Coffee heat rising

Angst

Holeee Shee-ut…

by

Waiting for the cops to show up.

And waiting…and waiting…and waiting….

Some charmer was sniffing around the front and the east side of the house. Seems to be gone now.

After SDXB chased off his burglars — caught them in the living room and waved his pistol at them — he called the cops. Said it was over 40 minutes before they showed up. At two in the morning…

That was a couple years ago…and one of the immediate causes for his moving to lovely, boring Sun City.

No sign of a gendarme here. Haven’t been tracking the wait time….

**
Okay
They finally appear.
***

Well, one lonely cop shows up. By the time he gets here, there’s not a soul around. Ruby is quiescent. Presumably our visitor has moved on.

I hope.

Garrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
Dammit, I have got to get out to the range and practice with my father’s pistol!!!

More to the point, I probably need to get a shotgun. Much easier to hit an uninvited visitor.

Cripes! Here’s a cop copter, a couple blocks to the north of us. That suggests Josie must have called them, too.

A uniformed officer showed up at the door about ten minutes after I called. That’s darned good  response time — usually it takes them at least twenty minutes to surface.

Phoenix…
What a garden spot!

Fundamental Questions of Olde Age

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What am I doing?

What am I supposed to be doing?

Who the Hell am I?

And why am I here?

Yes. There we have the fundamental questions
that confront the aging mind.

😀

Was just about to fly out the door and trudge down to the ever-pricey AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store, there to buy some swell stuff for the mid-day dinner. Charging around, it occurred to me to wonder…

* Waitaminit! What’s in the freezer?
* Waitanotherminit!! Whats wrong with this spectacularly fancy piece of spectacularly expensive steak?

and…

* Is there some REASON I can’t add this fresh, crisp asparagus to the menu?
* What??? No potatoes? Really??? What’s wrong with a fistful of freshly cooked pasta?

Sometimes I do wonder what’s wrong with me. At least this noon I escape the vicissitudes of old-age brain haze (for once!!), come away with what will be a very nice dinner, and not have to shell out another dime for it.

***

Y’know…ten years ago — even five years ago — it would never have occurred to me to traipse out into the (pricey!!!!) wilds to buy the makings for today’s mid-day feast. I would have known what was in the fridge. I would have known there was no need to go charging out in the traffic and scoop up $30 worth of fancy food and wine at AJ’s.

So…

Now we scribble while we wait for the kettle of water to come to a boil for the pasta. We swill wine by way of passing the time. And we wonder which drain our IQ points trickled down.

<<sigh>>

Worrying about SDXB and NG (New Girlfriend). He says she’s under the weather…apparently seriously so.

This is highly worrisome: first because she’s a lovely person and does not deserve to be sick; and second because he’s transparently in love with her and needs to have her in his life.

***

And in the Department of Weirdness…

Last  night I dreamed of returning to the sweet middle-class Berkeley  neighborhood where the relatives who raised my mother lived. And…

…how much I miss those women
…how much I miss Berkeley
…how much I miss the San Francisco Bay Area
…Oh hell! How much I miss my mother

How dast she smoke herself into the grave?

If heroin peddlers and cocaine peddlers and even marijuana peddlers are regarded as criminals, why the Hell aren’t tobacco peddlers legally recognized as the craven murderers that they are?

Ah well…movin’ on.

Maybe we’re all craven murderers? is that possible?

Daydreaming on in this vein, I found myself remembering Berkeley and the oh-so-long dead relatives, so vividly that they seemed almost real, almost here: and I wondered WTF is wrong with me.

If this is senility, my friends…then senility is freakin’ weird!

One Effin’ Nightmare After Another…

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Main Nightmare of the Day: SDXB’s excellent New Girlfriend is enjoying an Adventure in Medical Science. Trying to get thru to him on the phone today to see how that’s going and offer moral support: can’t get through.

Can’t tell whether it’s my phone (think it is) or his phone or the effin’ phone company at work. Call an operator. Spend half an hour or 45 minutes on a runaround. NOTHING is fixed. No phone service. No way to reach SDXB easily.

His annoying “automated phone answering system” message takes you NOWHERE. Nothing you do gets you anywhere.

Try again: end up in the same fruitless runaround.

This leaves me SO frustrated I can’t even remember the several other aggravations of the day. F*** It! Let’s just go to the grocery store and diddle away some cash on a new bottle of wine.

How do I hate life in the Twentieth Century?

Let me count the ways….

Just a LITTLE peace and quiet, puhleeze?

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Uh huh... 7:46 p.m…. and it’s

ROAAAAARRRR roooarrrrr buzzzzzzzzzzz whizzz roar buzz…

Cop helicopter overhead. Dayum! Am I tired of this routine or tired of this routine?

He buzzes around in circles over the northwest section of the ‘Hood: right above the house where SDXB and I lived together for a couple of years before parting ways, then buying our own shacks here in the neighborhood.

Lovely: I guess I should be glad we split up and moved away from that corner.

SDXB, I’m sure, is very glad he moved to Sun City, where the local crooks rarely feel it’s worth the effort to stage a home invasion.

Not altogether, though.

LOL! I can remember the panic my mother enjoyed when they had a couple of guys who would climb up on top of a car in a carport (there were no enclosed garages in that garden spot), slide open the ceiling hatch, climb into the attic, make their way across the rafters to the area of the living room, cut a hole in that ceiling, and hop down into the living room. Yes: dwelling in the land of the somnolent and the half-dead did not guarantee freedom from burglars.

😀

Hm. Sounds like the cop copter has already flown away. Must have chased our boys on down the road.

We live directly south of one of the highest-crime ZIP codes in the state. Every now and again the action spills over into the ‘Hood, which provides us a little entertainment.

Ruby will bark at our guests, but weighing only abut 20 pounds does naught for her potential as a threat. Really: one does need to be armed in these parts.

Arizona. What a friggin’ garden spot!

STOP THE WORLD!

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I wanna get off!

LOL! It’s 8:30 in the morning; breakfast is not made, coffee is not made, California is burning down, and the world is going to Hell on a proverbial handcart.

SOMETHING is wrong with the pool, but I’ll be dayumed if I can figure out what it is. Calling Pool Dude has involved not one, not two, but three telephone runarounds. And now the damn thing seems to be working all right, so when he shows up here, having made a special trip in response to my squawking, he will find exactly NOTHING wrong with it.

The phone company has dorked up its service, so trying to find a phone number through Directory Assistance entails a hair-tearing runaround. When you do reach a person, either they don’t speak English well enough to understand what you’re asking or they’re so plug-stupid you can’t MAKE them understand.

Well…Pool Dude shouldn’t be too infuriated. He forgot to pick up his check last time he dropped by. So even if nothing gets done or fixed, at least he’ll walk away with a hundred-and-a-quarter in his hand.

But now I can’t take poor l’il Ruby the Corgi for a walk, because we’ve gotta wait around all morning for Pool Dude to show up. If he ever does.

huh!  Y’know…you don’t think (well, at least I don’t think) about how much of your day’s organization depends on the stack of chores you have to do first thing in the morning. Dork up even one of those, and your whole darned day is likely to be dorked!

Hmmm… Ever think you went into the WRONG BUSINESS?

Pool Dude gets $125 to come once a month and maintain the Hole in the Ground Into Which to Pour Money. He’s here…oh…maybe half an hour.

Consider that. If he has a half-dozen customers a day, AND he only works five days a week, then…hmmmmm…. 6 customers x 5 days/week = 30 customers a week.

So… 30 x 125 = $3750 a week.

LOL! Can that be right?

Naaaahhh…couldn’t be. It’s English-Major Math.

First off, snabbing six customers a day would be quite a marketing trick, especially since the woods are full of pool dudes AND cleaning your pool is not very difficult — a large proportion of pool owners take care of their holes-in-the-ground themselves.

But…but…even if he had only half that many customers, he’d still be making over $1800 a month. That would put a few McDonalds’s on your table. Especially since you could get away with not reporting whatever was forked over to you in cash. Hmmm…

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…  The deadbolt on the east side gate is busted.

Hooo-raayyyy! Now I get to sit around all day waiting for the locksmith to show up and fix that.  He’ll prob’ly show up around 4:40 this afternoon. Right?

Jeez. Makes living in a Box in the Sky look good.

****

Trash hauled to alley.

Deadbolt dorked with: still busted. So yeah: sit around all day waiting for the locksmith.

Colder’n’aBygawd out there.

Well. No: not really. Surely Bygawds make frost and snow. Cars on the street are not even slightly frosted. But…presumably for arcane reasons, it SEEMS preternaturally chilly outside this morning.

Hm. We’re told, via Google Gnus, that Southern California’s wind is expected to come up again today. That usually means we get some wind, too…but just now the air is still as Death. Dunno what’s up…and probably don’t wanna know what’s up.

The side gate to the backyard is busted. Well: its lock is busted. That means somehow I’ve gotta get Lock Dude over here to fix it. Which means I can’t go to the grocery store at my convenience.

LOL! Ain’t life rough?

Two careers I’m secretly glad I couldn’t even begin to qualify for: Pool maintenance dudette and locksmith.

****************

Gadzooks! It just goes on and on!

Stupidly, I got it into my little pea brain to toss the pooch in the car and take a li’l sight-seeing drive. Maybe go down to Encanto park…get out, explore around, chase a few ducks…i dunno. Just pass some time with relatively little annoyance and hassle.

Dumb, huh?

The result of this little fugue was that we spent the whole damn afternoon piddling around.

If Pool Dude showed up, I missed him (he seems not to have left a bill).

Deadbolt never got fixed or even looked at.

Wonder-Cleaning-Lady showed up at the door along about 4:30, just as I was about to plop my exhausted a$$ in an easy chair.

Well, I sure as heck can’t complain about this wonderful woman. All I can say is i can’t believe that woman cleans not one, not two, but THREE houses in one day!

Augh, is all I can say to that.

 

 

 

Apocalypse!

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Good Lord! Have you been following the nightmare news out of Southern California?

Sooooo thankful that we don’t live there anymore.

We moved to Long Beach, where I was born in another century, after my father changed jobs from Standard Oil to Union Oil. Upshot of that shift was that instead of shipping out of northern California’s East Bay (he was a merchant marine deck officer), he docked in Southern California.

Sooo…if the present apocalypse were going on 20 or 30 years ago, we would be right in the middle of it.

In Long Beach, my mother lived in terror of exactly the kind of conflagrations we’re seeing today. The potential for fires like these has always existed, though it wasn’t anything the normal person on the street thought about.

Arizona presents a similar potential, though as far as I can tell, it doesn’t apply inside the major cities. Well…not to the degree that it applies in Southern California. But that potential is one of the reasons I chose not to move up to the little mountain town of Payson when several of my friends did so. We do get some major forest fires…but because many, many fewer people live here, our fires don’t get the kind of publicity we see coming out of Southern California now.

But gosh, am I ever glad I don’t live in California now!