Coffee heat rising

aging

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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gaaaahhhh!!! At 5;40 in the evening, it’s 104 in the shade of the back porch. Wunderground says the chance of rain is 0% (ya don’t say, Jose?). We’re told the weather’s relatively cool for this time of year, though supposedly a blast of heat is due next week: around 110º. Uh huh.

Just back from circumabulating the park. I did leave the pooch  home: those asphalt roads will truly be tooooo hot for her li’l feet. But the park was not too hot for young people loafing and playing…so that was pleasant enough.

Blasting unsurvivable heat brings to mind one’s mortality. And this led me to try to locate a surviving partner of my recently deceased lawyer, the redoubtable Michael Kimerer.

He dropped dead in his office a few weeks ago. A former partner of my former husband’s, he was one of the most powerful and most respected lawyers in the state. Probably in the Southwest, actually.

Having been reminded of my own mortality by recent trips to the quacks, I wanted to be sure my will and other matters are neatly in order for my son. This stuff, I understand, is on file with the county…but damned if I know how to confirm whether that’s true.

Still nobody at Kimerer’s office; apparently his partners have scattered to the winds. So now, lhudly sing goddam, I’ve got to find a new estate lawyer (Mike had the advantage of being very talented in a number of legal fields…), have him or her check to be sure all that paperwork is done right, and that it’s filed where it’s supposed to be filed. And be sure my son knows how to find it…

 

Arfa -EEEK!!!

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OMG! Is there a reason I can’t keep track of dates and times?  Some sort of learning disability? WHAT?

Moment of panic just now: Calendar seemed to say I missed an appointment with WonderDentist.

Eeek thrash bang thrash eeeeek!!! Look stuff up. Call the kid. (He plans to drive me over to the doc’s office.) And…and…nope! It’s not until tomorrow.

Personally, I’d prefer not until the next lifetime…but WTF. At least I haven’t enraged that good man. And tomorrow afternoon I can go over to his place to be made miserable.

Goodie.

Y’know…it seems to me that the older you get, the harder it is to keep track of this kind of ditz.

Why?

Do you really get stupider as you age? Or what?

Actually, I think as you age you just plain get sick and tired of it all. The beloved dentist, for example: I would be happy if I never had to see him again!

Well, maybe over cocktails would be nice. But at his office, in his leather chair? Not. So. Much.

Oh well.

So my son was enraged because I interrupted his workflow by calling him in a tizzy. Just you wait, kid! Give yourself another 40 years, and you’ll know how it feels. 😀

 

And speakin’ of real estate…

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…as we were saying yesterday, briefly, Zillow claims my li’l middle-class house is worth (hang onto your hat) $563,000!  And change.

What????????

Over half a million dollars for an aging tract house within walking distance (easy walking distance) of a dangerous slum? Seriously????

And horrors!

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I return to the idle thought that maybe I ought to think about moving out to Scottsdale — more specifically, to the district known as McCormick Ranch. Once a very fancy-Dan tract, McCormick ranch is now a mid- to upper-middle-class suburb, filled with ticky-tacky construction set in seas of Bermuda grass. The area is relatively safe. Of course, no place in a big city is “safe,” but McCormick Ranch is far more so than the swaths of North Phoenix that border the alarming Sunnyslope tract, where I live now.

This proposition presents its challenges. The main one: I very much doubt I could get anywhere near that much for this house. And houses out in Scottsdale are pricier by far than the ones here in North Central on the edge of Sunnyslop.

To get into Scottsdale housing, I’d probably have to move into an apartment. And I don’t wanna.  I love my house and all its roominess. I love my swimming pool — my pool and no one else’s. I love the trash pickup service from the alleys. None of these appertain to apartment living.

And another important adjunct to this issue:  unless there’s something I’m misunderstanding, it doesn’t look like it would be worth moving unless I could get into a better area.

McCormick Ranch is not a better area than North Central Phoenix. The two districts are about on a par. Fairly affluent. Relatively low in crime. Close to upscale shopping. Attractively built middle-class homes. Decent schools. Sooo….

Why would I want to live there? 

* It’s ten minutes from the endlessly importuning Mayo Clinic. The gawdawful drives to see MayoDoc would go away, once and for all.

* Shopping is excellent, ranging from the high side of middle class to the high side of very much upper middle class.

* Proximity to lots of great restaurants.

But…but…waitminit here. 

* I don’t go to restaurants. I can cook lots better than that…for lots less change!

* These days I do about 75% of my clothes shopping online.

* I should base where I’m gonna live on the proximity of a doctor’s office? Uhhhh… don’t think so…

* The Ranch is a long way from my son’s neighborhood. If I moved out there, I’d hardly ever see him!

* I dunno if the Cleaning Lady from Heaven would be willing to drive way to Hell & Gone to clean the Funny Farm if it were in North Scottsdale.

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Hmmmmm….  To my mind, the “Waitaminits” outweigh the benefits by about ten to one. Seriously: there aren’t enough positives to convince me that I should pull up (expensive!) stakes and move to the far side of Scottsdale.

So…one is led to apply that Fine Old Saw: When in doubt, don’t!

  • Doubt, indeed. There’s just not enough there to persuade me that I would benefit from moving. Benefit: in any way…
  • Socially (I know one! person who lives out there.)
  • Financially (Any benefit from moving to a tonier area will be outweighed by the costs of selling, buying, fix-up, and moving.)
  • Comfort-wise (My house is a luxurious palace; noplace on McCormick Ranch is any better, and most are not as good.)
  • Gasoline and mileage savings (I probably drive out to the Mayo Clinic no more than once a month. That’s hardly a motive to pull up stakes!)

So unless my son decides to move someplace else — say, he gets a job in another city — there’s really no reason for me to even consider buying a place in McCormick Ranch.

If he did move out of North Central Phoenix, I might move out, too. Either to follow him or to put some distance between me and the gangs. But as long as he’s in these parts…well, so am I!

Hotter than the Hubs!

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Seriously: hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. At 7:20 in the morning, the shaded(!) back-porch thermometer reads 85 degrees…but you couldn’t prove that by me. Ask me, and I’ll guess 95 to 100.

* Wet.
* Overcast.
* And hot.

A humid day like this is NOT a typical Arizona number. Generally, “it’s a dry heat,” as the locals like to say.

Ruby and I: just back from dragging the human around the park. Sweltered!

This morning M’hijito is dragging me to the dentist, lhudly scream Goddam. A crown fell off a back molar. So won’t THAT be fun!

Frankly, I don’t think it needs any repair work…because when you look closely at it you see it probably never needed a crown to begin with. I suspect a lot of these li’l procedures are actually procedures on your pocketbook.

That is almost certainly the case here. You can see, absent the crown, that the tooth was never cracked and probably never broken, more than at the level of a small chip. If it were up to me, I’d go on about my business and leave it alone.

But when you get old, things are not up to you. The next generation takes over and pushes you around like you were an eight-year-old.

😀  Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. In some aspects, I probably do operate about on the level of an eight-year-old. After a certain number of decades, you lose patience with all the hassles, all the bullshit, all the unnecessary expenses, all the gouges and just let it go. And frankly: I’m long past that point.

LOL! One benefit of living at McCormick Ranch would be that it would be too far from my son’s house for him to justify traipsing across the city to accompany me to every little event and crisis. And you may be sure that if I were out there today, I would not be trudging to the dentist this morning. 😀

My poor father!

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He would have been trying to save the equivalent of something over a million dollars in today’s money.

I doubt if he would have thought of it in those terms. He surely was aware that a hundred grand (his coveted goal) was a lot of money for a working-class guy. But a MILLION BUCKS’ worth? Probably not a concept that would have presented itself to him.

He did it, y’know. No kidding: He stashed a hundred thousand dollars in savings — that was his life’s savings goal — and then quit his job.

Shortly thereafter, the stock market crashed. 

So much for his hundred grand, eh?

Oh well. He went back to work for another couple years and then…soldiered on.

My mother died: the love of his life killed herself with tobacco sticks. He sent me through college. Then he quit his job, figuring at least to live ever after without having to work his a$$ off.

Frankly…I cannot imagine that he would have kept at his savings goal if he had thought of it as the equivalent of a million dollars. It would have been beyond his comprehension. But to tellya the truth, that is what the man accomplished in his lifetime.

He may have intuited that there was no way in Hell he could ever earn & save the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a million bucks. But I doubt if he actually knew it, at least not at a gut level.

I sure hope he didn’t.

That is what it amounted to, y’know. His goal of a hundred grand, by the time he retired, would have equated to just about a million dollars, in the change of his time.

Shhhh! Don’t tell him, though!

7:00 a.m.: The Moron Hour

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Why IS it that every  moron on the planet turns out of their house at 7 in the morning? With their dog, o’course!

Just back from the morning DoggyWalk. Nasty morning: hot, overcast, and wet. Back porch thermometer registers a mere 85 degrees.

Days like this, sometimes rain just coalesces out of the air. Don’t even need clouds to make it rain!

Welp, that doesn’t seem to be happening today…not yet, anyway. Wunderground predicts a 15% chance of rain and just now registers an ambient temperature of 85 degrees. Not very hot. But yeah: damp, that’s for sure.

Ruby never seems fazed by a soggy atmosphere. Maybe the thick furry coat protects her, to some degree from the elements: whether cold and wet or hot and wet.

At this hour, everybody and their little brother, sister,, and grandmother is out tromping around with their dawg. And they just don’t seem to get it that “they just want to pwaaaayyy” doesn’t apply to your dog. No, stupid… my dog just wants to rip their dog’s throat out. 

After you tell them to please keep their dog back and they refuse to do so, they get all peeved when your dog goes in for the kill.

Speaking of dogs, M’hijito bought a puppy yesterday, to replace his beloved old white golden retriever who croaked over a few days ago.

Oh, my, what a little cutie! And the parents were also white retrievers, so this one will grow up to look a lot like the Late, Great Jake.

I should call him — the kid, that is, not the dawg — and see if he’d like me to bring something over for lunch from the AJ’s deli. That would be pleasant…and an excuse to see the new pup. 😉

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Meanwhile: ugh!  My hip is spavined and hurts like Hell.

Years ago, the Late, Great Dr. Daley — one of the finest GPs ever to walk the surface of the Earth — told me that someday I’d have to get surgery on that hip. Looks like the Someday has arrived.

Just what I need: surgery, and then weeks in the hospital recuperating and going through endless physical therapy. Whee…I can hardly wait.

Could I even walk from AJ’s to M’jito’s just now? Probably: once I get going, the gait seems to move along OK. The problem, I think, would be trapping a bus, getting down to Central & Camelback, and then hiking to the Kid’s place.

Dunno. A guy across the street has taken up the Uber business. I may ask him to drive me down to the store…and maybe for a few extra bucks he could be persuaded to stick around long enough to schlep me from the AJ’s to the Kid’s house.

The Uber thing looks like quite the little Godsend. I’ve only tried it once, but it really was The Business! The guy showed up at my house right away, schlepped me across the city, and then showed up again at the dentist’s office to schlep me home.

Truth to tell, it really may be that Phoenix has turned into enough of a Big City that you could live here without owning a car. M’hijito would like to get rid of mine — apparently he thinks that at 80 I’ve reached such a state of decrepitude I’m not safe to be driving. And I’ll tellya: if I knew for sure that a car would show up when I call for it — and show up in a timely manner — I’d agree with him.

But…well…that is something that I don’t know. Actually, to the contrary: I do know…a cab is not gonna show up on time when you need it. Period. This ain’t San Francisco, folks: this is Phoenix.

And no: dyed-in-the-wool Phoenicians do not ride cabs.