Wow! What an AWFUL, wet, swampy morning!!!
Ruby and I just returned from our daily circumnavigation of the neighborhood park. MISTAKE! We should never have started out on that venture!
At 7:45 in the morning, it’s 100 degrees out there, with 40% humidity. So saith Wunderground.
If anything, that’s an understatement. It’s as hot and as soggy out there as anything we used to see on the shore of the hideous Persian Gulf, when we lived there in Saudi Arabia. And believe me: that is NOT a place where you would want to live!
Dawg is flopped on the kitchen tiles, having swiggled a raft of water. I’m flopped in a leather chair, its upholstery covered with a cotton throw in an effort to keep the sweat from wrecking the thing.
Horrid morning in a horrid place. If I had any choice at all, I’d be living soooooo far from here!
Where would so far be? Probably the San Francisco Bay Area, whence my mother’s family emanated. Yes, the air gets wet there, too…but at least it’s COOL air!
Our relatives lived in Berkeley, then a middle-class to upper-middle-class district sprinkled over rolling hills. Such a pretty place! I sure do miss it!
What possessed my parents to move to Arizona…well, I can’t say that escapes me.
Yeah, I know what called them:
Money. At the time, the cost of living here was so much lower than California’s that my father figured he could afford to retire. And…yah: quit his job and knock off working was what he most craved in life! At least, at the time that was so.
Politics. Arizona is as far to the right as you can get outside of the Deep South. People’s hearts are filled with hate here. Especially in regard to anyone who is not white and middle-class. My parents made an Alabama politician look liberal.
Weather. Yes, summers here are gawdawful. But the other nine or ten months of the year are pretty lovely. In the low desert: temperate days, no snow, rare rainy days.
Cost of living. You can buy a house in Sun City or Youngtown for a fraction of what a similar place costs in California, whence we emanated. True: it’s not a place you’d like to live year-round: summers here embody Hell. But air-conditioning makes it possible to survive.
Cheap tuition at the state university. I got into the University of Arizona at the end of my junior year in high school. After we’d lived here for a year, the cost of “education” (as it were) in Tucson was a fraction of what any California college or university charged state residents there.
Well. My son is well established here, so I’m not about to leave the state. Where be my son, there be I.
That doesn’t make me like this place a helluva lot more, though….
😉
