Coffee heat rising

Angst

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.

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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!

Argh! When was the last time….

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I felt this weary at 6:00 p.m?

LOL! Just this minute, I could very easily fall face-forward in the sack and conker out…

Alas, that would mean that along about 10:00 p.m. — tonight! — I’d be WIDE AWAKE with noooo hope of getting back to sleep…

Ohhhh well….

Dawg and I: just back from a mile-long perambulation of the park. Pretty quiet out there. Numbers of cute li’l kids playing. A couple of athletic teams bopping balls back and forth. The moon glowing brightly against a dark blue dusk sky.

Ahh, the young people are so fine, so much pleasure to watch. It really IS a beautiful neighborhood, full of excellent young folks alive with energy. My idea of energy is getting all the way around the park — about a mile — without conkering out.

The hound, being as lazy and as superannuated as her human. has taken up her position at the foot of the mattress and is busy conkering out. It’s only 7:00, but frankly I doubt if I’ll last much longer than she will… zzzzzzzzzz

*****

After Dark…

LOL! So there I wuz, going on about how beautiful the’Hood is. That was this afternoon. Now it’s coming onto 8 p.m., and what we have is BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Gunfire or backfires — or maybe a bit of both — resonating down from Conduit of Blight Blvd.

Honestly. This kind of sh!t makes the mausoleum that is Sun City look good. Which is sayin’ something.

Something horrible.

Ugh. I should have moved out to Sun City when SDXB did.

Trouble is, I hated living out there with my parents. The Silence of the Mausoleum is just not my idea of pleasant.

On the other hand…the whiz of ricocheting bullets is prob’ly not all that grand, either.

Phoenix: LA. East.
What a dump!

Been there… Yow!

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Holee mackerel!

I can remember smelling the smoke from fires like this when my parents and I lived in Long Beach — back in the Dark Ages. Quite a few ages have passed since those days…and now, here we are again.

Five major fires around L.A. and Malibu… What a horror show! Some estimates claim 11,000 buildings have been torched. Sure am glad I’m not there, these days.

Welp…I guess that yes, I’m glad I’m out of California. It doesn’t say much, though. Arizona is full of forest land, too, equally vulnerable to fires. So far, we’ve been (relatively) lucky. Almost surely, though, as the climate gets hotter and drier, we’ll see more and more fires like this: here, there, and everywhere.

Just look at this stuff. Among the many things that strike you: your dog will have to go to a special animal shelter: you can’t bring him or her with you!

Well…I’d be sleeping on the side of the road with the dog, thank you. But…it strikes me that if one doesn’t have relatives someplace within a far-stretch drive of where one lives, one should make arrangements well before the event for where to go and where to take one’s sidekick. Or always have camping gear stashed in your vehicle, so you and the critters can get up and get out, fast.

Another thing that strikes you: You should keep your gas tank at least 3/4 full. Probably better than that, if at all possible. It means you’d be traipsing to a gas station every time you turn around…but that would be one helluva lot better than running out of gas while you’re on the run from some catastrophe.

Probably also should keep a kit of your regular and emergency medications at hand — either in your car or right by the door you’d go through to get into the car.

Good times, eh?