Coffee heat rising

Angst

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!

Another Balmy Arizona Summer Day…

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I.e., you have to be balmy to keep on living here!!!  Just now it’s 106 in the shade of the back porch, 20% humidity. Clouds built up to the north, tantalizing with a vague promise of rain…but as we scribble, they’re burning off.

Arizona…what a garden spot!

Man, I’ll take San Francisco fog over burning heat, any day.

Speaking of the which: spent half the afternoon doing battle with the pool. The current Pool Dude seems to have f*cked things up royally.

Had to buy a big heavy bucket of chlorine tablets (none remained out there at the pool or in the pool shed). Dosed the drink with that stuff.

Next: decide whether to backwash…decided it’s toooo damn hot to wrestle with that task. Get the vacuum system to work properly: see that it’s picking up most of the debris. Think gotta clean out that filter NOW. Decide it’ll hafta wait.

ohhhhh gawd, tell me I don’t have to track down and hire a new Pool Dude.

See, the problem with these guys is a substantial proportion of them are jailbirds. If they’re on probation and they get into trouble — apparently that includes so much as a traffic ticket! — they end up back in the slam. This, as you can imagine, does not help to keep the algae outta the pool.

😀

Maybe what I should do is install some cages in the backyard where the Authorities could store the Pool Dudes. Then I’d always have one of the critters around to contend with the drink. And maybe I could even get the state to pay me for putting up the resident convicts….

Arrrrggghhhhh! What a place we live in!

Teeth hurt. Don’t know whether it’s from aggravated clenching or whether there’s an infection or some other such nightmarish pending dental bill. We shall see over the next few days, no doubt.

If I were a grown-up, I’d stumble out to the kitchen and bolt down an aspirin or an ibuprofen.

But I’m not a grown-up. Consequently, I’m bolting down a glass of wine. Oddly, that does nothing for the sore tooth.

Ohhh well. It sure tastes better than ibuprofen, though!

😀  😀

Driving around this afternoon eyeballing real estate.

Yknow, my mother was a real estate agent. Like me, she felt some strange magnetic attraction to Reel Estate. What it is, I do not know. But the whole business fascinates me.

I used to write about real estate for Phoenix Ragazine and for the weekly Phoenix Business Journal. Sometimes I think I should try to wriggle back onto a local publication’s staff — actually for awhile I wrote for a national real estate trade rag, but the truth is, I find the local market a lot more fun.

Yesterday I stopped by an open house and met a lovely young Realtor. Ohhh how ambition blooms forever… Well, I wish her well and hope she gets rich…or at least finds a nice rich man to support her. 😉 Real estate is one of those endeavors that looks like it should make you rich, but that at best maybe won’t make you poor.

***

Dog’s conkered out. I should conker out, too…dawgs having better sense than humans…

This, That, & the Other

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Hotter than the Hubs out there...and wetter than the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Seriously: it is SO hot and SO humid, you step out your (soggy) front door into a corner of Hell. Or…more likely, into a corner of Lovely Saudi Arabia.

Today and yesterday have been weirdly reminiscent of the balmy old days beside the Persian Gulf.

There, the air would get so wet that sometimes rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky. We’re not that bad…yet. And I sincerely hope we don’t get there.

Ugh! Gotta go to the store. Get stuff for me and the hound: stuff that can’t wait. Then another errand…while I’m running around, I prob’ly SHOULD run by the mid-town Best Buy and get another power cord for this li’l computer.

Because…AS YOU AND I BOTH KNOW….wherever you are, you can’t get there from here. Whatever room I happen to be in, when the power runs low on the MacBook, the power cord is on the other end of the house!

😀

Ogling real estate in Moon Valley, a sprawling Mittel-America tract where my friends La Bethulia and La Maya moved. Look at this shack, for example. It’s on the high side of houses out there: not the best available, but far from the tackiest. I’d say it’s comparable to my current hovel, in style and size and maintenance.

Guess if I wanted to run away from the Romanian Landlord, that would be a likely candidate. It’s not quite as large as my house…but truth to tell, my shack is one bedroom too much.

Relatively pretty, as tract houses go.

But…y’know…so is mine. And my house is closer to M’hijito’s, by some miles. And click through the photos to see that thing next door to it. That’s a weird lash-up, isn’t it? It looks, for all the world, like a commercial structure with an underground garage.

?????

Not likely, in a suburban middle-class tract. But…weird, isn’t it?

Dunno that I could live in Moon Valley: too much emotional baggage.

A dear friend of mine: her husband died out there. He had cancer, and he died excruciatingly. And…well…her behavior left something to be desired. So did mine, come to think of it. We should never have been socializing in the kitchen while he was dying in the bedroom.

Horrible.

After he passed, I never heard another thing from her. She sold the house in Moon Valley; moved to Scottsdale. Then, apparently as she herself sank into decrepitude, she moved back to the Midwest, where her adult kids lived. And that was the last I knew.

Moon Valley is a bland tract of bland, throw-’em-together stick-and-drywall huts. For my purpose, it’s kind of a sentimental journey, cruising the Web and eyeballing the overpriced ticky-tacky. But in fact, my house is far nicer: block construction, real walls that keep out the burglars.

Seriously: a good-sized man could break right in through a wall out there, simply by delivering a good-sized kick. When my friends moved into that house, I went out to help her paint and fancify the place. You would not have BELIEVED the ticky-tacky construction!

No kidding: you could break in with swift kick to an exterior wall. The walls, which were pretty much all stick-and-plaster, were so poorly insulated that as I stood on the tile floors painting the living-room (she had the whole house tiled before they moved in!), I could feel the HOT heat under my feet. You don’t even wanna know what their power bills must have been.

***

Here I am at the neighborhood doc’s office. Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting.

What I wanna do is ask him if he’ll refer me to the Alzheimer’s facility at Good Samaritan Hospital, in downtown Phoenix. That’s about a 10-minute drive from my house…as opposed to an hour’s trudge to get out to the Mayo.

Also, quite frankly, I want a second opinion. The Mayo is halfway to Payson from my house. Good Sam is straight down 7th Street: outside of rush hour, an easy shot. Soooo….we’re talkin’ two advantages here:

  • If the staff at Good Sam do indeed appear to be competent, then we have excellent doctors within easy reach; and
  • Good Sam is right on the route to my son’s house and to a dear friend’s house! Thereby producing an excuse for visiting. 😀

*****

Didn’t get far with that scheme. Oh well: I’ll have to keep at it.  A little peripheral neuropathy isn’t gonna kill me. Soon. And if my brain has turned to Swiss cheese, there ain’t much anyone can do about it.

 

 

 

Wednesday

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Seven-thirty in the morning: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch, humidity 44%.

Back from a mile-long walk with the Hound. Hotter than the hubs out there, and soggy. Ruby doesn’t seem to notice. She rockets along the whole route like she was shot out of a cannon.

The irrigation system is crapping out. Gotta try to track down the installer (if he’s still in business!) or find a new one. Probably will have to replace a fair amount of that fine plastic piping. Ugh! Not to say $$$!!!

At the park: not too many dogs to have to dodge around this morning, probably because the weather is constraining most of the strolling dog-lovers. That’s a relief: some of those folks are stupid beyond belief, when it comes to dogs.

I find it impossible to understand how you could conflate a dog with a  kid. Wake up, folks! It’s not your “fur-baby”! It’s a highly evolved wolf that has developed a co-dependent relationship with humans. It doesn’t want to “pw-a-a-ay” with your neighbor’s dog. It wants to EAT your neighbor’s dog.

LOL! Hafta say, at the time I moved into this house, I never would’ve thought that I would be here long enough to need to replace the irrigation system I paid heftily to install during my first weeks of residency. Rebuilding it does NOT sound like a great idea. But…if I’m going to stay here (am I???), the watering system has gotta work.

Personally, I’d like to move into a high-rise on North Central, thereby mooting the whole yard and watering-system issue. However, my son WANTS this house. and accordingly he wants me to stay here until I’m carted off to the nursing home. At that point he’ll sell his place and move in here. Sooo…one could regard the proposed new plumbing as a gift to him.

Besides which: despite the proximity to Crime Central, I do like this house and this neighborhood. LOVE having the pool to topple into on a hot day. Love the trees and the shade. Love the yard that lets me have a dog of just about any size.

***

7:30 p.m.

And here we are, twelve hours later! Another day…not a single ‘nother dollar.

Weather progress: it’s a hundred degrees in the backyard just now, under a light film of high clouds. Nine percent chance of precip.

In Arizona, that’s what we call “humid.” 😀

No, I did NOT get my dainty little self enough off the dime to call the irrigation dude, or even to try to track him down. This laziness thing is becoming…uhm…a thing.

It’s too damn hot to do an evening doggy-walk — the pavement would burn Ruby’s feet. So we loaf.

Loafing is our specialty. Ruby is stretched out on her doggy-blanket atop the bed. The human is stretched out on her human-bedding atop the bed. We rule!

Hotter Than the Hubs…

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Places I’m glad I’m not:

No. 1: Butte County, California

Egad! This is not all that far from where La Bethulia and La Maya live. CAN you imagine????

Makes 100 degrees in the shade and no tinder within reach look pretty good, eh?

And yep: 110 is just we have out on the back porch just now.

Truth to tell, I’ve always loved central and northern California and would’ve loved to retire there. But Dear XH would have none o’ that. He being no fool…

If it’s blindingly hot here (as you may be sure it is!), it’s excruciatingly hot over there, too. But a 110-degree day ain’t likely to burn your house down, or trap you at the end of a country road.

No. 2: Central California

This is the general area where La Maya’s folks come from. I gather they’re more farm folks than anything else, so it’s to be hoped that most or all are out of harm’s way. But still: eeeek!

Ohhhh man! Those Santa Ana’s…I remember them well! Awful time of year. And when we lived there, they weren’t blowing conflagrations across the landscape;.

A-n-n-n-d…how glad AM I that I don’t live in the Middle East anymore? It was a species of Hell then, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten much better. What a bunch!