Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Hiking Dogtilda…

by

So along about noon or so, I imagine I’d heard nary a word from the Kid, so I assume he doesn’t give a da*n what my Christmas is like.

Grump, say I and grumble! Send him a crabby-ole-lady message and take off into the ‘Hood with the pooch. and…

And…yeah….

The Dawg and I return and take up our chore of loafing loafing after enjoying a very nice, very peaceful, and surprisingly long dog-and-human walk.

GORGEOUS weather!!!!  What a spectacular, clear, cool urban day.

Amazingly quiet out there.  A bit strange, that…but nice. Peaceful.

And what do we hear from our Honored Son?

“We did get together yesterday, Christmas Eve.

“I picked you up in the afternoon and brought you to my house. We had dinner there, and I took you home afterward. I’m attaching a photo from the evening to help anchor it.

“Today I already have plans and am spending the day with my father.”

AUUUGH! Can you BELIEVE that?????  My marbles haven’t fallen out my ears. They’ve melted into a plastic puddle inside my brain!

Presumably melting a fair amount of the brain itself, in the process!

This stuff is, to understate extravagantly, DAMNED SCARY!

Decided to forego visiting the proposed purchase of the Rich Person’s Shack over on toney Central Avenue. WHY, after all, would the Dawg and I want to own another house in what is essentially the same neighborhood, to the tune of a couple hundred thou’ more than we can get for the Funny Farm?

Truth to tell, the F.F. is actually a better house than that fancy shack. Plus… We know all the neighbors here. It’s close to not one, not two, but three major grocery stores. And just now we have an Uber driver residing right across the street, 😀

To move would be madness! 😀  Totally….

***

Back to the immediate moment of hysteria…HOLEEE maquerel!

What I’d better do — I think — by way of maintaining some grip on whatever marbles remain (if any do….) is to create a file in which I write down everything, no matter how consequential or inconsequential, that goes on during course of a day.

So…hmmm…how would this work?…

Possibly a spreadsheet would be easiest to format. So…

Date / time/ event/ people

How’s that? Enter the date and the time. Then list whatever it was that I or we did, and list the names of the folks who were involved. So we’d get something like this:

12/24  /  4:00 – 7:00 p.m.  / Dinner at IDH house. / Ian, Georgia, Jane, & Pete.

This blurb would go in a spreadsheet, so it would be easy to grasp at a glance.

Wacky…but it would have the advantage of heading off TOTAL forgetfulness. At least I could tell at a glance that I actually had visited with M’hijito. And if he had guests: who they were.

Wow.

Dunno about you, but I think this is damn near the scariest thing I’ve EVER experienced…

Merry Xmas!!

by

Waiting to hear from M’hijito to see if he’s coming over for dinner, or if the’s been hijacked by his dad. 😀

One way or the ‘tother will be fine. We have some nice steaks defrosting. If he doesn’t want to surface here, he can come over on the weekend to tear into them.

Meanwhile, Ruby and I loaf. If it turns out the Kid is not coming over here this Christmas Day, that’s fine. The Dawg and the Human now have plenty of fine food, plus a gorgeous afternoon in which to circumnavigate the neighborhood.

And it is a spectacular day for a long, lazy walk through the ‘Hood.

The more I see of days like this, the more I wonder what nutty worm got into my head as I was looking (almost seriously!) at shacks in surrounding neighborhoods.  And the more I think…uhhh…NO, thankee! 

Seriously: I have no desire to move out of the Funny Farm. This is a handsome, solidly built block house, with classy tile floors and nice paint jobs and tony windows and up-to-date appliances… WHY on earth would I want to move someplace else?

Truth to tell, with a firmer grip on my marbles just now, I most certainly do not. 

None of the places we saw over the past few days are any better than this one, and the neighborhoods have drawbacks (like noise and access to strangers and rackety main drags) that this one does not. So…I reckon Ruby and I will be hanging out here for the next several whiles.

A serious advantage to the Funny Farm that these other places lack is that with its outrageous four bedrooms, the FF has plenty of room to accommodate a babysitter for the elderly.

Yes: if I need someone to come in and be here to oversee me 24 hours a day, I can offer the person her own bedroom and bathroom. All hers. No sharing. No nuisance. This should (I hope) put off the dread day when I will need to be consigned to an old-folkerie: with any luck, by some weeks… with more luck, by several months. Or maybe even years: who knows?

No sign of my son or word from him this Christmas Day. Presumably he’s at his dad’s.

Would’ve been nice to know if he’s planning on dinner here. However, we’re amply supplied: a gorgous T-bone big enough to feed Napoleon’s troops, which we can toss on the grill when he gets here. If he chooses not to be here… 😀 …Then we have enough steak to feed the FatLady a good three or four dinners.

So the Big Question just  now is… Are Ruby and I going for a walk this afternoon — sans kid? Or are we gonna loaf around and see if he shows up?

Well, he has a key, so if and when he gets here, he can let himself in. And if he doesn’t get here? Ruby and I can throw ourselves on the chow!

LOL!  See why I just luuuuv Christmas so damn much?
😮 

LOL! NOW what new neurosis???

by

Just don’t get old, especially if you’re female. It’s a recipe for escaped marbles! 😀

Seriously (…well…almost…) !  Just roamed out into the backyard, on the trail of the Dawg. So there we are out in back, puttering around. Nice and quiet. Clear sky. Balmy afternoon…

Balmy is right!  😀

Suddenly, weirdly: I’m horrifically scared!  

WHAT the DICKENS brought that on? 

  • Nary a coyote in evidence. (Coyotes don’t especially scare me, anyway.)
  • Nice, clear sky.
  • Dawg in attendance is calm, sniffing around cheerfully.
  • Distant kids are playing and laughing.

Ghosts, right? That’s gotta be the only explanation!

Dart inside with the hound on my heels. Find all is calm and quiet inside the Funny Farm. Dog seems not to have noticed that a marble or two slipped out my ears.

WHAT ON EARTH was THAT about??????

She killed herself. Why, why, WHY the Hell????

by

I fail to understand how she could have done anything so stupid. 

It was as though she deliberately incubated the cancer growing in her gut so as to inflict as much suffering as possible not only on herself but on those around her.

She knew.

She knew because she had been through the same horror with her own mother.

She had watched her wild-assed mother fuck her way into a terminal reproductive cancer. And, half a lifetime later, she drank her way and smoked her way into the same damned thing, calculated so as to cause as much suffering as possible for her husband and for her only child. And for herself, while she was at it.

Because she clearly knew what she was doing. I would suggest that what she did was not stupid. It was calculated. She knew she was gonna kill herself. She knew it would cause as much pain and suffering as possible to those around her. And that was her strategy.

So…well…I have to say that what she did was not stupid. It was malign, maybe. Because it was deliberate. Purposeful: she knew.

My poor father! He attended her through just about every moment of her hideous terminal illness, caring for her, feeding her, washing her, medicating her, dragging her to (useless!) doctors…God help him.

No question in my mind: she knew what she was doing.

We had known since the late 1950s that smoking causes cancer. She died while I was pregnant with my son: in the middle 1970s. A good 20 years after the cause and effect were identified. The more she heard of the science, the more she puffed away. I do think she truly believed those reports were Big Brother trying to control her life.

Why, why, why are people so stupid???? 

Oh well. Can’t fix stupid, can you? And you sure can’t undo its results.

The horror of it, though, is pretty straightforward: one’s sense is that what she did was not stupid. It was deliberate. 

She knew what she was doing would kill her, and she engineered the process to create as much suffering and as much stress as could possibly be inflicted on herself and on those around her.

Just. Plain. Evil. 

Key Hell

by

LOL! Went to find a key to unlock one of the exterior screens and… Voilà!  a half-dozen goddam different keys!!!! 

It’s taken almost an hour to unjumble that mess, and it’s still not straightened out. Just now: counted NINE keys, a couple of which I don’t even know what they go to.

Part of the problem is, different doors bear different brands of locks. So you can’t just have one or two keys made to work all seven (!!!!) exterior doors. Plus, because these houses back onto public alleys (which call in legions of bums and burglars) which require their own deadbolts, we end up with…hmmm….let us count…

11111 11111 1

ELEVEN LOCKS! 

At one point along the line, as I recall, I did ask a locksmith to key all the locks the same. But, for reasons I do NOT recall, he couldn’t do that. He was able to key a few of the same, but not all of them.

And that leads to an even more confusing mess!!

ooooohhhhh gaawd!! i have gotta have some breakfast. where the hell is that coffee?????????

Is there a REASON we never notice…???

by

{chortle!} Just back from the early morning dawg traipse. It’s a little after 9 a.m.

I take it into my vacant little noggin that I should walk over to the Sprouts (a few blocks away, across Main Drag West), thereinat to buy a new bag of coffee beans and some beloved dawg food and…such-like. What time do they open?

Get online and discover they’ve been open since 7 this morning!

Argha!!!!  If I had a fake “disabled” dog vest for Ruby, we could have darted in there while we were trudging around the neighborhood!

Not quite my style… But…did you realize you can buy those things online? Amazon peddles alleged “disabled” dog vests for a dime a dozen.

Well…a large dime. But still: they’re easily available. Probably can get them in local pet stores, too.

LOL! I was sitting in the church one day when some lady came in with a ridiculous tiny pooch, gussied up in an alleged “disabled” vest. She picked the little guy up and set him on the pew next to her!

Holee holee maquerel!

You don’t see obvious fake “service dog” vests often. Mostly you see them in grocery stores around here, no doubt because dogs are considered too unsanitary to allow in a grocery store. In England, we saw companion dogs everywhere: not just in grocery stores and pharmacies but also in restaurants. Around here, a “service dog” vest is something you might see once every two or three weeks…probably because the things are kind of expensive.

And most people don’t have the chutzpah to tell someone who dares to challenge them to kindly fu*k off. Who needs that kind of confrontation?

😀
😮
😀