Coffee heat rising

Angst

Eeep! That Was Close!

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Yep: I really thought Funny about Money was done for. That was IT. Never again would I be able to get into the site.

{chortle!} Yes, I indeed DO panic easily….

But this morning, things are working better and looking better.

What a fine few days these have been!

No kidding: over the past few days, not one damn thing has worked properly, whether has had to do with the computers, whether it was the bank account, whether it was the garage door opener, whether it was the pool equipment…WHATEVER, it busted or it stopped dead.

Good thing the kid made off with my car, eh? With that kind if miasma hanging over my neurotic little head, who knows what horrors would have transpired if I’d tried to drive through Phoenix’s rabid traffic.

😀

And now, speaking of “it don’t wanna work,” let’s see if this post will go online…

Hubs of Hades, Redux

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Three-thirty in the afternoon. High, magnificent white clouds off to the north…but nary a sign of rain here in the Valley. Wunderground says we have 114 degrees; humidity 11%; precip zero.

That, my friends, is another way of saying “hotter than the hubs of Hades.” 

The hapless woman my son hired to babysit me — he thinks I can’t take care of myself alone anymore — is bored out of her mind. The reason I’m unlikely to get hurt while I’m sitting around all day by myself is that…

* I go noplace;
* I do nothing;
* I sit around watching the dog as she does nothing.

Oh, well. If that’s how he wants to spend his money, far be it from me to contradict him.

Haven’t persuaded the poor lady to drive me to any stores or other amusements, mostly because I don’t need any new provisions and surely do not want to go out in that unholy heat.

What to do? How to deal with this new headache?

Well…

1. Make a list of things that need to be done (or at least can be done) while I’m under her control.

2. Be nice to the poor soul. She’s probably as terrorized as I am about this whole wacky thing.

3. Since my son has cut off my driving privileges, get her to drive me to stores (even those within walking distance) at least several times a week.

4. I walk a couple miles every day, for exercise. See if she would like to come along on these walks, after the weather gets cool enough that we could leave around the time she gets here.

Godlmighty, this fiasco is making me crazy. Pretty clearly, I’ve passed a milepost on the road to senility. And some major changes are going to have to be made to accommodate that. The big hope — the big stumbling block — the big screaming nightmare…is that I’m not yet so batshit that I have to be locked up in an institution.

I hate, loathe, and despise communal living. Hated every minute of living in the college dormitories. And that is NOT the way I want to wrap up my life.

This job will be made tougher for our New Lady by the fact that I refuse to pay for television. I will be DAMNED if I’m gonna pay to have advertising shoved in my face. Plus about 90% of what’s on TV is just not worth paying for.

So…that means she doesn’t have any pap to amuse her when she’s here. She must think I’m even crazier than I am. And she must be excruciatingly bored.

So…THAT means we’ll have to come up with things to do and places to go while she’s here. Better confer with her along those lines: mostly to find out what she likes to do and figure out when and where we can go for those things.

Also must ask my son if he thinks we should go ahead and pay for cable TV, so she will have some drivel to watch while she’s here. I’d just as soon not have brainless blah blah blah emanating from one of the rooms, but…if that’s what it takes to keep some poor soul in our employ, I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

{sigh}

Guess I’ll have to get used to the whole damn fiasco!

What He Knew She Went Through…

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As my mother lay shucking off her last hours on her deathbed, I approached and tried to offer some comfort. Angrily — furiously! — my father physically chased me off. He wouldn’t even let me come into her bedroom.

He never was especially empathetic to me. I believe he always saw me as a weird little kid — which I was, to a degree. But not allowing me to be with my mother as she lay dying? Not even after she had said she wanted me there?

WTF? How cruel could a man get?

During all these years that have passed since then, I’ve resented him for chasing me away from her. I’ve thought (as I’d often thought in other circumstances) that he hated me because I was a weird little girl. And because of my eccentricity, he didn’t want me around her.

No kidding: decades have passed, and those decades did nothing to offer any insight to what he might have been feeling.

Recently, though, an insight has snuck into my feeble little mind.

He didn’t want me around her because he didn’t want my last memories of her to be utterly hideous. As they would have been, had I lingered by her bedside until she died.

She didn’t even know I was there, so out-of-it was she. So…what reason (other than to make me miserable) for me to linger by her bedside as she slid into death?

Now, in retrospect, I think he didn’t want me there because he didn’t want me to go through watching her die of a ghastly enteric cancer. The vomiting. The horror. The agony. Dear God!

He wasn’t a real articulate guy. It would have been exceptionally difficult for him to have said that to me outright. But now, after year and year and year have passed, it strikes me: what we were looking at was hideous. Truly hideous: a ghastly death by cancer. The best thing that could have happened to me, during that unholy ordeal, was to have been kept away from it.

And that is what he did.

He stood between me and the worst moments of my mother’s dying. And that, God bless him, was probably the kindest thing he ever did for me.

I Want My Mother Back!

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Not only her, but also my great-grandmother and my elegantly intellectual great-aunt. (My grandmother was gone long before I came onto the scene.)

Oh, my! How my mother would have admired her bright and classy grandson today! She really would have thought he was The Business.

But alas, she smoked herself to death shortly before her grandson came on the scene.

When the word came down, in the 1950s, that smoking causes cancer, she decided the pronouncement was Big Brother trying to control our behavior. So she chose to ignore the science.

And, not surprisingly, she developed the disease shortly after my father retired and betook himself and her to Sun City, Arizona.

Not long after her cancer was discovered, my pregnancy was also discovered! No kidding: my first (and only) child.

She was so sick by the time she lay dying that she didn’t much care about anything or anyone around her. No doubt what she most wanted was an end to it all.

Shortly after M’jito was born, I took him out to my parents’ house in Sun City, there to introduce the grandparents to him.

When I carried him into their bedroom to show him off, she took one look at him, shrugged, and said,”Meh!”

She wasn’t even slightly interested in him.

So offended was I that I felt I never wanted to see her again. But…well…  That was neither feasible nor humane. My father needed my support, and on reflection I had to allow that she had no reason to get all excited about a child that she would never watch beyond infancy. Particularly given that she didn’t especially like children…

Eventually, then, I got over it. After all (as I came to realize)…

  • She would not live to see this child grow old enough to toddle around on two feet.
  • She didn’t especially care for children; she had me only because her grandmother insisted on it.
  • When she died, we figured, our little son would be well short of the age when he would remember her. And that proved to be true, in spades.
  • And I could not walk away from her as she lay dying.

Still. What would it have taken to have muttered, “That’s nice, dear. Congratulations…”

So. OK, I never got over it. And yeah: I want my mother back. The mother who was still reasonably healthy before she smoked herself into oblivion, the one who cared about everyone around her, the one who would have been delighted with her adorable little grandchild.

But no. ‘Twas not to be.

Aftermath

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Not much damage here at the Funny Farm from last night’s fierce storm. Leastwise, not that I can see. The WonderAccountants across the street were out inspecting their place, too…they also failed to find serious damage to the roof.

Wow! That WAS a fine freshet of a storm, too.

In Arabia, when we would get a storm like this (rarely, thank Gawd), it would blow roofs off the houses. So that was kinda what I expected to find this morning.

Apparently 21st-century roofing is stronger stuff! 😀

M’jihito is dragging me to the Mayo Clinic this morning. It’s an hour-plus drive out there. And GAWD how I hate that drive and hate that place!!!!!!!

As usual, you can be sure they’re gonna tell us there’s nothing much wrong with me. But they’ll waste as much of our time as possible in doing so. They’ll stab and they’ll jab and they’ll pester and they’ll muster, and the result will be: nil. 

They must make money based on how much time they spend with a patient. That’s the only explanation for the amount of time consumed in every nuisance visit out there.

When I go to young Dr. Kildare, my “Doctor in the Wild” as the Mayo set calls docs who aren’t on their staff, he asks a few questions, does an exam, tells me there’s nothing wrong with me, and throws me out. Today I will wait and wait in their waiting room, get quizzed, get jabbed and stabbed, maybe run through some horrible roaring tube, and then be told there’s nothing wrong with me.

That, I must say, gets tedious. 

A Fine Freshet

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wowWEEE!!! What we have here is the mega-rainstorm from Hell! You would not BELIEVE!!

No, it doesn’t come up to the level of tornado…or even to hurricane. The wind’s not that high. But the torrents of rain are…well…beyond my experience, that’s for sure.

Seriously: Haven’t seen a storm like this since I was in Arabia, when a storm came in off the Gulf that tore off people’s roofs.

Let’s hope Stateside roofs are a little sturdier. {heh!} Especially the one on my house! 😮

Dayum! This means tomorrow I’ll have to get someone up there to inspect that roof.

Yeah: me and 87,000 other locals, eh?

Goodie. I can start calling at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow.

We haven’t lost the power yet. Usually that goes out whenever we have a serious storm. And this IS a serious one.

Wooo HOOO! Just LISTEN to that thunder! :-0

Really, this one sounds a lot like the Biggie we had in Saudi Arabia, all these many years ago. One year we had a monster storm roar in off the desert. Tore off people’s roofs. Blew boats ashore. Scared the bedoodles out of everyone.

Be glad you’re not an Arab living in a tent out on the desert when one of these things blows through.

***

Looks like the thing has already lost its clout.

Can’t see the pool through the back windows in the dark. And am not going out there in the rain to inspect. Whatever mess is out there will still be out there come sunrise.

And won’t Pool Dude be pleased…. 😮