Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Roar! Roar! ROOOARRR!

by

And HOW glad am I that I don’t live in Sun City anymore?

GAWD, what a racket emanating from that place this afternoon! And it’s a good 20 miles from here…

We’re talkin’ jet engine noise. Sun City is just down the road from Luke Air Force Base, where what must be a VAST fleet of fighter jets resides. And yeah: damn near every day: ROAR ROAR ROAR!

My mother, who dearly loved her home in Sun City and was one of the rightest-wing of all possible right-wing patriots, used to coo on and on about how glorious the roar from the air base was. It’s the sound of FWEEDOM! she would emote.

Yeah. If the sound of World War III bearing down on you is the sound of fweedom, that must be it, all right.

Ugh. What an awful place!

At any rate. just now even our North Central Phoenix ‘hood is too damn close to Luke.

WHAT!

A!

RACKET!

And yeah, if I could move even further from it than we are here, I sure would.

Oh, well…  Round and round the ‘Hood with the little dog this noon. Beautiful day. And the place seems to grow handsomer with each passing month and year, too. I think it’s because of the location, mostly. And the quality of the aging tract houses, which were fairly upscale when they were built and which remain so.

SDXB and I really fell into it when my Realtor brought us to this place. Both of us bought houses here. And neither of us lost $$$ in the transition.

He has since moved to Sun City. Having lived there when my parents were there, you couldn’t give me the place. But I guess he likes it.

You do need to enjoy the Sound of Freedom to fully appreciate the joint, though. Ugh!

 

LOL! It Gets Stupider and Stupider!!!

by

ooooohboy!!!!!! This is ONE OF THOSE DAYS!!!!

One of the days where EVERY GODDAMN THING I TOUCH goes SPROOOOOIIIINNNNGGGGGG!!!!

Seems to be a rather more extreme Sproingy-Day than usual, too. 

Forgot that today was Cleaning-Lady Day. So the wonderful Luz showed up as I was loafing and playing with the computer, and o’course the damn place is a mess.

DAAAYYY-UMMMMM!!!!!!!!!

  • Leap up.
  • Charge around.
  • Put things away.
  • Put things away.
  • Put things away.
  • Put…no! REPAIR this goddam thing.
  • Repair another thing.
  • Repair another thing.
  • Put more stuff away.

Ohhhkayyyy…there! That’s done. I guess.

Now look at notes on computer and see I was supposed to have done a test for the corner doc’s office AND gathered some info for a young lawyer I may (or may not) want to recruit.

My dearly beloved lawyer dropped dead on the floor of his office a few weeks ago. No emergency being under way, I have lazily failed to recruit some other warrior…largely because I have no idea which way to turn.

* All the Old Guard lawyers I know have retired.
* Not having any luck getting referrals to any new folk.
* Found a young storefront lawyer just around the corner, but
a) Don’t know a thing about him; and
b) Have been too damn lazy to get off my duff and go see if he wants a crazy old lady as a new client.

 Just now…well… Gotta say: I am just not in the mood to charge into battle over any of these damn things. Plus having the cleaning lady underfoot does nothing to facilitate dealing with exterior hassles.

Welll…..

Really, I should go over and introduce myself to the young pup lawyer up the street. Not because I need his services, but because it’s always wise to have a professional of that type on the string BEFORE you need his or her services.

Well. There’s really no hurry. So I suppose that errand can wait until tomorrow, since we have plenty of other distractions running just now.

Right? If I wait until the beloved Wonder-Cleaning-Lady is done, that will be one distraction out of the way. So then I can focus on the proposed new guy…and, failing him, work on finding someone else to replace my late, much beloved (and useful) lawyer.

What a Godsend our wonderful Wonder-Cleaning-Lady is!!! She’s in there banging and scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing. Gawd knows, I am in NO condition to clean house. She’s only about 3/4 done, and the place already is practically spotless.

And…continuing in the Department of Stupid Weirdness…

I seem to have dropped an entire size in my blue jeans. But the bathroom scale doesn’t indicate I’ve lost any weight.

So….  Either the scale is on the fritz, or something has happened to stretch my pants up an entire size (!!!). Which is another way of saying SPROIIIINNNGGG!

…..

Hmmmm….  Apparently the solution to that puzzle is (b): somehow I’ve dorked up my jeans so they no longer fit.

GGRRRRRR!!!!!

by

SEVEN-FORTY FIVE IN THE MORNING and here’s some phone soliciting a$$hole on the phone to pester me!

Jayzuz!

Arizona doesn’t do Daylight Savings Time, so these clowns are probably calling from what seems like an early but marginally OK time for them. For me, there is NO time that’s OK to pester me with a nuisance call — marginal or not.

Really: telephone soliciting should be illegal. 

A perp should get 30 years in jail for rousting some poor victim on the G.D. phone. Add another five years for every minute they call before 10 a.m.

Phone soliciting is a prison industry. So a lot of these clowns are calling you from inside a jail (where they belong, presumably).

And that brings us around to the question of WHAT THE HELL do the state and federal authorities think they’re doing to sic their criminal charges on us? In our homes! At all hours of the day and half the hours of the night!

The proprietors of these operations also belong in jail, alongside their (presumably unpaid or underpaid) charges. Damn them all!!!!!

No Longer Even Bother….

by

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

CALL FROM “V….[ETC ETC ETC]

Oh, hey!!!  Turns OUT

it’s from my pal VickyC!  She wants to go out for brunch…lunch…whatever it is!

Yahoo! Now I have less than an hour to get off my duff, wash up, and get dressed.

The heck with that noise: I’m drinkin’ the rest of this coffee, come what may! 😀  😀  😀

And how convenient: I need a new lawyer, my beloved guy having retired. And she DOES know a good one, I believe. I hope…she was hiring my guy, but I think she needed someone who had a slightly different specialty.

Well! We shall see in an hour or so.

Must review the piles of legalistic paper and be sure my will and other paperwork remain set up to cover my son, with the least possible degree of hassle, for when I croak over.

*****

Aaahhhhh SHEEE-UT! 

No, we won’t see any such thing. Turns out my son has made a goddamn appointment with the goddamn Mayo Clinic…on SUNDAY MORNING!!!!!!!

This is not the first time those idiots have done this.

It’s a hour’s drive out there, one-way.

That means if I have choir: cancel choir.

If I have anything else to do: cancel that.

Get in the car and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and…  Find a place to park in their maze of an underground parking lot. Ride upstairs and wait and wait and wait and…GODDAMMIT!

Just what I wanna do on a Sunday morning. Choir or no choir.

****

And now here we are in one of their draped rooms, waiting for…Gawd only knows what new torture. Presumably something entailing a generous jabbing of needles.

How do I hate this place? Let me count the ways.

One nice thing about it, I guess: if you croak over, you don’t regret it so uch…it would be a bit of a relief.

1:54 p.m.

“Morning,” eh? 

Well, it’s comin’ on to two in the afternoon. We’ve been here for HOURS. I’m still lashed up to a needle and fukkin’ tubes and…HOW can I say how much I hate this?

Yeah, I do recognize and understand how amazing our medical system is and how astonishing all the stuff we can do is and…boyoboyoboy…  And how much I hate this stuff.

Cruising the Internet. Come across a notice of my nephew’s demise. Poor guy. He never was…well…quite right. Short a few IQ points, from the git-go. Just…really sad.

This was the grandson of the woman who became my stepsister when my father married her mother…

2:15 in the fukkin’ afternoon…

Tied down to a couch in the Mayo with a damned needle in my arm for…how long? I’ve lost track of the time. Feels like fukkin’ hours, though. Son is yelling at me..I can’t open my mouth without pi$$ing him off.

One

Bitch

of a

Day

* * *

And now we’re on the way home. My poor son’s mood is not improved by our escape. He’s yelling at me. I just want to get home, get in the house, and shut the door!

And maybe, with any luck, find something to eat. Without having to hike to the grocery store.

“The Sound of Freedom”!!!

by

Weather conditions are right this morning to waft the breathtaking “Sound of Freedom” 25 miles across the Valley from Luke Air Force Base into our yards here in North Central Phoenix.

My parents’ little house in Sun City was just a few miles up the road from Luke. So there was no escape from that fine melody, no matter what time of day or which way the wind blew.

R-R-R-R-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R!!!!

Jet warplanes ripping their way through the atmosphere.

My mother loved to take her morning coffee on our screened back porch, out there in Sun City. Right about the time the boys climbed into their fighter jets and took off….

“Ohhhh,” she would coo. “It’s the sound of freedom!”

Today I listen to that terrifying racket and wonder, Did she REALLY believe that “Sound of Freedom” b.s.? 

She wasn’t a stupid woman. So when you think about it, it is puzzling that she would fall for that line.

Maybe, I thought then and sometimes think now, maybe it was a way to justify staying in Sun City, where she and my father retired after his 30 years of crushing work overseas and on oil tankers.

If she pretended to like that gawdawful racket, then of course she couldn’t bellyache about it to my father: he who labored like an animal to get them to the bourgeois little house in Sun City.

How would he have felt, one wonders, if she had turned to him, after 30 years of hard labor, and said I don’t like it here! Let’s move someplace else!

You don’t even wanna know. Truth to tell, an admission like that might very well have ended the marriage.

I suppose “oooh, it’s the sound of freedom” was at base a way to smother the terror we all felt, knowing at any time a nuclear war could break out…and we could be in the middle of it.

In San Francisco, where I went to junior high school, the screaming air raid sirens were terrifying. The “duck-and-cover” drills in the classroom: terrifying. The instruction to “get home as fast as you can!” — on foot, a good two or three miles: terrifying. The ridiculous air-raid shelter in the basement of our apartment building — all too obviously about as efficacious as a styrofoam cup: terrifying. The bomb shelter that doubled as a garage for all the apartment dwellers, each automobile filled with gasoline a potential little bomb of its own: terrifying. The beeee-EEEEE-eee alert on the radio: terrifying. The blasting air-raid siren on the tower’s roof: terrifying.

Few if any places to get away from the racket: terrifying. The apartment building’s useless basement where we were to take cover: terrifying. Day by day: terrifying.

Really, looking back on those days, that’s how I recall it: as a time of terror.

What kind of morons were we: we and the Russians and the Chinese and all the rest of the worldwide chuckleheads who bought into nuclear armaments? Peculiarly stupid ones, apparently.

What COULD she have been thinking?

by

Or DID she think? 

My great-aunt Gertrude — a kind of amateur intellectual — lived with her mother (my great-grandmother) in a pretty little Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced bungalow in California’s Berkeley foothills. It was such a lovely little house! All wood floors and handsome windows and…on and on.

In back stood a similarly designed garage.

Neither woman had ever learned to drive.

(Can you imagine living in a time when you didn’t have to drive to get around a city?)

So that garage — big enough to hold two cars — served as a gigantic storage bin.

And what did they store in it?

Piles and piles atop pile on pile of old magazines. 

Yes. Gertrude subscribed to National Geographic, and she NEVER threw out a back issue. That garage was chuckablock full of antique issues of National Geographic.

Without doubt, there were other titles, too. But Nat’l Geographic is the one that sticks in my mind. They must have had twenty or thirty years’ worth of issues stashed in that lean-to.

Well. The place would’ve been a fire hazard under the best of conditions. But stacked from floor to ceiling with inky paper? HOLEE mackerel!

Back in the day, when I was a kid, it never occurred to me to ask them WHY they felt they should keep all those old issues, when any public library would have had them. Today, though, I look back on it and wonder were they crazy…or WHAT???

And looking back on it, it surprises me that my father let me and my mother stay at their house for a week or three at a time, while he was off at sea. Though my mother might not have noticed what a hazard that pile of paper presented, he was the kind of guy who would have looked at their proud collection and thought hoooleee sheee-ut! 

Only thing I can figure is that maybe he was never invited back there and so maybe he never saw it. Damned if I’d have let my kid stay for weeks at a time when one spark would set off a conflagration that would burn the house down.

People are strange, aren’t they?