Coffee heat rising

Angst

Heah Come De Rain!!

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Wow! The Ruby and I just dodged inside in the nick of rain-time!

Failing to realize how fast the storm to the north was barreling our way, I fired up the ‘Cue and stacked my dinner on the grill.

Not one of my smarter moves.

Pressed for time, we got the chow inside — Ruby darting back and forth through the wind and around the lightning and thunderclaps.

Bolted (heh!) dinner.

Back outside: the grill was JUST….BARELY cool enough to close and cover with its plastic veil.

I hope…

But oh my… SO hot! SO humid!! So windy!!!

Something evil this way blows….

….

…and now the wind has stopped.

All is still.

Thunder rolls in from the north.

When you are a small dog. you hunker on the human’s bed and pretend you have no clue anything is up. When you are a small dog’s human, you hunker on your bed and hide under the covers.

😮

And the thunder rolls again…

Gaaahhhh!

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One of the problems w/ being unemployed…uhmm, “retired”…is that your schedule (such as it is) is out out whack with everybody else’s.

11:30 a.m.

JUST ready to draw a bath, get dressed, and head out for errands. This, after loafing all morning playing computer games.

Arise from my leather throne. Stumble toward the back bathroom, reach for the tub faucet. And…

RRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

WHIRWHIRWHIRWHIRWHIR!!!

RRRR  RRRR RRRR!

oh holee sheeut!

Gerardo’s guys are out there cleaning up the unholy mess that is the yard.

Could he have told me they were coming today? Maybe even have let me know they were on the way?

Course not. What else does the Li’l Retired Woman have to do but sit around and twiddle her thumbs?

So now I can’t jump in the shower and get dressed.

Because as you know, the minute my clothes are off and my hair is sopping wet, it’ll be BING BONG!

Now I can’t prepare for the meeting I have with a client, because RRRR  RRRR RRRR! BLAST BLAST BLAST! THUMP WHUMP THUMP! is remarkably counterproductive to thinking through a problem.

Now I won’t have time to run by the store before the client gets here, because I’ll need to sit here and wait till the boys exit, stage left.

Now I’ll have to think through the stuff Client and I need to discuss…to the symphonic roar of weed whackers and leaf blowers.

Now I won’t have time, on the way to the grocer’s, to go by the office complex where the dermatologist’s office supposedly resides and try to find his place. (Yesterday’s expedition was a FAIL!)

LOL!

Isn’t it wacky that all it takes is ONE thing like that to dork up your entire damn day? At least half the things I needed to do this afternoon are not gonna get done.

😮  huh  o-:

Y’know, it doesn’t seem to me that, when I was younger, I used to have this problem. Yes, I would be annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of something I’d planned to do. Yes, it would (or at least could) dork up my schedule. But it didn’t bother me all that much.

It didn’t leave me feeling inconvenienced and pi$$ed.

Strange that I’d feel that much different about it, now that I’m old.

😮

Ohhhhhh sheeeUT! They had to replace a strip of piping: $120!

And, trotting around and inspecting, I see they had to replace a bunch of smaller stuff, too. Ugh!

That whole irrigation system needs to be rebuilt. I had it installed when I moved in here…what? Ten years ago? More than that???? And now, it all being plastic, it’s pretty well shot.

Question is: is it worth having the system dug up and replaced? That will be a several-thousand-dollar job.

And…well…y’know… I’m probably not gonna be here that long. Surely not long enough to recoup the cost of digging up and rebuilding the whole system.

One of three things is gonna happen:

  • I’m gonna drop dead (if I’m lucky).
  • I’ll survive a stroke or a heart attack and end up rotting away in some care home.
  • Or decrepitude will force me to sell the house and move into an old-folkerie.

Arrrrghhhh! What a golden, shining future!

Seriously…

If I were certain my son would move into this house when I’m gone, I’d have that system replaced right now. Then it would be a gift to him (of sorts…paid out of his future inheritance…). It would keep the yard running smoothly, and that would be one fewer headache he’d have to attend to when he moves in here.

Or sells it. If you know the irrigation system is cattywampus, you’re pretty well gonna have to get it fixed before you put the house on the market.

But…the future. Ahhhh the future. How DO you plan for something you can’t really know?

If I dropped dead tomorrow, my son could figure these things out at his leisure, and pretty easily. He being one of the brighter pennies in the Coin Collection of Humanity.

But dontcha just know that ain’t a-gonna happen? Women in my family who haven’t fu*ked themselves to death or smoked themselves to death have lived well into their 90s…with no medical care! They were Christian Scientists! Since I don’t smoke and I don’t frolic with strange men, the chances that I’ll last well into my dotage are pretty good.

Better yet: my Berkeley relatives stayed in their homes right up until the end.

Well, no; that’s not correct: my  great-aunt allowed her son to persuade her to move to an apartment in downtown Berkeley. Smart move, that: the cute little Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff house she lived in was infested with termites. Even though the neighborhood was still a galloping fine investment, it was one that would cost homeowners more and more as those houses aged, aged, and aged some more.

But…but…ahem! About those termites….

WHY DIDN’T GREAT-AUNT OR COUSIN KNOW ABOUT THEM?????

Possibilities:

* Good cousin told his mother to have the place inspected, and she blew him off with a fib to the effect that she had the job done and no termites were found.

* He clued her, but she blew him off with “yes, dear.”

* She had it inspected and got a “no bugs” report.

* She had it inspected, was told it needed an exterminator, and blew it off.

* Neither one of them thought of having the place inspected.

See what I mean about “GAAAH”?

Just stop the damn world so we can get off.

Seriously: I don’t want to leave conundrums like this to M’jihito. Not even one just conundrum.

Quack Day

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A-n-n-d…speaking of doctors, as we were yesterday…in a few minutes I need to head off to a dermatologist. One of my fingernails is lifting right off its bed — for, as far as I can tell, no good reason. I haven’t hurt my hand, and none of the other nails are doing that.

Well…no: not so. You could argue that the thumbnail is starting to do the same thing.

Hmmmmm…. An infection, maybe? Far’s I can remember, I haven’t stuck my paws in any caustic solutions. If I had, you’d think all the nails on that hand would be acting the same way.

This guy is a partner of the beloved Young Doctor Kildare, who once again has left the practice of medicine to take up the leadership of a charitable organization. I hope he and I get on (I adored YDK!), because these are my “doctors in the wild,” as the Mayo calls them. That is: doctors who do NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic.

😀  The Mayo is truly wonderful. But their doctors’ offices are located halfway to Payson. No kidding: they’re on the far northeast side of Scottsdale, almost an hour’s drive from here.

So I’m not inclined to safari all the way out there for just any li’l ailment that I don’t consider life-threatening.

***

So it was over to said local doc. No satisfactory explanation or diagnosis was given. But they want me to go to a neurologist.

And of course, getting in to see this worthy entails a whole new set of endless hoop-jumps! Goodie!

How do they get people to go to doctors at all, these days?

I am JUST NOT UP for this kind of hassle now.

So instead of hurrying home and making a new appointment with the new guy, I cruised up behind YDK’s offices, into a sprawling middle-class housing development of ticky-tacky stick-and-plaster homes.

My dear (late, absconded) friend Elaine and her (now late) husband lived there. I helped them fix up and paint the house when they moved in, which was how I got a good, clear, horrifying look at the place’s construction. What junk!!!! 

And when you drive around (and around and around and around and…) in there, what you see is square mile on square mile of junk.

How the Hell do developers persuade Americans to buy this stuff?

😀

In theory, it ought to be a nice place to live...but…but… Heh: but if you happen to look closely enough to see how the houses are built, you want to RUN away. The structures are as flimsy as flimsy can be. Really: if you’ve ever done any work on one of them, you know that “flimsy” overstates the quality of the construction out there.

So what you have in lovely Moon Valley is mile on square mile on square mile of tossed-together ticky-tacky. Expensive tossed-together ticky-tacky.

Well. Not spectacularly expensive — most of it isn’t, anyway, though there are some fancier(-looking) areas. But these are people’s houses. Houses that are supposed to last a generation or three.

Some of them, you’d be amazed to see last a decade, to say nothing of a generation.

****

Ohhh well. Here’s a rather interesting passage about a new theory of Alzheimer’s, speaking doctoring. It appears rather little is really understood about the condition…and it’s a condition that’s spreading to drastic proportions.

****

Tuesday
August 20

And now it’s quarter six, after several more sleepless hours. Might as well get up and walk the dawg before it gets hot.

What a life! Such as it is…

Fears

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What are you scared of?

We’re all scared of something, whether it’s a real something or a something we blow up all out proportion. Most of the time, the more we think about it, the more we scare ourselves. 😀

Me, I’m scairt of…what?

  • The local burglars. We live…what: about a mile?…south of a dire, drug-ridden slum. On the east, the ‘Hood runs adjacent to an aging, crime-infested apartment shambles. So we have a pretty high crime rate. Everyone here lives behind deadbolts and burglar alarms and steel security screens.
  • Crazies on the road. Every now and again, some hapless driver gets shot because they annoy a fellow homicidal driver. People carry guns around in their cars, and when they get mad, they break the things out and use them.
  • Along the same lines: crazy traffic. You have to stay alert every second you’re behind the steering wheel. If you don’t, you will get into a fine crash. Even if you do stay as alert as a cat after a bird, eventually you probably will be rear-ended or side-slammed anyway.
  • The vicissitudes of old age. Just now I hurt. Have developed some new ailment that I never heard of. It does hurt, yes. And no one seems to have clue to how to treat it or whether it will go away. The Mayo has suggested a drug that will make me sicker than the disease…so…yeah.
  • Doctors. Not my favorite species. And speaking of “just now,” well…just now I’m having wayyy too many dealings with them.

LOL! So it goes.

My mother was scared. Of everything. In particular, she got it into her head that a perp was going to climb up on the roof of their car (which in Sun City was parked under an open carport), open the hatch to the attic, jump up into the attic, walk across a beam to the living room, cut a hole in the ceiling, and jump down into the house. Apparently this actually did happen out there, at least once. It must have been reported in the Sun City newspaperoid.

But….but…if she was so scared of the bogeyman jumping down into the living room from the attic, why not install a burglar alarm in the attic? It would’ve been easy to do.

Weird, though, that I never thought of that until just this minute. Why don’t people think of the obvious?

Probl’y she was afraid my father would pooh-pooh her, tell her she was a lunatic. He was an artist at little-womaning. But if she could show him a news story proving it had happened, surely he could’ve been persuaded. Maybe.

Even SDXB, the Man of Steel, carried a loaded pistol in his car’s glove compartment. Just in case, y’know. And he slept with a shotgun right at hand.

A good thing, despite the implicit paranoia. He needed that shotgun when he got up at 2 in the morning to find a pair of perps had sliced out a window pane and were climbing through the gap into his living room.

Ohhhh well.

I was gonna drive downtown to the Cathedral this morning — it being Sunday — in hopes of picking up old friendships from the choir and…maybe???…even seeing if I can get back on the choir.

Here at the church in uptown central Phoenix our choir director retired. His replacement changed the gist of the choir’s offerings — as was his perfectly reasonable right. The new repertoire was — and is — way, WAY over my head. We had no music teaching where I grew up, in Saudi Arabia. So…I can’t read music unless I can hear it.

That makes it impossible for me to perform with the New! Improved! All Saints choir. Had to drop out.

As it develops, a lot of the folks on the choir did the same: they ended up on the choir at the downtown cathedral. So…I’ve been thinking I would drive down there, sit through the service, and try to schmooze with the choir members a bit. Maybe even get back on the choir.

But…hmmmm….  Maybe not today. Given my current state of decrepitude, it’s just too dangerous to cruise the homicidal streets in the rain. It’s been pouring all night; no sign of a let-up.

Therein lies the barrier to following fellow ex-choir members downtown: “just too dangerous.” You have to park in a covered garage…and I do NOT feel safe there, not even in broad daylight. Certainly would not feel safe walking around there at 10:00 p.m., after choir rehearsal. Maybe if someone would go with me — I could park my car at their house, say — but to go down there alone? Not. So. Much.

So…yeah. An aspect of living in Phoenix scares me so much, I’m afraid to do something I miss terribly and very much want to do.

Scairt!

Soggy Doggy Day II

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Ick! It is SOOO HUMID out there at 7 in the morning that by the time the pooch and I got home from a leisurely mile’s stroll through the ‘Hood, I literally had to peel my jeans off my legs!

NASTY weather, hideously reminiscent of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…only without the beautiful beaches on the Persian Gulf. Just desert, repetitious middle-class tract housing, and swampy heat.

At the crack of dawn.

Garden spot, this….

Actually, it is a garden spot! 😀  Irrigated lots sporting bright green lawns; big ol’ 1950s ranch houses; huge and ancient shade trees; citrus trees abounding.

As we perambulated through the lower reaches of Upper Richistan, we passed a young dad pushing a pair of twins in a double stroller. Dad: white. Kids: brown. Cutest li’l thangs you ever saw in your life…and evidently adopted.

A couple of families over there have taken in youngsters from duskier races. A house on the main road into U.R. is home to two teenaged boys of the African-American persuasion; all the adults in the house are whitey-white. The young fellas like to practice basketball in the front yard, which is grand fun to watch.

As the sun has climbed into the sky, humidity is a balmy 30%. Clouds and haze lurk overhead. The AC labors mightily, groaning to keep the indoors moderately livable.

Loafing, I daydream about the Old Neighborhood, where DXH and I lived for well upwards of a decade after we were married. Loved that place!

It was so beautiful. Here’s the old house. It was so beautiful — even more so inside than outside. Built in 1929. Zillow claims it’s worth something over $1.2 million.

Yeah. Well…whatEVER.

It is a LARGE place, in a famed historic neighborhood, smack in the middle of the city. If you worked downtown, your commute would essentially be nil. Same if you taught at Phoenix College or worked in any of the gerzillion office buildings up & down Central Avenue.

I loved that house. Didn’t want to move. But…

We moved because we didn’t feel safe. The transients and the crime level in those parts will take your breath away. After a couple of hair-raising incidents — German shepherd notwithstanding — we moved to get away from the bums and the crime.

{sigh} I miss it, and I miss our classy neighbors.

But I don’t miss feeling scared half to death at night. Don’t miss the guy who broke in one night, chased off by said German shepherd. Don’t miss the guy who tried to break in, another night, but couldn’t get past the deadbolt. Don’t miss the bum who took up residence in D-XH’s car one night…he flew into a rage when D-XH had the nerve to climb in, start the engine, and begin to pull out of the driveway, headed to work.

No. Encanto is a beautiful historic district. But if you have any common sense, you don’t wanna live there.

Outta here

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M’jito, ever wiser than his de-marbled muther, advised me to delete the most recent post, the one about today’s Adventures in Medical Science.

NATCHERLY, WordPress won’t let me just kill it.

ohhhhhh nooooo…that would be easy, eh?

So: let’s delete the content and replace it with blather: Herewith.

Stop the world…i wanna get off!