Coffee heat rising

aging

Gettin’ Old…how is it possible???

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Gosh. As dawn cracked this morning, I happened to think of a long-gone Arizona Highways colleague, Jerry Jacka. He was one of the great landscape photographers of the Western World…I’ll tellya! Look him up in the Font of All Electronic Wisdom (the Internet, of course) and discover…my gawd! He was EIGHTY-THREE when he croaked over. And that was in 2017!!!

I myself must be older than Methuseleh (not doin’ the math: don’t wanna know!). LOL! No wonder I hurt from stem to stern and back again…all. the. time.

Y’know…I’ve not been conscious of that much time passing. Don’t pay attention to birthdays. Don’t really care and don’t wanna know. But truth to tell, Jerry and I were about the same age. That he has croaked over and someone new is living in his handsome Southwestern-style house is NOT a good sign…

***

Not much longer for me, I’m afraid.

Women in my family — those who didn’t drink and didn’t smoke — lived to ripe old ages. My great-grandmother, Gree, was 90 years old when she died. Her daughter, my great-aunt, also lived to age 90…so we’re told. I believe she was older than that — but for sure, she wasn’t any younger.

They were both devout Christian Scientists: never saw a doctor, never swallowed anything that looked like a medicine. And surely never swilled any booze.

Who can imagine how long they might have lived if they’d had medical care!

As for moi, truth to tell none of these pills seems to be doing a damn thing to help pain. About all they’re doing is making my ears ring!

→ My hands still hurt.
→ My hips still hurt.
→ My lips still hurt.
→ The gums around my upper teeth still hurt.
→ The soles of my feet still feel like an electric current is zapping through them…

hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt 

And frikkin’ never stop hurting!

Whatddaya bet I won’t live longer than to age 90, either? 😀

One can only hope…

😀  😮  😀

 

‘Round & ‘Round They Go…ARF!

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Eighty-nine degrees out there, sez Wunderground, with 12% humidity.

Ohhh yah? Couldn’t prove that by me.

Just back from a junket around the park, dragged forth by a small dog. I’d have said it was nigh unto 90 degrees, ayup… and freakin’ WET. Humid. Soggy. 

😀

Thinkin’ about my late stepsister as we traipsed along. Many of the 70s-ish ranch houses remind one of her family’s place. I do miss her. Even though her politics were somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini’s, she was a smart woman, an interesting woman, and a fun person to be around.

{sigh} Ah, the bygone days…

How she came to spring from the loins of the witch my father married after my mother died: that escapes me. That woman was one of the meanest humans I’ve ever met: nasty, nasty, and nastier. In startling contrast, her daughter, who became a Superior Court judge, was one of the nicest people you could hope to meet.

They’re all dead now: Witch stepmother, smart step-sister, sister’s bright daughter, sister’s mentally stunted son, and her lawyerly husband. Ohhh well: nothing lasts forever.

Which is probably just as well…

Ahhh! And now to LOAF!

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Dayum, but Olde Age has its compensations. 😀  The biggest is NOT HAVING TO GET DRESSED AND TRUDGE OFF TO WORK!!!

Wheeee! Here we are, dawn’s early light cheerily glowing in the window. The Dawg and the Human stuffed with breakfast. Human lingering over a cup of hot coffee.

Beloved Pool Dude has been here and gone, leaving the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money spotlessly, sparkling clean. Bless that wonderful man!

Ruby thinks he IS wonderful. And weirdly, she seems to know what day of the week it is. On Pool Dude Day, she lurks by the back door, waiting…waiting…waiting for the Moment of Joy when he shows up.

And yea verily, on that morning he does show up. Then we have a Magnificent Moment of Doggy Joy, after which Ruby must tear outside and stand there at the pool fence’s gate, admiring his magnificence.

Apparently many of these guys are ex-convicts. Pool cleaning is one of the…uhm…trades for which Arizona prisons train inmates. So, theoretically, when they get back on the street they’ll have some other way to earn money than by stealing your car, eh?

At any rate, I have no idea what about the guy makes him seem so splendid to a corgi. But without doubt, she thinks he’s about the best Human ever to stumble across the surface of the earth.

Whenever I get off my duff, I do need to trudge down to the neighborhood clinic to…uhmmmm…. wwwaaaaitaminit!

I wuz about to say, to try to get the doc to do something about the constant maddening ITCH in my feet and legs, and as the computer cruises happily across the Internet it lands on a page that tells us...

Vitamin B12: Common Side Effects (Oral Supplements and Injections)

  • Headache
  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Mild diarrhea
  • Itching or a skin rash/acne
  • Dizziness
  • Tingling sensation in hands and feet (peripheral neuropathy)
  • Weakness or fatigue 

And which Vitamin B-gulper do we know who has a mad itch and crazy-making tingling in the hands and feet?

For.
The.
Luv.
of.
GAWD!!!!!

Manufacturers of OTC nostrums should be required to list ALL a drug’s potential side effects on the label! In 14-point type!!!

Man! I just stumbled across that li’l blurb. Wasn’t looking for it. And now know why my hands and feet and lips and gums feel like an electric current is buzzing through my body.

GodDAMMIT. I wish I’d known this two weeks ago. 

Ugh!!! Wonder how long it’ll take for this stuff to wear off… Bare minimum two or three days, whaddaya bet? More likely a week or two.

Wouldn’t you think that by now, having arrived in the middle of Olde Age, I would KNOW BETTER????? 

Yea verily, by now shouldn’t I have figured out that just about every damn pill I drop down my throat has some untoward side effect?

Argh!! My Christian Scientist crackpot relatives may not have been crackpots, after all. Maybe they had somethin’ there…

Too Gorgeous to be Miserable…

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Seriously, this afternoon — along about 3:00 p.m. — is SO mellow, so soft, so clean, and SO beautiful that even the plague of little maladies fails to make one miserable. Just…incredibly…lovely!

Maladies? Ohhh…just a few…

Peripheral neuropathy: frantic buzzing and burning in the hands, soles of the feet, and lips. Hurts. Makes you crazy.

Fingernails: lifting from the nail beds. No indication of why, or of what one can do about it.

Awful sore and itchy spot on the tail end. Dunno what to do about it. Rubbing in an analgesic does…hmmm…essentially nothing.

As of this morning, the hip pain was gone. But now it’s back! No idea why.

Dared to try to sit out on the back porch to take in this gorgeous afternoon.

B-a-a-d idea!

Place is swarming with mosquitos. Forthwith, had to dart back inside. Slam the screen door. Slam the kitchen door. RUN AWAY!!!

###

Thinking about my father: the jobs he had, how hard he worked to support me and my mother.

He was a tanker captain and, when he worked a shore job, a harbor pilot.

Maneuvering oil tankers across the ocean paid him well. But the job took him away from home for weeks on end. And…y’know…weirdly, the man was basically a homebody. A harbor pilot’s job is dangerous and demanding…he must have been exhausted most of the time during the ten years he did that in Saudi Arabia.

When he finally retired to Sun City, he and my mother had…ohhh…about 18 months together until the cancer sticks she’d smoked in gay, stinking abandon since she was 16 years old ganged up on her and killed her. She died horribly of tobacco-induced cancer shortly after they settled into their Dream Home in the suburbs of Phoenix.

They’re both gone now. The only relative I have left is my excellent son. And…heh…that does put some strain on him, the poor man! 😀

Seriously: he works ferociously for the insurance company that employs him. I would go back to teaching freshman comp if I had to work that hard!!! It doesn’t leave him much time or energy for riding herd on an ailing old bat. So…well…I try to keep from belly-aching too much. But he does know I’m ailing…and that the indications of that ailing do NOT bode well.

Oh, well. The sooner I croak over, the sooner I stop hurting. Right? 😀

EEEEK! Senility Attack!!!

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Well…that was a moment of high terror…

This morning I went to get my laptop so I could take it out on the back porch, there to play with the Internet by the dawn light of a gorgeous morning.

Get computer from bedroom…

Uh…no. Nope.

No computer in the bedroom.

Nor on the bed.

Nor under the bed.

Nor in the bathroom…nor…anywhere. 

Repeat searches. Search and search and search.

No computer.

Must have left it in the car, think I.

But…the car is at M’hijito’s house. He’s decided that it’s unsafe for me to drive (no kidding!!) and has purloined the vehicle. If I’d left the laptop in the car (not impossible: I take it to coffee shops all the time, for loafing purposes), then the computer’s at his house, too.

Shoot off an email to him. You know the variety: the “I’m nuts” type…

This is Sunday. He won’t roll out of the sack for another couple of hours, and probably won’t turn on his laptop for another hour or two after that.

Resign myself to having lost my most precious li’l object. Tromp through the bedroom to the bathroom. Tromp back out of the bathroom…and…wait for it! 

Right: THERE IT IS, sitting on top of the bureau drawers, right there in the bedroom.

Yep.

I must have looked at it three or four times and not even registered it.

WTF?

If I ever had any marbles, I seem to have lost the last of them.

***

Meanwhile: hurt hurt HURT lemme tellya HURT!

The gettin’ old stuff is NOT for the faint of heart. No, indeed not.

This morning a hip joint has gone out of whack. Every. Single. Step is excruciating. So is getting up out of a chair. I hurt so much I can hardly breathe!

All that notwithstanding: with no one here to help, I have to get up and limp around….

And…

And….

GOOD GRIEF!

I’ve limped out to the back patio. Plopped down in a chair. Opened the computer.

Realize that (what’s the matter with the damn computer NOW???) (??? naturally it’s stopped doing whatever it was doing…whaaa?) my coffee still awaits…on the kitchen counter.

O Hell O Damn

Drag myself out of the chair. Limp into the kitchen. Pour a cup of coffee. Limp back out here. Pull a chair up to the table…and find THE PAIN HAS STOPPED!!!

Huh??????

Not to say

WHAAAA?????

No idea why it stopped.

But lemme tellya…

THAT

DID

HURT! 

Argh. 

Now I’m afraid to sit down, lest the pain start up again..

So…

What we have here is one of those days!

Need to walk over to the Sprouts and reprovision a few favorite goods. But I’m kinda scared to try it, lest that pain flare up in the middle of the quarter-mile hike.

Hmmmm….what to do, what to do?

When in doubt, nothing. Right?

***

Yep! That seems to be the correct motto…  Just laid down on the bed. Put my feet up…and…OWWWWWWWW!

Holeee MACKEREL does that hurt!

Hmmmm… Whaddaya bet I ought not to stroll across a seven-lane thoroughfare plus a railroad track with this thing doing…whatever the.hell it’s doing.

Definitely something in the hip joint. But what? I cannot imagine.

Oh, yeah…ONE OF THOSE DAYS! 

Glorioski! Glorious Day, Glorious Future

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Wow! What a gorgeous morning. Intermittent overcast with big, fluffy, cottony clouds. Cool but not cold. The sky wants to rain, but can’t work itself up to that much effort.

Ruby and I frolicked through Upper Richistan, as usual admiring the big ole’ expensive houses and their big, expensive irrigated lawns. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Ours isn’t “gorgeous,” but it’s adequately pleasant. Mid-middle class homes on lots that put enough space between neighbors.

Ruby loved up some workmen…cuteness is like some kind of joy drug for most people. We went on our way eventually. Now we’re back at the house.

And the Human finds itself wondering what next? 

Despite the family track record for longevity, we can pretty safely bet that I don’t have all that much longer to go. Relatives who have lived into their dotage have uniformly been Christian Scientists…tee-totalers, that is.

I ain’t no tee-totaler and never have been. My first boyfriend introduced me to wine when I was about 17, and I’ve been lapping up the stuff ever since. As we know, anything alcoholic is a handy device for shortening your life span. So I think it’s safe to figure I’ve got maybe about 10 years left — at most. Probably a little less than that.

The best I can hope for, I think, is to drop dead…and thereby avoid ending up in some nursing home or prison for old folks. That’s not outside the realm of possibility — as I say, the forebears who dropped dead in their late 90s didn’t drink. I do (with élan!), and so it’s safe to assume I’ve probably cut a good 10 years off the inherited lifespan. But that still would leave me another 10 years. Ten years that I do NOT want to spend in an old-folkerie!!!!

And therein lies the challenge: How to stay out of one of those horrible places. 

They soak up your life savings…and I want my savings to go to my son. Not to a holding pen for old bats. But….

But I have yet to figure out how to protect those savings for him, especially if I live much longer. Even more especially if I live much longer and get sick. How to evade those eventualities, though, does escape me.

If I manage to stay healthy into my dotage, though, M’hijito should inherit enough to retire in comfort…forthwith. By then, it’ll be time for him to figure out how to evade life in the old-folkerie…  😀