Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Re-Watering Project, continued

by

Don’t get old: Ya can’t remember yer name!!

Much less that you needed to get out in the 110-degree heat and turn the hoses on the backyard plants.

This, to make up for some A**-hole TURNING OFF the irrigation in my yard, thereby killing everything in sight. 

Sheeee-ut!

Fortunately, I noticed before all the backyard trees were dead. These, mostly citrus, need to be watered regularly and deeply.

So…now I’m running around in 110-degree heat, dragging hoses and trying to deep-water the trees and plants back there.

As infuriating as this is…amazingly I failed to remember this fiasco until about 5:00 this afternoon. God. DAM. It. 

So I missed today’s project to try to re-irrigate the vegetation back there.

Just darted back in the house — at 5:00 p.m. — having started to lay out hoses and run sprinklers.

Dammit. Now this will take until about 9:00 tonight. Just what I wanted to do with a roasting-hot evening!

Jayzuz! What the HELL would possess some clown to turn off all the water in my yard? We’re talking a full-fledged irrigation system that drenches the trees and soaks the ornamental vines: front, side, and back.

Because, in my dotage, I forgot about this as the cleaning lady was charging around in the house, now it will be well into the night-time hours before all the hose-dragging is done.

Matter of fact, it probably won’t get done tonight. I’ll have to go out there tomorrow and wrestle with hoses in the morning.

WHO would do such a thing??????

by

Holeeee GAWD!  I just went out in back and discovered that ALL of the watering system has been turned off.

When, I do not know. It sure as hell wasn’t turned off by me. Not in 110-degree heat, of that  you may be sure.

So either one of the yard dudes did it (not bloody likely) or some visiting workman vandalized my yard.

Think I caught it (I hope) in time to save at least some of the plantings. Just now, water is POURING to the citrus trees. They’re bone-dry…normally get water a couple times a week. But forgodsake: the hedges? The citrus trees — ALL of them? The climbing roses? The cat’s-claw vines in gay abandon….

WHAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD DO A THING LIKE THAT???

They had to have known what they were doing…because they turned off ALL the watering zones!  There’s half a dozen of them!!

And it has to have been someone who had a key, because the back gate is kept locked.

Holeeee shee-ut!

Well…I guess I’ll need to have all the locks on the exterior gates changed….how many is that?  Let’s see…

1…1…1…in back…plus the garage side door. That’s four. Oh, shee-ut! What d’you suppose it’ll cost to have a locksmith come in and do that?

More than I want to pay, you can bet. About four times more than I want to pay. 😮

Godlmighty. I hope they didn’t put any kind of poison on the trees and vines.

The plants look OK just now… Maybe the jerk figured just turning off the water to them would do the trick, in 110-degree heat.

Ohhhh man!  The hoses are POURING the water to them right now. It’s getting dark out, so I’m gonna have to turn off the faucets pretty soon. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll have to get back out there and turn the water back on.

This defies belief!

Why would anybody do such a thing????

Another Soggy Doggy Day in Arizona

by

LOL! What was I was mooning on about yesterday, how even though it’s hotter than Hell here, at least the air is dry and the humidity is low?

Har har!!!!

Today we’re looking at a high of 114º, with humidity of 27%.  If that ain’t Rasty Nasty, the lovely American oil compound where we resided on the shore of the Persian Gulf, I’d like to know what it is!

Twenty. Seven. Percent of the air will be water!  Ugh!

Welp! The dawg and the human are back from this morning’s trek around the ‘Hood. The human is drenched with sweat. What a horrid morning!

We passed our friend Josie’s house: she who inherited the place from the City of Phoenix after her place was bulldozed to build an airport runway.

Pore folks live on airport property, ya know. So there she was, minding her own business as she dodged jet airplanes, and along came the City, grabbed her house, and gave her SDXB’s place. He had moved to Sun City — and so anxious was he to get away from his bosom enemy, Tony the Romanian Landlord, that he handed the house over to the City for a song.

Little did anyone (other than SDXB) know that the plumbing under the kitchen sink had been the target — several times — of SDXB’s amateur repair jobs. It had sprung a series of leaks, and each time he, being too parsimonious to hire a qualified craftsman, did the fix-it job himself.

Well…this time when it sprang another leak, the water flooded the entire damn house! Especially the kitchen, the laundry room, the dining room, the living room, and up the hallway into the bedrooms.

Good…
Lord…

So Josie came home to a deluge. All the carpeting had to be removed. Plumbing changed out. Cabinetry repaired. CAN you imagine?

These houses were cheaply built to begin with — though they’re far better constructed than today’s junk out in the suburbs. You don’t even want to know what resulted from SDXB’s amateur plumbing job.

😀  You don’t have to know: all you have to do is glance at the ripped-out carpeting piled in Josie’s front yard!

Anyway, just now it’s as wet outside in the open air as it is inside Josie’s house! High, ineffectual-looking clouds lurk off to the east and the north. Not a great day for hiking a mile or two around the neighborhood.

Ugh! I could brain my father for dragging me to Arizona. Too late: his brain resides inside an urn, as part of a pile of ashes.

But seriously: whatever could he have been thinking? Didn’t care, I guess, what hauling me to the middle of the desert and plopping me in a third-rate university would do to my optimistically planned academic career. Hey! Why does a woman need a Ph.D. from Berkeley, anyhow?

How do I hate Arizona? Let me count the ways…

by

As we scribble, the temperature in the shade of the back porch is 118°…yes, that IS one hundred eighteen degrees. Clear skies: no sign of rain. But 13% humidity. That’s today’s low, in the wet air department.

Think of that. Thirteen parts in 100 doses of air are water. Ugh.

Let’s see what it looks like in Saudi Arabia, the hell-hole where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf:

Hmmmm… Temp: a crisp 105 degrees. Ahhh, how balmy! But….uhm…humidity? FORTY-EIGHT PERCENT.

Yeah. Almost half the air you breathe in there is water. 

Ugh. I do recall it: hot, wet, and miserable.

Here, we’re only hot and miserable. 😀

So…the Human reminds itself: Qwitcher bellyachin’!

Eeeek! Worser and worser!!

by

{chortle!} If you were watching this space, you’ll recall that earlier this morning I was bellyaching about the heat.

THAT WAS NOTHING!!!

Yeah. As we scribble — at 1:23 in the afternoon — it is ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN DEGREES IN THE SHADE OF THE SHELTERED BACK PORCH!!!!!

Noooo kidding!  111º in the shade! 

Garden spot, eh?

Let’s see what our favorite weather site, Wunderground, has to say about that…..

Hmmmm…. Our thermometer understates! Wunderground says we’re enjoying 114 degrees, with 116 forecast!

Eek, I say to that…eeeeek! 

This is expected to go on for SEVERAL DAYS, with extreme heat forecast all over the Southwest. Holeee doggerel!

Well. So much for my proposed afternoon stroll! Silly of me, eh?

It also will cancel Ruby’s evening stroll. Even after dark, the superheated pavement will burn her little feet.

It may be OK to take her out as dawn cracks tomorrow morning. But pretty clearly she ain’t goin’ out at any other time.

Jayzuz! Highs of 115 degrees (Yes! you read that right: a hundred and fifteen!) are supposed to go on through the weekend.

Horrors! What a place!

Truth to tell, I don’t remember it ever getting this hot when we lived in Saudi Arabia — which was a certifiable hell-hole. Right now, as a matter of fact, it’s only 93 there.

Gawdlmighty, I do hate Arizona. Thank you, Daddy, for dragging me to your retirement paradise…you chucklehead! I should move away from here…but probably won’t, because I’m not leaving my son behind. As long as M’hijito is here, I’ll be baking here, too.

Welp…about all we can do right now is stay indoors and hope to God the air-conditioner holds up!

Brrr! A Brisk Day in Dumb-Ass Arizona!

by

Brrrr! It’s a brisk 103º out there in the shade of the back patio.

A cold day in (un)lovely Arizona.

What a place! WHY do people choose to live here?

I’m here because my parents dragged me here when I got into the University of Arizona a year before my planned high-school graduation. My father wanted to retire, and he didn’t give one thin damn about the effect it would have on my education, my career choices, or my life. Yeah. No: he did NOT care what yanking me out of school would do to my future.

How would I rather be in California, where I belong? Let me count the ways….

Oh, wait! I can’t count that high! 😀

This is a horrible place to live — particularly if you don’t have pocketloads of money. The weather stinks. Politics are grim at best. The education system leaves a lot to be desired…like, for example, education.

No kidding: I had students in my junior- and senior-level college courses at Arizona State University who did not know what the Declaration of Independence was about.

Arizona: the Land of the Ignorant and the Home of the Dumb. Maybe not so much now as then…but then, that was what we ran into. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Arizona without lifting a finger, because I hardly needed to crack a book open to get an “A” in an undergraduate course. Just show up in class and look kinda like you were listening to the instructor, and voilà. Semester grade: A.

Google “has quality of education improved in Arizona”; skim the results; and you’ll get a real good idea of how well we educate our kids here. HOOOlee maquerel.

When my parents dragged me to Arizona so my father could take early retirement, I was a National Honor Society student in an upper-middle-class Southern California high school. Not surprisingly, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a Phi Beta Kappa key in hand…without having to lift a finger on either hand.

No kidding. I just sat through my college courses staring at the instructors as I daydreamed, faking them out so they would think I was paying attention to them. Any student who seemed to be listening to what the “professor” was saying most certainly would get an “A” — or at worst, a “B” — in the course. Phi Beta Kappa: What a joke! 

Is this place any better than it was back then?

To a degree (heh!). Today, if I had to move a family here for a job, I surely would put my kids in private schools for K-12. On the college level, carefully investigate the quality of the majors. Some of them are pretty good. Some are pretty bad. If your kid won’t enroll in a decent program at the University of Arizona or Arizona State University, then send him or her to an out-of-state college with credible standards.

Couldn’t pay me to come here now, if I were under retirement age and could get a decent job in a state that respects educational attainment. RUN AWAY!