Coffee heat rising

Angst

Reel Estate…

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Good lord! Looking at the local real estate ads is like watching a horror movie! 😮  Prices have hit the stratosphere and are headed into orbit.

Here’s an aging tract house in my son’s neighborhood, nothing special: $389,000. What the hell do they think it’s made of???? And…have they ever heard of “taste”?  That orange and black in the bedroom: eeeek!!! Wait wait! check out the blood-red bedroom!!!

Zillow thinks my son’s house is presently worth $498,000!!!

Let’s see what the prices are here in the ‘Hood…

One house for sale, right on a truly gawdawful main drag: 3 bedrooms, $420,000. And…1300 square feet; doesn’t even have a pool. WTF???  Here’s one up for auction(???!!!): it’s the same model as mine, $477,000. 

Wow!

Now we begin to ask, am I going to be able to stay in my home? Because the taxes are gonna go into the stratosphere.

That’s what happened in Southern California when real estate prices went berserk. I had a cousin — an elderly woman who had lived in the same place for-freaking-ever — who lost her home because she couldn’t afford the taxes.

THIS is not good.

Oh, jeez! Here’s one right up the street from me…matter of fact, it seems to be the same model as mine: $635,000!!!!!!

Uhm…I may not be able to pay the taxes, either….

 

Pain Pain Pain!

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Augh!!!!  WHAT a way to start the New Year!

My left hip hurts SO much — for reasons that frankly, I do not understand — that I can barely stand up from a chair or hobble across a room. Amazing pain!

Apparently I spavined a hip joint — how, I do not know. The result: pain, pain, pain, and more pain. And no, aspirin doesn’t do a damn thing for it.

Soooo….  I assume that this will go on for at least a couple of weeks — that assumption, based on experience. If it’s not gone after about three weeks, then it’s off to the accursed Mayo Clinic again! 

Ohhhhh my gawd, do I ever hate traipsing to Scottsdale to go to a doctor!

Young Dr. Kildare, that adorable young fella, closed his office up the street here and moved his practice to fukkin’ Sun City. And lemme tellya…

After the monstrous experiences my mother had with her Sun City quack, you could not pay me to go to a doctor out there. Not even YDK. That he opened a practice there does not tell me it’s possible for a Sun City doctor to be competent; it tells me that YDK is very probably incompetent.

The Mayo, as we know, is supposed to be the best. They certainly think so… And bein’ better than anyone else, docs out there peer down their noses at you, condescend to you, and treat you as if you had an IQ in the negative numbers.

But with YDK now ensconced as far on the west side as the Mayo is on the east side, there’s hardly any point in traipsing halfway to Yuma to get care that’s no better than you’ll get halfway to Payson.

We thought medical care in this country left something to be desired, yea verily back in the day? Little did we know! We had yet to experience medical “care” that does not come up to the level of care. 

I suppose I could decamp to Canada, where the socialized system is supposedly somewhat better than ours. Or somewhat worse, depending on your point of view. But…I have an allergy to snow! 😉

{sigh}  My poor li’l dawg! I was going to take her for a walk this afternoon. But…just now I can barely walk across the room…to say nothing of the mile or so around the park.

This hound is not gonna be happy with me when she sees me dodder back into the bedroom and climb into the sack. But…tough nugies, dawg! I couldn’t walk her to the end of the block, much less on her usual park-encircling route.

Outta here!

Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt!!!!

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Ohhhhh my GAWD it hurts! 

The hip ailment, that is. Old age bein’ what it is, I contrived to SPROING my hip (don’t ask how…I dunno!) so that every goddam movement hurts, hurts, and then hurts some more.

Dog followed me out to the mailbox this afternoon…didn’t know whether I could get her back in.

Fortunately, dawgs being the empaths that they are, she intuited that something was up, and she did trail me back into the house. My kinda dawg! 

Man!  I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed such baroque pain. This, from the old bat who delivered her baby without anaesthetic  because she thought labor was supposed to hurt more than one’s periods. 😮 It did not. Not by a long shot!

The hip pain envelops most of the right side, plus the lower back. And the pre-existing left hip pain has not gone away.

So…LOL! What we have here is painš and pain² and painÂł…how much fun is that?

Hmmmm… Here’s something at Amazon, the Savior of All Who Refuse to Trudge Out to the Store: A hip brace thingie that’s supposed to ease your back pain. Dang! I wonder if that would work?

Well…let’s wait until  tomorrow morning…if this thing still hurts (believe me: it will), we’ll order this lash-up then. And hope for the best.

If there is a best…

Wow!!

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Life in lovely downtown Phoenix…  This little adventure occurred right across the road from where I was gonna live. Yeah: just a few years ago, I almost bought an apartment just across the street from this spot.

What a place!!

Fortunately, I decided the price was too high for what the condos offered. And that the location would be too noisy. All very urban, y’know.

It was a conundrum, for sure.

I didn’t want to move to Sun City, where my parents held forth after my father retired, and where SDXB went. Old folks’ mausoleums aren’t my speed, alas.

We have our own little adventures, here in this middling in-town section of North Central Avenue. But so far nothing that dramatic! And certainly we have fewer incidents per month or per year than other centrally located districts do.

Honest t’Gawd, this place gets more and more like Southern California as the days trundle by. But really: I’m past the age where I feel any enthusiasm for packing up a house and moving into a new shack and finding new places for all the junk and unpacking box after box and stocking shelf after shelf. Ugh!

So I sit here and listen to the melody of gunshots — off in the distance, so far — and watch the kids play and…loaf. 

Brats and Morons Abroad!

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Saturday night! A lovely night, actually: cool but not cold, soft of air and clear of sky….

The racket from our local morons’ unmuffled hot-rods echoes down from Main Drag North. And what a racket! The cops have lots of other things to do than enforce the law that requires cars to be equipped with mufflers. So…that’s one that’s ignored consistently.

And so here in the ‘Hood we get roar roar ROOOAAAR into the night. All night, every night. With ROARS in spades on the weekends.

And just now we’re getting BAM…BAM…BAM BAM from an idiot neighbor playing with his gun. And probably one or two other idiots setting off fireworks.

Makes Sun City look good, I’ll tellya!

And I ain’t fond of Sun City….

It’s agin’ the law to run your car without a muffler hereabouts. BUT…this bein’ Arizona, it’s a law honored more in the ignoring than in the enforcing. So here in town, we get blasted with engine noise, way into the the night.

And one has to allow: no doubt the cops have lots better things to do than bellyache at people for making a racket.

Speeding.

Gunshots.

Rattletrap junkers.

Stoned drivers. 

Ech! What a place!!

But I suppose most places are like it, eh? Well…city places, anyway.

Wish there were a quieter place to live in these parts. NOT the mausoleum that is Sun City, that is. But really: far’s I can tell, there’s not.

Just get used to it and enjoy it, eh?

Merry Xmas!!

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Waiting to hear from M’hijito to see if he’s coming over for dinner, or if the’s been hijacked by his dad. 😀

One way or the ‘tother will be fine. We have some nice steaks defrosting. If he doesn’t want to surface here, he can come over on the weekend to tear into them.

Meanwhile, Ruby and I loaf. If it turns out the Kid is not coming over here this Christmas Day, that’s fine. The Dawg and the Human now have plenty of fine food, plus a gorgeous afternoon in which to circumnavigate the neighborhood.

And it is a spectacular day for a long, lazy walk through the ‘Hood.

The more I see of days like this, the more I wonder what nutty worm got into my head as I was looking (almost seriously!) at shacks in surrounding neighborhoods.  And the more I think…uhhh…NO, thankee! 

Seriously: I have no desire to move out of the Funny Farm. This is a handsome, solidly built block house, with classy tile floors and nice paint jobs and tony windows and up-to-date appliances… WHY on earth would I want to move someplace else?

Truth to tell, with a firmer grip on my marbles just now, I most certainly do not. 

None of the places we saw over the past few days are any better than this one, and the neighborhoods have drawbacks (like noise and access to strangers and rackety main drags) that this one does not. So…I reckon Ruby and I will be hanging out here for the next several whiles.

A serious advantage to the Funny Farm that these other places lack is that with its outrageous four bedrooms, the FF has plenty of room to accommodate a babysitter for the elderly.

Yes: if I need someone to come in and be here to oversee me 24 hours a day, I can offer the person her own bedroom and bathroom. All hers. No sharing. No nuisance. This should (I hope) put off the dread day when I will need to be consigned to an old-folkerie: with any luck, by some weeks… with more luck, by several months. Or maybe even years: who knows?

No sign of my son or word from him this Christmas Day. Presumably he’s at his dad’s.

Would’ve been nice to know if he’s planning on dinner here. However, we’re amply supplied: a gorgous T-bone big enough to feed Napoleon’s troops, which we can toss on the grill when he gets here. If he chooses not to be here… 😀 …Then we have enough steak to feed the FatLady a good three or four dinners.

So the Big Question just  now is… Are Ruby and I going for a walk this afternoon — sans kid? Or are we gonna loaf around and see if he shows up?

Well, he has a key, so if and when he gets here, he can let himself in. And if he doesn’t get here? Ruby and I can throw ourselves on the chow!

LOL!  See why I just luuuuv Christmas so damn much?
😮Â