The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Some sumbiche came INTO MY BACK YARD through the side yard and STOLE ALL MY CLOTHESPINS!
Jayzuz! What kind of asshole steals clothespins!??
Now I’ve either got to traipse to the Albertson’s through 110-degree heat or order a new bag of pins from Amazon, at a premium price.
Hmmm…. Amazon will send 60 wooden clothespins for just $6.00. But it still pisseth me off!!! What kind of asshole steals the clothespins off your clothes line?
I swear ta gawd!
Yuch!! Just back from this morning’s (soggy!) doggy walk. What a horrid morning! Gray, wet…yes, SO wet the air actually does feel soggy.
Feels like Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf, where we used to live while my father worked for Aramco — the Arabian American Oil Company. HORRIBLE. One of the nastiest places to live that you can imagine.
Ruby is panting frantically as she lounges on the kitchen floor’s cool tile. I’m covered with sticky sweat…thirsty but too tired and sore to get up and lumber into the kitchen after a glass of water.
WhatEVER possessed my father to move us to this ungawdly place when he retired?
Oh, yah: I know. CHEAP.
Del Webb was practically giving away the houses in Sun City — certainly by comparison with California real estate. But Sun City’s BIG appeal to him, IMHO, was NO KIDS.
Truly: he abominated kids. He hated the sound of kids playing outside. And when he heard of a whole housing development where no kids were allowed, he thought he’d found Nirvana.
He made me drop out of high school a year early, so he could send me to the University of Arizona…thereby getting around Del Webb’s rule that no one under some extenuated age could live in Sun City. If your kid was away at college, you were allowed to move in…even if the brat was under 21.
So that fucked up my education. But why should he care? I was just a girl. What did I need a degree for, since all I was gonna do was take dictation and type? And raise kids, of course.
Y’know, if he’d waited just one more year, I could have gotten into UC Berkeley, and there I could have landed a decent degree that would indeed have led to an interesting job or a first-rate graduate program. But nooooooo….we had to move to f*cking Sun City.
What a place!
At any rate, here we are, enjoying a classic Arizona late-summer day. Wet, soggy, dark…just gross. I hate Arizona (in case you hadn’t noticed…). And really…I will resent him for the rest of my life for f*cking up my educational plans (I was lined up for a Ph.D. from Berkeley or UCLA!) and dragging me out to the middle of the Sonoran Desert.
But…yeah. So what? I was just a girl….
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…. 😮
Egad! Just stumbled out back…glanced at the back-porch thermometer. A HUNDRED AND SEVEN DEGREES. Yeah, you saw that right: 107º… IN THE SHADE OF THE BACK PORCH ROOF!
Yep: 107 in the shade.
Almost as balmy as lovely Saudi Arabia, whither my parents and I spent 10 years. Except it was damn humid there…I’ve seen rain start to fall out of a clear blue sky. Here, it really is “a dry heat.”
And the “dry heat” is significantly more tolerable than swamp conditions. Not anything that you’d like to frolic in…but at least it doesn’t suffocate you.
I see we’ve got a dead shrub out back. Looks like it’s not getting watered. Drag the hose over to it. Remember to ask the Yard Dudes to be sure the system reaches that part of the hedge. And have them take out the dead thing.
Yard Dude: there’s another of those fine jobs one is mighty glad not to have. Gerardo and the boys get started as dawn cracks: that’s so. But they’re sure not done before the heat comes up. I don’t see how they do it!!
We’re told we have a 15% chance of rain. Why do I doubt it? Maybe later tonight: like, well after dark. But not any time soon.
After dark…it’ll still be too hot for Ruby’s feet. So that’s another daily doggy-walk we’ll miss today. We did get out, as usual, along about dawn…even then, it was nigh unto too hot for her. I’m afraid this evening will be well beyond the pale for little bare doggy feet.
Yech!! What a place!
Yech!!!!! This morning Ruby and I plowed through the heat and humidity reminiscent of the weather in Rasty Nasty, the horrid seaside oil & shipping colony parked on an Arabian shore along the Persian Gulf.
My father was a merchant seaman. Shortly after I was born, he got himself a handsomely paying job in Saudi Arabia, as a harbor pilot steering tankers and freighters out of the port at Ras Tanura. Horrible — truly horrible — place to live: hot, dangerous, disease-ridden, unwelcoming to the Yankee set. Hence, my father’s nickname for the place: Rasty Nasty.
It truly was awful, from an American’s point of view. My mother caught amoebic dysentery out there, which led to the enteric cancer that ultimately killed her. My father and I managed to escape it…apparently because neither he nor I ate the infected salad that an idiot neighbor served up to us for a farewell dinner.
No kidding: we were slated to go back to the States, permanently, when she came down with this horrible endemic disease…because one woman was too goddam stupid and stubborn to soak the goddam lettuce in Clorox before tossing it into a salad!
This was a habit the Company tried to instill in the ladies: when the wives got out there, they forthwith had to attend classes designed to protect Americans’ safety and health. That particular lady really was blindingly stupid…and she just ignored everything the Company tried to teach her.
Result: she killed my mother.
Think of that. We’d been out there 10 years, during which my mother duly sanitized every bite we put in our mouths, and in the LAST WEEK before we were to go home permanently, that bitch murdered her by failing to clean the goddam produce.
Her laziness killed my mother.
The treatment for amoebic dysentery, at the time, was fierce. And it was carcinogenic. Not surprisingly, then, she came down with cancer. By the time her doctors discovered it (women’s complaints of abdominal pain in those days were discounted as signs of hypochondria), her abdomen was filled with columnar growths. There was nothing they could do to save her.
As you can imagine, I could do without weather that reminds me of that horrible place. {chortle!} I can do without anything that reminds me of Saudi Arabia.
At any rate, those fine adventures were brought to mind as Ruby and I plowed through the swampy heat this morning, and passed men working like Arabs at a house where they were building an add-on.
Yeah: out there at the crack of dawn, climbing ladders and hauling lumber and pounding nails…augh! Surely there’s gotta be a better way to make a living?
So while I’ve been bellyaching about this minor house matter and that minor yard matter, in comes the REAL news.
God help us. Please!
Turns out that my lovely and brilliant cousin, who was two or three years younger than me and who grew up in the San Francisco East Bay — where the California contingent of my mother’s family lived — dropped dead on his office floor.
Apparently he was just standing there when plop! Down he fell.
Stone dead.
Can you imagine?
He was younger than me, by several years. Very, very smart: brilliant, even, in a low-key way. And just the sweetest man you could possibly ever get lucky enough to meet: a joy to know.
Heart-breaking. Truly — no exaggeration — heart-breaking. Because he was such a lovely man. You could not hope, ever, to know a kinder, smarter, gentler guy.
Dear God! How could such a thing happen?
Apparently none of the people around him had any earlier indication that anything was wrong with him. He just. dropped. dead.
It makes me feel so sad.
He was several years younger than me. When his sisters and I were growing up, he was the little kid brother. So…seriously: how in heaven’s name could this happen?