Coffee heat rising

aging

Hotter than a Two-Dollar Cookstove…

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Jayzuz!! As we scribble — at 6:05 p.m..,early evening! — it’s 109 degrees out there on the back porch. 

Got that? A hundred and nine degrees in the freakin’ SHADE of the back porch!!!!! 

Auuughhhh! 

Even (un)lovely Saudi Arabia never got THIS warm and cozy. Horrible!!!!!

We lived right on the shore of the Persian Gulf, so it did tend to get pretty humid. Temps soared into the low 100s…sometimes. But pushing 110? Not so much.

Just now, we have a little high overcast, but it doesn’t seem very humid….hmmmm…we have a resource that Saudi Arabia couldn’t offer at the time: Wunderground. 

Let us inquire…

Hmmmm….

110 degrees in the shade
No overcast
“Active warning: Extreme heat” eeeek, be very scared!
Full forecast: 115 tomorrow

Well. That will make for a nice, cozy night and a …uhmmm….balmy day tomorrow.

LOL! You have to be balmy, all right, to choose to live in this place! 😀

Seriously, though: the winters are lovely. Even at its coldest, the low desert doesn’t get snow. Usually, though, the winter days are cool and clear and pretty as can be.

Invited M’Hijito to come up and spend the night here. The Funny Farm is some 30 or 40 years newer than his place, and accordingly better vented, better insulated, and much better air-conditioned. It looks, though, like he’ll hold his own down in old Central Phoenix.

******

Ever so much later… 11:14 p.m. in yet another endless night.

To make everything perfect, it appears that I have a dental abscess. Look this up in the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest (i.e., the Internet), and you learn this requires dental surgery. Ohhh goodie! More pain, pain, and pain. 

I can hardly wait.

People think I’m being morbid when I joke about dying, finally getting free of all this sh!t. (At least I think and hope I’m dying…most folks, it develops, are so terrified of the end that they can’t see the appeal to it…)  But y’know…it’s NOT morbid to want to be free of pain. Free of fear. Free of pointless medical procedures that induce more pain and fear. Free of stupid BS that does not encourage you but leaves you hopeless.

No.

Freedom’s just another word
For nothin’ left to lose…

Ole’ Janis had somethin’ there…

That’s what death means, you know: Nothing left to lose. It’s not, of course, a joke. It’s plain, unadulterated truth. At some point life ends. And at that point…well, yeah: you have nothin’ left to lose. And nothing left to be afraid of.

Do not go gently into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

So Dylan Thomas begged his dying father. But…no, Dylan, my man. There’s no point in raging. The light dies for all of us. No amount of raging will change that.

What it means is that at some point, the pain stops.
At some point, there’s no need to rage.
At some point you will be set free.

And that, my friends, is not a bad thing. 

August 5 Heat, Continued…

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So the day that I began describing this morning has trundled on. And on. And on.

Now it’s late afternoon. Hotter than a two-dollar cookstove out there. No kidding: As we scribble, the back porch thermometer registers 110 degrees in the shade of the back porch overhang!

Yeah: that’s 110 in the shade! 😮

WHAT a place, eh?

Today has been quiet…probably because it’s too damn hot for anybody to get up to any hijinks. 😀

But I’ll tellya: the hijinks of recent days are still eating at my nerves. Enough, I might remark, that for brief periods I seriously consider piling my stuff and the dawg in the car and driving outta here.

Where would “outta here” be?  

I dunno. Grand Junction, Colorado, is a pleasant enough venue. A little cold in the winter. A little hickish. But a LONG way from here, and in another state. Presumably out of Arizona’s jurisdiction.

That those two social-worker women who showed up here had, in hand, a record of the night that SDXB and I got into a fight and I stalked off down an alley, ending up at a neighbor’s place…WOW! 

Sorry, folks, but THAT scares the Hell outta me. That little flap happened years ago! How much else does Big Brother have on me? And what can be done with that “else”?

Jayzuz!

Haven’t yet decided what, if anything, to do about this. I don’t want to leave, for two reasons:

* Most important, I absolutely don’t want to leave M’Hijito behind. I love my son, relish his company, and do NOT want to sever relations with him…or even to put any distance between us.

* And I love my home. It’s perfect for me and the dawg, probably the most pleasant place I’ve ever lived in, and you may be sure I do not want to leave. This place is where I want to live until I die.

Which I expect will not be soon!

Seriously: That sounds overweening. But I’ve known several women who have lived here in the ‘Hood, all by their little old selves, dwelling in these houses well into advanced old age. Most notable was my first neighbor here. She was in her 90s when her son carted her off to an old-folkerie — WELL into her 90s. And going strong.

But after her, I’ve also known several others who’ve been able to stay here into their dotage, as the young pups have moved into these houses, fixed them up, and jacked up the property values. A-n-n-d…

…I love young pups and enjoy having them as neighbors.
…As they upgrade the houses, they jack up property values all around them, which means that…
….When I croak over, my son will inherit a house worth A WHOLE LOT more than I paid for it, and a whole lot more than one would expect inflation to increase that value.

I want him to get the benefit of that sharp increase in value. And that’s one reason (far from the only one!) that I hope to stay here through my dotage and until I die: Money, honey! 😀

The cost of locking me up in the desired old-folkerie would absorb every penny we get from sale of this house…and then some. The longer I survive to take up space there, the more of my savings will be taken away from me.

And, at the risk of repeating myself: I want those savings to go to my son, not to some damn depressing institution!

Beloved Contract Workers….

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Bein’ an old lady alone with a 25-pound dog in lovely Phoenix, well…natcherly I have a swimming pool, right? And natcherly it takes up about a third of the back yard.  And, it bein’ a swimming pool, natcherly it has to be kept clean.

In lovely Arizona, maintaining a pool involves much more than a weekly brush-down and a slug of chemicals.

Much, much more.

It really needs to be swept down every day. And it certainly needs to have its chemicals kept current…that would be acid, chlorine, and whatnot.

It’s not very hard, and as a matter of fact this ole’ lady can do the job just fine.

Problem is, a pool requires daily maintenance, not — as some would think — weekly maintenance.

And that causes the ole’ lady to become surprisingly bored with the job. 😀

Just in from the backyard, about five minutes ago. Looks good out there. Thanks to Pool Dude, the guy who comes around once a week and beats back the algae, the water is just plain pristine. No kidding: downright crystal-clear.

Everything else is crystalline, too: the equipment is in good shape, the system’s working fine…nary a glitch in sight or hearing. YAY!

This state of affairs is not because of a busy ole’ lady but because of the Beloved Pool Dude.

Lemme tellya: THAT is a guy who earns his keep. In spades! 

He comes around early in the week to clean, service the pump and filter, and apply chemicals. Today, incredibly, is Saturday and that thing is still crystal-clear. He is making it possible for this ole’ lady to stay in her house. Because at this age? NOT A CHANCE would I be able to keep that hole in the ground even half as clean as he does. To say nothing of keeping the equipment running as though it were brand-new.

The pool and the backyard are, taken together, a main reason I absolutely do not want to move into an old-folkerie like the Beatitudes.

That water out there? It doesn’t have anyone else’s germs in it but mine. Well…and a few birds’. 😀

That fencing out there? It keeps the Ruby Doo out of the drink. (Ever had to jump in the pool to rescue a dog? Innaresting experience…) And it serves nicely for the occasional bird to perch on.

That equipment out there? It runs seven days a week, nooo problem no trouble no hassle. Once a week, Pool Dude checks it and administers whatever maintenance is needed.

He’s not the only guy who comes around to keep this place running. We have Gerardo and his crew, about whom you read every couple of weeks. Those guys…ohhhhh Lordie! WHO would want their jobs? Talk about working like horses…  They not only beat back the weeds and maintain the desert landscaping in 110-degree heat, they keep the watering system working, trim the voracious trees and shrubs, and control the vines that pile up along the back and east walls. The thorny vines… The ones that keep the prowlers, peeping Toms, and cats out. There’s a reason they’re called cat’s claw vines.

Then we have the watering system guy, who (along with Gerardo) keeps that large and complicated system running. Properly.

And Wonder-Cleaning Lady, who kindly absolves me from housework. Just about all housework, short of dropping the dinner dishes in the dishwasher.

And the electrician, who is certifiably smarter than the average cat. By about 1000 percent…

And the plumber, who understands products and systems that date back to the early 1970s…

How do I love Gerardo and his colleagues? Let me count the ways…  WAIT! I can’t count that high! 

😀  <3  😀

A Hundred WHATS????!!??

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HOLEE DOGGEREL!

Gerardo the Lawn Dude’s guys just finished blowering and raking the front and back 40. His head dude knocks on the Arcadia door and asks to be paid.

“How much?”

“$100.”

HOLEE SHEE-UT!

That’s up from the $80 they usually charge. Forgodsake: we’re not talking about any extra work here. Nothing special. Just blower up the leaves and wind-blown debris and trim whatever few plants need to be trimmed.

Once again: here’s a “house” thing that makes life in a high-rise apartment on North Central Avenue look a whole lot better.

Well.

It would look better if I didn’t have the dog.

Ruby would have to be paper-trained or litter-trained (did you know you can train a dog to use a cat-box?). That amounts to more hassle than I care to engage. For what?

For a box in the sky. No yard for Ruby to run around in. No peace and quiet for me. No private pool where I can go skinny-dipping…

Barf. 

Okay, okay…settle down! And let’s consider the things we imagine DO make the proposed Box in the Sky look good.

Bear in mind: I have lived in high-rise apartments, and in fact rather enjoyed them. But..that was a long time ago and I was a lot younger and my parents dealt with the management and they paid the rent and…. Today, to tell the truth: I don’t wanna. 

{sigh} Well…unless you’ve got someone to run interference with Life, The Universe, and All That, you’re always gonna have these hassles, right? And you’re always going to be paying for the hassles.

So…quitcher bellyachin’ … right?

Heh…  Another thing “I don’t wanna” is to take care of that damn yard in this heat. Gerardo’s boys earn their pay and earn their pay and earn their pay some more. A hundred bucks — let’s get real — is a bargain to get four guys slamming around in the heat for an hour.

Because he’s not just paying them for an hour of work. He’s paying for an hour of work x 4 … that would be FOUR hours of work. And he’s paying for the gas to run his truck over here (and the wear & tear on the truck). And for gas to run the blower and the mower and the tree trimmers and the shrub trimmers and the weed-whackers…. Arrrghhhha!

How am I glad I don’t own a yard-care business? Let me count the pestiferous ways…

****

On the ‘tother hand…

What with my son having purloined my car, I was gonna walk over to one of the nearby stores — maybe the Sprouts — and pick up some chow and assorted junque. That ain’t a-gonna happen now.

It’s 102º in the shade just now. And I’ll tellya…that does NOT inspire me to hike 8 or 10 blocks (x 2: make that 16 or 20 blocks, round trip) for the privilege of buying lunch and some ice cream!

The local grocery stores have recently announced that they’ll deliver. I haven’t looked into this offer yet…but need to do so.

In the Department of the Stuff of Nightmares…

Last night I found myself dreaming of visits to the terrifying Mayo Clinic. Auuugh! Arrogant doctors who presume that because you’re old you must be stupid. Endless waits in dreary waiting rooms. More waits in the doctor’s office. Wasted breath trying to explain yourself to said doctor, who’s only half-listening to you. And when a visit or three has happened recently, it’s a challenge to tell the difference between a memory and a nightmare.

Spare me, Lord!

It’s a bit of a drive over to the Mayo from the Funny Farm. Must say: more of a drive than I’d like to make. But the doctors and the facilities closer to home? Huh-uh!

My relationship with the adorable Young Dr. Kildare came to an end when I went over to his place shortly after a visit to the far, far-away Mayo Clinic. Figured I could get what ailed me treated there without having to drive halfway to Nevada for the privilege.

Yeah…I could. If I didn’t mind having him treat me for the wrong ailment! 

Hilariously so: he misdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and misdiagnosed with élan. Understand, this was something that not only had been seen by the Mayo but also by the high-powered St. Joseph’s, in mid-town Phoenix, added to a couple of lesser issues about which he simply made mistakes.

YDK has now moved to Sun City. The medical care out there is one of the main reasons you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City. My mother’s terminal illness was horrifically mismanaged by the quacks out there.

No doubt she wouldn’t have survived the cancer that was filling up her innards. But she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Telling her it was all in her fuzzy little head increased her suffering massively. And my father’s: he was at home trying to treat her as she lay dying of her “imaginary” ailment. And that IS the specific reason I would never buy a house in Sun City or Youngtown. Horrible!

One would like to hope that medical care out there has improved. But get real: we know what Americans think of the elderly. We know how elders are treated in this country. Why take a chance when you can stay in town and at least have a shot at decent care?

Ninety degrees at seven-forty…

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Yeah, you read that right, far as it goes:  Just now it’s 7:40 in the morning, and the thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch.

Ugh!

Dawg and I just returned from a stroll around the park — about a mile or so. Ruby is SO ridiculously cute and adorable that every passer-by has to pause and coo over her. So that tends to slow things down a bit.

Gawd, it feels like effing Saudi Arabia out there.

Not quite as colorfully wet, though, as when we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Come a summer morning, literally the humidity would drip off the eaves like rain. Houses out there had swamp cooling, so the “air conditioning” was marginally helpful, at best.

Jayzuz! What a place to grow up! 

And Jayzuz! What a pair to grow up with as parents!

Not that they were bad parents, exactly (except when they were pounding on me). What made me resent them was their idiotic smoking habit.

Both of them smoked and smoked and smoked! The house stank from rafters to floor. The carpets stank. The furniture stank. The drapes stank. The air-conditioning system stank. We stank. Ugh!!!!!

What possesses people to do that?

To be fair, at the time — the 1950s — people didn’t understand (or believe) that smoking causes cancer. Seriously: When the word came down and reports appeared in women’s magazines and on the news reports, my mother discounted the whole idea. She believed it was Big Brother trying to tell us all what to do.

And, to continue being fair, she was deeply addicted to nicotine. She would have had a bitch of a time stopping, even if she’d wanted to — which, you may be sure, she did not.

But…jeez…  Wouldn’t you think the fact that everything stank of tobacco smoke — your clothes, your hair, your kid’s clothes and hair, the carpets, the furniture, the draperies, the bedding, everything — would register with a person?

If it ever did, she didn’t give a damn. If her cigarettes burned down the planet, she was not a-gonna stop smoking.

Wouldn’t you think she would have made the connection between the house’s saturation with stinking smoke and her little girl’s chronic, awful respiratory infections? I was sick ALL THE TIME that I was growing up. “Ohhhhh,” she used to simper, “you’re so susceptible!”

Yeah. Not so susceptible to viruses, dear muther, as to the poison you puff into the air all day and half the night.

I have no clue whether the addictive quality of nicotine was widely known at the time. Hard to imagine how anyone could miss it…to get the picture, all you’d have to do is watch someone try to kick the habit. She knew, all right. She knew she was addicting herself and she knew she was making me sick. She just didn’t care. Those fukkin cigarettes were more important. Far more important.

Ugh! That’s what I’m led to think about, when the morning breaks to a hot, muggy, stuffy Arabia-like day. Fukkin’ cigarettes. And a woman laying in her bed dying in agony as her husband worked like an animal to care for her.

Guess I should have more empathy for her dying throes. But…she knew what she was doing. She knew tobacco could and probably would kill her. She had cared for her mother as her mother lay dying of cancer, so she knew what that was about, too.

{sigh} It’s hard to work up a lot of empathy for a person who deliberately kills herself with a toxic product. Just really hard.

Yuck! …and… WHY am I Here???

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Hot. Humid. Sticky. Feels almost like Arabia.

The park: overrun with early-morning dog-walkers, all trying to get the daily calisthenics out of the way before it gets seriously hot.

All these folks leave their IQ points at home when they take their dogs out. So, when you have an aggressive dog — especially one as cute as a corgi — you’re dodging morons to the right of you and morons to the left of you, all of them grinning stupidly and cooing Don’t worry! They just wanna pwaaayyy!”  Result: I get home plumb exhausted.

In the wintertime, I can wait an hour or so to take the dog out, meaning I miss the morning office-hour rush. But in the summer; forget about that. If you don’t get out the door before the sun is more than a few degrees above the horizon, you and the dog will be fricasseed by the time you get home.

***

This rumination led me to yet another tangent: Why am I staying here at all? 

SDXB moved to Sun City, there to join the beloved New Girlfriend. The two of them have been very happy out there, far as I can tell. My parents, who decamped to Sun City back in the 1960s (they moved there the minute they got me into college!), loved living there.

Still, my father would have been better off, later in his Sun City tenure, had he not remarried after my mother died. (And my mother would not have died had she not smoked herself into the grave…). But with those lessons in mind… set up and accept a few retirement realities for yourself. To wit:

  • Don’t be in any hurry to replace a dead or divorced spouse;
  • Buy a house with amenities comparable to your present castle (i.e., similar kitchen; about the same overall square footage — assuming you live in a modestly sized middle-class home;
  • Restrain yourself from installing a swimming pool;
  • Evade the grassy lawn;
  • Be sure the carport has a garage door;
  • Use Amazon and similar services to find and purchase the kind of household and personal items you’re used to buying;
  • Find a hobby or activity that will keep you busy several days a week — if at all possible, one that gives you some outdoor exercise;
  • Get used to having no privacy when you’re out in the yard;
  • Understand that you can’t, in any practical way, have a dog out there (no fences around the yards!);
  • Learn to golf…
  • Oh yeah: and don’t imagine you’re gonna get decent medical care. The doctors and medical facilities my parents encountered…oh my!!

Seriously: my mother would have died anyway of what ailed her, no matter who or what she had as a doctor. But she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Not. At. All.

If you’re female and American, your problem with doctors is that too many American doctors presume you’re a neurotic hypochondriac. So when you go in with a real ailment, real symptoms, real signs of something serious going on…they just pat you on your pretty little head and go “there, there little girl…” No matter what your age, gender, or ethnicity, you need a doctor who will take you seriously. And in my experience, the quacks in Sun City did not — and presumably still do not — take women seriously.

So…there y’are: The main reason I don’t move to Sun City is that my son lives within a few miles of the Funny Farm and can ride herd on my eccentricities. The secondary reason is that you have a much better chance of finding a competent doctor in the center part of the city.

***

Another potential retirement destination is a large development over on the east side of the Valley, Fountain Hills. 

It’s a little tonier than Sun City: still middle-class, yet more upscale than the west-side tracts. But…as far as I can tell (and yes, I have inspected), the construction in Fountain Hills is no better than what you find in Sun City, and maybe not as good.

Fountain Hills poses other issues , some of them similar to Sun City’s, some unique unto itself.

For example, it’s not in the city. Neither is Sun City, which itself is a bland (one could say dreary) suburb.

Fountain Hills is right under the flight path to Sky Harbor Airport, a huge commercial lash-up where planes fly in at dawn and dusk…just when you’d like to sit outside and enjoy your coffee or your bourbon & water. Both tracts are blasted with noise on a regular basis…especially in the mornings and evenings. Sun City gets its morning serenade from Luke Air Force Base, which exercises its fighter jets right at dawn.

While Sun City is whitey-white (don’t even think of moving out there if you’re of the duskier persuasion), so is Fountain Hills. I don’t know for a fact that darker-skinned folks are also chased off from Fountain Hills…but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s easy to find some indications that folks of the African-American persuasion might not be altogether comfortable in Fountain Hills. Far less easy to find indications of enthusiastic welcome….

So…uhm…to return to the fundamental question driving this post: Why am I here? 

Well, because there really isn’t anyplace better. Not here in the Valley of the Sun, anyway. Or for many leagues around it.