Coffee heat rising

Angst

Arrrrghhhh!!!!!

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Puhleeeezzze, li’l computer! Let me enter ONE (1) new post without another disaster!

Just got sat down to wrestle with this thing, when BING -BONGGGGGG!!

Yard dude at the front door.

I’m so harried with the damn computer that i don’t remember why I called him!!!!!

Nor, in the course of yakking with him, does it come to me.

Well….you can be sure it WILL come to me…along about two or three hours from now.

And what will it BE?

You can be damn sure it will be something that affects the entire system and probably chokes the water off to every plant on the property.

STOP THE WORLD!
I WANNA GET OFF!!!

WTF?????

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Okay, friends…and yes, dear foes: I’m about to tell you something I probably shouldn’t tell you. Or anyone.

Stuff is scaring the Hell out of me…even though it probably shouldn’t.

Weird stuff. Stupid stuff. Even serious rational stuff.

For example…

I lost my bicycle. 

Yeah. Lost it BIG time. Don’t know where. Don’t know how. Have only the vaguest idea of when.

The other day I rode my beloved old gaudy pink bicycle through the ‘Hood and over into the classic North Central neighborhood just to the east of here.

That neighborhood is dominated by two historic Catholic high schools — Xavier and Brophy Preparatory — which are surrounded by staunchly middle-class, boring little homes.

As I got tireder and hotter, I came to light at the home of a woman who was hanging out on her front porch. She invited me to take a seat and rest.

It became apparent, before long, that I probably should not ride my bike home in the heat, especially in the fagged-out state I was exhibiting. She brought out a phone, and we called my son.

Shortly, he showed up in his car, coming to light in front of her house.

He loaded me into the vehicle, and we left: he brought me home and deposited me in the air-conditioning.

Here’s where it gets weird: He apparently forgot to load the bike into his vehicle — or didn’t realize he needed to. When we got home: no beloved pink bike! 

I was very much overheated and not in any state for anything more than tumbling into the sack with a cold washcloth on my head. He drove me over to St. Joseph’s hospital, where, by the time we arrived, I had pretty well recovered and cooled down into a safe status. We came home. I forgot all about the bike…until the next morning, when I realized it is GONE!

I want my bike back! 

Getting weirder now: We can’t figure out where we left it. If we left it anywhere. I thought we’d brought it home and left it in the garage.

But it’s not in the garage. Or inside the house. Or in the backyard. Or…anyplace we can imagine.

Did I actually ride my bike over to the high-school neighborhood and carelessly leave it there, when M’Hijito arrived and toted me off?  Dunno. I have no memory of that. He says not. But…it’s a pretty vague-sounding “not.” Maybe I actually walked into that neighborhood???

If so, where the Hell is the bike?

So… I’m bereft at the loss of a beloved bicycle. But more than that: I’m scared sh!tless at the loss of my IQ points!!!  WTF? WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED? 

That is what’s scaring me. Really, really scaring me.

It’s hotter than the Hubs of Hades outdoors today: temps over 110. So walking back over into that neighborhood and trying to explore around is pretty much out of the question.

And M’hijito is (quite reasonably) pretty much out of patience with this shenanigan. He has a job (can you imagine??) and cannot take off to wander around searching for a bike that by now has probably been spirited off to Yuma.

Dunno whether he recognizes that a big, scary part of this moment of lunacy is that I genuinely cannot remember what actually happened at that lady’s house, not in any detail at all. So frankly, I don’t know if we left the bike there…or what. Probably did…but at this point anything’s possible.

At 6:00 p.m., it’s 108 in the shade of the back porch. Too hot, by far, to go exploring around North Central Phoenix — not that we’d  be likely to find anything.

Meanwhile, M’jito, deeply alarmed with this weird behavior of mine, has kiped my car and locked it into his garage. So I can’t climb into it and drive it around that neighborhood on a searching expedition.

Soooo… I guess my beloved pink bike is gone. As in GONE gone. Along with a few of my brain cells, presumably….

Jayzuz! Don’t get old, whatever ya do!!!

Did She Know?

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The murder weapon…

Did the woman who murdered my mother know what she was doing?

Well…there is an element of ambiguity there. Luella was, after all, stupid as a post, a perfect match for her less-than-brilliant spouse.

But Jeez! How hard is it to understand “You must clean all produce thoroughly AND sanitize it, lest you come down with amoebic dysentery, which will put you in the hospital and may even kill you”?

Really, how hard IS that? Especially if you’re sat down in a classroom and made to WATCH the process, step by step, for sanitizing contaminated produce?

Back in the 1950s, American wives who were sent out to Saudi Arabia to accompany their spouses, on contract with Aramco, were required to take classes in how to prepare food safely and how to keep their families well. One point of those classes was to convince you to clean your food thoroughly before cooking it or putting it (raw, as in the case of salad greens) on the table.

There was nothing difficult about these lessons:

*Germs
*Germs make you sick
*Germs make your kids sick
*Germs can even kill you and your kids.
*So you must wash all your food thoroughly to get rid of the germs.
*This especially applies to things you eat raw, such as salad greens.

Does this seem hard to you?

Seemed pretty self-evident to the ten-year-old me. But I do remember my parents’ idiot friend, Luella, standing in the kitchen and preparing a cabbage salad…without ever so much as rinsing off the leaves. And I remember her handing me pieces of raw, unwashed cabbage greens to munch on, as she puttered about the kitchen.

This treat did nothing to me. Not unduly surprising, since I arrived in Saudi Arabia as a two-year-old and, during the time we spent there, was exposed to every Middle Eastern germ known to personkind.

But…that yummy salad made my mother very, VERY sick. Desperately sick.

The company sent her back to New York, where she was hospitalized for weeks and dosed with every treatment known and imagined to beat back the microbes.

She spent a good two or three weeks in the Ras Tanura hospital before the company doctors felt it was safe to fly her back to New York, where she spent the better part of another month in in treatment – drastic treatment.

That STUPID, evil woman apparently poisoned my mother on purpose.

What did she think it would do to her? Probably nothing. She was so stupid she didn’t understand difficult concepts like the germ theory. But she had been told about it. And told about it. And told about it again and again. If she’d had a synapse between her ears, she would have understood that unwashed produce grown in fields fertilized by human feces was likely to make you good and sick. How hard IS that to understand?

To this day, I remain convinced that Luella quite deliberately sickened my mother by quite deliberately neglecting to sanitize the dinner produce. What…A…Witch!

At any rate, my mother did survive, though she was never fully well again. Eventually she did die of a gastric cancer – to what extent it was related to the parasitic infection and the ferocious treatment, I do not know. But…I do remain convinced, to this day, that Luella killed my mother.*

I don’t get unconvinced easily, y’know…

*Actually, while Luella had a lot to do with it, the tobacco manufacturers went a long way toward killing my mother. She was addicted to nicotine, and so, thanks to that habit, she smoked herself into the grave. 

Report from the Department of Weird Experiences

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Good grief! If it hadn’t been so funny — so goofy — I’d be hiding under the bed right now.

Did you know there are people in this world who cannot imagine why anyone would want to buy a chilled bottle of white wine? Some of those folks reside behind the customer service desk in a certain beloved nearby liquor store.

No kidding!  Hey!  What’s wrong with this fine room-temperature swiggle of white???

This has been one of those days when your fellow citizens are SO goony, SO ignorant, SO far out in left field that you simply have no clue how to respond.

Seriously: Every which way I’ve turned, lurking there has been another wacksh!t experience, another goofball customer “service” clerk, another inexplicable weirdness…to the point where it all comes out kinda hilarious.

But y’know…you hafta love them all! Think how boring this world would be without them! 😀

This morning I hit my favorite local strip mall, right up at the corner of Conduit of Blight and 19th Avenue.

And yeah: you DO have to love Latino culture to love that mall.

Yeah, you DO have to be White Trash yourself to appreciate how cool, how fun, how slippery, how smart the merchants up there are. Yea verily, you need to be such WT that you wish your Daddy were here to blaze the trail through that place for you. Ohhhhh dayum, do you wish your Daddy were here!! And would you love to hear the (hilarious) opinions he would’ve formed, after a day among the locals.

I’d love to be able to say I’d be as entertained as Daddy would’ve been by today’s antics of the locals. But you know…when he was alive I couldn’t read his mind. Now that he’s deader than a doornail, I have no idea whe he would’ve thought.

Well. I have an idea. But I sure as hell could have not been able to guarantee he would’ve thought that.

But ohhhhh… Yeah. He would’ve been…

amused
pissed
wilied up
out of patience
and telling his daughter to get the f*** outta there.

😀

But when you’re my daddy’s daughter, watching a$$holes dig themselves into a$$hole ditches is…well…damn funny.

 

Makes the Old Folkerie Look Good…

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Gawd, I never imagined I’d have any such thought!  But here it is, not even 6 in the morning, and I’m being blitzed with hassle after hassle after HASSLE.

Got to take the dog for a walk before it gets hot — which means we’ve gotta get out the door NOW.

The pool is suffocating in dead leaves. WHERE is Pool Dude????  Amazon just delivered a new net for the leaf catcher, the original having plain worn out. 

Put that out back with a note for Pool Dude. No guarantee the guy is gonna show up.

Pool cleaning is one of the “professions” for which the state prison system trains its residents. So…that means chances are good that your pool cleaner is an ex-convict: not exactly the soul of reliability. I should wait here and see if he shows up, but you KNOW that if I do that, the dog will not get out for her walk. Because…

* The guy won’t show up before 10 a.m., by which time outside temps will be pushing 108 degrees; or
* The guy won’t show up at all.

Meanwhile, to get to the grocery store on foot before it gets too hot to walk up there (my son having purloined my car), I need to get started on that errand NOW.

But I can’t do that and take the dog for a walk. And even if I leave for the store right now, by the time I get back it will be too hot to take Ruby out.

My son is probably right: the time draws nigh when I will no longer be able to stay in my home. I’ll either have to move into an apartment (and what am I gonna do with the dog?) or into an old-folks storage bin (and what am I gonna do with the dog?).

Actually, I think some of those places will let you keep your dog. Ducky: how do you keep her from yappiing at every footfall that comes up the hallway?

Speaking of footfalls: better get the dawg out for her walk before the heat comes up: i.e., NOW.

Another (un)Fine Mayo Day

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Ugh! This noon we have to traipse to the far side of the galaxy for another round of poking and prodding at the Mayo.

How can I do without that? Let me count the ways!

Way #1 is simply that I do not believe anything serious ails me. For that reason, this medico-charade strikes me as a fine waste of time and gasoline. (Believe me about that last item: it takes a quarter tank of gas to get out there!)

Meanwhile, other more immediate issues pile up. 

A piece of pool-cleaning equipment fell apart. I need to get to the pool store (walking ten blocks through 114-degree heat) and get it fixed or buy another one.

I need a car i need a car i need a car i need… You can’t live in Phoenix without a car. Therefore, I need a car translates that I either have to go buy one or go rent one.

My son persists in confiscating the Dog Chariot, so I’ve decided to give up and just let him have the damn thing (let him explain that to the insurance company!). To fill its place, I can either walk up to a car rental outfit about eight or ten blocks up the road, or go over to a dealer and buy one.

Theoretically, I’m enjoined from driving. Why? Because I’m old, apparently. Our honored bureaucrats can explain their reasoning (such as it is) to my lawyer.

Complicating this matter, my redoubtable lawyer died a few weeks ago. It appears his partners have simply shut down his office. No one answers the phone. So now I need to find a new lawyer.

It’s been sooooo long since I was married to one of the most prominent lawyers in the state that I now no longer know anyone in practice. The bastards have all retired,  if you can imagine the nerve!

Seriously: no one that I know is still practicing law; at least not that I can find. So somehow I’ve gotta get someone to refer me to someone and then get that second someone to see me and persuade him/her that they want me as a potential client and…ohhhhhhh gawd!

So sooner or later, I’ve got to get off that dime.

And ya know what? I don’t wanna!!! 

Come to think of it…I don’t wanna do anything. Nothin’. Not anything at all.