Coffee heat rising

Angst

BELAY that Last Post!!!!

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Forgodsake. Look at this morning’s FaM Post. Read that, and then say to yourself, with sterling accuracy and common sense, My gawd! The woman has lost every marble she ever had!  And THEN some!!!!! 

My imaginative little discovery, contingent on my son stealing my car out of my garage — “I don’t need a car to get around here! ” — turns out to be the single stupidest thing I’ve ever thought, said, or written. 

Yeah.

Today, as the sun made its way across the sky, I took it into my thick little head to walk down to the Albertson’s supermarket and pick up some dog food for Ruby the Corgi. While I was in the vicinity, I wanted to talk with a lawyer who practices in that shopping center — no, nothing drastic… Just a business matter. So: grabbed my home-made roller cart and headed on down there!

  • Walked.
  • And walked.
  • And dodged panhandlers.
  • And walked.
  • And fried.
  • And walked.
  • And fried some more.
  • And walked…..
  • Holeeeeee shee-ut!

The business lawyers whose office I’d seen so often in that shopping center were…GONE!!! Their space was empty.

Dayum!

The other lawyers, the ones across the parking lot, said they don’t do business law. But if I ever get arrested for drunk driving…. 😀

Yeah. 😮

By now, I was just fricasseed!

Went into the supermarket; hung out with the security guards for awhile. They put up with me, kindly, while I cooled down a bit.

But…now I had to get home. And that entailed walking block after block after block after block through searing, GAWDAWFUL heat.

Honestly: for a few minutes there, I wasn’t at all sure I was gonna make it.

Got up to the church. No one there; all the doors locked. Just a couple of bums hanging out in the shade.

Stumbled across the vast, black asphalt church parking lot. Staggered into the ‘Hood. Hotter and hotter and hotter….

Trudged and trudged through the residential part of our ‘hood. Hoped my neighbor Tom would be out…he and his wife Carol would let me inside to cool off, and keep me there long enough to be sure I wouldn’t pass out.

Nope. No sign of those two.

Hauled the empty cart along, and hauled it, and hauled it, and hauled it. Finally came to my house…not at all sure I could make it through the courtyard to the front door.

But I did: unlocked the door (clumsily: hands not working well) and staggered into the house.

And now here I yam, parked in front of the wonderful table fan. Dog snoozing on the floor: thank GAWD I didn’t take it into my feeble little head to take her with me this afternoon!

It’s much, much hotter than I’d estimated: 108 degrees, sez Wunderground. That may be an understatement!

At any rate, I made it home (miraculously!) and am now cooled down.

I guess I’m going to have to go out and rent another car — or maybe buy one. Obviously, I can’t get around on foot, not in this heat.

My ears are whistling.

My heart is pounding.

I probably should go to the ER. But without a car and through this unholy heat, how on earth would I get there?

Another Gray Day in Arizona…

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Leave us all enjoy it!

LOL! A Phoenix radio station, extant some years ago, used to have a talk-show announcer who would start the day with his trademark greeting:

It’s another beautiful day in Arizona!
Leave us all enjoy it!

This particular illiteracy was apparently some sort of Midwestern dialect.

Today is another muggy, damp day in Arizona. No clouds to speak of, but the air is just plain soggy.

Just back from trudging around the park with Ruby the Corgi. Absolutely positively NOT in the mood for a morning stroll through air as thick as Jell-O. But now we’re home (at last!). The coffee is steeping. The dog is flopped on the hallway floor; the human is flopped in its favorite easy chair.

My son wants me to compile a grocery list for him. He doesn’t get the picture — and won’t, no matter how desperately I try to explain. To wit: I don’t do grocery lists! 

Nope. I know what I need, and when I get to the store, I patrol the aisles…grabbing whatever I see that needs to be replenished. Ask me face to face what those needs are, and…I dunno. 

So that will start the day with an annoyance, both for me and for my excellent son, who proposes to haul me to said store. Pore guy!

Day-dreaming while hiking this morning: remembering the Moon Valley home of a now long-gone friend. When she and her husband moved into the house, it needed a lot of superficial fix-up work. I went over there to help them: paint, drywall repair, window caulking…

It was kinda fun, though it quickly devolved into boring work, and more work than I’d had in mind doing.

Work! It’s bad for your health!

 

A Minor Miracle(???)

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Wow!  This morning the spavined hip hardly hurts at all. 

Well. Yeah: it does hurt. But NOTHING like it has!

So…jeez. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe this gawdawful thing will clear up.

Soon as I finish swilling a mug full of water (too lazy to fix coffee just this minute), the plan is to take Ruby out for a Doggy-Walk. If we can make it to the park (that’ll be a miracle…), she’ll be beside herself with doggy joy. She does LOVE the feel of grass under her little feet. So adorable!

Last time or two ago that we visited the park, some sh!thead pestered the bejayzus out of me. That’s why you need a German shepherd, not a corgi.

Unfortunately, I’m no longer strong enough or patient enough to handle a GerShep, so nowadays I have to take my chances with the f**king general public over there. That day I dodged around to the front of a neighbor’s home and leaned on their doorbell. Asked them to call the cops. That shed the sh!thead, anyway.

Godlmighty, but I’m sick of living in Phoenix. Don’t know where on earth we’d go, though, if we tried to move out of here. I’m afraid these little phenomena are characteristic of the society in general: America has become the Land of the Sh!thead. About the only way you can deal with that is either never to go out without a male in tow (a male human, not a male Chihuahua), or never to go out at all.

For the luvva gawd, I’m an old, ugly woman! It’s not like I was a nubile young thing. What about an old hag attracts sh!theads?

Ohhhh well. On the positive side, it sure is nice to be able to walk up the hallway without hurting like the dickens. For a change.

LOL! Why do people do this???

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Point in question: Why do cleaning ladies decide how your house is gonna be organized and where the things you use daily are going to be “put away”?

Does it not occur to them that you wouldn’t have left something somewhere unless you wanted it there?

😀

Wonder-Cleaning Lady is among those given to assigning places to my possessions and stashing them where — you got it! — where I can’t find them. Or where accessing them is as inconvenient as humanly possible.

Batting all over the place this morning trying to find where W-CL put the bath towels, the knife sharpener, the scissors, the calculator…what she did with the clean pillowcases, the toothpaste, and…why she left a bath towel neatly folded up on the seat of a family-room chair.

I am so, SO sick! Upshot: I just don’t have the energy or the patience to search from pillar to post for everyday gear that I’ve left out where I want it, where I can find it quickly when I need it, and yes, where it doesn’t belong. She picks up all that kind of stuff and puts it “away”: i.e., in places that I would never imagine looking for it.

Feels like it would be passing rude to tell her to just leave the goddamn stuff where I put it…because often I do carelessly leave things laying out where they don’t belong. She, being the tidy type, quite reasonably resists leaving the junk scattered around the house.

Ohhhh well. What seems “normal” for me quite naturally seems “weird” for you, and so it’s to be expected that a person whose job is to organize and to clean will decide where things to and put them there. Just wish we thought along closer lines….

Whew!!!!

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BACK ONLINE!

We’re in one of those idiot moments. You know…when you can’t remember your name, to say nothing of your website’s password?  😀   Yeah: like that.

Fortunately, this isn’t my first Senior Moment. By way of heading off these events, I kept a record of the site’s password…and stored it on MY OTHER computer!  So…,mirabilis! Here we are back in Funny about Money.

How long this will last remains to be seen…

Hotter than the Hubs outside. Just came in from hiking through sweaty, nasty heat. For reasons unknown: wired to the teeth. 

Think it’s because my car has been kiped, thanks to the idiots at the Mayo Clinic.. That plus absolutely positively NOTHING that I need to get done works! 

The MayoQuacks put the eefus on my driver’s license, at my son’s behest. Note that I have not been in an accident in years — and that one wasn’t my fault. Nor have I had any tickets. Or any complaints about my driving. Or…whatnot. What I do have here is a royal screwing…the upshot of which: my son came down here, snatched my car out of the garage, and drove it off. I now have no car and no sane way to get around town.

And in a Los Angeles-style city like Phoenix, that IS a problem. Yeah: a BIG problem.

Apparently it’s a Hexed Day for everyone. 

Josie, the lovely lady who glommed SDXB’s house from the Welfare folks when he moved to Sun City, is having one of those, too.

Ohhhmigawd, Josie!  In a highlight of her day, apparently the kitchen plumbing jammed and…basically exploded, from what I can tell. Pipes leaking all over the place. Nothing working. And yeah: just TRY to get a plumber over here on short notice.

Last I saw, she’d managed to shut off the water into the house and was trying to mop up the tidal wave. What a horror show!

Yeah: every time things are bad for you, remember: they’re worse for someone else!

In-fukkin’-furiating!!!!

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Never fails! Sit your tail down in a dinner-table chair, and RINGY-DINGY DINGY!! There’s some a$$-hole on the phone trying to hustle you to buy whatever they’re peddling.

Literally. This happens almost every time I sit down to eat. This morning, they jangled their way into my breakfast…again.

grrrrrrrrrr!!!!

If I had any sense, I’d disconnect the phone before I sit down to eat. But…but…

a) I’m too lazy to remember to do that;
b) I highly resent being forced to disconnect MY phone, for whose service I pay richly, because those a$$holes keep pestering me with ads.
c) Sometimes I want the phone to ring through to me at this hour.

****

Comin’ on to 9:00 a.m. I’m so sleepy I mostly just wanna go back to bed. But that doesn’t make sense: far’s I can tell, I was out cold all night. Slept like the proverbial log, all the way thru till sometime after 7:00 a.m.

So…why do I feel like a zombie?

Thinking about how my mother killed herself. She smoked herself to death.

Literally. She was never conscious when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth or in her hand. Or, usually, in her mouth. Puff puff puffety puff puff puff. You knew when she was awake, morning or night, because you could smell the stench of her goddamn cigarettes emanating from her bedroom. That’s how heavily addicted to nicotine she was. She couldn’t pass more than an hour — if that long — without a murder weapon in her mouth.

Not surprisingly, this habit drew her onward to her death. A peculiarly ugly and painful death.

She managed to time that death just as I was coming up on the deadline for my Ph.D. dissertation.

When I explained to the dean who ran the Graduate College that I needed more time to finish because my mother was dying, she said, effectively, tough nougies, and then announced that if I didn’t complete the book by the deadline, I would be dropped from the program, and no, I would NOT be given a second chance to complete the degree for which I had worked over the past many years.

Evil to the left of you… Evil to the right of you… Evil in front of you… Evil behind you. Every which way you look, there’s another slice of evil. :-0  That’s academia for you!

Okay, admittedly, they didn’t kill her. She killed herself. But she did so with an addictive drug (nicotine) that made countless magnates rich as Croesus, as they killed the far more countless nitwits who were their customers. And in the process, she created an opportunity for the ba*tards at Arizona State University to make me even more miserable than I already was.

And that was plenty miserable!

It’s the primary reason that I would not go back to work there. Nor, very probably, in any major academic institution. People who run those places have no empathy whatsoever with the worms that make up their constituency.

For some time after my mother was murdered, I considered — very nearly with seriousness — a kamikaze run. I would get a job in a tobacco factory or in the offices of a cigarette company. Then one day walk into the place with a bomb or three in hand. Set them off and blow up the damn place. 

Blow myself up, too…which would be OK, because that would be better than spending the rest of my life in prison, should I survive the attack.

Ahhhhh, the Almighty Dollar…