Coffee heat rising

Angst

AUGH!!!

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Comin’ right on to 7:00 p.m.  No sign of my excellent son. He’d said he would make a grocery-store run and bring a bunch of stuff by here. {chortle!} Apparently, the “run” turned into an expedition! 😀

Seriously: I do hope he’s OK. If he’s gone to the slum market to the north of the ‘Hood, that place ain’t very safe. It sure isn’t a venue one would want to visit in the dark. Or near-dark.

Well…we’ll find out, soon enough.

Hotter than the hubs out there: dusk or no dusk.Walked about six houses down the block to drop a misdelivered piece of mail into a neighbor’s mailbox. Ugh! Not only hot, but humid!

No clouds, but the air feels like a sauna.

Oh, well. The envelope (with its contents) is now in the correct mailbox. The human is back in its house. The dawg is snoozing in her favorite hideaway: under the toilet. And…I wonder where my son is! 

Gosh, I hope he’s OK. If his car is crapped out, I’ll have to hire the Uber guy across the street to schlep me over to wherever the kid is. That, as we know, is because my son has purloined my car, in the belief that his superannuated muther needs to quit driving.

Well…I’ll give him another half-hour or 45 minutes and then pester him on the phone. (Won’t he be pleased?)

What a yucky afternoon/evening!!  Hot, hot, HOT. Humid. And now dark.

Y’know…I’m coming to really dislike living in Phoenix. 

* Driving around this place is a freaking nightmare.
* Walking ain’t any better.
* Where once I rarely felt unsafe, now I get the willies every time I walk to the grocery store.
* The Albertson’s grocery store staff has conceived its own willies! They’ve decided everyone who walks in the door is a shop-lifter, an assumption that does not make for a fun shopping experience.
* The Fry’s ain’t much better…  And it’s a longer walk away, through a shadier neighborhood.

Considering the possibility of moving out to the far, far east side, where my cousin lives in an upper-middle-class tract. Problem is, it’s a LONG way from my son’s present home: damn near an hour’s drive through Phoenix’s bat-sh!t traffic. He sure ain’t gonna move out there because I do: his dad and New Wife live here in the ‘Hood.

So…I reckon as long as he’s here, I’m stuck here. Could be worse, o’course: lots worse. This is a nice neighborhood, very centrally located, with three major grocery stores in easy walking distance and a train and a raft of busses and…on and on. Dunno where I’d go that’s any better.

***

Ah hah! Got him on the phone. He was (audibly) in a restaurant, apparently with his Dad and New Wife. That’s good!  Sorry to pester him…but happy to hear he’s with loved ones and glad he’s not out there driving around the dark. 😀

Never a proverbial dull moment….

G*d-D***ed PHONE

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Y’know, I’m just about at the point where I can imagine not having a phone at all. Not ANY phone!

These days a phone — especially a land line — is more of a nuisance than a convenience. This morning the f*kin land line jangled for the third time — BEFORE 9:00 A.M.! — with a**holes trying to hustle me. Last time, I took a DEEEEEP breath and SHRIEKED INTO THE GODDAM PHONE as loud as I could manage:

G-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-H…..

The convicts hired to hustle you over the phone are wearing headphones.

So when you SCREAM into the phone at the top of your voice, that actually hurts the bastards’ ears. And interestingly, the SHRIEK-a-thon technique has cut the number of pestering nuisance calls. Quite a lot: I’d say by about 80 percent.

Telephone soliciting should be against the law.

But that would put a dent in our “freedom of speech,” right? Free to bug you and me….

Seriously, though: if you blast each ba*tard who calls with the loudest noise you can muster, that DOES bite into the flood of phone solicitations. An air horn would do the job, if screaming is not your preference.

Many of the jerks calling you in the early hours of the day (and all the rest of the hours…) are calling from inside prisons.

Yes. Phone soliciting is a prison enterprise. Check it out: just google phone soliciting prison industry, and you learn all about a gigantic scam tailored for convicted scammers and other criminals.

Hey…you’ve got a crew of crooks. Why not put ’em to work doing what they do best?

Skeeert!!

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LOL!  Now what on EARTH is the matter with me!!?????

How weird is this?  I’m scared! 

No, nothing’s going on, other than high clouds and a brisk wind.

No, no burglars seem to be lurking about.

No, nothing’s wrong with the house — not that I can tell, anyhow.

No, the sky is not falling.

No, the dog is not on alert. She’s snoozing at the foot of the bed, fully unalarmed.

Well…yeah: we do have some brisk winds and some lively clouds. But they all seem to be staying aloft. 😀

So. Whence this weird, uneasy feeling that SOME damnfool thing is either happening or about to happen?

Skeert!!!!!!!

Bing Bong!!$$!

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Yeah: come the middle of the lunch hour (you thought you were gonna be allowed to have something to eat??), BING BONG goes the doorbell.

Forgodsake. City water meter guy.

He descends on the equipment. Bop bop bang bang fix fiddle fiddle... They’re gonna bill me for his services, sez he.

Whaddaya bet that’ll be a couple hundred bucks. Or more….

No idea what he was supposedly repairing. No leak. No…nothing that I can tell is on the fritz.

Except, presumably, my bank account….

The Siege of the Front Yard

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So the sprinkler is running in the front yard, outside the walled patio. It’s the kind of cheap little metal sprinkler that screws on to the end of a hose. So…given our late experiences with our patio thieves, now I need to wait till the watering cycle ends; then RUN out there, unscrew the sprinkler, and bring in inside.

Or at least hide it somewhere in front.

Nahhh….prob’ly bring it in will be safest.

Can you imagine??  Having to run in circles and jump hoops to keep the local morons from stealing ordinary junk like sprinklers and bird feeders?

The hummers’ feeders are now inside, or, to the extent that some of them are still hanging up, ensconced in the backyard.

I’m assuming that any idiot who would steal a hummingbird feeder — over and over and over again! — will soon come along and steal the water sprinklers off the frontyard hose. So…need to let that water run about 20 or 30 minutes; then run outside and rescue the sprinklers from the front-yard hose. Bring them inside and hide them in the garage.

I ask you: How stupid IS this?

Really, it makes living in the Beatitudes old-folkerie look good: someone else can deal with the rampant morons!

***

Y’know…this stuff is making me awfully depressed. 

Honestly: what kind of morons steal bird-feeders and lawn sprayers? And do I really want to stay here sharing a neighborhood with jerks like that? Maybe it’s time to move somewhere else!

Problem is, now that I’m old (with a vengeance!), about the only option for moving is to decamp to the Beatitudes: a dreary old-folkerie where they babysit you into the next world. And honestly: that’s not where I want to spend the last months or years of my life! 

Horrors!

Truly: I love my home, and I absolutely positively do NOT want to move into an institution. Horrors, indeed!

Yes, sooner or later it no doubt will be inevitable, unless I’m lucky and I drop dead. But I just want to put off that horrible inevitability as long as possible.

Jerk neighbors who dork with your yard ornaments and your sprinkling system sure as hell don’t make that easy! 😀

Hmmmm…..  Maybe a strategy might be to put up some small, discreet cameras out there. Let them run 24 hours or so. And see if they don’t capture our perps in the act. If I could catch them, I could report them to the police — or to their daddies — and bring a stop to the shenanigans.