Coffee heat rising

Angst

Moving Crabbily On…

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As we scribble, come 6:00 in the evening it’s freakin’ hot outside. Yeah: 98 degrees in the shade of the back porch, according to our thermometer. About right: Wunderground says it’s 99 degrees out there, “feels like 102.”

😀  Is THAT all?

***

A small fiasco is under way, one that will require the attention of my amiable lawyers. So: tomorrow it’s over to their office, wherein to have a chat. Just what I need to blow away half my day.

***

Meanwhile, the poor little dawg is about fried. Now that she’s had a few bites to eat and had a chance to flop on the kitchen tiles, she seems a little better. And as we scribble, she has retired to her favorite spot on the cool tiles under the toilet…

Dayum!  I hope she’ll be OK.

Give her half-an-hour or so, and then retrieve her from the toilet cave. Put her on the bed. And let’s see how she does.

Hope she recovers fully. I’m not sure where the nearest animal hospital is…which doesn’t matter, because Caligula has kiped my car, so I can’t get her to an emergency vet, anyway. If that’s necessary, though, I hope one of the neighbors will drive us.

Really….I probably ought to chat with the WonderAccountants (they live across the street) and ASK — in advance!! — if they will please help me get Ruby to an emergency vet should that ever be necessary. Maybe beg the same (in-advance!) favor from some of the other neighbors.

***

This mother/son squabble and automobile rip-off flap has gotten SO stupid that I’m thinking I probably need to sell the house and move to some other venue: one where I can buy and use another car to get myself to key destinations.

Where to go, where to go??  Well…Sun City probably.

Yuch!

My parents decamped to Sun City. They LOVED it…because that sort of stodgy atmosphere and whitey-white exclusivity was right up their alley.

Personally, I prefer a more liberal atmosphere and a more diverse set of neighbors. Plus (really!) I do love the sound of children playing outside. In Sun City, instead you get the melody of jet warplanes blasting out of nearby Luke Air Force Base. Loverly….

***

Oohhh gawd! Now Ruby has taken to choking frantically every time she laps a few sips of water!

KEEEripes! WHAT is causing that?

Well, she gets over it quickly. Now it’s stopped…

Tomorrow morning I’ll call the vet. Maybe I can put up one of the neighbors to driving us over there. Otherwise, it’ll be a half-hour hike, each way, though gawdawful heat. Carrying the sick dog in my arms…

What next, Lord?

A Rasty-Nasty Day

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Rasty Nasty…so glad to be gone!

Today’s weather is what my father used to call “rasty-nasty,” after Ras Tanura, the dreadful ARAMCO company town where we lived for nine years, perched on the shore of the Persian Gulf. It was a hot, soggy, miserable place.

Today’s ugly morning is hot and soggy, for sure. The sky dark gray with overcast, rain varying from drizzling to pouring.

Directing matters toward Hell, Ruby has  something wrong with her sinuses…or something. She keeps gasping and wheezing…hork  hork hork hork! Damned if I can tell what the matter is.

So I need to get her to a vet, but without a car, I can’t imagine how to do that through this unholy weather. I’d have to pick her up and carry her eight or ten blocks…and migawd!! Just now I’m so sick I can barely carry her around the house!

A guy across the street drives for Uber…but somehow I doubt he’ll agree to carry a sick dog in his cab.

Yesterday’s junket to the Mayo Clinic was just gawdawful! What I need today is to sit down, hassle-free, and be quiet all day. Doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen, though. Afraid to ask my son for a lift…yesterday he and I were at each other’s throats. Plus…he has — of all things — a job! He can’t be knocking off half the day to schlep me and my dog to a vet.

In related sylvan fields, I need to find a decent doctor who does NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic, halfway to Bisbee. Dealing with a doctor — especially when you’re a woman, Gawd help you! — is dreadful enough, without piling on a 45-minute drive each way. 

And “find a decent doctor” is no small task these days. Our wonderful old docs from the law-practice days are long retired, after having repaired to the Mayo some years ago (dragging us with them). And of late the quacks I’ve met there have ranged in competence from bird-brained to spectacularly arrogant; half the time when you describe your issue, they’re not paying the slightest bit of attention. Their minds are made up, and they don’t care be distracted by any damned facts, thank you.

Lawyers tend to know which doctors have been sued and which haven’t. That’s why you should seek a recommend from a lawyer, whenever you’re in the market for a new doctor.

Now that my lawyer hubby and I have been divorced for some years, I no longer know a lawyer to ask. Most of our friends are now retired…I haven’t seen a practicing lawyer in for-freaking-ever.

***

Blech!!! It’s getting still uglier out there! How it’s possible, I do not know…but the sky has turned even darker than it was.

I give up! Back to bed with me and the hound!

Escaped from the Mayo

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Okay..well…I guess I’m not quite ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. That notwithstanding, a visit to the Mayo Hospital does little to persuade me of that. LORDIE, how I hate hospitals, and how I hate that one in particular!

By the time we left that sylvan realm, my angry son and I were speaking to each other more or less politely. Sorta. So there’s some hope that we’ll get back to normal in a day or three.

Miserable experience, though.

***

How much longer do I have in this sylvan vale, really? 

Well…that’s no easier to tell for me than it is to tell for anyone else. My guess is, if I don’t get any sicker than I am (which isn’t very), we’re looking at five to ten years. But if I follow in the family Tradition of Extreme Longevity, it could be another twenty to twenty-five years.

Twenty-five: no, I would not expect. But twenty: that wouldn’t be very surprising. Women in my family have lived to advanced old age…and without medical care, because they were Christian Scientists.

Sometimes I think that the very reason they lived into their dotage was that they stayed away from doctors and hospitals.

Today’s experience at the Mayo was enough to cause you to hear the sylvan call of the Other World, that’s for damn sure. All afternoon with a needle stuck in my arm, miserable hurting scared annoyed pissed in the dark as to what was really happening… How CAN i count the ways….?

Well, I never want to go back there, that’s for sure. But since the Mayo is the best medical facility in the Valley — very possibly in the whole state — this surely was not my last adventure in those parts.

Ugh. Maybe I should convert to Christian Science…

Cross and Crown emblem

Here We Go Again…

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Dammit! Cop helicopter buzzing the neighborhood to the west of us.

By golly, I’m tired of this stuff! Every time you turn around, here’s another Happening.

Part of it is because we live directly south of a low-income, high-crime district. SOMETHING is always going on up there.

Only way to get away from that is to sell my home and move to a higher-rent, lower-crime zone.

But ya know what? I LIKE my house. And I like my neighbors. And I like our location. And no, I do NOT want to move to some other district.

This is an old-line, moderately upscale central-city neighborhood. Prices here are moderate, too. Moving to a similar neighborhood in a “safer” part of the city would cost me a proverbial arm & a leg. And, as one cop remarked, it wouldn’t accomplish the goal. ALL neighborhoods in the Phoenix area are plagued with crime.

Crime is endemic here. You can’t get away from it.

So, no. There’s no point in spending 87 gerjillion dollars to move to Scottsdale or Moon Valley or…whatnot. It’s all of a kind.

Another Unlovely Day in Arizona…

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“…Leave us all NOT enjoy it.” 

Ugh. Not yet 9:00 in the morning and it’s 100 degrees in the shade of the back porch.

Some asshole has messed up my watering system. Spent altogether too much time trying to undo that fiasco and get water going on the plants. (Any amount of time on that mess is too much time…). Time spent in ungodly heat.

Goddammit! I hope it wasn’t Gerardo or one of his guys who did this! If I find out that’s the case, he is sooooooo fired!

Kinda doubt it, though. He has worked here for years, and nothing like this has happened before. I reckon it must have been a service man or a prowler.

How to keep any such worthies out of the backyard escapes me, though. The guys from the power company and the city water department have to get back there to fiddle with things. They’ve never done anything like this before, and since I’ve done nothing to offend them, I kinda doubt the perp was any of those guys.

Problem is, they have to get back there to do their job. So I can’t change the locks on the gates…it will keep them out as well as the sh!thead who f*cked up the watering system.

So now I’ve somehow got to catch Gerardo the next time he surfaces here — or else call him on the phone and pester him. He’ll need to untangle that mess and get the system working properly again. And…won’t he be thrilled!

Maybe I could sneak a motion-sensitive camera back there. It would run whenever ANYone strolled into the backyard, so would rack up Gawd Only Knows how much time wasted studying the images. But at least it might catch the jerk.

Hm. Another thought: how about installing a motion-sensitive bell back there? Then anyone who walked into the backyard would cause it to ring BING-BONG inside the house…then (assuming I was home at the time) I could see who was roaming around.

Or…I could just post a sign reading “SMILE! YOU’RE ON CANDID CAMERA!”

Chortle! If the jerk believed it, maybe he’d stand down.

Eeep! That Was Close!

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Yep: I really thought Funny about Money was done for. That was IT. Never again would I be able to get into the site.

{chortle!} Yes, I indeed DO panic easily….

But this morning, things are working better and looking better.

What a fine few days these have been!

No kidding: over the past few days, not one damn thing has worked properly, whether has had to do with the computers, whether it was the bank account, whether it was the garage door opener, whether it was the pool equipment…WHATEVER, it busted or it stopped dead.

Good thing the kid made off with my car, eh? With that kind if miasma hanging over my neurotic little head, who knows what horrors would have transpired if I’d tried to drive through Phoenix’s rabid traffic.

😀

And now, speaking of “it don’t wanna work,” let’s see if this post will go online…