Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Holy Sh!t….DUCK FOR COVER!

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KeeeeRAAP! Some ba*tard just shot at our cop helicopter!

The action took place a couple blocks to the north of the Funny Farm…maybe three. But definitely on our side of Main Drag North.

Call the dog — she’s loafing in the kitchen, and she sees no good reason to get up and leave her scrap-scavenging post.

Call the dog.

Call the dog.

Call the dog again.

At last the obedient beast decides to get up and roam over to see what I want. Who knows? Maybe the Human has food.

Coax her up the hallway and hit the tiles. 

Stay down until whatEVER-the-Hell is going on quits.

Cop Copter is hovering over our old house, the noise-collector a few houses in from Conduit of Blight Blvd. That’s about a block-and-a-half from where the Funny Farm stands.  We hunker down on the bedroom floor…and….

ohhhhhh shee-ut, here he is again, roaring over at roof-top height. 

WTF?

Stay hunkered.

At last the Copter swoops around and takes off into the north-easterly distance.

Lift the corgi onto the bed. Check the doors — for the third time! — to be sure everything is locked.

Climb onto the sack with the dog.

Holeeee krap, what a place!

BONK! And this didn’t occur to me…WHY?

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Y’know…having lived in sprawling Southwestern cities all of my adult life, this factoid never occurred to me. But…y’know what? YOU DON’T NEED A CAR TO LIVE IN A CITY LIKE PHOENIX.

Early adolescence in San Francisco, taught me that…well…yeah. You don’t need a car to live conveniently in the City, as my mother and I used to call SF. San Francisco has (or had, at the time) premier public transit. You’d never wait more than ten or fifteen minutes for a bus or train to come by.

But Phoenix, a hub of blue-collar dorkishness, is NOT like San Francisco. Not even close. Phoenix is more like Los Angeles. Or Long Beach, where I had the un-privilege of spending my high-school years. Wherever you’re goin’ in Southern California, you can’t get there from here…not without a car.

To the extent that Phoenix and L.A. have trains, you don’t wanna ride on them…not unless you enjoy being pestered by panhandlers and oversexed bums. Yeah, there are busses, but by and large they don’t run on time, they’re filthy, and they also tend to harbor folks that you prefer not get too close to you. (“Too close” being “in the same county….”)

But…

Over the past week or ten days, I’ve made two disoveries that change ALL of that:

a) You don’t need a car; AND
b) You don’t have to ride on the off-putting public transit, either.

Why?

BECAUSE OF UBER. 

Turns out that during the past few months and years, Uber has become an enormous success here.

Yeah. You can get from  Point A to Point B in a private car, hired out by its owner to Uber, for less than a taxicab costs. The cars are clean, you feel reasonably safe in them, they show up in a timely way, and the cost is within reason.

Not only that, but a guy who drives for Uber lives three houses down the street from me!  And he’s not the only Uber driver in the general vicinity.

Dayum!

This changes everything. 

****

My son got mad at me and, in consequence, he stole my car. It’s parked at his house — presumably locked inside his garage.

I do not feel like bickering with him, so I decided, in a phrase, ohhh fu*k it! Let him have the damn thing.

And that’s when I discovered that Uber is everywhere. Even three houses down the road. No kidding. One of the neighbors is driving for Uber!

I can easily get from just about any Point A to just about any Point B (or C, or D, or whatEVER), and with a cell phone, I can call Uber from anywhere. 

And y’know what? Just now the only reason I want that car back is so I can sell it to some other sucker!

She’s b-a-a-c-k again…for the nonce

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The li’l computer is back online…just now. We’ll see how long that lasts. /eyeroll/

Several hours of galloping from pillar to post finally brought us to a store that could fix it: not surprisingly, an Apple store. This one, in a large shopping mall on the northwest side. So now this unit is operative.

When we got back to the Funny Farm, though, the big old desktop was acting up.

My son sat down to it and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it….  Several hours of working on the damn thing left us both short of temper. The upshot of that: a fine shouting match.

Once that got started, we both started getting madder and madder. He just roared out the door in a raging fit of high dudgeon. I, meanwhile, sink into a slough of stupidity…nothing I say helps, because I’m incapable of saying anything that helps.

The laptop still isn’t working right. I have no car, and so I can’t take it out tomorrow. There’s a computer store about six blocks away — my son abominates the place. Abomination or no, I guess I’ll have to take the thing there, even though my son has forbidden me to do so. (He hates the place, because it’s a hole-in-the-wall into which to stuff money.)

Without a car, I’m pretty helpless: if a destination isn’t within a couple of miles, I can’t get there.

What to do next?

 

A WTF Week…

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I’d say this is One of Those Days…except that doesn’t do the current three-ring circus justice. One of Those Weeks?  Lordie…just hope “week”is the right term…

Actually, it started out several weeks ago.

What IS the matter with me? No IQ, maybe? Presumably what IQ points I had have rolled out my ears and skittered away down the gutter.

The fun began when a friend — a guy I’ve known for years through a business group we both belong to, an apparently lovely man given to a kind demeanor and an intelligent air — asked to borrow my laptop computer. Thinking he’d return it in about a week, I said why sure. 

Don’t do that, folks.

😀
Not to say
😮

He made off with my computer and…ghosted into the distance, leaving nor hide, nor hair, nor email message.

Time passed.

After nary a satisfactory reply from my alleged “friend,” my son swaggered around a bit and finally got the computer back. Very fine, thank you Dear Son.

But…turn it on and come to find out IT’S BROKEN!

For the luvva gawd!

The perp is not responding to emails asking WTF happened to it. Surprise, eh?

We took it to my favorite computer fix-it and sales store. Their staff said they couldn’t fix it: beyond their skills.

So now M’jito hauls the thing to another store, where they tell him it needs to go back to the Apple store.

Ohhhh…kay….  He takes it to the Apple store in Ritzy-Titzyville, a spectacularly expensive shopping mall in Phoenix’s Biltmore district. They now have it, supposedly fixing it…and nor hide nor hair has been heard again. My guess is they can’t fix it and that’s why we’re not hearing from them — whaddaya bet?

My computer has now been gone for weeks, and we have no word as to if or when the Apple St0re will get it fixed. Now I’m sitting before my desktop Mac, perched in a hard wooden chair in front of a conference table converted into a desk.  And that pose HURTS.

Replacing the computer will cost about $2,000. I can’t afford that.

***

Okay…over in the next circus ring…

Months ago — many months ago, nigh unto a year or so — I was involved in a fender-bender. It was raining, dark, and in a bad part of town. The woman in front of me jammed on her brakes the instant a red light turned at the intersection. I jammed on my brakes…but my car skidded on the wet, oily pavement and rear-ended her car.

As is customary in those conditions, I got a ticket for causing a wrecky-poo. Hereabouts, it’s assumed that if you rear-end someone, you’re driving too close…and nevvermind about the slippery pavement.

Months pass fairly uneventfully.

Now I’m at MayoDoc’s office with my son, and he tells the doctor about this episode and that it was all my fault.

This is accepted as evidence that I’m non compos mentis and should not be driving at all. So she writes an order that the state must rescind my driver’s license!!!!!

So now, I cannot drive legally and my son has dutifully confiscated my car.

Phoenix is an L.A.-style city — vast, spread-out, and frantic. You can’t even get to the local grocery store without being able to drive, to say nothing of a doctor’s or a dentist’s office.

So this really puts me over the barrel.

Probably I can get around, to some degree, by hiring Uber cabs. But just imagine what that will cost!!!!

****

Fortunately, there’s an Albertson’s about five or six blocks to the south of the Funny Farm; a Sprouts right across an eight-lane thoroughfare and set of lightrail tracks, and a Fry’s supermarket a few blocks to the north.

Grand fun, walking to these establishments in 100-degree heat.

This morning I started out around dawn — opening time — to visit the Albertson’s and the Sprouts. Fortunately, I have a rolling cart, which will allow me to haul a week’s worth of groceries from these fine establishments to my house.

Unfortunately…the route between my house and those fine establishments is littered with stoned-outta-their-heads bums. A lightrail train comes up that main drag and drops these fine citizens off in our neighborhood, where they can panhandle and burgle to their crusty hearts’ content. This makes the trek from the Funny Farm to either of those stores…well…shall we say “less than pleasant.”

§

The journey to the Fry’s is not quite so…umh…daunting. You can reach that shopping center by a shorter route and then dart into a stretch along a sidewalk passing a number of small stores that are usually open. If anyone starts to pester, you can whip into one of the stores, and that invariably chases them off. But of course it means you have to hang around the store until they’re gone, and hope they’re not lurking down the way, waiting to snab you again.

Complicating that option: said Fry’s is an ethnic store, the neighborhood to the north of us being a barrio. The emphasis, then, is on Mexican food…which is really kinda cool. It would be a whole lot better if I knew anything about Mexican cooking.

My good Latina friend who used to live around the corner from the Funny Farm has moved away, settling in an upscale suburb. Actually, I once thought about buying a house there, but…well, it’s quite a distance from M’jito’s house, and the other folks that I used to know over there have died or moved away. So…that kind of obviates opportunities to learn la comida mexicana.

Speaking of the which, it’s almost noon. Already too hot to walk to the grocery store. But WTF…it’ll be even hotter in an hour or two, and I do need some chow items. And so…awaaayyyyy….

Over the Hills and Through the ‘Hood…

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Beautiful morning!  Edging on to 10:15 as we scribble: a warm mid-morning, “hot”by some standards. Hmmmm….  Wonder what the mechanical opinion is?

{tap tap tap…Enter...}

Gosh! It’s only 82 degrees out there! Feels a LOT warmer than that.

Which implies some humidity is lurking around… Oh, yeah: 20 percent!

Whew: A fifth of the atmosphere you breathe in as you stumble around the streets is…water!

What a kick, though: roaming through the reaches of the ‘Hood! I’ve lived here for one helluva long time. I think SDXB and I had been here around 10 years by the time he decided to move out to (un)lovely Sun City. Having lived there before, with my parents, I refused to go. To my mind SC defines “miserable place”….

And it defines “static”: as in unchanging and unchangeable.

The ‘Hood, however, has evolved. 

When SDXB and I moved here…what?15 or 20 years ago, maybe? — this was a mid-middle class collection of look-alike ticky-tacky tract houses.

Today?

My goodness...what a difference!

Over the past decade, the homes here have been gentrified, re-gentrified, and mega-gentrified. These 1960s plugs of boredom have been updated, fancified, and turned into”classic” — even “historic”– houses. Lawns and trees have spread across the gravel landscape. Ticky-tacky Nineteenth Avenue has taken on the spiffy, ultra-modern light-rail trains.

And now…what a place it is! I dunno what these houses are worth today, but you can be sure none of them will go for the hundred grand SDXB and I paid!

Well, hell! We have the freakin’ Internet to tell us what the thing is worth now. Let us look up the Shack’s address…

holeeee mackerel!

The “Zestimate” for the Funny Farm is $522,700.

Seriously?

And my old house, a block east of Conduit of Blight Blvd???

Gasp! Zillow thinks one of ém is worth $568,700. It’s the SAME MODEL, the SAME SIZE as our first house here!

And how much does Zillow think that place,located handsomely where you can be serenaded by car, bus, and train noise 24/7, is worth? $522,700. 

Most recently sold for a mere $389,000.

Good grief.

And yet, it must be admitted: as the area has matured, it has grown more handsome. Hiking up and down the old avenues was a pleasure. The houses have been well maintained. The city has kept up the streets.

And that fact alone: the place has gone uphill, not downhill; at the worst stayed steady in quality and value — that has gotta be worth A LOT. 

My father would faint dead away, if he could see these prices.

Y’know, when he retired (for the first time…) in the early 1960s, he figured a savings pot of $100,000 would see him and my mother through the rest of their lives in solid, middle-class comfort.

By the time I graduated from college — just four years later — he had to go back to sea. That’s how much the dollar’s value fell in just four years!

Makes it damn hard to plan for retirement. Or to figure you’ll ever really be able to afford any retirement.

How, really, do younger people manage to afford any kind of life at all, long-term? Really, today in calculating for retirement, you’d have to figure you just weren’t gonna retire. Not until you were hopelessly infirm, anyway.

Welp! I can’t stand it another minute! Gotta pick up the Funny Farm’s litter collection. Then fall face-first into the sack for a stupefied nap.

And…A Different Viewpoint

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The other day I was holding forth about my puzzlement over my parents’ loathing of my undergraduate boyfriend. And yes, they did hate him, and hate is the operative term. That post speculates that it was because of his Eastern European ancestry.

Could be.

But this morning it occurs to me that there was a different reason. A better reason.

Paul was the one who introduced me to the use of alcohol. Make that the daily use of alcohol. (I was about 17 years old at the time…)

You understand: my parents were no teetotalers. They generally had a cocktail or two before dinner, and they were known to get extravagantly sh!t-faced on the bootleg booze passed around at gringo parties in Saudi Arabia. But they didn’t give it to me, nor did they invite me to join them in their informal pre-prandial whiskey-swilling, not even as an adult.

Yes: they did drink whiskey, a variety of which we could distill in lovely Araby. My father had a still on the stove and a couple of huge jars in the janitorial closet for that purpose. This was vastly against Saudi law. But nothing was done about it, presumably because the Kingdom was making too much money selling oil to the apostate gringos to make a fuss over their drinking habits.

When we got back to the States, my parents continued their pre-dinner-hour swiggling. At that point, they were never getting drunk. They were just having a cocktail with food and cigarettes, unwinding before dinner.

Meanwhile, though…back at the college campus: Paul and I drank all the time. We would start when classes were over — often as early as 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon — and tipple until we tipped over into the sack. That that meant he and I were drinking a lot more than my parents were, and we were doing it every day.

Once I got quit of Paul, I did quit drinking that much. I continued to have wine with dinner, but I rarely drank hard liquor, and I didn’t swill wine all afternoon.

However, to this day I still pour a glass or so of wine with dinner.

And…Lookee Here!

Turns out chronic alcohol use can lead to neuropathy.

No wonder my hands and feet and lips tingle!

If that article is accurate, my case must be pretty mild. But the booze habit may very well be the source of the buzz in the paws!

Of all those melodramatic symptoms, the only one I’ve encountered (so far) is tingling in the hands, feet, and lips.

Hmmmm…  It looks as though you can make this ailment remit — at least to some extent — simply by going on the wagon. This may or may not work…but apparently for some folks, it does.

I’ll be damned…think o’that!

And how hard would it have been for one of those MayoDocs to simply ASK me how much I drink and then suggest I climb onto the wagon?

Pretty clearly, the treatment is to quit swilling booze every day. 😀

Whether this will stop the current tingle-fest is unclear. But apparently if you quit boozing, you can at least block the neuropathy’s progression.

LOL! Welp, my dear late parents didn’t have the right reason for disliking pore ole’ Paul. But they were right that I should have gotten quit of him as a boyfriend. No booze-swilling boyfriend: no booze-swilling.

😀