Coffee heat rising

aging

Babysitter Hell

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My dear son has hired this annoying woman to sit here all day and babysit me.

As though I hadn’t been living alone and taking care of myself and my dog and my home and my yard and my pool all by my little idiot self, for year on year. You wanna talk about annoying?  

Holeeee shee-ut.

She sits there on the phone gabbing with her friends and whomever, yakity yakity yakity yakity yakity yakity…. The endless yakathon devolves into an exceptionally annoying noise. Especially to a person who is used to living alone.

This comes on top of the discovery that some workers he sent over got into my office and stole sh!t to the left of them and sh!t to the right of them. They stole my office phone’s handset, among a number of other things.

Fortunately, I had another phone stashed in a cabinet in another room. But…that means that sooner, if not later, I’m gonna have to buy another handset.

If they even still make that brand and variety. Seems to me at one point a guy at the local phone store said these things are no longer available.

In-f*cking-furiating!

So, back to the original infuriating element of today’s post: I need to decide whether to try to stay here, in my nice little house in my nice bourgeois neighborhood, until I drop dead (good luck with that!) or to move, in the very near future, into one of those horrible prisons for old folks….uhm….”life-care communities.”

The very thought makes my skin crawl.

Back in the day, the University of Arizona (my dear alma mater /eyeroll/ ) required all female undergraduates to live in the dormitories. Well. Unless one was married or living with one’s parents.

That experience left me with a lifelong distaste for institutional living.

Ugh!!!!  I started in that way, and I do NOT want to go back out through that door. Bleayach!

Every Moron on the Planet…

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No kidding. Go for a morning walk, and all the morons on the planet come bounding out of their homes, there to make trouble for the passers-by.

Idiot and his unleashed dobe were standing out in their unfenced front yard this morning. Naturally, his dog came charging after Ruby, who weighs all of about 25 pounds. Sheeee-ut!

Now here we are, unwinding at home over breakfast…uhhhhm… DREAM ON!

Bing bong!!! 

Former cleaning lady: now the woman my son has hired to babysit me all day.

DamNAYshun!

What I do NOT need is some dear soul underfoot all day, watching my every move.

Clearly my son fears that in my dotage I’m no longer competent to live in my home unmolested.

And what THAT means is that pretty soon I’ll have to move into the old-folkerie called The Beatitudes — or else into Orangewood, the one my father consigned himself to — so as at least to get one room without some intruder underfoot.

….And…THAT is not something I want to do. Not for love nor money.

Godlmighty, but this dear woman is a nuisance. GO AWAY, dearie! Leave me ALONE!

😀  😀  😀  😀  😀

If this is what I’m gonna have to contend with in my own home, day in and day out, I might as well move into one of those old-folkeries.

Godlmighty. Now she’s turned her phone on and is listening to some sort of yammer. Even though she’s got the volume turned way low, I can hear the yak yak yakity blah blah where I’m sitting, clear across the room.

* * *

Get up. Trudge to the office, in the back of the house. Make the bed on the way.

Fire up the desktop. Fiddle around.

Y’know… If this sh!t is what I’m going to have to contend with, day in and day out, in my own home, I might as well move into one of those prisons for old folks.

Pick up the dog’s Rx bottle, while she watches, watches, watches. Check to be sure that yes, I did give Ruby her morning dose, while our dear lady watches, watches, watches.

Realize there’s no way I can slip out the back way without this broad spotting me.

Well…maybe. But it would be tricky. And one way or the other, when I come back to the house, she’ll know it. And she’ll blab to my son.

Well. Y’know…. If he’s going to treat me like this — as a non compos mentis inmate — then I might as well sell the house and move into one of those horrible prisons for old folks. They gouge  you, gouge you, and gouge you some more. And because women in my family are spectacularly long-lived, that means effectively nothing will remain of my estate to leave to my son.

One of those places has set up a tour for me and the young man. Just got an email from one of their hustlers telling me not to worry, it’s not “institutional living.”

Give.

Me.

A.

Break!

As if I at this age I don’t have friends who have lived there and in places like it. How fukkin’ STUPID do these people think their customers are???????

Icky-Sticky Day!

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LOL! This is one of those days that don’t happen in Arizona: hot and HUMID. Very humid. 😀

It feels almost like the weather used to feel in lovely Ras Tanura, where I grew up in Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Not quite, though. There, I’ve seen it start to rain out of a clear blue sky: that’s how wet the air would get there.

Garden spot, eh?

Anyway, hereabouts we’re told the humidity is 32% just now. And for Arizona…well…that’s more than passing damp. 😀

No clouds, though: The sky is gorgeous sterling blue. And no sign of fugitive raindrops.

Strolled around the park this afternoon…rather later in the day than I should have: it was a little warm for strolling. That notwithstanding, though, it was not excessively unpleasant. And as usual, fun to watch kids playing and grownups lolling around.

I do love our neighborhood and our park. Struggling to stay here: to avoid being moved to an old-folks’ institution. How to avoid that — displacement, I mean — gets more and more difficult to intuit. I’m awfully afraid I’m going to be forced out of my home, sooner or later, on the grounds that I’m too old to take care of myself. We haven’t reached that point yet…but it’s hard to avoid the fact that we’re headed there.

Indeed, my son wants us to visit a place called the Beatitudes, down the road from the ‘Hood. To which I say horrors! I’ve had friends who lived there.

And no, it’s not a bad place, as institutions go. But….it’s just that I absolutely, positively, passionately HATE institutional living. I hated living in the dorms. And spending the next few years living in a dorm for old folks is NOT how I want to wrap up my life.

There simply must be a better way….

Why I don’t want to move into an old-folkerie

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So this guy is trying to get me to move into an old-folks’ home called The Beatitudes.

Right?  I do NOT want to live in any such place: hated living in the college dorms, and do not want to end my life on that note.

What does he do? He emails my son with “Do you have availability on Thursday October 8th at 10:30?”  Nary a word to me. The assumption being that as a doddering old bat, of course I have NOTHING else to do next Thursday.

And right there: that presumptiveness. THAT is why I do not want to live in one of those places.

Hired Help Humor

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This morning I discovered that someone stole a pair of shoes that I use every day.

I wouldn’t have put them “away” someplace where I couldn’t find them, because they have a standard “away” place in the closet. I would have put them in that place. If I carelessly left them out, they’d be sitting by the bed.

So presumably one of the hired help snabbed them.

Experience suggests that these “care givers” pull little stunts like this — stealing your shoes, spiking a dish of leftovers with ultra-hot chili — because they think it’s funny. Or maybe they think they’re getting back at you for some senile offense they imagine you did on purpose.

… … …

It’s bad enough to contemplate having to move into an institution for the last phase of your life. But dear God!  If this is how those folks behave in order to keep their wards under control, it will turn the last few months — or, God forfend, years — of one’s life into a living Hell.

If you can call that living.

I’m thinking it may be time to end things before they reach that point.

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Ruby just dragged her human back into the house, after a circumnavigation of the ‘Hood. Gosh!  What an icky morning!

Be glad — be very glad — that you don’t have to work outside in Arizona’s heat and humidity. It is just sticky out there right now.

Ohh well. Ruby and I successfully traipsed around the neighborhood, with little ill effect. Wunderground says we’re enjoying 56% humidity…egad! Does that REALLY mean more than half the air out there is water?

😀  Hope not. But sorta suspect that’s the case. We have 81 degrees with rain showers predicted for this morning.

What, dear Gawd, is on the calendar for today? (Gets up and traipses back to the office…)

Nothing! Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

Hmmm…it’s Sunday. Thank goodness I no longer have to get up, throw on some decent clothes, and fly down to the church to sing half the morning.

No kidding: I do miss the choir. A lot. But on a day like this, I’m mighty glad not to have to go out into the traffic and the weather.

….ohhh goodie! Just to make the morning, my son sends an email reminding me that we’re traipsing out to the Mayo Clinic (again!!!!!!) tomorrow morning. 

Boyoboy, could I do without those junkets! No doubt he feels even more strongly about that: the Mayo is a good 40-minute drive from here, meaning a trip out there and an hour wasted talking to doctor about essentially nothing consumes half his working day. And since he’s contrived to get my driver’s license negated, he ends up having to drive me out there.

To me, it feels like such a waste of time. (Imagine how it feels for him!!) Their doctors never have anything to say that makes the slightest bit of difference for my condition….whatever that condition may be. They seem to have no clue. Basically, they’re charging me for getting old.

Makes Christian Science look better and better….