Coffee heat rising

Angst

Lordie! Make it stop!!!

by

4:00 a.m.

Charley, my son’s crippled, superannuated dog who is staying here while his human bucket(-list)s around the country with his terminally ill buddy, is up and stumbling around.

His nest has been in the family room, which is a sunken room (very stylish when this house was built) down two steps. Problem is, he can’t negotiate even two steps.

He woke up barking, rousted me out of bed about 20 minutes ago. Needed to go out, apparently.

This entails my having to haul him up off the floor, because he can no longer stand up by himself.

Understand: he weighs 80 pounds.

Poor old fella!

Now he was stuck on the floor. He couldn’t get himself upright.

I began to think I was going to have to call the fire department by way of getting some strong men over here.

FINALLY he managed to get enough traction to stand up.

Out into the backyard.

… ohhhh gawd, what am i gunna do if he gets stuck out there?
… ohhhh gawd, what if a coyote comes over that wall?
… ohhhh gawd, how’m i gunna get enough water to him and, if he can’t stand up, into him to keep him alive until I can get someone over here to help?

Back into the house. Back on the slippery tile floors.

Can’t let him go back into the family room…I’ll never get him outta there.

Grab the dining-room chairs, tip them on their sides, and barricade the ledge between the family room and the dining room/kitchen area.

Holeeee shee-ut!

Move his stuff into the dining room.

Now he’s in here (so am I, tapping away on the computer) and laying on his bed but partly off the bed…yeah, the part that presumably hurts is laying on the hard tile floor… I’m so upset I can’t even think about going back to sleep.

All of this drama in about 25 minutes…wheee!

This is what happens when you outlive your life.

Say a prayer, my friends:

God, please let me go
When it’s time for me to go…

My great-grandmother and her daughter, my great-aunt, each lived far beyond their time. Gree — great-grandmother — was well into her 90s when she passed…in the night after she had prepared a Christmas feast for 15 people and then cleaned up after it and mopped the kitchen floor. Her daughter Gertrude, who held onto her job as executive secretary to the president of a large international bank in San Francisco until they had to order her to retire, was similarly superannuated when she died. Around a hundred years old…her son having to take care of her for several years before the end.

Understand: they were Christian Scientists. They never, ever saw a doctor!

My mother smoked herself to death. Murdered by the tobacco companies. No telling how long she would have lived if it hadn’t been for the profit-making cancer sticks. She turned 65 on the day she died.

Ohh my gawd. Now Charley is back up. He wants to get back into the sunken family room, whence he can’t get out…. Now he’s standing there, panting miserably. It’s 4:30 a.m. sharp. And…he’s headed for the back door, meaning ANOTHER wrestling match to get him back in the house.

***

Back into the house HUFFA HUFFA HUFFA HUFFA steam-engine serenade.

The switch to the light in the side yard is busted. I can’t turn the goddamn light off.

Guess that’s better than not being able to turn it on. But now I’ll have to shell out another $75 or $100 (plus parts) to get the electrician over here to fix it.

***

Finally ensconced back on his bed.

Human stumbles toward her bed.

Ruby, who has been cowering under the toilet, emerges from her hideaway.

{sigh} Now it’s quarter to five. Wonder if I could get another half-hour of sleep in?

oh HELL!

I hear his claws clicking on the tile out there. He must be up again.

Welp. I guess that’s the end of sleeping tonight. Good thing I crashed in exhaustion around 8 or 9 last night….

****

Now he’s ensconced on his bed back here next to my bed.

When he breathes, he goes HUFFA PUFFA PUFFA HUFFA, a lovely lullaby.

ohhhhhh shit!!!!

He’s just settled down and now he’s up again HUFFA PUFFA PUFFA HUFFA…. Circle around circle around circle around doggy-dance…now he’s back down on his bed. Will he PUHLEEZE settle down enough for me to get another 20 minutes of z’s in?

Poor beast…

Settle down? Not a chance in Hell!

Up. Traipse up the hall into the kitchen. Guzzle water. Stumble around stumble around stumble around stumble around. Decide to go back to nest in living room.

Human loses patience.

Dog ensconced in living-room nest. Lights out.

ohhhhh-kayyyy…. Trying again…

by

Wrote a post.

Hit “Publish.”

WordPress disappeared it.

Jeez, thanks, WordPress!

Tired.

Don’t feel like trying to resurrect it. The afternoon is still light out, but I just wanna go to bed.

Hot. Hotter than the Hubs of Hades. A-a-a-nd…overcast.

Overcast and windy.

Get home from a gallivant around the North Central section of town.

In the human’s absence, Charley has filled most of the day with determined loafing, and has been highly successful at it.  The human comes staggering in around 5 p.m. Secures the busted garage door. Sets out chow for itself and for the dogs. Charley bestirs himself to scarf down the whole dishful and lobby for more.

Good grief. This beast has not budged all day, but still is hungry enough to clean out the fridge.
Meanwhile, outside a fine windstorm is working itself up. A surly overcast is riding in from the north.
Dogs fill themselves up, then lobby to go out. And…here’s the amazing thing:
Charley roams out into the backyard, gazes skyward, and clearly understands that those clouds are bearing down on us. So…he stands there and tries to bark them away!
No kidding. He very obviously is ARFing at them in an attempt to chase them off.
It sounds weird…but not as weird as it looked.
😀
At the human’s behest, we retreat inside the house.
Ohhhhh gawd, it is SOOO hot out there! Wunderground says it’s a mere 105 degrees (ohhh yah? on which mountaintop?), with 10- to 16-mph winds. Patio thermometer says 106…good enuf for gummint work. I guess.
***
M’hijito is traveling across the country, westward from Pennsylvania, with his old high school buddy.
It’s buddy’s bucket trip.
Yes. Buddy is dying of a cancer commonly brought on by exposure to asbestos. As in the type of asbestos that is used in, say, schools…
They went to the same schools. K-12.
God help them and all the rest of us. At least one of those schools was infested with asbestos and required a major, spectacularly expensive, and alarming clean-up job.
My son has not complained of any symptoms. Yet. But then….he’s not a doctor.
Buddy is an M.D. His wife is a very accomplished and experienced R.N.
Yeah.
And…holeee shee-ut!
Meanwhile, speaking of my son, he reports that they’re in Ogallala, Nebraska. Egad!

Things [Don’t] Work Out

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September  5

On the way home from today’s spectacularly unproductive junket to the Mayo, I eschewed the freeway and drove south through a middle-class neighborhood of Scottsdale, where my son’s best friend in K-12 used to live.

{there’s a sentence! does it even make sense??}  Two boys. Affluent. Brilliant fathers. Upper-middle-class incomes. Pals at a tony private Episcopalian school. One lived (in a tract house of the tackiest design!) in Scottsdale. The other lived (in an absurdly expensive house of wannabe richerati design) in tony North Central Phoenix.

The buddy’s father was a brilliant man. Chinese. Escaped the horrors of WW II and the Communist revolution. Graduated from Princeton(!). At the time I knew him, was Dean of the Great Desert University’s reasonably well-regarded College of Architecture. The mother: I knew her better and did not envy her. Very smart. Landed a civil service job with the City of Phoenix. Soldiered on.

Their sons — both of them — were clearly very smart, too.

Buddy and relatives are now living in Aspen, being no fools. 😀 The parents divorced. The father is retired; the mother lives in New Mexico now.

Meanwhile, another buddy from the K-12 era, now (like my son) a middle-aged man, has come down with a very ominous peritoneal cancer. He’s been surged and irradiated, but the assumption is…well, that ain’t the end of it. From what M’hijito says, it’s presumed to be terminal.

Terminal Buddy lives Back East now. So the plan is… This week M’hijito will fly East to meet his pal. They’ll rent a car, and make the Road Trip of Their Lives from New England out to Arizona, sight-seeing along the way.

And, speaking of terminal, I’ll have Charley the Golden Retriever over here for a week or ten days. Or more. He is now VERY advanced in his dotage and requires a lot of care…we’ll see how that goes. I hope he won’t be traumatized by being brought over here and left without his Human.

Written yesterday…and forgotten. Senility: ain’t it grand? Moving on…

********

Wednesday, September 6

Another nightmarish day yesterday, largely sucked down the drain by having to traipse out to the Mayo to get an answer to a simple question:

Where is this new doc you’ve assigned to me?

They have two huge facilities: one in north Phoenix and one on the far, far, FARTHEST side of north Scottsdale, a true drive from hell to get there.

Literally, I could not get through to a human on the phone! So I decided to drive up to the nearest facility and ask in person.

Thirty minutes through homicidal traffic; thirty more minutes of my time consumed driving home. Yes, I did discover where the new doc is: NATURALLY, way to Hell and gone out at the Scottsdale office building, almost an hour’s drive each way.

My son is bringing his dog over today, and tomorrow I’m supposed to meet a friend for dinner…how to manage feeding and wringing out the dog around that escapes me.

Maybe I can invite her to come over here.

Gaaaahhhh!

I need to find a decent doctor “in the wild”: i.e., not associated with the Mayo. The adorable Young Doctor Kildare has left the practice he’s been with — this is the second time he seems to have experienced a catastrophe with a medical practice. They refused to tell me where he went, and I can’t find him.

The last time this happened — his former partners went off to form a new practice and left him behind — he ended up as executive director of a nonprofit.

I take this as decidedly not a good sign. To get on the outs with one set of partners…yeah, that’s within reason. But for it to happen twice? Maybe not. I fear he may be practicing mal…and so continuing to see him could be taking quite a risk. That is, assuming he continues to practice medicine at all.

The outfit he’s been with tried to claim I hadn’t paid a bill. They stood down when I showed up with a statement from the credit union proving the bill was paid. So that moment of incompetence tends to make me suspect the problem is with the practice he joined, not with the guy himself. But…who knows?

Since I’ve dropped out of choir and quit the brain-numbing volunteer job at the church, I don’t have any friends to ask for recommendations to a doctor “in the wild,” as the Mayodocs call those who practice in the general population. Posted a query on the neighborhood Facebook page. Talk about a pig in a poke!!

Heh! One of the other joys of senilitude is that every scam artist on the planet thinks they can take advantage of you.

Turns out there are mailing lists and phone soliciting lists organized by age. The phone solicitors and the scam artists think they can take advantage of older people because after about age 65 or 70, some or most of your marbles have rolled out your ears.

I no longer answer the telephone at all. Because…literally I am blitzed with scamming and nuisance soliciting calls.

Complaining to the phone company does no good. Nor does blocking specific phone numbers — because they spoof local numbers. Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs occupy THREE area codes. I’ve blocked calls incoming from two of them, because the only potential caller I know in the outlying areas is a dermatologist’s office on the west side. Also block calls from area code 213 (Los Angeles), among several others.

*****

Ohhhhh gawd. It’s quarter to six. I’d better get going on the morning doggywalk before the traffic and the dog-walking hordes come out.

And so…awayyyyy!!

I hope….

Water! Falling Out of the Sky!

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Who’d’ve thunk it? Last night we got fierce thunderstorms rolling through the Valley. And…rain! This wet stuff that fell right out of the sky onto the ground. Weird…

Seriously: it was one of the fiercest little freshets I’ve seen in awhile. Apparently it caused a fair amount of damage and — horrors!! — shut down a football game. Lightning apparently hit a house not far from here…looks like a condo development where I considered buying a place. This story claims it’s a house, but reportage in the local media leaves a lot to be desired. Like…you know…accuracy?

Three in the morning just now: the usual hour for the Little Old Lady Wake-up Call.

Went out to check the pool, figuring to find the Mess from Hell. But no! It was nowhere like a disaster area. This, thanks to the various workmen who inhabit the yard:

  • Gerardo’s crew beat back the palm tree mess just a week or so ago.
  • Pool Dude, who works some kinda miracle with the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money, has kept the pool amazingly clean over the past some weeks. It was still OK as of this wee hour…just some leaves floating on the surface, which I scooped out easily with a net.
  • It’s too dark to see the roof, but no leaks made themselves evident…so I assume (hope!!) it’s OK. Probably was a real good thing that I forked over a few fistfuls of cash to have that thing worked on.

Hmmm…. Can’t see much in the dark, so further inspection of the Funny Farm will have to wait until tomorrow. I think Garage Repair Dude is supposed to show up tomorrow to fix the garage door. Hope so. Checking to see whether that thing is still closed — it could have blown open in the wind, since there’s a side door to the garage that would have invited some mighty gusts in.

…Nope! The side door slammed shut, apparently pretty early on. Don’t see a lot of mess on the floor out there. Can’t bring myself to go out on the west side and inspect that part of the yard…wouldn’t be able to see a lot in the dark, anyway. Plus there would be nothing I could do about it at this hour, anyway.

LOL! And — natcherly — now that I’m ready to crawl back under the covers, the Dawg wants to get up. Never fails!

😀

Twenty-First Century as Gigantic Rip-off

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Those of us who are decrepit enough to remember life in the late 1900s can surely attest that there were plenty of ripoffs on the float, back then in the “good” ole days. But jeez…

Every which way from Sunday, here’s somebody trying to siphon your money out of your wallet. I swear ta gawd!

Today I had to register the Dog Chariot. Every year or two (depending on how much you’re willing to pay at any one time), you have to trot your car into a state facility to get an emissions test, for which you have to pay about 20 bucks.

Once you pay, they give you a sheet of paper that you have to use to re-register your car. This year: the tab is $227 and change. In other words, it’s going to cost almost $250 to register a nine-year-old car. For one year.

I find this passing infuriating. Yes, I know: we need to pay to maintain the roads and hire highway patrolmen. But we already pay an exorbitant state income tax. And stiff sales taxes on everything that passes a cash register.

But evidently there’s nothing one can do about it.

For a change, though, this year’s ritual was not the unpleasant production of the past. Used to be, you’d drive in and find a dozen lanes, any one of them with ten or fifteen cars ahead of you. So you get in line and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and you…

…and you don’t have much choice of which line you get into. And this is August. The hottest month of the year in Arizona. (Understand: it was 112 here today…and that was actually a fairly balmy day.)

To my surprise, this time there were not very many cars and trucks ahead of me.

A worker motioned me to a line that had only one vehicle, and it was already inside the drive-thru.

So, incredibly, I didn’t have to wait long at all — only a few minutes.

Get in there…and usually they make you get out of the car and wait inside an uncomfortable booth: hot, stuffy, and claustrophobic.

This year, though, they seem to have done away with those. He didn’t even make me get out of the car!

And…it only took him a few minutes to do the job — not a quarter-hour or more. Forthwith he came back, handed me the paperwork, and said I was good to go!

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! No hassles??????

Well.

Then you look at the paperwork.

The fee to register that nine-year-old vehicle is $227.77.

Can you imagine?

Two hundred and thirty bucks to drive a car I should have traded in four years ago?

Dayum. What do you suppose it costs to register a brand-new Venza? If they even still make them….

I don’t drive that car much. Now that I don’t have to schlep to jobs in Tempe or in Glendale, I rarely have any reason to bucket around the roads. Yeah: I drive to the grocery store, the Costco, and the occasional doctor’s or veterinarian’s office, but that’s about it.

If we had decent public transit here, I probably wouldn’t even own a car.

But we don’t, so I do.

There’s good reason not to feel safe on the city’s buses and trains. Mainly, the transients ride them for free (partly because on the train, no one is taking tickets, and partly because various organizations hand out free bus passes. And o’course, because they’re air-conditioned). Most of those folks are harmless. But some are…not. Many are ex-convicts. Most are drug users. Some are out of their heads with mental illness or the effects of street drugs. So…no. They’re not strangers you want to spend a lot of time with, in elbow-to-elbow seating. Or standing.

And that’s specifically why I don’t ride lovely Phoenix’s buses and vaunted trains.

So here we are in a city — and a state — where public transit is neither very practical nor very pleasant, and those of us who have to drive (that includes almost everyone) gets gouged for the privilege of putting our cars on the road. Don’t forget: this is not the only tax we pay. Gasoline is taxed liberally. Most retail products are taxed at the checkout counter (and points along the way thereto…). Power is taxed. Water is taxed. On and on it goes.

Not that one doesn’t want to support government and public services. But maybe the funds should be used intelligently?

Lordie! One extreme idea after another!

 

Eeeeek!

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Not to say A-a-a-a-a-k!

Just saw the BIGGEST RAT I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!

She was lurking in the garage, and when she saw me she was just as startled as I was in spotting her. She shot underneath the dryer, where she presumably is hiding now.

Called Ruby the Corgi, who came trotting out to investigate.

Corgis are ratters. One of the things they’re bred for is chasing rats around ships and barns.

But by the time Her Majesty arrived, Rattie had dodged out of sight. Dayum!

Well, I have rat poison now. Been reluctant to put it out, lest Ruby find it and munch on it. Or…lest she find a deceased gourmet rat and eat that.

Tossed several pellets of the stuff in behind the washer and dryer, and then put some inside a rat trap along with a little slab of dog food, hoping maybe the combined deliciousness will lure Rattie into that.

Rattie, it develops, is very smart. She has exactly zero intention of strolling into a trap.

That would make her several degrees smarter than a dog, we might note.

I’ll have to keep Ruby out of the garage now, to be sure she doesn’t get into the scrumptious rat pills. Or find a rat roast to munch out there.

This is gonna be a PITA of the first water….

Speaking of water, as we scribble the much-vaunted California storm is making its way into the Valley. It’s thundering away out there, the air having chilled down to a crisp 71 degrees. We’re told to expect an 80% chance of rain and light winds.

Hmmmm…well, it may rip and roar a bit in our parts, but I doubt we’ll see any rain here. The thunder is pretty far off in the distance…I think the alleged thunderstorms are well to the north of the ‘Hood.

San Berdoo apparently got something over 13 inches of rain with this storm. Almost 12 inches in Riverside. Looks like the main part of the thing is bearing toward Nevada. Pretty startling images from the low desert of California…egad! Wunderground is predicting a .o5% chance (whoop de dooo!) of rain here, with a low of 71 during the night. Eeek. Be scared. Be very scared.

And lookee here!  I failed to “publish” this adventure. Apparently.

Trying again…