Coffee heat rising

Angst

Bang-Bangs in the Night

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{sigh} Two in the morning. Wide awake. Gunshots in the distance, emanating from Gangbanger’s Way. Pop pop pop sounding above the roar of wailing hotrods and motorcycles.

Lordie, how I hate living in Phoenix. Especially this part of Phoenix. It’s never quiet here.

Gangbanger’s delineates the middle-class zone flanking North Central Avenue from the dire slum of Sunnyslope (and I do mean “dire”: a drive through that place is like a visit to a Mexican barrio, where people live in huts and abandoned railroad freight cars). That balmy boulevard is frequented by bikers and gang members. The ‘Hood is technically part of Sunnyslope, though in fact most natives regard the area to the north of Gangbanger’s as the ‘Slope, and North Central as extending south from Gangbanger’s to about Camelback or Missouri. Whatever…the noise and the crime emanating from those northerly precincts are…well, characteristic.

That we are theoretically part of Sunnyslope (though no one who lives here would ever admit that) is what keeps real estate prices relatively low. I couldn’t even begin to afford this house if it were in a better part of town.

{moan!} Now Ruby the Corgi is awake. Is she going to demand to go outside?

Hmmm…not too insistently. Yet.

oook. whine.

Okay…i take that back…

Get up. Lift the dog off the bed. Follow her to the back door. Accompany her outside, barefooted. Not that cold out there, but still…surely there are other things to do at two in the morning. Well…2:30 now. Wait until she does her thing. Follow her inside. Bribe her with a dog treat to get back on the bed.

Gooood morning, America! {sigh}

Is this as terrible a place to live as I think it is?

Probably not. Our enclave, per se, is no slum, though we’re flanked to the north and to the west by districts that do deserve that accolade. You’d be crazy to put your kid in a public grade school here, though the high school (thanks to the efforts of one heroic teacher and her allies) is highly rated — nationally. People actually move here so as to get their kids into Sunnyslope High School. Which, when you think about it, is kinda bizarre.

Cheaper, by far, than having to put them in the Catholic or private high schools here. Brophy Prep, where we sent our son, will set your retirement date back quite a bit, as will All Saints Episcopal, the favored private grade school for the lawyerly and the doctorly set.

What a place! Cheaper than Southern California, no doubt, but still: Southern California Redux.

There was a reason I hated living in Southern California — several of them, as a matter of fact. When we first moved here, in the early 1960s, this place had its own character. Provincial, yes: but still…it was its own place. But now — largely thanks to our honored leaders’ pig-headed civic planning (they quite deliberately and openly modeled the Valley after the L.A. area), — it’s crowded, smoggy, hostile, noisy, and overall an unpleasant place to live.

Well. Unless you consider snow more unpleasant than the serenade of unmuffled engines and gunfire. And 112-degree summer days. 😀

I do not know that I would want to live in snow….matter of fact, I suspect I wouldn’t. But wouldn’t that be better than mobs and mobs of people, gunshots at two in the morning, and the serenade of gangbangers’ hogs?

There are quieter venues to live in this place. Sun City: there, you can enjoy the quiet of the mausoleum, punctuated by the roar of fighter jets emanating from Luke Air Force Base. Fountain Hills, way on the other side of the Valley, offers you the quiet of an upper-middle-class suburb, punctuated by the roar of passenger jets heading into Sky Harbor Airport. In between: noise, traffic, crime, and more noise.

The bikers have quieted down. Three in the morning. I’ve gotta go back to bed.

arrrrghhh!

Another Fine Day from Hell y-Cumin’ In…

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Yes: this is going to be a day from Hell. Only quarter to eight and I’ve emptied the refrigerator & freezer, packed what would fit into the big freezer in the back of the house; stashed the rest of it on the kitchen counter.

Can’t empty the refrigerator compartment until the guy gets here to deliver the new fridge, which could be any time between now (ten to 8 a.m.) and 5 or 6 p.m. So all that stuff will have to be taken out and stashed…who knows when? Who knows where? Then immediately placed in the new refrigerator, which we can only hope will chill down fast. Fortunately, it’s wintertime, so if I turn off the heat, the ambient air can be relatively cool in the house. So with any luck, nothing will spoil.

Meanwhile, the brats in Tony the Romanian Landlord’s day-care for juvenile delinquents* continue to make pests of themselves. Just now a big van drove up to that house and dropped off a bunch of them. One of the girls over there has taken to showing up at my door begging for help, claiming someone has hit her (quite possibly true, given what we know of the way he brought up his own daughters). After this, when I see that kid at the door, I’ll call a cop. She can explain the problem to the police, who are the ones who should know about it.

No sign of Pool Dude. It’s 8 a.m.  He’s usually here by 7:00. Hope this doesn’t mean we’ve lost him…I have nooo idea where to find someone else to do battle with that thing. He does a wonderful job: the water is pristine clear, with nary a sign of the usual algae curtains growing on the walls.

His presence or absence may be moot, though: with no end in sight to the growing Southwest water shortage, the city or the state may mandate that pools have to be drained. In that case, I may build a patio over the top of the thing. But…let’s borrow that trouble a little later.

Later this week: another expensive home improvement: installing motion-sensitive lights and a security camera on the side of the house facing the Romanian Reform School. The little dollinks throw rocks at the side of my house and the roof. Although I’ve seen them in action, I want some proof so that I can call the cops on him again. And if I can find out what agency he’s working with, I can put in a complaint with that outfit.

Four hundred dollah for that little embellishment!

Really, I should put the house on the market and move away from that mess.

That would make sense, eh? Blow 5 or 10 grand to escape a malicious nuisance? Right….

Probably makes more sense than fighting it. BUT…my son is dead-set against my selling this place and moving somewhere else. Why? Escapes me. I suspect the sub-text is that he may want this house for himself, and he hopes to sell the aged, un-air conditionable shack where he’s living now.

Hmmm… Supposed to rain tonight and all day tomorrow, continuing into the week. Goodie…a little more hassle!

A-n-n-d speaking of expensive home improvements: we’ve got delivery of a new refrigerator AND a new microwave scheduled for today. Yeah: they both crapped out at once, to the tune of $1500!!!

Satan and Proserpine, who were inveterate DIY nuts, replaced all the appliances in the kitchen. As one might expect of a set of gadgets installed at the same time, they’re all crapping out at once.

Actually, the built-in double oven crapped out a long time ago. Since I can’t afford to replace that and it’s not something I must have to live a halfway normal life, I use those ovens as storage cabinets. The countertop oven and the backyard BBQ take up the slack. In theory, I could even bake bread in the countertop oven, but since I can get excellent bread at the corner Sprouts and down at the beloved AJ’s market, that idea is moot.

Ohhh well. If I have to sell the house to get away from the Tony Situation, at least we’ll have two brand-new kitchen appliances as a selling point.

* Hmmm… Looks like I’ve never held forth on Tony’s Home for the Delinquent and the Hapless. Okay…well, that tale will be forthcoming, maybe today while we await the advent of the appliance guy. And what a tale it is!

WERE the 1950s so bad?

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A post from my favorite time-waster, Quora — just put this up last night.

Were the 1950’s so bad? How could we stand to gain by returning to more traditional family roles, with the wife in the kitchen and the man out getting the money? Why bother having a family if you need your independence too?

I grew up in the 1950s. Here’s what I recall about it.

My mother was home all the time — that was nice, I guess. My father went to work; he was a harbor pilot who worked swing shifts, so if he wasn’t working during the day, he was sleeping, and anyone else in the house had to be verrreee quiet. Or else.

I loved science, especially astronomy. When I told my parents I wanted to be an astrophysicist, they informed me that girls didn’t do that kind of thing, but I’d make a great secretary.

We lived overseas for ten years, in a Middle Eastern country where my father wrangled tankers for an oil company. My parents took great care to teach me that…

  • America was the greatest country in the world.
  • All other countries were inferior.
  • People with dusky complexions, such as the Arabs whose country we lived in, were inferior to white people.
  • Communists were the evil enemy. So were socialists. And anyone else who didn’t agree with our way of thinking.
  • A woman’s place was in the home.
  • And a lot of other blather along those lines…

We flew Constellations back and forth, when my father got a vacation (three months every two years). They were wonderful planes. Slow and noisy, yes. But what fun sleeping in your own fold-down bunk, stopping in country after country after country, cruising through the Alps, watching the sun rise over the Atlantic as you were homeward bound from Shannon, Ireland, to New York, being served breakfast, lunch, and dinner in your seat — that was traveling!

Nuclear war was a constant threat. After we returned to the States, we lived in a San Francisco high-rise. Every Saturday at noon, air-raid sirens atop our tower went off with a BLASTING scream. If, as a young teenager, I ventured to sleep in, the howling noise of these terrifying “tests” would literally lift me out of my bed.

  • We had air raid drills at school.
  • We had to register an escape plan with the school: in the event of a nuclear attack, would I be bussed down the peninsula, or would I be picked up by my parents at the school, or would I be sent home on foot to my parents to take shelter or to evacuate?

My father raised He!! and put a block under it when he found out the school had assigned me a locker mate who was a black girl.

  • I learned from her that black people are human, when shortly after my father had roared into the principal’s office, the little girl’s things disappeared from our locker. Weeks later, though, she reappeared…with burn scars all over her body. She had been helping her family fix breakfast when her robe caught fire; in a panic, she ran across the room and, before anyone could catch her, crashed through a closed Arcadia door, thereby adding life-threatening cuts and gashes to the burns she suffered. Black people can have scars? Pain? Terror? Panic? Who’d have thunk it?

Television was relatively new — still black & white — and some of the shows were great: The Phil Silvers Show, The Jack Benny Show, As the World Turns, The Twilight Zone, Dragnet, many more. As today, some were pretty stupid, too.

My mother got a job: her salary was $75… ”Such good pay — for a woman!” my mother crowed. It wasn’t enough to cover our rent, to say nothing of feeding us and running a car. If anything had happened to my father, we would have been flung into poverty.

Part of her job as a receptionist for the large apartment development where we lived was to greet prospective renters. She would hand them an application to fill out. As they left the office, she would mark, in code at the bottom of the first page, whether the applicant was white, black, Jewish (in her estimation), or Asian. Only whites needed to apply.

Phones plugged into the wall. There were no cell phones. If you had car trouble and could not flag down another driver, you would have to walk to a gas station or a store and use a pay phone to call for help.

Cars did not have seat belts, or if they did, they had only lap belts. And in many other respects, cars truly were unsafe at any speed.

If those were the best of times, you don’t wanna know what the worst of times were about…

Image: Wikipedia, Constellation

Lemme Outta This Place!

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Seriously….  If my son did not object SO vociferously to the idea that I should move to some other precinct in the Phoenix area, I would be sooooo radically OUTTA here.

But he does. I think it’s because he wants his muther and his father and New Wife and himself to be within easy shootin’ distance. Just now we all live in the venerable North Central part of lovely uptown Phoenix.

If I had my way, I’d live one HELLUVA lot further from the noise, the crime, the goddamnable lightrail, the crime, the vagrants, the goddamnable lightrail, the constant cop helicopter flyovers, the goddamnable lightrail, the…you get the idea.

Although this neighborhood is on the fringe of tony North Central, it is decidedly fringe. The lightrail brings homeless, drug-shooting, thieving transients up to the end of the line, on the northwestern corner of our neighborhood, and tosses them off here to wander through our streets, alleys, and yards; to sleep in our carports; to steal anything that’s not red-hot or nailed down. Directly to the north of us is one of the toughest districts in the city, sweetly called “Sunnyslope,” an incubator of crime and long the hometown of the local Hell’s Angels. Consequently we have cop helicopters roaring overhead all the freakin’ time.

And y’know…  rrrrrrrrooooaaaaarrr rrroooaarr roar roar roar roar is not a very soothing lullaby. Earlier this afternoon we had a cop copter chasing around the neighborhood and then settling on the alley behind the Funny Farm. Back and forth. Forth and back. Around and around and around. Roar roar roar roar roar…  45 minutes of it…

Godlmighty, who and what are they chasing out there?

Get up. Check the doors. Lock the last door the pooch went out and then came back in. Set a phone next to the chair I’m loafing in. Cancel the plan to get in the car and drive off to the Costco, lest a sh!thead breach the defenses while I’m gone.

How tired am I of this stuff?

Seriously, it’s business as usual here in the’Hood, the cost of living in a centrally located middle-class urban neighborhood. And…

Am.

I.

Tired.

Of it!!!!

If I had my way, I’d move to Fountain Hills ((cheap construction; questionable whether the benefits outweigh the hassles). That’s assuming I wanted to stay in the crime-ridden Valley of the We-D0-Mean Sun. Alternatively, I’d pick Prescott (nice little burg, but a bit too tourist-ridden), Santa Fe (New Mexico), the Oro Valley (suburb of Tucson), Patagonia (artsy-craftsy community nigh unto Nogales, Mexico)…. Hmmm….

The truth is, few or maybe none of these places would be a huge improvement. You think you’re getting away from the cop fly-overs by moving to Sun City? Wait’ll you hear the fighter jets out of Luke AFB! Makes the cop helicopters sound like a lullaby.

Keeeripes! Where can you live in These Newnited States where you don’t have to keep deadbolt locks on every exterior door, alarms on every window, and a pistol close at hand? Where the ambient noise isn’t enough to drive you nuts?

IS there any such place?

Certainly not here. You don’t dare even drive down the street without locking your doors. Twice, I’ve had unsavory types try to pull my car doors open at stoplights — one of them was a guy who, according to that evening’s news, was a violent SOB on the run from the cops.

Surely there must be SOME place left in the good ole U.S. of A. where you can live in peace. Anybody know where it is?

 

Stormy Weather y-Cumin In…

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Looks like we’re going to get the leading fringe of that big California storm. Kind of a gray day now: high clouds coating the normally blue skies.

La Maya and La Bethulia came flying into town, leaving their retirement palace (a nice double-wide) behind in Sta Cruz. My escaped church friend Joan and her daughters, far as I can tell, are about in the thick of it, there in the middle of California’s inland valley. Yipes! Actually, in these parts it’s supposed to be overcast but calm until the middle of next week. Then: 75% chance of rain.

We’ve already had a little rain, but nothing much out of the ordinary. One night: enough to fill the pool almost to the scuppers. Otherwise: pretty low-key.

I could condescend to pick up the frost covers, since it never freezes here under an overcast and rainy sky. In fact, we’re in the 70s now. Kinda doubt temps will drop 40 degrees tonight.

On the other hand…if in fact it gets much chillier tomorrow night and the next (never believe Phoenix forecasts that predict temps in the mid-to low 40s: depending on where you are in the Valley, that can easily translate to the 30s), I’ll just have to lay all those covers out again. Probably better to wait until the Season’s Drama blows over.

***

And now we see that what has transpired here weather-wise is…nothin’ much. A whole day of high clouds. No rain, no wind — at least in these parts. Apparently the water falling out of the sky is confined to California so far. As you see on the news, that is quite the spectacular drama: floods, sinkholes.. WHAT an unholy mess.

Mighty glad I don’t live over there anymore! 😮

 

Another Day to Cope With….

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One of the joys of old age seems to be that almost every day of your life is filled with hassles, most of them entailing trips to doctor’s offices or efforts to keep your personal infrastructure running. Today’s menu includes both of those.

Something has happened to my ancient land-line phone. When I’m talking to someone, they complain that I’m “breaking up” and they can’t hear the conversation. I have no problem hearing them, so apparently the issue is with the out-going function, whatever that is. Cox, after a long and annoying runaround, agreed to send someone out to try to fix it. Which of course he’ll be able to do only if the problem is with Cox’s lines, not if the problem is the gadget itself.

He’s supposed to appear between 8 and 10:30. Let’s hope (against hope….) that he actually shows up in that time frame. Because I’m supposed to appear, too: at the dermatologist’s office, an hour-long drive across the city. I’ll have to leave here by about 11:30 to get there on time.

So there’s exactly no wriggle room there.

A signal joy of old age, at least for people who have lived all their lives in sunny climates, is that your skin sprouts carcinomas like an Ohio farm field sprouts corn. Since the last time I saw Dr. Derm, I’ve developed at least three and probably more spots that will have to be cut or frozen off. Whee! I can hardly wait.

If the Cox guy says the problem with my phone is the devices, then I’ll have to stop by a Best Buy and pick up another set of phones that don’t make me crazy trying to work them. Assuming such phones are still being made….

The ones I have came from Costco. There’s a Costco on the way back from lovely Avondale, but it’s in a part of town where I’m not at all comfortable getting out of my car. Plus the first (and last) time I went into that store, their staff was astonishingly rude to me…. So I’m not about to go back there.

If I have to buy another phone, then, I’ll have to go to the Costco wayyyyyy up on the freeway, halfway to freaking Flagstaff, or the one all the way over at 44th street. I’ll be spending the dermatologist’s time at 107th Avenue. Streets in Phoenix are on the east side of Central Avenue; Avenues are on the west side…that’s 151 blocks of hectic city traffic to contend with: a good 20 miles from my house. The Costco I usually go to is 23 miles from the derm’s office and 9 miles back from that Costco to my house: 32 miles through crazy-making, dangerous traffic. In the rain.

The likelihood that I’ll be able to find a new land-line phone is slim to none, o’course. Most folks have thrown those out and replaced them with cell phones.

Now…that’s nice….except….

a) I am all learning-curved out. Try as I may, I can NOT figure out how to use the expensive iPhone my son gave me a couple years ago. He gave me the phone just as the plague was coming down on us. Result: the classes on how to use it that took place in a local senior center were shut down. They’ve never resumed. The class that the Apple store offers, wayyyyyy to hell and gone on the northwest side of town, was a ridiculous joke.

b) It’s another thing to lose. If I don’t set it down in the SAME PLACE every time I pick it up, I’m going to lose it. That’s not a “maybe.” That’s an “absolutely positively.” Then I will spend heaven only knows how long banging around the house and the car frantically searching for it…give up…and finally several days later — after I’ve bought a new phone — find it. This is not a device that works for old folks, for people whose lives have any distractions whatsoever,  or for those who aren’t memorizing every goddamn step they take as they move through life.

c) It’s something else for phone solicitors to pester me with. I’ve managed to block most phone soliciting on the land lines (at the expense of blocking all incoming calls from the west side and from many area codes).

I get up to ten nuisance phone solicitations every day. Blocking area codes and certain prefixes cuts this to two or three pestering calls per day. My phones are set up to minimize that harassment.

Change my number over to the iPhone and…yeah. Here we go again!

It appears you can replicate the area-code blocking on an iPhone, sure. But you have to pay for the privilege! Natcherly.

Lordie! It’s after 7 a.m. Gotta start running…

****

P.S. Just to frost all those cakes, I go to let the dog out and find…it’s raining!

Ohhhhh Hell & damnation. It’s hard enough to schlep to the far, far west side under the best of circumstances. But to do it while dodging around repairmen AND coping with the homicidal drivers on slick, wet roads…dayum!

I may have to call the dermatologist and reschedule, if they’ll allow it.

******

Cox guy in. Cox guy fixes phone. Finds defective cable. Fixes. Cox guy out.

Meanwhile, adding a litle chaos: pool dude in, pool dude paid, pool dude out. Dog gets into pool area but, for a miraculous change, does NOT fall into the (icy-cold!) drink.

Doctor’s appointment canceled: saved from THAT unholy hassle.

Lost iPhone found. Plugged back in.

It’s ten minutes to ten.

Now…if the dust will just settle….maybe I can have breakfast???