Coffee heat rising

aging

For the Luv of GAWD!!!!!

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KeeeeRAP!!!!!

Come the crack of dawn, the dawg is dragging me around the park on the usual morning Doggy-Walk. And what fun happens?

Yeah.

SHE DRAGS ME THROUGH AN ANT NEST!

The li’l ladies are out for their morning forage, so they’re swarming all over the place. I don’t notice them until it’s too late: now they’re all over my sandaled feet and legs, going bite bite bite bite-bite-bite BITE BITE BITE!!!

Hurt? Lemme tellya HURT.

We scurry away and I manage to bat most of the little gals off my skin. But now my feet and legs HURT LIKE THE DICKENS.

We turn around and race back toward the house, through the horrible SWAMPY morning. A classic nasty Arizona summer day is dawning, and the goddam place feels like the Okefenokee Swamp!  Holy crap, is it gawdawful out there!

Now my feet are covered in stinging, itchy ant bites. Coating them in calamine lotion doesn’t seem to be doing much good.

GAWD, but I hate Arizona!!!!!  What a horrid place to live. A thousand curses on my idiot parents for dragging us to this horrible, nightmare right-wing dump.

Yeah: part of their joy in this hole was its right-wing aspect. They abominated LIBarulism, which was one reason they were miserable in California. Barry Goldwater was holding forth here at the time. Believe it or not, I used to be a Goldwater Girl, one of his gingery little supporters.

Over time, the scales fell from my myopic eyes. Now you couldn’t get me anywhere near the right-wing crazies. Sorry if you’re one of them…but… Been there, done that!

What a horrible place this is, full of horrible people. If my son weren’t here, I’d be SOOOO FAR GONE from here!

Where would I be, if I had my choice?

I dunno. Not Hell, that’s for sure.

The east side of the San Francisco Bay Area, if I could afford it. But no doubt I couldn’t even begin to afford it.

My mother’s relatives lived in Berkeley, having settled there early in the last century, when it was reasonable to do so. I think their little bungalow is now valued at nigh unto a million dollars. Here’s one on the Web, just up the street from their place, at over two million dollars. But…it looks like that place is about twice the size of theirs.

So obviously, I couldn’t afford to live there today.

These days, I think I probably would consider the east side of Tucson. Weather’s decent there — because of the mild elevation, it’s not even too horrid in the summer. But there, too, unless you’re willing to go into a “townhouse” (which I believe means “apartment”), the prices are outta sight.

Since the Funny Farm is situated on the fringe of Phoenix’s highly upscale North Central district, presumably this place will be worth a fair amount when my son inherits it…. That’s assuming I can manage to live here long enough to be able to pass it to him but not so long as to be relegated to a prison for the elderly — and unfortunately, longevity is a thing among women on my mother’s side of the family.

So, I’ll probably be dragged off (kicking and screaming, you may be sure!) to one of the horrid old-folkeries that are now in vogue. Those places take everything you have in exchange for babysitting you through your dotage. And so…if I don’t drop dead fairly soon, presumably little or nothing will be left for my son.

What times we live in, eh?

…and we did this…WHY????

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Chortle!  Today’s Moment of Stupidity seems to take the proverbial cake.

What on EARTH possessed me? 

Come about 1:40 in the afternoon, I took it into my feeble little mind that nothing would do but what I should take a little walk around the neighborhood.

Yeah. That’s the neighborhood where the back porch thermometer just now registers 115º in the shade. Don’t ask what that translates to when you’re out in the direct sun!

Okay…so, bein’ stupid as a post, we don’t ask that key question, but just pull on a shady hat and trundle on off down the sidewalk.

Extraordinarily bad idea. Got about a block before I smartened up, turned around, and came back to the house. Made it before we fainted and plopped face-down on the sidewalk….

Holeeee maquerel! It’s almost hot out there!

Welp...tomorrow’s exercise will have to occur at dawn. Again. And probably (again!) without our furry friend’s company. If the heat is still this fierce, outdoors will be no place for Ruby the Corgi.

What a gawdawful place!  WHY did my parents drag me here, lo! these many years ago?  

I should have headed back to Northern California on my own, the minute I graduated from the University of Arizona with the low-rent B.A. This was not the place for me to have stayed put!

Swamp?? Make That Quagmire!

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Wow! What an AWFUL, wet, swampy morning!!!

Ruby and I just returned from our daily circumnavigation of the neighborhood park. MISTAKE! We should never have started out on that venture!

At 7:45 in the morning, it’s 100 degrees out there, with 40% humidity. So saith Wunderground.

If anything, that’s an understatement. It’s as hot and as soggy out there as anything we used to see on the shore of the hideous Persian Gulf, when we lived there in Saudi Arabia. And believe me: that is NOT a place where you would want to live!

Dawg is flopped on the kitchen tiles, having swiggled a raft of water. I’m flopped in a leather chair, its upholstery covered with a cotton throw in an effort to keep the sweat from wrecking the thing.

Horrid morning in a horrid place. If I had any choice at all, I’d be living soooooo far from here!

Where would so far be? Probably the San Francisco Bay Area, whence my mother’s family emanated. Yes, the air gets wet there, too…but at least it’s COOL air!

Our relatives lived in Berkeley, then a middle-class to upper-middle-class district sprinkled over rolling hills. Such a pretty place! I sure do miss it!

What possessed my parents to move to Arizona…well, I can’t say that escapes me.

Yeah, I know what called them:

Money. At the time, the cost of living here was so much lower than California’s that my father figured he could afford to retire. And…yah: quit his job and knock off working was what he most craved in life! At least, at the time that was so.

Politics. Arizona is as far to the right as you can get outside of the Deep South. People’s hearts are filled with hate here. Especially in regard to anyone who is not white and middle-class. My parents made an Alabama politician look liberal.

Weather. Yes, summers here are gawdawful. But the other nine or ten months of the year are pretty lovely. In the low desert: temperate days, no snow, rare rainy days.

Cost of living. You can buy a house in Sun City or Youngtown for a fraction of what a similar place costs in California, whence we emanated. True: it’s not a place you’d like to live year-round: summers here embody Hell. But air-conditioning makes it possible to survive.

Cheap tuition at the state university. I got into the University of Arizona at the end of my junior year in high school. After we’d lived here for a year, the cost of “education” (as it were) in Tucson was a fraction of what any California college or university charged state residents there.

Well. My son is well established here, so I’m not about to leave the state. Where be my son, there be I.

That doesn’t make me like this place a helluva lot more, though….

😉

Not Exactly HOTTER than the Hubs…

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But at least VEERING toward hot as the Hubs of Hades. Outdoors: hot, sticky, gummy weather. Indoors: sticky and gummy.

July is the time of year when you do NOT want to be killing time in Arizona. The heat is fierce, and no, it is most surely not a “dry heat.” It’s as humid and sticky as (un)lovely Saudi Arabia used to be when we lived out there. Yuck!

Wunderground claims it’s only 94º outside. Supposed to get up to 107º during the day. If you asked me, I’d say we’d reached that goal already! At ten in the morning…

Ugh. If my parents were still living, I’d brain them both for dragging me to this hellish place.

They thought Sun City, over on the far west side of Phoenix, was just loverly. 

Yeah…

No accounting for taste, eh? If you love the sound of fighter jets roaring up and down, starting along about 5 in the morning: just loverly. If you love folks who hate kids and wish to live in a place where no such critters exist: loverly. If you love folks who hate people whose skin is darker than theirs and wish to live in a place where no dusky types reside: loverly. If you love grocery stores that sell nothing more exotic than a T-bone steak: loverly.

Ye gawds, did I hate living out there!

Finally got a job in town, one that supported a studio apartment’s rental. So…was able to escape loverly Sun City.

Now in my old age: here I am, parked in North Phoenix….most certainly not in the retirement environs of Sun City. To this day, the appeal of that place escapes me. Reckon it must be….what? ….

The whitey-whitness (No kidding: just a few months ago an African-American friend of mine bought a house out there. Within weeks he was literally HOUNDED out of the place!)

The ultra-tidy sameness of the architecture and of what passes for the landscaping. (Nothing like a gravel lawn to stay nice and neat, eh?)

The relative cheapness of the houses. (A comparable house in town would cost half again as much…or more.)

The remoteness from the rough-and-tumble noise of a big city. (Sun City is characterized by the silence of the tomb….when fighter jets aren’t blasting back and forth.)

One could go on and on, I suppose….but one would prefer not to.

Never was so happy as when I got into graduate school and made my escape to a university campus.

Ugh!!!

The Weirdness of People

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Okay, here’s the Question of the Day:

Why would somebody steal a bag of clothespins?

Old clothespins, for that matter? The thing has been hanging out there for YEARS, probably since I moved into this house, and nobody has ever bothered with it.

This morning I stumble out into the rain and find, there on the covered side porch, that the bag of clothespins that’s hung — yes, for years — from the covered porch’s little laundry line is GONE.

* No, it’s not in the garage
* No, it’s not on the back porch
* No, it’s not anywhere in the house

So…presumably, some yard guy or repairman stole it. A bag of clothespins. Can you imagine?

What possesses people? Forgodsake! A package of 50 only costs about $6.00 from Amazon. Presumably they’re cheaper in a local grocery store or dime store that doesn’t have to ship them to you.

****

WHOA! Just found a brand-new package of classic wooden clothespins, sitting in the garage.

Certainly wouldn’t want a morning to pass without some stupid PITA, eh? 😀

Ahhh, decrepitude!  What fun gettin’ old is!!!

Says a lot about my own senility: that I didn’t even remember I’d had to buy a whole new package of clothespins!  And if that ain’t scary, I’d sure like to know what is….

Also says a lot about people: What kind of jerk steals a bag of clothespins off a backyard clothesline?

Can you imagine? Now I’ll have to stash this new trove in the garage…they cannot be left to hang on the porch clothesline.

So. Now that we know I can’t leave clothespins on the clothesline, we need to find someplace to keep this recovered bonanza. Dayum! What a nuisance.

They’ll have to go in a box on top of the dryer in the garage, I guess. Thereby taking up space normally occupied by laundry detergent and bleach and whatnot.

*****

Disturbing.
Seven Ways from Sunday!

Weirdness of Widespread Ignorance

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{Chortle!} After I went on and on yesterday about the silliness of my own stupidity, now it’s my turn to bellyache about others. To wit:

Have you noticed that people no longer can follow directions that include words like “north,” “south,” “east,” and “west”?

No kidding. Many, if not most, people do not know which way those are. If you tell someone to “turn north” at a four-way intersection, they really and sincerely do not know which way to go.

Once again, I explained to some babysitter whom my son had hired to ride herd on me that to get here she needs to come west across Neighborhood Lane, turn south on Innumerable Road, and then come one block down to Erewhon Alley. And by golly…once again the person could not find Erewhon Alley. BECAUSE she did not understand which way is west and which way is south.

Substituting “left” and “right” presupposes that the errant driver is going in a given direction as she approaches the ‘Hood. But…after she gets on the desired entry street, she could be coming our way from any of three directions!

So…once again, yesterday’s babysitter ended up in NeverNever Land. And I never ever did see her.

It can’t be THAT hard to figure out which way is left and which way is right; which way is north and which way is south. Almost all the repairmen find the place with no problem. Then I realized: these women are driving their own private cars. A guy whose job is to drive all over the city, going to addresses where he has to fix air conditioners or barbecues or plumbing, probably has a GPS in his truck.

Questionable whether a woman whose job is to sit in a chair all day and watch you sit in a chair all day is bright enough to learn how to use a GPS. But measurable IQ or no measurable IQ, without a doubt the problem is that most of them don’t have a GPS in their car. 

Geez! Problems of the 21st Century, eh?