Coffee heat rising

aging

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.

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!

****

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.

***

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!