Coffee heat rising

aging

STOP THE WORLD!!

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😀  First good thing that’s happened this morning, as dawn proceeds to break: I have managed to weasel my way into the FaM website.

At 6:45 in the morning, all Hell is breaking loose, and as far as I can tell the terrorized demons are running off down the road.

Worst thing under way: the diabetes that runs in my family has apparently decided to visit me. At least, I assume that’s what these hair-raising and painful symptoms are. Can’t get in to see a quack at the Mayo. And the beloved Young Dr. Kildare has quit the practice of medicine to return to his first love, social work. His partners have moved to Sun City, an hour’s drive from here.

So later this morning I will have to go to one of those roadside docs — one resides about five minutes from here — and ask (again!!) to be tested for the Family Disease.

Failing that, I do have a friend who’s a chiropractor…vaguely, I hope he may be able to connect me with an M.D. who can test me for full-on diabetes.

To frost those cookies, the deadbolt on the back door has frozen shut. Joy! I cannot get the kitchen door open to let the dog outside!!!!!

So whenever the hour hits 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock — that is, whenever somebody’s shop opens — I have to call a locksmith and try to get him over here to fix that damn thing.

You realize…this means that if a fire starts in the kitchen, I can’t get out into the backyard. The dog and I will somehow have to make our way through the garage or else around Robin Hood’s Barn to get out the front door.

Hm. It also means I can’t get at the key to open the backyard gate into the alley, since that thing hangs on the inside of the back screen door.

Hm and hm… Do we have an extra key…???

Yes. It looks like it.

OK. If and when I can get a locksmith here, he’ll need to make me a couple more keys.

These adventures are just the frosting on the cake. This diabetes thing is a REAL terror.l

My mother’s grandmother, who raised my mother in Upstate New York back before there was such a thing as insulin, died of the disease. It runs in the family. I’ve been told (repeatedly!) that I’m “pre-diabetic” (none of the quacks seems able to explain what that really means), but apparently the implication has been that sooner or later I’ll develop the disease.,

We may now be at the “sooner than later” point…

Oh…lookee here! Just to make everything perfect, the clothes dryer just went on the fritz!

AAAUUUUGHHH!

************************************************

8:02 a.m.

The dryer decided to start working again. Hallelujuah brothers & sisters!

I smashed my hand in the back door. Doesn’t appear to be anything broken, though.

Will have to wait another hour to get thru to make an appointment at the Mayo…unless I decide to take my chances with one of the li’l roadside quacks closer to home. I don’t trust those guys…but…frankly, I don’t trust doctors in general. So what’s the difference?

**************

WOW!

Everything I touch goes S-P-R-R-R-O-I-N-N-G!!!!!!!!

Migawd, I can’t unlock the back screen door without breaking something!

*****

On the other hand:

* The clothes washer is running again…apparently working OK
* The smashed hand seems not to have any broken bones
* The clothes dryer is running, normally far’s I can tell
* The padlock on the back gate is now working: no clue what made it go on the fritz

But meanwhile, it’s not even 9 a.m. and I can’t get in or out the back door.

gaaaaahhhhh!

Tryin’ Again…

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Believe we’ve lost several posts since the last time I was here scribbling. And…well…I am NOT in the mood for struggling with the Internet just now.

So let’s freakin’ start over.

Today is Sunday, March 16.

It’s 3:40 in the afternoon. A rather stuffy and damp afternoon, one with high clouds lurking overhead.

Ruby and I are just back from circumnavigating the park. Enjoyed watching teams of young people playing soccer and volleyball. Nice way to spend time…

Contemplated the potential joys of inhabiting some other neighborhood.

My cousin lives in an outlying suburb called Fountain Hills. A little higher in elevation, it’s a bit cooler than the more central parts of the Valley. It’s practically within walking distance of the Mayo Clinic.

Would I like to live there?

I might, if my cousin were just a shade friendlier. For reasons I cannot imagine, she visibly dislikes me. Dunno what on earth I did to piss her off permanently, but she’s openly hostile to me whenever we’re within hollering distance. So…that does nothing to encourage me to move to the far northeast side of the Valley.

How about Sun City?  Way to Hell and gone on the west side?

Ugh! Nothing feels more repellent to me than the Old Folks’ Ghetto. Make that the Whitey-White Old Folks’ Ghetto.

My mother loved the place after she and my father came to light there. But…I never could see the charm to its visual and social monotony.

How about back down into the historic central part of the city?

Well. Yeah: I did like living there. Thirty years ago… However…today? Maybe not so much.

Social-stratum-wise, it’s about the same: a popular destination for the young, the affluent, and the upwardly mobile. But…but….

First off, it’s noisy. The upscale neighborhoods are bordered by large, incredibly busy commuter roads. So every morning and every evening you get roar roar roar from seven-lane roads that don’t let you turn left. A major regional hospital occupies a large corner to the north, and another one stands to the southeast: ambulances shriek past at all hours of the day and night. And Sky Harbor Airport calls jet plane traffic to the south and east, roar roar roar roar roar — also at all hours of the day and night.

So…even though it’s a pretty and a historically interesting neighborhood, it’s less than perfectly ideal. Especially given the crime rate, which is pretty breathtaking.

Not that we don’t have a healthy crime rate up here in Sunnyslop. But with only one regional hospital we do get lots less siren music.

Ohhhhh my…. WHERE would I go if I could escape from lovely uptown Phoenix?

Hm.

Just about noplace in Arizona. It’s much of a sameness, all across the state…when you come right down to it. Loved living on the ranch, but it probably wouldn’t be safe for an old lady: at this age, you need to be closer to medical and social services than thirty miles out in the middle of nowhere.

So…. {sigh}…  I’m probably about in an ideal location, given my age, my health, and my social status. I do like it here, even though there are places I’d like better.

La Maya and La Bethulia have moved to the area around Monterey, California. It is beautiful there. And cold. And foggy. And expensive. No way in Hell could I afford to live there.

SDXB’s relatives live in Seattle. It also is quite lovely. And a bit too expensive for my budget.

I do love New Mexico. But…I don’t know anyone there, and at this age you may be sure I don’t wanna start all over.

Back to the San Francisco Bay Area? All my relatives in those  parts are long gone, left for the Other World many a year ago. No longer knowing anyone there and without a job there, I can’t imagine much of any point in moving back.

So I feel like I’m kinda stuck here, trapped by inertia. There’s noplace else to go to that makes sense, and I sure don’t wanna work hard enough to create any such place.

Arizona: Garden spot. I guess.

Renovations

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The young(ish) couple who bought my neighbor Sally’s house are over there madly renovating. Sounds like a buzz saw — or maybe a floor sander — whirring away.

Hm. While we think of it…let’s go on a li’l doggy walk and poke our nosy schnozz into their business as we stroll by…

****

So we’re ARF! ARF!  out the door. Around the park. through the south side of Lower Richistan. Ruby: beside her canid self with doggy joy.

And it’s ROAR! ROAR!! ROAR!!! from Luke Air Force, off to the southwest side of Our Fair City. Holy mackerel, what a racket!

That racket is one of the several reasons you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City: the melody of jet fighter planes soaring overhead, taking off from an Air Force Base just down the road from one’s backyard. That’s about as far from what I wanna hear over morning coffee and evening cocktails as you can get.

Hilariously, my mother claimed to love it. She would sit on her screened back porch, swill her coffee, and listen to those blasting jets’ engines as the sun came up.

ohhhh, she would coo. It’s the sound of freedom!

ahhhh…no, Mom. It’s the sound of World War III, comin’ your way….

WHY are humans so fukkin stupid?????

Ohhh well…

The pair who bought the Beloved Sally’s house behind me: nicest neighbors you could hope to have. A yardful of screaming kids: maybe not so much. But only a  couple of kids in sight just now…and that makes for a reasonably QUIET occupancy.

They may have bought the place on spec, though. We shall see. I hope they last a good long while.  But whatever: for the nonce, they’re about as ideal as you can get.

Secretly, I even enjoy and am happy to have Tony the (Amazing!) Romanian Landlord as a neighbor. Forgodsake don’t tell him, though! Who knows what shenanigans he’ll get up to if he hears that bit of apostasy! 😀

Meanwhile, the young people behind us are  busy fancifying Sally’s shack.

* On the one hand, I hope they spiff it up and extract a nice profit from it.
* On the other hand: I rather like that bunch and would  be pleased if they hung around a few years.
* On the third hand, soon it will be time for me to move into an old-folkerie or some such horror. And I surely would like either to leave this house to my son as a fine investment or to be able to sell it and add the proceeds to the pile of dough I hope to leave to him.

Please, God: let me exit, stage left before that third exigency comes to pass.

ROOOOARRRR!

Is that another F-15? Or is it Cosmic laughter?

She Done Did Herself In

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Thinking about my mother, for reasons unknown, here in the early hours of a Sunday morning.

She killed herself, the poor woman. Not on purpose…uhm…at least, I don’t think she did it on purpose. At least, not at a conscious level.

She smoked herself to death. Literally: she was never awake when she didn’t have a goddamned cigarette in her hand or in her mouth. She would even smoke in the shower. Understand: she didn’t just light a cigarette and let it burn down. She huffed and puffed on it, all the way down to the filter.

Not surprisingly, she died of cancer.

That cancer may as easily been kicked off by life in hideous Saudi Arabia, where she spent ten years of her (and my) life. Arabia was not a place for humans — least of all for humans of the gringo persuasion. The unholy diseases you could get out there…my God! She caught one of the worst of them — amoebic dysentery.  In those days, there wasn’t much they could do to treat it: they put her in the hospital and ran her through three or four rounds of chemotherapy, each of which made her sicker than the disease itself did.

Evil treatment for an evil disease native to an evil place.

If she hadn’t been weakened by the toxic treatments for the amoeba, would she have died anyway? I’m inclined to think she would have. She was a walking smokestack. You knew when she awoke in the morning — or in the middle of the night — by the stink emanating from her bedroom. She started puffing before she lifted her head from the pillow, and she smoked all day long, until she turned off the light at bed-time. I’m certain that what killed her — the immediate cause, anyway — was the tobacco. As it develops, few substances are as addictive as nicotine.

She was murdered by the tobacco peddlers.

But the thing about it is…it was a kind of self-murder. She knew. By the late 1950s, the word was out that tobacco causes cancer. Not so much emphasis was laid on the fact that it’s an addictive drug…so, she was less inclined to recognize that her passion for the damned stuff was not for pleasure but to dodge the discomfort of addiction.

(sigh) She never saw her grandson. Though I was pregnant before she died, she croaked over before he came into this world.

But you hafta say: she didn’t much care for kids. Why she had me utterly escapes me. Once she’d delivered an offspring to my father (was he the one who wanted me???), she took to a killer regimen of contraceptives. They didn’t have the Pill in those days, so to avoid pregnancy required some elaborate machinations…and no doubt the occasional abortion.

Strange people, those…

Another Day, Another Taxpayer-Funded Dollah…

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Mwa hah ha!  Social Security: what could be better?

Seriously, I do hafta say that I am mightily grateful for the wee Social Security income that trickles in each month. Yes, I do have enough in savings to live on as a retiree…for the time being. But…that’s assuming I do NOT acquire the insane longevity of my non-smoking forebears.

Yeah: the Christian Scientists on my mother’s side of the family lived into outrageously advanced old age — and by and large, they did so independently. They were well into their late 90s when they croaked over…and might have lived even longer if they’d been given to the blandishments of modern medicine.

Would they have wanted to? Ah. Yea verily: that is the question.

My son dragged me out to the Mayo yesterday, an annoying and time-wasting trip. Among the several sillinesses to which they subjected me was this…uhm…Olde Folke’s IQ Test. As it were.

And as it were, it was the stupidest thing you could ever hope not to encounter. Seriously: an unutterable and frustrating waste of time.

Frustrating because I had better things to do of an afternoon.

Unutterable because one probably should not openly express one’s opinion of such stupidity, especially not to the professional who is inflicting the stupidity on you.

When you come away from an encounter like that, you find yourself thinking “Them thar Christian Scientists had somethin’…”

Fundamental Questions of Olde Age

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What am I doing?

What am I supposed to be doing?

Who the Hell am I?

And why am I here?

Yes. There we have the fundamental questions
that confront the aging mind.

😀

Was just about to fly out the door and trudge down to the ever-pricey AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store, there to buy some swell stuff for the mid-day dinner. Charging around, it occurred to me to wonder…

* Waitaminit! What’s in the freezer?
* Waitanotherminit!! Whats wrong with this spectacularly fancy piece of spectacularly expensive steak?

and…

* Is there some REASON I can’t add this fresh, crisp asparagus to the menu?
* What??? No potatoes? Really??? What’s wrong with a fistful of freshly cooked pasta?

Sometimes I do wonder what’s wrong with me. At least this noon I escape the vicissitudes of old-age brain haze (for once!!), come away with what will be a very nice dinner, and not have to shell out another dime for it.

***

Y’know…ten years ago — even five years ago — it would never have occurred to me to traipse out into the (pricey!!!!) wilds to buy the makings for today’s mid-day feast. I would have known what was in the fridge. I would have known there was no need to go charging out in the traffic and scoop up $30 worth of fancy food and wine at AJ’s.

So…

Now we scribble while we wait for the kettle of water to come to a boil for the pasta. We swill wine by way of passing the time. And we wonder which drain our IQ points trickled down.

<<sigh>>

Worrying about SDXB and NG (New Girlfriend). He says she’s under the weather…apparently seriously so.

This is highly worrisome: first because she’s a lovely person and does not deserve to be sick; and second because he’s transparently in love with her and needs to have her in his life.

***

And in the Department of Weirdness…

Last  night I dreamed of returning to the sweet middle-class Berkeley  neighborhood where the relatives who raised my mother lived. And…

…how much I miss those women
…how much I miss Berkeley
…how much I miss the San Francisco Bay Area
…Oh hell! How much I miss my mother

How dast she smoke herself into the grave?

If heroin peddlers and cocaine peddlers and even marijuana peddlers are regarded as criminals, why the Hell aren’t tobacco peddlers legally recognized as the craven murderers that they are?

Ah well…movin’ on.

Maybe we’re all craven murderers? is that possible?

Daydreaming on in this vein, I found myself remembering Berkeley and the oh-so-long dead relatives, so vividly that they seemed almost real, almost here: and I wondered WTF is wrong with me.

If this is senility, my friends…then senility is freakin’ weird!