Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Bad to Worse!

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As if we weren’t having enough “fun” here, yesterday as I was puttering in the front yard a black widow spider bit my right hand.

OOOWWWWWWW!!! Does that HURT!

And it still hurts this morning, as dawn cracks.

This would be quite enough “fun” if I didn’t already hurt from head to toe with this accursed peripheral neuropathy. Add the pain from a spider bite, and…HOLEEE MAQUEREL!!!

To frost that cake, Ruby the Corgi is sick. She’s laying on the bed hyperventilating.

No way for me to get her to the vet, not without a car. My son is swamped with work and also sick himself, so asking him to come here, pick her up, and drive her back and forth is…out of the question.

Add the cleaning-lady maliciousness…and, by golly, we are in TROUBLE!

Malicious Meandering??

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This morning, by early light of day: contemplating the unmistakable fact that SOMEONE — not me — turned off all the watering systems that my yard plants depend on to stay alive. That would be…

* the bougainvilleas
* the roses
* four bearing citrus trees
* the olives in front
* the ornamental trees in front…

…on and on.

This would have required them to turn off more than one faucet. In the back yard alone, they would have had to manually turn off water for a dozen individually irrigated trees and plants! And that doesn’t count the front yard and the east-side yard.

It may rain today — one can hope. We have a 61% chance, according to Wunderground. Not great…but better than 0%. So that would get the yard’s plants through a day of summer heat. Maybe…

At any rate, I’ve turned the system back on  — as best as I can, since that is not my métier. Yard Dude is the one who rides herd on the automatic watering. Hope I can catch him the next time he’s here…won’t he be pleased to be asked to check and fix everything!

The thing that I’m concerned about is…well…the perp may be another of my employees, one who does not like me (I didn’t hire her! my son did…) and who has already pulled another malicious little trick. At least, I’m pretty sure she’s the one who did it.

If I can catch her the act — or round up some convincing evidence — she’s gonna be fired instantly. But…she’s a pretty slippery character, and so I’m afraid it’s unlikely that I will catch her.

And if I can’t?  It leaves me with two choices:

  • Fire ALL the hired help and recruit new household and yard workers.
  • Or sell the house and move into the horrible old-folkerie.

Neither of those is an appealing option.

I’m afraid the first looks better (to me, anyway) than the second. Actually, for my workers it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the 0ther: if I have to move out of my home, they’re all going to lose their jobs here, anyway.

ohhhhhh keerap!

BING BONG! 
BING BONG!!

Now what? 

Trot to the front door. City of Phoenix: they’re turning off the water in the neighborhood, for some sorta water system project they’re doing.

No sh!t, Jose?

Race around the house and yard. Turn off the outdoor faucets that were running on the landscape plants. Fill a big coffee pot with water…  Fill the Brita coffee filter pot with water….

Should have enough water for me (not the plants) to last all day. I hope.

This development raises another question:

Is it possible that whoever turned off all the watering systems in the back yard was NOT an annoyed and malicious cleaning lady, but THOSE guys?

Hmmmmmm…..  Not likely. City workers wouldn’t be suicidal enough to just barge into your backyard to get at your water panel, not with legions of guard dogs lurking around this neighborhood. Plus they don’t have a key to the gate, which is kept locked.

No. Whoever turned off every watering spigot in the back yard was someone who could access that back yard and who did the job maliciously. And I have a pretty fair idea who that someone was.

And if I catch her on camera as she’s up to whatever her next antic will be, she’ll be looking for another job.

Besides, it couldn’t have been the City’s guys! I was able to turn on all the watering zones less than an hour ago. If the men had turned off the water to the house, those zones wouldn’t have been working (so I could test them).

Nope. Coincidence notwithstanding, what has happened here is that some a$$hole came into my yard and, in 100-degree heat, and cut off the water to ALL of my plantings. That was probably done yesterday or before. This morning I went out to turn it back on in time to water the trees and shrubbery before it really gets hot today, and in doing so discovered that the whole system had been turned off.

Those guys wouldn’t have come into my yard and turned off my system, certainly not without my permission. Besides, if they’d turned off the water from their end, I wouldn’t have had any water coming into my yard to turn back on. What they were doing was asking me to turn it off. So…no…  Obviously, they didn’t pull that stunt on me.

What Possesses People???

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Honest to Gawd! Are people malicious, or just plain stupid?

We’re talking about your regular workers, not some burglar or passing vandal. The yard guys. The cleaning lady. Arrrrghh! 

These days, I hire a phalanx of workers to keep up the Funny Farm:

  • Pool Dude
  • Gerardo the Miracle Yard Dude
  • Cleaning Lady from Heaven
  • Smartest Plumber on the Planet
  • Air-Conditioning Dude

And on and on and endlessly on. Together, they keep this place running, and see to it that nothing falls apart.

But singly…one wonders if any of them has a measurable IQ….

This evening I stumble out into the backyard behind the dog. As I’m trying to call her back into the house, I realize the motion-sensitive back porch light isn’t coming on.

Dang! Did the bulb burn out? Or what?

After dorking around with the system for a bit, I realize…waaaitaminit here! There’s nothing wrong with the outside lights. What’s happened is…Jeez! Some idiot has switched off ALL the lights out there! 

HUH? 

Why would you think I wanted the lights turned off if I’d left them all turned on? Why would I install motion-sensitive lights if I wanted to turn the backyard lights on and off manually?

O’course, this event could signal something more malign than mere stupidity. Somebody could have switched off the lights so they could creep around the backyard in a burgling project.

One never knows.

This, of course, is why one has a dog and a firearm. But still… Grrrrr! It’s the principle of the thing. Right?

Yea, verily: more malign than mere stupidity…. Just tried to turn on the motion-sensitive west-side lights. And…yeah. They don’t come on. At all. Someone has unscrewed or broken them.

No, not likely they burned out: we have four of them out there. One or two might burn out after extensive on’s and off’s. But not all four at once.

So…most likely: someone has set up the place so he can burgle around the house & yard unmolested.

Tomorrow I’ll have to call the electrician and have him replace those outdoor lights. Let’s hope whoever has been messing with them doesn’t decide to come a-visiting tonight….

Makes moving into a holding pen for old folks look better and better…

Makes a .38 look damn good, too!

What Next, Lord?

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It’s now an hour and a half later than when I wrote this morning’s post. I take it into my feeble little noggin to walk up to the nearby Albertson’s grocery store to pick up a few minor necessaries. Right….

Step out the front door and….

ROAR!!!!

Cop helicopter blasts overhead. Circles the neighborhood: round and round he goes, clearly searching for someone.

Someone you may be sure we do not want to get to know…

Back into the house. Lock the doors behind me. Double-check that all the other doors and windows are locked.

See why I find myself thinking, almost obsessively, about moving someplace else?

Ugh!

I really do begin to think that if I’m going to stay in a single-family home, I need to move down into my son’s neighborhood. Houses there are within walking distance of the beloved AJ’s overpriced market, plus a nearby aged shopping center hosts a large Fry’s supermarket.

Hafta say that I no longer feel safe in Phoenix.

O’course, I never did: you’d be a fool to think all was hunky and dorey in this place, wherever you live & whatever the time of day. But these days I do feel more uncomfortable than I used to.

I never used to feel unsafe inside my home, in broad daylight.

And that’s telling me it may be time to move.

But move where?

  • My son’s neighborhood? Frankly, it’s no safer there than here…in fact, it’s probably less safe.
  • Fountain Hills, whither my cousin betook herself? Very nice, very toney…but wayyyy too far from where my son lives.
  • Tempe, suburban home of Arizona State University? Meh! It’s about as bland as you can get. Does have, as one of its advantages, easy proximity to the many cultural activities at the university campus. But…how likely am I to take advantage of those things?
  • South Scottsdale, where my best friend and her husband lived for awhile after they returned to the Valley from an excursion in the Virgin Islands? No better than Tempe in the Meh! department.
  • Into an old-folkerie? The Beatitudes and Orangewood retirement “homes” await. Problem: I hate, loathe, and despise institutional living. And I’m not anxious to wind up my life in one of those places.

I can’t say that I exactly feel unsafe, here in the Hood. It feels more like…nuisanceferizing.

Yeah: one damnfool nuisance after another.

The cop flyovers are nuisances. No, I don’t feel at risk. But I do feel that I have to get up, close and lock all the exterior doors, and check the windows to be sure they’re secured shut.

Do I want to do without the cop flyovers? Hell, no! Those cops are all we have between us and a legion of sh!theads.

But…how wise is it, really, to stay here much longer?

Biggest Mistake of My Life…

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Loafing under gray skies, I find myself gazing back on the major decisions of my life. Ever-entertaining….

It strikes me that the single worst decision I ever made was NOT to have majored, as an undergraduate, in a subject that would have landed me a decent job. Without benefit of a graduate degree.

As it is — stupidly having majored in English and pursued not one but two graduate degrees — I can’t get a “decent job” for love nor money.

Consider the likely possibilities:

An Ed.D. would have gotten me a principal’s position in some high school in a desirable location — like the San Francisco Bay Area, for example.

An MBA almost certainly would have led to a decently paying corporate job. Just about anywhere.

An MS in microbiology (my favorite subject) would have landed a job at a hospital or a university, pursuing interesting challenges.(nevvermind that women were not welcome in the sciences at the time…TOTALLY not welcome!)

Any of those jobs could have led me to a career far, far away from hot, muggy, intellectually backward Arizona.

But ohhhhhh  no!  I had to chase a Ph.D. in English…so that I wouldn’t have to go back and change my undergraduate major to a subject that would have made economic sense.

What? Me? Make sense? 

Surely you jest…