nuts. I am so sick of the phone soliciting harassment, I’ve seriously thought of disconnecting the phone service. Who the Hell needs a phone if all it’s going to be used for is to pester you?

Yeah, I know: turn off the phone during periods when you don’t want to be hassled.

But…my son uses that phone to get in touch with me. What if something happens that he needs to get ahold of me RIGHT NOW…and I’ve disconnected all the phones?

The bastards have got you coming and got you going!

***

Gorgeous morning! Sunny and balmy at once. 

Ruby and I circumambulated a route that SDXB and I used to take every day, back when he lived here. Goes through a neighborhood of tidy middle-class homes, probably dating back to the 1960s. All green and grassy and tree-shaded now: a very pretty route to walk in the mornings.

One of our favorite neighbors, The Ole Guy, lived on this route. He would be out puttering in the yard every morning — we would pause and chat with him.

No sign of him today. Probably moved into the Beatitudes when he had to consign his wife to the place, a prison for the decrepit. She refused to go, when he realized she had reached a point where he could no longer take care of her. Finally, it became clear that the only way he could shove her into that place would be to go there with her.

The Beatitudes is a terrifying old-folkerie, one that’s been in Phoenix for years. Sooner or later, most of us who survive into old age will be forced to move into such a place. But oh, my!  The horror!!

Institutional living is not my Thing, that’s for sure. I hated living in the dorms at the university, and you can be sure a prison for old folks isn’t anywhere near as tame as a college dormitory. Sincerely do I hope I will die before I can be carted off to one of those places…but there’s not much hope for that, given the longevity in my family and my own vigorous health.

My father had himself locked up in a similar place, one called Orangewood — now called the Terraces. My mother had refused to go. Upshot: he had to take care of her at home as she lay dying of the cancer brought on by her rabid smoking habit. But the minute she died — frankly, I think that’s no exaggeration — he put the house on the market and signed himself into the old-folks’ prison.

He didn’t mind that lifestyle. Having gone to sea all of his adult life, he was used to crowded, institutional living and bad food.

I, however, would far, FAR rather be dead than locked up in one of those horrid places. And you may be sure that if I have to do so, I will engineer exactly that. No way in Hell am I gonna spend my “golden years” (har har!) in Decrepitude Hell.

For what those places cost, though, I do believe you can hire people to come into your home and babysit you into the Next World. They’re horribly expensive institutions. And really: if you’re not a stroke-induced vegetable — if you can still hobble around your house and bathe yourself and lift a fork to your mouth — you can make exactly that kind of hire.

Well…there are better fates. One could instantly drop dead of a stroke, for example.

Let us hope for that!

Reminiscing…

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Dear GOD, how I hated living in Saudi Arabia!

I grew up there, in an American oil camp called Ras Tanura. That means “Cape Brazier”…and they ain’t kiddin’!  It was a horrible place, hot and humid all summer long (add the spring and fall to that, to get the total length of the season…). Some days, it was so humid that rain would start to pour out of a clear blue sky!

This jolly memory was spurred by a moment of reminiscence: was remembering some of the kids I went to school with, what our lives were like (ugh!!), some of the teachers (double-ugh, to most of them!).

Well…hold that thought for a second or so.  I was very lucky to have had an utterly brilliant first-grade teacher (no kindergarten out there). Her name was Miss Woods, and that lady DID know how to teach the urchins to read. The astonishing result was that by the time I walked out of her class at the end of the first year, I could read and I could write — fluently.

When we got back to the States a few years later, I was even more astonished to find kids who could barely read. No joke: that is NOT an exaggeration. This was at the end of the sixth grade. And no, they were not learning disabled or special-ed types: they were the normal kids in the normal classrooms.

In Arabia, the teachers ranged from decent to excellent — with the exception of one nitwit who must have been some executive’s girlfriend. By and large, by the time we students got back to the US, we were well ahead of our respective grade levels. Kids who had been in stateside schools all that time often struggled to read a grammar-school book.

But…in Arabia, the social norm among the kiddies was Conformity with a Capital C.

Because I was a little girl who wanted to grow up to be an astronomer — not a secretary or a mommy or a grade-school teacher — I was The Weird One. Make that the Target. 

The little monsters teased and tormented and tortured me all the way through grade school…never was I so glad to get away from anyplace as I was when I left that horror show in the 6th grade. And THAT was why I hated living out there. With all my beady little heart…

When we got back to the States, I was years ahead of grade level. I loafed my way through junior high and a year or so of high school. Then was pulled out of school and sent off to a university. YAY!

That was a slice of heaven. 

For my father, too: it allowed him to retire a year early. We decamped to Southern California and they stuck me in a school there.

His “retirement” didn’t last long: Before long we hit a major recession, my father’s investments went down the drain, and he had to go back to work.

But by then he and my mother had fallen in love with Sun City, an Arizona tract for the elderly and the white, and I was at the University of Arizona. I managed to stay in school there, drifted into graduate school and into marriage with a lawyer who could support me in the manner…and now here I am. Not married any more, but comfortably ensconced, with a Ph.D in my résumé.

Life is strange, eh?

A Minor Miracle(???)

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Wow!  This morning the spavined hip hardly hurts at all. 

Well. Yeah: it does hurt. But NOTHING like it has!

So…jeez. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe this gawdawful thing will clear up.

Soon as I finish swilling a mug full of water (too lazy to fix coffee just this minute), the plan is to take Ruby out for a Doggy-Walk. If we can make it to the park (that’ll be a miracle…), she’ll be beside herself with doggy joy. She does LOVE the feel of grass under her little feet. So adorable!

Last time or two ago that we visited the park, some sh!thead pestered the bejayzus out of me. That’s why you need a German shepherd, not a corgi.

Unfortunately, I’m no longer strong enough or patient enough to handle a GerShep, so nowadays I have to take my chances with the f**king general public over there. That day I dodged around to the front of a neighbor’s home and leaned on their doorbell. Asked them to call the cops. That shed the sh!thead, anyway.

Godlmighty, but I’m sick of living in Phoenix. Don’t know where on earth we’d go, though, if we tried to move out of here. I’m afraid these little phenomena are characteristic of the society in general: America has become the Land of the Sh!thead. About the only way you can deal with that is either never to go out without a male in tow (a male human, not a male Chihuahua), or never to go out at all.

For the luvva gawd, I’m an old, ugly woman! It’s not like I was a nubile young thing. What about an old hag attracts sh!theads?

Ohhhh well. On the positive side, it sure is nice to be able to walk up the hallway without hurting like the dickens. For a change.

April 22, Continued!

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Gerardo the Lawn Dude’s crew just shot out the front gate, headed for their next customer. Good lord! Do those guys ever WORK. 

This house’s yard isn’t even that huge — much of it is occupied by the swimming pool, and another third of it by the paved front patio. It still takes them upwards of an hour (i lose track!) to rake and blower and rake some more and shovel and haul and clean and trim and shovel & haul some more and…on and freakin’ ON! That is not a job I could do even if I were male and healthy enough for it.

Forked over a hundred bucks to them….which is more than their usual fee. But IMHO what they did today was more than their usual ungawdly slug of labor. I sure couldn’t do it. Wouldn‘t do it. They are amazing gents. 

What now, for the rest of the day?

If I had any sense, I’d walk over to the Sprouts (remember: my son having purloined my car, if I can’t get somewhere on foot then I have to hire an Uber driver).

But…well…sense is not my strong suite this morning. Nope

Don’t feel like traipsing around in the heat, and so I ain’t a-gunna. Tomorrow morning I may stroll down to the Albertson’s (same distance, but don’t have to cross 7 lanes of homicidal traffic to get in the front door) and restock the supplies.

And “in the heat” is the operative term: It’s overcast and HOT and muggy out there. Just walking across the yard works up a sweat. The Albertson’s is open at the crack of proverbial dawn, so if I start the hike as soon as the dawg is fed (that IS at the crack of proverbial dawn!), I may be able to get down there and back without an attack of heat prostration.

Hmmmmmm….  When you spend this much time loafing, a lot of weird thoughts cross your mind. One of them, just now, is the idea that not owning that car is saving me so much money that I probably could afford to hire taxicabs to take me everyplace I go and still come out ahead financially.

No kidding.

Hiring someone to drive you hither, thither, and back may not cost as much as owning a car, paying taxes, insurance, and maintenance on it, keeping it filled with gas….paying to park it…hmmm, indeed….

No kidding, indeed: I’ve just about decided not to replace that vehicle at all. Why bother if I can get everyplace I need to go behind hired drivers? Without doubt for less than I’ve been spending on the Dog Chariot!

Within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm — just a few blocks, under a forest of shade trees — is a car rental place. Get in good with those guys, and…well…seriously, there WOULD be no reason to own another car. If they know me, they get paid on time, and they figure I’ll bring their heap back to them, very probably I could snare a vehicle whenever I feel in the mood.

Now, to add to that….  I do have to say that if I were my son and I had an 80-year-old mother, I do not think I’d want her driving around.

That sounds awful, eh?  But frankly, it would worry me.

As you age, your reflexes do slow. You lapse into — let’s admit it — a kind of fuzzy stupor. And you really should not be doing something where your life and the lives of people around you depend on the speed with which you react to the craziness around you.

And on Arizona’s roads? Yes, we are talking about craziness. Drivers around here are quite mad. As in dinga-donga!

Life is dinga-donga, that much is true…but there’s a limit to how much you have to engage it…