Coffee heat rising

Angst

One Li’l Catastrophe After Another

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Man! When we say it‘s one of those days, we ain’t kiddin’!

The latest news to crash on our skulls:  The Wonder-Accountants are freakin’ RETIRING!

And for an innumerate old bat like me, that is a freakin’ CATASTROPHE.

Because…in case you can’t imagine, eh?…my son is NOT innumerate. Not at all. Quite to the contrary. And…as with his grand-dad — my fierce and chronically angry father — my own inability to deal with numbers drives him up the wall. The frustration of having to watch an idiot like me try to figure out the simplest operations…well…it must be just awful for him.

It’s damned awful for me, that’s for sure.

Well. I can NOT figure my taxes: must have an accountant for that task, even when its stages are fairly simple. Tax prep is so far over my head, I have no hope of doing it right. Or doing it at all. And because my understanding of what the heck I’m supposed to be doing in said task hovers near the ZERO level, trying to connect brains with a new accountant is gonna be… Well…gawdawful, that’s what.

*****

In other sylvan vales: Mygawd, it is hotter than the proverbial hubs outside.

Went out for a quick walk around our part of the hood, mostly to try to run off some of the stress and worry. No dog with me, of course: the pavement is so hot it would scorch her furry feet right off her legs.

It’s such a pretty little neighborhood. Nothing really special, to tell the truth: 1970s tract houses, by and large. But everything is neatly cared for and handsomely painted and tidy and clean…I love this place.

Ideally, I’d like to stay here until I die.

****

That, alas, is no longer the American Way. Nowadays, we who lurk in the aging middle class are consigned to prisons for old folks, where we’re locked up and fed bad food until we finally get out of our family’s hair.

So about the best you can hope for, when you come unto my age, is a stroke or a heart attack that will carry you away forthwith.

Not the custom in my family, alas. My mother died horribly of a gut cancer, allegedly brought on by her incessant smoking  but more likely spurred by the hideous, gawdawful treatment she had for the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Arabia. It was a slow and ugly death.

My father wasted away in the excruciating company of the woman he unwisely married after my mother died. Took a good two years for him to die. Horrible.

My maternal grandmother supposedly died fairly young of cancer, apparently brought on by her flamboyant promiscuity. However, it appears that this story, as told to (or by…) my mother, was not true; in fact she lived to be 88 years old. Well…that’s if you believe the figures in Ancestry.com….a site that appears to be less than fully reliable.

The grandfather…well, if they’re facts, they’re pretty vague. If you believe the scanty data on Ancestry.com, he died at the age of 65.  Or not…who knows?

*******

Oh, well…. When we say side-tracked, we mean sidetracked, eh?

The reality of the day is the WonderAccountants’ decision to retire. A hair-raising contemporary reality that has nary a thing to do with all that historical, ancestral babble. 😀

ANOTHER insanely hot day!

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{chortle!} Yea, verily: some of us  have NO measurable IQ points!

Just stumbled back in the house from peregrinating around the neighborhood in the noonday heat.

Hey! Why not? It’s only 105 degrees out there!

No IQ, eh?

Ohhhhh well. At least I got the desired exercise.

Tony the Romanian Landlord caught up with me in his car. Handing out his religious propaganda!

boyoboy! 

WHY do people do that? Do they seriously think they can convert you to their faith by pestering you?

I assume he does: otherwise he wouldn’t bother. 😀

Certainly is annoying, though.

It is seriously hotter than the hubs of Hades just now! Got back to the house without fainting dead away…some kinda miracle, I reckon.

I had fantasized that I might walk down to one of the three nearby grocery stores to pick up a couple of idle necessities. But…ahhh…. No! Nope! No!Way too hot to hike several blocks and then haul a couple bags of loot back home.

Will have to wait till dawn cracks tomorrow. The Sprouts opens at 7:00 a.m. And I think the Albertson’s may, too. If I’m at the door as they unlock the place, I should be able to grab some loot and then get back to the house before the heat is at the make-you-faint level.

Daydreaming about my long-late grandmother. She was a fast one! Apparently she would fu*k anything that had two feet, and some that had more than that.

My mother once related a story of coming home from school to her grandmother’s house, walking into the living room, and finding her own mother on the floor — in action — with a current paramour. My mother was a grade-school kid at the time and had no idea of what they were up to! 😀

Her first adventure in sex ed, apparently.

If I’m not mistaken (big IF), the grandmother tossed the floozy out, having learned from my young mother of the day’s shenanigans.

Often I wonder what on earth you’d do if you had a daughter who was mentally damaged in the sex department — as appears to have been the case with my mother’s wild-a$$ed mother. You certainly couldn’t have her around an adolescent child.

So…yeah: I believe the grandmother evicted her daughter at that point. Really….what else could she have done? Evidently, the younger woman was mentally ill — to the point where she had little or no control over her behavior. The only way to protect the girl, one figures, would be to show the mother the door.

Welp….it’s too hot to breathe in here just now. So it’s off to the bedroom with a phalanx of fans working. Away!!!

Update on Yesterday…

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LOL!  It got stupider and stupider. I sweartagawd!

So today’s proposed old-lady babysitter never showed up. AWWWWWW!  What a shame!

She probably went to the neighborhood street labeled “Lane.” I’m on the street labeled “Way.”

Josie, the occupant of the “Lane” house, lives alone and dwells in fear. She will NOT open the door to anyone she doesn’t know. So if the wannabe babysitter went to her place, she rang the doorbell and…nothing happened.

Awwww….what a shame!

Welp, I ain’t about to do anything about it. Just gunna lay low. I do NOT like people lurking around underfoot — especially not strangers. If I need or want someone here to keep me company or fend off the sh!theads, I’ll call someone of my own choosing.

M’hijito dragged me out to the Mayo today. After some inspection, the doc didn’t seem to find anything drastically wrong. So with any luck, I should be free of further harassment from that quarter, at least for awhile.

The Mayo Clinic is on the freaking far side of the galaxy from our neighborhood: located, not surprisingly, in one of the Upper Richistans. So any time we have to visit our doctor(s) out there, we face one helluva drive. As for me, I’ll make one or two appointments a year, just to stay on their rolls. If you don’t show up, they drop you…and then when you do need a really first-rate doctor, you don’t have a snowball’s chance.

What a place we live in!

Another Icky Day Comin’ Up the Pike….

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LITERALLY icky: Just got back from a humid walk with Ruby the Corgi. It is so hot and so wet out there that literally, the air feels sticky. Feels like Saudi Arabia: a hot and wet outpost of Hell.

Now some woman that my son hired to babysit me is supposed to show up pretty soon. Goodie gumdrops!

Not to say dayum! 

He thinks I’ve advanced enough into senility that I shouldn’t be left alone. Ohhhkayyy….

Meanwhile, I am a very private person. I don’t enjoy people lurking around me, and I especially don’t welcome strangers hanging over my shoulder. But the next stage, as you no doubt can intuit, is going to be locking me into an institution. And…well…I’d rather die, thank you.

So if a babysitter lurking around will forestall that horror, let’s do it.

Ugh!

It’s after 8:00 and the babysitter hasn’t shown up. Probably went to the wrong house. The resident there, a woman named Josie, repels all boarders. 😀

Seriously: she will NOT answer the door unless she knows the person who’s out therel.

We have identical street numbers on adjacent roads with nearly identical names: Erewhon Road and Erewhon Lane. So delivery people and assorted newbies invariably get lost here.

Meanwhile, Josie lives in terror. She got the house — which belonged to SDXB until he went into battle with Tony the Romanian Landlord and fled to Sun City. At that point the city purchased it for a song and GAVE it to her.

Yeah. The city was building an airport extension, which would place her house smack in the middle of a runway. So our honored civic leaders  bought SDXB’s house and gave it to her in exchange for her shack in South Phoenix.

More power to her. But…well….if you’re gonna live in a middle-class neighborhood, you need to learn middle-class customs.

😀

Speaking of the which…ohhhh gawd! The other day Josie reported that a pipe under a sink in the kitchen burst. FLOODED the entire kitchen, laundry room, dining room, and living room!!!!!

Holeeeee maquerel!

One of the advantages of being on the city’s dole, though, is that they cover little catastrophes like this. So apparently, other than being put out for a few days and maybe having some furniture damaged, this misadventure isn’t going to cost her much.

What a horror show…

Speaking of horror shows, mine has yet to start this morning. As I mentioned, M’jito’s proposed babysitter has yet to show. She’s a half-hour late. Was supposed to have been here at 8:00; it’s after 8:30 now.

Maybe I got the time wrong? If she was slated to surface earlier than 8:00 a.m., she missed me.

Well…frankly, I’m not up for a quarrel with my honored son, so I reckon I’ll refrain from calling him and asking about her. Later…but not right this minute.

Okayyyyy….I’ve got on my calendar that I’m supposed to go to the dentist today. Was he going to take me? Was this babysitter supposed to take me? No clue. Emailed to ask: so far, no response.

Maybe I should call and cancel the dentist’s appointment? I really can’t afford to pay for a missed appointment.

Here’s a yesterday’s email from him saying “expect me tomorrow.” Presumably that refers to this morning’s junket. So presumably he’s driving me to the dentist.

Goodie gumdrops.

Dayum! I don’t wanna do this today!

On the other hand…I don’t wanna go to the dentist any day. So what difference does it make?

 

Thank Goodness for Amazon!

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Saudi-style weather: Hot, wet, sticky. Eighty-four degrees right now, at 7:20 in the morning: 105 predicted.

Out the door with the corgi, at dawn’s early light. Everyone else has the same idea: we have to circumvent the park to evade the potential dog fights.

Cleaning lady on her way this morning. That….

wait wait wait! It’s not the cleaning lady! WonderAccountant (who lives across the street, BTW) reports that her understanding is the woman who is supposed to show up is more on the order of a babysitter…hired by Dear Son.

Ohhhhh gooooodie…  

Just what I need: someone new to poke her nose into my business…

Mwa ha ha! Today, what we’ll have her poke her nose into is a grueling trip to Sprouts!  Poor babe….

Seriously: I need a few grocery items, but not enough to justify trudging block after block through 100-degree heat. If any such person does show up, what we’ll do right off the bat is put her up to schlepping around.

Hmmmmm……  Along that line, d’you suppose Sprouts delivers? If it does…how does one engineer that?

Hmmmmm….. They do deliver, but….the process to order up stuff is brain-banging. And it’s not clear that they deliver in this area.

Anyway, I can order up the dawg food from Amazon. Fresh groceries: apparently not so much.

Well. Let’s see if the proposed woman shows up here. If she does, first thing we do to make her crazy is ask her to schlep us over to the Sprouts. From there: straight downhill, the poor child!

😀

 

“SIZZLE!”

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You think I jest?

Nay, verily: it is SIZZLING hot out there, on the streets, in the park, in the grassy yards. Hoooleee maquerel!

Just staggered back in the house. Fortunately, I had enough presence of mind to NOT take the dawg with me when I left the Funny Farm a couple of hours ago.

That was because I’d planned to go by the nearby office of a lawyer-for-all-trades, as it were, and ask him to help ensure that, when I croak over, everything in my sticky little hands will transfer smoothly, quickly, and with ZERO hassle to my good son.

In theory, it should: I have no other heirs. None that I know of, anyway. But who knows? We’re talkin’ bucks here. What with the wonders of inflation, the house alone is worth in the vicinity of a million bucks. And I want every single one of those bucks to go straight to him.

Don’t you know that someone, somewhere will jump into that fray and try to rip off a chunk of that bread dough?

Yeah.

So. Get lawyer now. Get will scam-proofed. Get everything set up for my excellent son. 

Navigating to said lawyer’s office, in the absence of a car, entails traipsing through UNGAWDLY heat. And alas, at this point — a little after 4:00 in the afternoon — this old bat is in no shape to trudge over there right this minute.

Tomorrow.

Let’s hope I live until tomorrow, eh? 😀

I’ll charge over there in the morning, along about when I hope they open. Not open yet? Coffee shop lurks right next door!

My son’s father is a lawyer…of the retired variety. What I’m hoping is that I can set things up with this new guy, and then DXH can review whatever we come up with to be sure it’s OK. If not, the two can work together to make it OK.

This would evade any question of a conflict of interest. And yet still be sure someone who cares is overseeing things.

Í hope.