Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

And QUADRUPLE-ARRRRRRGHHH!

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So some long-time workmen who are pretty reliable fellas show up. They’re puttering around…and somehow….

SOMEHOW…

…they get ahold of my front door keys and they fuck them up with élan!!!!!!!

My GAWD!

None of the keys works any of the locks or none of the locks or whateverthehell…WHAT A MESS!!!!!!!!

HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THAT???

GODDDAMMMMIT!!!!!!!

Now I’m gonna have to call the locksmith AGAIN to come over here and untangle all the goddamn locks.

This guy charges an arm and a leg just to breathe the air inside your house, to say nothing of doing any work. So this is gonna be another $200 bill. Then I’ll have to listen to my son bitch at me for spending all that money on the goddamn locks.

Again. 

Y’know, when I had the first locksmith over (they all work for the same outfit), I asked him to fix ALL THE LOCKS so they work on the same key. So: this would make it hard for me to confuse the keys and fu*k everything up.

Now, NO TWO LOCKS work on the same key. Set one key aside and you are FUCKED until you can dig it up from wherever the Hell you put it down.,

And wherever that is will likely be pretty random, meaning it will be hours or maybe days before you find that key, if you ever do.

STOP THE GODDAMN WORLD!!!”
I WANNA GET OFF!!!!!!!!!

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Back home right at 7:30 a.m. from a dog-and-human walk around the neighborhood: circumnavigating the park, roaming through the ritzy-titzy part of the ‘Hood, trotting past a major grocery store, past a 24-hour clinic, past the Sprouts, past the Walgreen’s…and…

..And WHY, again, have I been driving my car from the smallest pillar to the tallest post — with its pricey licenses and its expensive regular maintenance and its $3.48/gallon gasoline???

When my parents and I came back from our ten-year stint in Saudi Arabia, we took up residence in San Francisco, in a Fancy-Dan apartment development called Parkmerced. I dearly loved that place, and if I had the money (hah!!) would go back in an instant. It was a handsome place, and it was designed for residents to get around on foot. I rode the bus to school(!!!), and my mother and I rode busses and streetcars into downtown SF for our (altogether too frequent!) shopping trips.

Later, my father changed jobs and we moved to Southern California — to dowdy Long Beach, where I had been born and not far from where my father’s ships came in to dock. Unlike the Bay Area, southern California was not designed for pedestrians. My Northern California relatives didn’t even own a car. In Long Beach, you couldn’t begin to get by without one.

Remembering our walks around Parkmerced; and that walking was not practical in SoCal…probably because the place was not designed for pedestrians, as San Francisco was. Neither Gree nor Gertrude — my great-grandmother and great-aunt in Berkeley ever owned a car.

Just imagine having access to your job, to one of the world’s most magnificent cities, and to all the shopping you liked (and then some) without a car!

Well. I wonder if one could engineer something long those lines here in (un)lovely uptown Phoenix. Seriously…with a guy driving for Uber across the street, a light-rail train and a fleet of busses running up and down the main drags…why do I need to own a car at all?

Could I get rid of the Tank? That seems all the more feasible with a car rental place some three blocks up the road from my house. If something comes up that I really need a car for some episode, all I’d need to do is walk up the road and rent one.

I may give the Tank to Ian…let him pay the insurance and taxes and maintenance on the damn thing!

It is a nice enough vehicle, and it came in handy when one of its riders was a German shepherd. But a 35-pound corgi does not need a gasoline-powered covered wagon!

And to pay for an occasional taxicab surely isn’t going to cost what a van with its attendant taxes, maintenance and repair bills and gasoline bills costs.

How would I get the dog to the vet? M’hijito would have to drive us.

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Arrrgha! I’m gunna have to crash out of this post. Can’t get it to do anything and do not know if it will survive. My apologies for the weirdness!!!!!

 

Corner of Hell and Hades….

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HOOleee keerap!

It was hot when I left the Albertson’s to walk home with a small armful of groceries. My GOD what torture! I hafta tellya…

For sure:  I’ll never buy groceries at that Albertson’s again. As we scribble, it’s 115 in the shade of the back porch. Wunderground says it’s 116.  Out in the middle of an asphalt road, no shelter anywhere to be seen? EASILY 120…very probably more than that

I have never walked through such gawdawful heat…and I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where a 115-degree day was normal.

Today all I wanted was a six-pack of beer and a bottle of white wine. That notwithstanding, the bags weighed more than I wanted to haul through that heat. Asked the clerk if it was OK to borrow a cart and bring it back in the morning.

Well. No. 

So…will I be shopping at Albertson’s again?

Well. No.

Nope. Never again!

A grocery cart typically costs a couple hundred bucks. I can spend that much in a typical trip to a grocery store. Let’s say I make two such trips a month… Today Albertson’s traded $200 for a $400/month loss. For a year’s worth of shopping, that’s $400 x 12, or $4800.

Mighty fancy grocery carts y’got there, Mr. Albertson!

WTF?????

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Okay, friends…and yes, dear foes: I’m about to tell you something I probably shouldn’t tell you. Or anyone.

Stuff is scaring the Hell out of me…even though it probably shouldn’t.

Weird stuff. Stupid stuff. Even serious rational stuff.

For example…

I lost my bicycle. 

Yeah. Lost it BIG time. Don’t know where. Don’t know how. Have only the vaguest idea of when.

The other day I rode my beloved old gaudy pink bicycle through the ‘Hood and over into the classic North Central neighborhood just to the east of here.

That neighborhood is dominated by two historic Catholic high schools — Xavier and Brophy Preparatory — which are surrounded by staunchly middle-class, boring little homes.

As I got tireder and hotter, I came to light at the home of a woman who was hanging out on her front porch. She invited me to take a seat and rest.

It became apparent, before long, that I probably should not ride my bike home in the heat, especially in the fagged-out state I was exhibiting. She brought out a phone, and we called my son.

Shortly, he showed up in his car, coming to light in front of her house.

He loaded me into the vehicle, and we left: he brought me home and deposited me in the air-conditioning.

Here’s where it gets weird: He apparently forgot to load the bike into his vehicle — or didn’t realize he needed to. When we got home: no beloved pink bike! 

I was very much overheated and not in any state for anything more than tumbling into the sack with a cold washcloth on my head. He drove me over to St. Joseph’s hospital, where, by the time we arrived, I had pretty well recovered and cooled down into a safe status. We came home. I forgot all about the bike…until the next morning, when I realized it is GONE!

I want my bike back! 

Getting weirder now: We can’t figure out where we left it. If we left it anywhere. I thought we’d brought it home and left it in the garage.

But it’s not in the garage. Or inside the house. Or in the backyard. Or…anyplace we can imagine.

Did I actually ride my bike over to the high-school neighborhood and carelessly leave it there, when M’Hijito arrived and toted me off?  Dunno. I have no memory of that. He says not. But…it’s a pretty vague-sounding “not.” Maybe I actually walked into that neighborhood???

If so, where the Hell is the bike?

So… I’m bereft at the loss of a beloved bicycle. But more than that: I’m scared sh!tless at the loss of my IQ points!!!  WTF? WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED? 

That is what’s scaring me. Really, really scaring me.

It’s hotter than the Hubs of Hades outdoors today: temps over 110. So walking back over into that neighborhood and trying to explore around is pretty much out of the question.

And M’hijito is (quite reasonably) pretty much out of patience with this shenanigan. He has a job (can you imagine??) and cannot take off to wander around searching for a bike that by now has probably been spirited off to Yuma.

Dunno whether he recognizes that a big, scary part of this moment of lunacy is that I genuinely cannot remember what actually happened at that lady’s house, not in any detail at all. So frankly, I don’t know if we left the bike there…or what. Probably did…but at this point anything’s possible.

At 6:00 p.m., it’s 108 in the shade of the back porch. Too hot, by far, to go exploring around North Central Phoenix — not that we’d  be likely to find anything.

Meanwhile, M’jito, deeply alarmed with this weird behavior of mine, has kiped my car and locked it into his garage. So I can’t climb into it and drive it around that neighborhood on a searching expedition.

Soooo… I guess my beloved pink bike is gone. As in GONE gone. Along with a few of my brain cells, presumably….

Jayzuz! Don’t get old, whatever ya do!!!

Glub!!

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Hot! Humid. Light overcast. Not enough to rain — which might clear out the swampy effect. Just enough to create misery.

Dawg and I have circumnavigated the ‘Hood again…pretty much a daily ritual. My bike is still missing: either purloined by my son or stolen by a passer-by. The upshot is the same. Whenever I work up the energy, I need to go rent a bike at the nearby bicycle shop. Then, presumably, find a place to hide it.

Antecedent to that, Ruby and I have circumambulated the ‘Hood, traipsing from one end of the place to the other through a hot, soggy morning. Now we loaf upon the bed. Ruby is already conkered out, and — after this morning’s damp tramp — I wish I were, too. Swilling coffee and munching chocolate no doubt will militate against any snoozing on the human’s part, though.

Here inside the house, it’s hotter than the Hubs…and soggy. Aim the table fan at the Human and the Dog. Gaze enviously at the snoozing pooch…think turn off that light, shut down that computer, and go back to sleep!

Yet and still…even inside the house with the AC blasting and the fan whirring, it seems too hot and damp to doze. So we play electronic “card” games on the laptop.

Missing my mother. How dare she work up the nerve to DIE, f’rgodsake?

She killed herself, actually. Poisoned herself with tobacco.

Seriously: never was she conscious that she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. And eventually, the damn things did their job: killed her painfully and hideously. Put my father through the tortures of the damned: doting on her, tending to her through every agonized minute of her last three or four months.

Life is evil, y’know?

Speaking of the which, my bike is still gone — probably in my son’s precincts. But I don’t care.

There’s a Goodwill store across the road, and on the corner a retailer of bikes and such. I’m thinking I’ll go over to one of those and buy another bike.

That, however, would require me to get off my duff, climb out of the sack, and hike through the humid, overheated morning.

How do I not wanna do that? Lemme count the ways.

Gasp! Huff! Puff!!!

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Just back from about two miles through 105-degree heat. HOLEE shee-ut! Not only hot out there, but passing muggy. If I had any sense, I’d plunge into the pool. But…

a) No, I have no sense; and
b) It’s 107 in the shade out there on the back porch

Jayuz, it’s almost as miserable as Arabia.

And THAT, my friends, is bloody miserable.

On the way to and from the shopping centers, I walk past these blocks of apartments that my mother wanted me and DXH to move into when we first explored this part of town.

WHY in the NAME of God would your mother want you to move into a ticky-tacky pile sandwiched between a freeway on-ramp and one of the busiest, loudest surface streets in the Valley???

Never did understand her enthusiasm for those dumps, except that they superficially resembled apartments she and I inhabited in Southern California.

Ugh. Long Beach Redux. Who would choose to live in such a place?

Oddly, though, our Realtor found us a development to the east of the freeway, a tract that amounts to a pleasant middle-class neighborhood with a nice park, plus some distance between most of the houses and the traffic racket. And the structures in it are HOUSES, not tumble-down apartments.

Phoenix is kinda weird that way. Ticky-tacky tracts interspersed with reasonably decent middle-class developments wrapped around upscale neighborhoods. That’s our garden spot.

Ohhh well. 

It seems unreasonably hot out there. Just now, Wunderground tells us the temp is a balmy 110 degrees. Lovely.

Passed a truck driver in one of the parking lots, loading boxes — by hand — into his semi. Ugh!!!! Some people’s jobs, eh? Offered to help, but mercifully he declined.

Finally made it home and now am  loafing in the air-conditioning.

You don’t even wanna KNOW what the power bill is gonna be this month. My guess,, though, is around $300.

Summer bills run upwards of $200 here. But then, in the winter they’re practically nil…so it all levels out.

Welp…at least we don’t live in Texas. Have you seen the horror shows emanating from that place? Floods that wash people away, drown folks hiding in attics...augh!

That’s whence my father’s family emanated. I can remember my uncle relating memories of times when he and my aunt stood on their wooden porch and watched tornadoes sail past on the prairie. Never did understand how they escaped those storms…guess the weather must have been off in the distance.

Argh! As my father used to say: Texas is a good place to be from…as far from it as you can get.