Not even dark yet, and the morons around the ‘Hood are setting off their bang-bangs. This will go on into the night, probably till about 1 a.m. What fine patriotic fun, hm?
My alley wall is festooned with cat’s-claw vines, wonderful fodder for fireworks-inspired spectacles. So, no matter how tired I happen to feel (and lemme tellya: this damn covid bug really wrings you out!!), I have to stay awake and keep an eye on the shrubbery, so as to call the fire dept if a fire gets started out there.
Not a big order, though: even if by some miracle the human could sleep through this evening’s series of explosions, Ruby is terrorized by the racket. Even safely ensconced on the bed, she cowers and cringes and flinches with each crashing BAM! So in addition to keeping alert to the flammable shrubbery, the human has to try to quiet and soothe a terrified little dog.
My son is too depressed to get together this evening. That notwithstanding, I do hope some of his friends managed to lure him out. But do not know and will not know until tomorrow.
wait wait…i take that back! He just emailed from his house. Probably just as well…one doesn’t want to be too far from the flammable homestead with all the amateur fireworks shenanigans going on.
***
Blew away part of the afternoon ogling real estate ads. Looking at houses over on the east side of Central Avenue, which would be out of the purview of Tony’s social service empire.
I believe this is in the general neighborhood of where SDXB and his former wife Donna lived. The other day I happened to drive through that area and realized it’s pretty nice. Well kept, green, pleasantly middle-class.
LOOK at the price!!!!! {gasp}
And yet…. and yet, I could probably get something similar for my house. The house on State would no doubt go for more, but not enough so to bankrupt me.
It has no pool — which some might say is a good thing. It also has no backyard. They apparently have enlarged the house to such an extent that it occupies most of the lot. Is that even legal???
Still…it’s only 1621 square feet. And mine is 1628. So it’s the same size as my shack.
And there’s NOOOO Romanian Landlord within a hundred yards of the damn place!
On the other side of the canal, east of State and north of Orangewood, there’s this…
It’s only (“only”!!!!) $580,000. Can’t say I’m real impressed with it, but since I can probably get around 500 grand for my house, it would be a little more do-able. Has a pool, for what that’s worth…more like a puddle, actually. Living room effectively clones M’jito’s house.
Here’s one on Desert Park, east of 7th Street… A little bit further north. But I don’t think I can afford the price: Looks like they’re stilll renovating it. Nice little back porch, plenty of room for Ruby to run around, and no pool! Hmmmm….
And here’s one on Nicolet — the very street where XDXB and his former wife used to live. Look at the price! and it’s TINY: 2 beds, 2 baths! And get this: a price INCREASE of 75 grand…for THAT?????<
See this amazing fiasco? I could be right in the middle of it, right this minute.
Rio Verde is a moderately upscale housing tract on the far east side, just north of Fountain Hills, another tract adjunct to Scottsdale. Some years ago, while I was enjoying a bug in my bonnet about the crime, the noise, the Tony situation, and all that, I did look at houses in Fountain Hills. In the process, I came across a very nice little house, comparable to the Funny Farm, in Rio Verde. At the time, it was a beautiful place: quiet, clean, tidy.
Not anymore, though: planes flying in and out of Sky Harbor roar right over the place now. They used to fly in over Mesa and Tempe.
That would be passing annoying…mighty glad I didn’t buy.
Even then, they were having water problems out there. For many of the houses, water had to be trucked in. And that is no small task…nor an inexpensive one. I remember thinking at the time…you’ve gotta be kidding! You have a whole subdivision out here that has no reliable water service? Seriously???
Yep. Evidently so. And that particular vulture is coming home to roost just now. Of late there’s been quite a fine fire crackling away out there: 2500 acres, with 1,145 people evacuated.
Just imagine! Where on earth would you go, with kids and dogs and cats in tow, if they upped and announced you have to leave your home?
Sooooo….one can grouse all one likes about the crime in the slum apartments across Conduit of Blight Blvd or the traffic noise or the laughable light-rail project or Tony the Romanian Landlord’s home for juvenile delinquents…but things could be worse. Lots worse!
This morning’s doggy-walk devolved into another Trip Devoted to Hassles. At this time of year, a day very quickly gets hot. So all the dog-lovers are out by 5:00 or 5:30, traipsing around the park and up and down every street adjacent to the park. This would be charming (as long as you watch your step and don’t have a lawn that invites doggy toiletry), if only people would be just a little smarter about dogs. If only the idiots would keep their dogs under control. If only they wouldn’t assume you’re out there so that your dog can “play” with their dog.
Ruby is poorly leash-trained, because the minute I got her, I landed in the Mayo Hospital getting both boobs lobbed off. So she never has been adequately leash-trained. She’s fine as long as no one else is around, but let someone come trotting up with their “fur-baby” and she has a lunging frenzy,.
If you say something like “please keep your dog under control,” the idiots simper and go ohhhh don’t worry! They just want to pla-a-a-a-y!
Well. No. They don’t just want to pl-a-a-a-a-y. My dog wants to clear the earth of mutts like yours, stupid!
Seriously…what does possess people to come bounding up to a stranger and let their dog have at your dog?
Part of the problem, IMHO, is the idiotic “fur-baby” trope.
Jayzus! Talk about stupid!
Your dog is not your “fur-baby.” It is not your child. It is a highly evolved wolf. It can be regarded as part of your family only if your family is regarded as a pack, like unto a dog pack or a wolf pack.
That latter bit sounds promising, until you consider that dogs are not humans, humans are not dogs, and canine social structure is only superficially similar to human social structure.
The fact that those two social structures are vaguely similar makes it possible for dogs to live with humans, for humans to live with dogs, and for the residents to empathize with each other. But it does NOT make a dog the same as a human child, or a child the same as a dog.
This morning Ruby and I got out the door at exactly the wrong moment: 5:30 a.m. sharp. From the git-go, everywhere we looked, here came some chucklehead with a dog towing them down the street. In several cases, the dogs were off-leash. One guy had three dogs with him, nary a one on the legally mandated lead. At the park itself, people’s dogs were running around loose all over the place.
To avoid confrontation, we had to walk by on the far side of the street. This is a road that has no sidewalks in front of the houses facing the park. So either we climb up onto people’s lawns and tromp on their grass, or we risk life and limb to walk along that stretch of asphalt.
Finally we reach our corner of the ‘Hood and turn up our street. There, what do we encounter but a guy with one dog on a lead AND a guy with THREE dogs romping around off-leash!
Understand:
We’re not in the park
We’re not in anyone’s yard.
We’re on a public sidewalk running along a street where most people drive around 40 mph, out of not-payin’-any-attention habit.
Ohhhh-kayyyy…. Let’s see if WordPress will give us sane formatting today, or whether we have to jangle up our honored Web guru and make him crazy with whatEVER is going on.
Not that we’re not already crazy enough with whatever is going on. Do you still have the temerity to read the news? If so, how exactly DO you retain your grip on your marbles?
Here we are, busily charging a former (if incompetent, yes) president of the United States with THIRTY-SEVEN felony counts of what is basically a treasonous act. Oh, gooood…. Moving on (surely there must be someplace to move on to??)…
Meanwhile, the Republican Party worries that the Presidential Fiasco will come back to haunt them. Guys…if you didn’t want to have to handle a mess, why did you put a mess in the White House? 😀
We have our Native American brethren being (once again) madly ripped off by yet another huge Belagana scheme: hundreds of Navajo being exploited…and God only knows how many members of other tribes.
Enough of that, already! Quite enough to prove that WordPress’s paragraph-break function is working again.
*****
Meanwhile, as we discovered yesterday, the pool is decidedly NOT working. Swimming Pool Service & Repair’s guy surfaced (heh!) yesterday evening and made off with the pump. He figures it’ll take them about three days to fix it and get it back over here.
So far, the water hasn’t turned green. He said not to fuss with it: if algae starts to grow, just take a gallon of chlorine and walk around the pool’s perimeter, slowly dribbling the stuff in.
Ugh! Chlorine: not my favorite choice of drinks…. 😮
*****
Dawdled wayyyyyyyyy too long to get out the door for Ruby’s morning doggy-walk. It is spectacularly hot and humid out there by 7:00 a.m. And the Doggy Jamboree was in full swing by the time we reached the Richistans.
Ruby wants to clear the earth of other dogs, a little characteristic of which other dog owners seem utterly oblivious. While I’m trying to keep my dog from eviscerating theirs, they’re cooing ohhhh don’t worry! they just wanna playyyyy!
How does a species with so many stump-dumb stupid members manage to survive?
Ninnies of this sort had permeated the Richistans, so we doubled back and walked through the tract of 1960s ranch houses just to the north of ours.
Man! You do not even want to KNOW how much it must cost to air-condition those old piles. In the 1950s and 60s, power was not very expensive here. Consequently, houses and office buildings were never built with effective insulation…often not with any insulation at all. My son’s house, which is of that vintage, just about bankrupts him in the summertime, even when he jacks up the thermostat and has big floor fans blasting in every room.
Once the back yard…now the back porch of the back porch!
I remember my parents’ house in Sun City, each of whose walls was built of one layer of slump block. Period. Didn’t even have a slab of drywall inside, to pretty it up. Put your hand on one of those walls and you’ll burn yourself.
But…in those days, people didn’t stay in Phoenix over the summer. Without a doubt, Del Webb assumed his hordes of retirees would all drive back to Michigan and stay there in their RV’s between May and October. And many of those folks do. SDXB, who now lives in Sun City, does in fact clear out of the Valley for as long as he can, every summer.
My parents didn’t. They’d had their fill of living out of suitcases and driving back and forth across the country, what with my father’s Merchant Marine job and living in lovely Saudi Arabia. And yeah: that house got pretty hot in the summer. My mother jacked that AC so it never went off at any time of the day or night.
Here’s their house, photos taken during the last time it was on the market. It’s much modernized…didn’t have a dishwasher when we lived there, for example. The original screened porch along the back of the house has been enclosed, adding a nice dose of extra square footage to have to air-condition. They’ve laid down some reasonably decent tilework on all the floors– we had ugly carpets throughout.
My father! Just makes me cringe to look at this place and remember what he went through as my mother lay dying in one of those bedrooms.
That poor man. He worked SO hard, all of his life, just to build a comfortable, care-free retirement for them. And how thrilled he was to find Sun City! Boyboyboy: “no brats hollering outside your bedroom window when you’re trying to take a nap!”
Yeah.
Meanwhile, all the time my father was working like a mule, my mother was smoking herself to death. And what a way to go: just freakin’ hideous!
After he had “retired,” happily moved the two of them to a ghetto for old folks, and ensconced me in the University of Arizona (he got me into college a year early, for his convenience), his investments crashed. He’d put everything in insurance securities, which went down the tubes just a year or two after he had retired and deposited us in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. He lost his shirt and had to go back to work, to restore at least some of his retirement savings. I can’t even imagine how horrible that must have been for him. All his life he drudged away so that he could retire at the earliest possible moment and live happily ever after with his bride.
Who, we might add, really was the love of his life.
For his trouble, he got to attend her as she stumbled off to the Next World. And a mighty gawdawful trip that was.
As soon as she died — literally within days — he bought himself into Orangewood, a life-care community in the North Central district of Phoenix. It was ideal for him, because he was accustomed to institutional living and in fact liked it. My mother had refused to go, because a cramped little hole in a warehouse for old folks was not where she wished to spend the last years of her life.
Little did she know how few years she had…
Oh well. Forthwith he moved himself over there. And honestly, I think he would have been very happy at Orangewood had he not been instantly snabbed by the witch who seduced and married him. What a harridan! He didn’t know that until it was too late, though. Upshot: the last few years of his life were pretty damned miserable.
Keep that in mind: when you get old, don’t be in any hurry to lock yourself into a marriage. Nobody cares whether some old buzzard is living in sin with some old bat!
That house is lookin’ mighty good now — or at least, it was when those photos were taken. They enclosed the carport — which was on the west side of the building. Another layer of block plus a large space of empty air (garage) would cut the heat level in that living room, very nicely. They also enclosed the back screen porch, much enlarging the indoor living space.
And they added a dishwasher — my mother never had a dishwasher, in all the time she lived with my father…thirty-some years. All nice new appliances, very good. Ceiling fans: good. Those room air conditioners would have made it a LOT more comfortable for her…really, when you come down to it, it’s kind of odd they didn’t think of that. But then again, maybe not: they bought central air-conditioning to have central air-conditioning, after all. The bathrooms are basically the same, no doubt with updated fixtures. That gawdawful Pepto-Bismol pink tile in the back bathroom was the height of style when they moved in!
Really, if there just weren’t SO many unhappy memories associated with that place, right now today I would seriously consider buying it.
LOL! This morning, I’m reminded of one of my students’ favorite turns of phrase: “In today’s modern society,” to be followed by a low-key rant on some clichéd topic. Invariably, the kid would spell it “modren.” 😀
Funny li’l critters, students are.
Guess I’m with them today, though. Have you noticed how many things that we old bats have taken for granted for years are now difficult, even impossible to procure?
Today’s rant is inspired by the need to replace a plush bathroom rug. The incumbent has arrived in extreme old age, much the worse for wear thanks to Ruby trying to plump it up with her claws. Whenever I can again breathe without coughing my lungs out, I need to go over to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and pick up another one…
…uhm…
wait wait…
There is no more Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
Uh oh.
Well, surely I can get it at a Penney’s.
Uhm…
At Sears?
Argha!
Maybe the Broadway?
I’m gonna pay Broadway prices for a freaking nylon bathroom mat?????
Wait wait: the two Broadways near my part of town are closed down anyway.
No. Like everyone else, I’m gonna order it from Amazon.
And here it is! In 87 gerjillion colors. And five sizes. Mine is 25 x 39 inches. No doubt that equates to Amazon’s 24 x 40 model. Okayyy….it’ll fit. Is it cheap at $28?
I dunno. There’s nothing to compare it with. I’d have expected to pay about 15 to 18 bucks…but then, yah: it’s been awhile since I bought one.
Speaking of comparing, is it comparable to the one I have? It looks the same in Amazon’s image. But I dunno: I can’t actually see it, touch it, feel it.
With all the home stores around here shut down — except for Target, which may or may not have these little rugs — I really have little choice but to order the thing online. The Broadway, which used to carry this sort of thing, has long been shut down here, merged with Macy’s…imagine what that outfit will charge! Forgodsake: 48 to 72 bucks! FOR THE SAME PRODUCT!
How do these places even begin to compete with Amazon?
Welp…if I’m going to have to buy a new rug, I’m sure as hell not gonna pay two or three times as much as Amazon is charging. I’ll take my chances with the quality and order one up online.
Not even dark yet, and the morons around the ‘Hood are setting off their bang-bangs. This will go on into the night, probably till about 1 a.m. What fine patriotic fun, hm?
Blew away part of the afternoon ogling real estate ads. Looking at houses over on the east side of Central Avenue, which would be out of the purview of Tony’s social service empire.
