Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Snoop Snoop Human

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Here we are on Truthfinder, searching out dirt on an old neighbor and sorta-friend of mine. Their “search” is in-freaking-terminable! On and on and on and on….  And, as we all suspect, very probably a waste of time.

This lady was married to a prominent lawyer here in town, at the same time my own husband was a prominent lawyer. Had a bodacious daughter who was given to using weed and generally getting into mischief. And a cute young son who wasn’t yet old enough to create much trouble.

Ohhhhh lookee here! They make you sit through INTERMINABLE computer clicketymumbledypeggedy and then, after 15 or 20 minutes of this, they tell you they have all sorts of miraculously scandalous information about your victim…uh…subject…and want you to pony up cash to see it!!!!

Eff that, dear Truthfinder. You might consider presenting the “truth” of your business model up front, before your victims spend half the morning waiting for you to gag up data.

Hmmm…. Looks like my old pal moved to Tempe.

SPECIAL OFFER!!!!
DOLLAR TRIAL!!!!!!
PONY UP JUST A DOLLAR TO GET STARTED!

Bye, Truthfinder.

God, I get tired of Internet rips. “Information is supposed to be free!” Remember that?

And I for one do NOT pay for DIY data searches.

A-n-n-d…by now wouldn’t you think I’d be smart enough to recognize an Internet rip when I first lay eyes on it?

😀

Ripped!

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…and ripped off?  

Criminey! Just had to order a new set of queen-sized sheets. The pair I’ve been using ripped up the middle (that’s a new one on me!!). Forhevvinsake: FIFTY-FIVE BUCKS for one set of cotton sheets!

This, because the G.D. Mayo Clinic took away my driver’s license, so I can’t in any sane way get to a department store to buy the damn things.

Is this weird (not to say infuriating)? I have never had a sheet RIP right out from under me. It looks like probably a toenail somehow got caught on it, so that in moving around in my sleep I pulled the fabric apart.

Grrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!  

Yes, I do have another set of sheets. But only ONE such set. Those quacks at the Mayo have invalidated my driver’s license(!!!), so I can’t even drive to a store to select a new set.

One needs two sets, so that one set can go in the wash while the Cleaning Lady from Heaven is making the bed with the already clean set.

And yes, I surely should feel grateful that Amazon exists. Ordering the things online is less than perfectly desirable (one would like to see and examine a purchase before dropping $55(!!!!!!!) on it. But it appears that I don’t have much choice.

There is a store within walking distance where you can buy linens. But it ain’t the kind of place where I’m used to buying that kind of stuff, and frankly it gives me pause. So does Amazon, of course: either way, you can’t be sure of the quality you’re getting.

Well…I hope this doesn’t turn into the disaster that I’m expecting. Rather little hope, I must say: when you have to buy something sight unseen, you pretty well guarantee a nice little fiasco for yourself.

A nice expensive fiasco!

A Revelation in Transit

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Y’know… Over the past few days — “weeks,” really, is more like it — a kinda startling revelation has occurred to me. Hang onto your hat, now: What with the proximity of key retail stores, the new lightrail running up and down Conduit of Blight Blvd., and a fleet of shiny new busses, I don’t really need to own a car. 

Oops: should’ve warned you to sit down before reading that…  😀

But seriously…  Without the little catastrophes of the past two or three weeks, this idea would never have entered my fuzzy little mind. BUT…oh, yes, but: the fact is, between the lightrail, the shiny new busses, and the Uber cars swarming all over the neighborhood, I actually may not need to have an expensive pile of metal and glass sitting out in the garage.

Yeah. Seriously!

I can get from Point A to Point B with very little more trouble than it takes to climb in my car and drive between those points.

We have several Uber drivers living here in the’ Hood. They’re delighted to take you wherever you imagine you want to go. And if they’re not available, Phoenix still hosts a fine fleet of standard taxicabs. Call a Yellow Cab and it’ll be at your door in minutes. An Uber driver lives right across the street from me! He can be here in seconds, not minutes.

But…but…what does it take to walk from here to most of the fine emporia where I shop and loaf?

A lightrail line runs across Main Drag North, turns south on Main Drag West, swerves southerly toward Central, goes right past my son’s street, and proceeds to a stop in front of the Beloved AJ’s Grocery Palace.

So…uhm….. {ahem!}

Why on earth would I imagine that I want a car, here in the ‘Hood??

Consider: AJ’s is indeed a drive away. BUT…within a ten-minute walk, we have these fine emporia:

  • Albertson’s: a huge supermarket
  • Sprouts: the beloved hippy-dippy peddler of nominally organic chow
  • Walgreen’s: huge drugstore
  • Bookman’s: bookstore, music, whatnot
  • El Rancho: supermarket
  • Fireworks store (!)
  • Post office
  • Doctor’s office
  • Beauty salon
  • Independent pharmacist
  • Veterinarian
  • Coinstar

And on and on and on… there really is little need to drive anywhere. Certainly not on a regular, day-to-day basis.

Do I need a car to get to the Mayo? Yeah: I wouldn’t want to hire a cab or Uber to schlep halfway to Payson. But I sure don’t go out there often. And for that matter, we’re within walking distance of a major regional hospital…I could extend my little self so radically as to take up with a doctor who practices there. (The one I had there moved to $un ¢ity awhile back, having seen the dollar signs on the wall of the new hospital out there….)

But if you’re considering how much it costs to keep a car — taking into account insurance, regular servicing, repairs, gasoline, parking, and whatnot — the tab for maintenance, repairs, taxes, storage, and the stuff so routine that most of us never even think about it anymore very probably comes to more than it would cost to hire Uber or a taxicab to get around town. A LOT more…

Truth to tell, something over 90 percent of the places I go are within walking distance, or within a reasonably priced cab ride.

And given that amazing little factoid, one could argue — quite reasonably — that a person living in this location really has no need for a car. Especially if that person doesn’t commute to a job.

What the heck: not only that, but walking to the destinations around here comes under the heading of good exercise. When the weather is sane — which, believe it or not, is most of the time — you can walk to any of those places without putting yourself out much.

So…frankly, I’m beginning to think more & more that my son did me a favor by absconding with my car. Who needs it???

Re: Paul the Romanian Lover

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Oh! how my parents hated him!!

They hated him for racist reasons — in their minds, Romanian wasn’t quite “white.” But…truth to tell, they were right, only in ways they didn’t understand.

P. had no compunctions about theft. Or about cheating on one’s wife.

First time this came to my attention, he and I had gone to the campus bookstore to buy a semester’s worth of textbooks. He’s wearing a student-looking fake letter jacket…right? You know whereof I speak: leather sleeves, university logo on the jacket’s body.

We’re standing in line with a couple piles of books, when quietly he slides two of them under his jacket and pulls up the zipper.

Uhm…what?

Shortly — after we’ve escaped with $40 worth of textbooks (in those days that was a lot of money: the equivalent of $70 or $80 today), he tells me he does that all the time. It’s one of his ways of funding his education!

Eep! Maybe my parents were right!

Well, I was far from the point where I was ready to admit that possibility.

Time passed. We were in love. La-dee-dah!

Then one night we’re in the sack, chatting post-coitally. And this is when he remarks, admiringly, that his best buddy is f*cking a barmaid that he picked up while the boys were out drinking. He thinks this is a good thing — yea, verily: a brilliant thing on the buddy’s part: because the guy’s wife is some eight months advanced in pregnancy and can’t accommodate him.

No kidding.

His wife. He gets her pregnant. She’s about to deliver his baby. And he can’t wait until she presents him with his son, but feels he must go out and pick up a chippy in a bar NOW by way of getting it off!

And P. thinks that’s just great. Brilliant, if anything!

This — finally! — was enough to get my attention!

Man, when they say “love goes blind at the garden gate,” they ain’t kidding!

It took a night and a day for this to soak in. Once it fully registered with me — that he was demonstrating just what kind of a guy he really was — I tossed him out of my life.

Never regretted it.

He ended up as a university administrator — apparently did fairly well for himself, on the mid-level career level. Would have had lots of access to cute college girls, too, eh?

His career took him to a UC campus in central California. No doubt a nice place to live…and UC would have presented me with any number of appealing job opportunities. As it no doubt presented him with any number of chickadees.

Ahhh, the good ole’ days!

Tryin’to F’geddaboudit….

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Ever have memories that you seriously can NOT shake? You try to put events and stupid stuff behind you, but they just won’t go away.

That’s how I remember my childhood in Saudi Arabia, stumbling miserably through the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School.

It was a K-8 school for Aramco employees of the American variety. After you hit the 9th grade, they sent you back to the US (or to Switzerland), where you finished high school and, if you had something resembling a brain between your ears, either got a job or went on to college.

Growing up in Arabia — in a company town called Ras Tanura — I was the weird little kid.

What made me weird was that I was too damn stupid to understand that — especially as a girl! — I needed to cover up my intellect, pretend I was stupid as a post, and never EVER reveal my passion for science. Especially not for astrophysics.

Those kids in my grade were just so GODDAMN mean, and the teachers weren’t a lot better. In particular, the one I encountered when I hit the 5th grade, a Texas broad named Hatley, was just flat-out cruel. If I was sick of  b-o-o-r-i-n-g school by the end of the 4th grade, in Miss Hatley’s fifth-grade room I quickly learned to hate school — with a deep and abiding loathing.

Every now and again, I find myself musing over that time in my life. Not on purpose: the memories just bubble up like gas in some swamp.

Search the name and its variants on the Web, and a few candidates come up. She definitely existed. She definitely came from Texas. She definitely taught at the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School. But that’s about as much as you learn about her,

Probably just as well: some things, you don’t wanna know too much about!

She was a mean one, I’ll tellya…at least from my point of view. Seriously: she would actually encourage the horrid little brats in her classroom to torment me. I was the class pariah. And whenever an opportunity arose, I was reminded of that, teased about it and tortured over it.

What kind of “teacher” not only tolerates such behavior, but actually eggs it on?

Really, there was no excuse for it. I’d done pretty well in school until I reached her fifth-grade classroom. There was no reason for me to hate going to school. To hate my classmates. And especially to hate my teacher.

But hate is the word for it. I entered her class as a fairly normal kid, if one who wasn’t smart enough to keep her yap shut about what a wannabe brainiac she was. By the middle of that year, I hated school.

* Hated school.
* Hated the idiot teacher.
* Hated the mean little brats in my class.
* Hated the dim-witted, brain-numbing content that passed for subject matter.

Hated everything about it.

And then one day hated the horror of learning that the bitch who had tormented me all the way through the fifth grade was “graduating” with us to become our sixth-grade teacher.

Apparently, my mother figured out, sometime during that hideous fifth-grade year, WHY I had come to hate going to school…why I dreamed up every ailment I could possibly fake to get out of going…why I was so miserable I was passing beyond neurotic to damn near psychotic.

At the end of that school year, she announced that we were going back to the States. My father did NOT  want to come: he was working toward Aramco’s highly paid seniority, and leaving then put the eefus on that goal.

She must have told him that she and I were leaving, whether he came with her or not. He stayed behind for about six months, and then quit his job and joined us in San Francisco. My guess is, he must have reached some kind of lower-level seniority goal at that point, which made him feel he could leave without losing too very much.

It was pretty much in the nick of time, for me. I was so roundly hated by the little darlings at the school that I had no hope of ever making friends out there. And by then I had turned inward and become an odd — even weird — little hermit whose only serious interest in life was astrophysics.

Yeah. I wanted to become an astrophysicist. 😀  You see why the little darlings just loved me no end?

***

Back in San Francisco (at last! ), none of the kids at the school knew I was a weirdo. And apparently, an interest in science was not considered weird there, even for a girl. Well…and by then, I’d learned to keep my mouth shut; that no doubt helped.

 

Hotter Than the Hubs…Again…

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Or “still”…  Or something. 

Sunday…

The AC has been pounding away. Don’t even THINK of asking what the power bill is likely to be this month. Probably two or three hundred bucks. But…don’t think about it. No. No thinking!!

Today is Sunday. If I had any sense, I’d surface down at the church and rebuild old friendships. Because…well…I do need some human company. No question of it.

But…my son has kiped my car. 

I have no way to get down to the church except on a bus, a highly questionable ride.  Plus just now, as we scribble, the temp in the shade of the back porch is A HUNDRED AND FIVE DEGREES.

No way in Hell am I traipsing 16 blocks eastward to the bus stop and standing around in that heat until a south-bound ride comes along. If a ride comes along.

Now…yes, it IS true that if I would get what passes for my act together, I could lasso a fellow church-goer into picking me up and schlepping me down to All Saints. But…that would be…you know…work. 

It also would be a great deal nervier than I happen to feel just now.

Gasp! I keep thinking it’s hotter than the hubs in the house. But that really isn’t quite the case. What’s happening is…it’s just a little humid in here. And in Arizona, you don’t have to get very  humid to make the heat feel like a blast furnace. That would be because it IS a blast furnace….

Perusing real estate ads in Sun City. Y’know, the house that I’m in was built by the same developer who built out most of Sun City. And you can see the similarity!  My house looks surprisingly like a Sun City shack.

Mine is rather better built, though. The price range in North Central is far higher than westside locations will support, and so Del Webb — the Sun City guy — produced neighborhoods here that echo the look of Sun City, but…well… The houses here are sturdier, better insulated, more diversely designed. Even though the exteriors look surprisingly similar.

***

And now it’s Monday…

***

Started this a while ago. Lost track. Wandered off. Fell Asleep. Who knows what else…

Splendidly HORRIBLE morning out there. Hot (95 degrees in the shade of the back patio), high overcast, damp, and sticky.

Friend is slated to come over this noon, thereupon to go out to lunch. Hope she does indeed surface: Nothing like a convenable human to make life more or less livable!

Maybe I should offer to fix lunch here, so we don’t have to go out in that swamp. Don’t have much, though. And without a car, you can be sure I don’t feel like walking to a grocery store.

Hmmmm….

Not to say {chortle!}  Just stuck a wonderfully stupid sign on the front security door, telling the accursed door-to-door solicitors to take a flying F at the moon.

Well. Ahem.. Possibly not that explicitly. It asks that they not ring the doorbell, because someone inside is ill.

I’m ill, all right: SICK of nuisance phone and door-to-door solicitors pestering me several times a day.

LOL! My friend already knows I’m crazy. This visit will confirm her suspicions.

****

Grrrrrr!!! Speaking of nuisances, I’ve got a whole, large bag of beautiful frozen shrimp in the fridge…and can’t tell whether they’re the recalled, contaminated variety or not.

It doesn’t LOOK like they are, though. The brand name on the package doesn’t appear to be associated with the bad shrimp.

Hope not. Because I really, REALLY don’t want to go traipsing out in the heat to buy more dinner food. Nor do I want to throw out God only knows how many dollars worth of chow.

***

LOL!!!!!

Welp…there was a reason I didn’t want to traipse out in the heat to pick up chow for dinner.

It is too goddamn hot to make it all the way to the grocery store!!!

Or even halfway to the damn grocery store!

Wunderground claims it’s only 106 out there. And in fact, that’s exactly what the back-porch thermometer says, right now: 106 degrees.

I find that a little hard to believe: if asked, I’d have said it was 110 or a bit higher. But…heh! I are a English major: I are not a thermometer!

So. Half an hour ago, I set out for the supermarket on Gangbanger’s way, there to buy some light chow and a bottle of white wine. And as you can no doubt intuit: didn’t make it! 

Gave up before I got a block from the shack. Turned around. Came back.

Thank all the gods for iced water!

😀

Thinking of asking Wonder Cleaning-Lady to drive me up to the store. She’s here banging around the house just now. But…but…that seems like a little much to ask. As if she weren’t knocking herself out quite enough!

The local grocery stores open at 7:00 a.m. So..duhhhhh! The answer to this conundrum is to show up at the Sprouts or the Albertson’s door at 7:00 a.m.

How hard IS that?????

Some of these establishments are now delivering. If I really wanted to bestir myself, I could call one of them and get stuff sent over.

But that has a fundamental drawback: Americans.

Seriously! 😀  Americans by and large don’t cook with fresh food — they heat junk that comes in cans and boxes. S-O-O…they don’t know how to pick out fresh fruit and vegetables. Ask them to bring you a fresh head of romaine, and they  just grab whatever’s on top of the pile in the grocery-store bin. And that…well…tends not to be good.

******

Whooooaaaaa! Look up the local Albertson’s on Conduit of Blight, and you see they open at SIX a.m., not at seven!

Hot dayum!

(And we DO mean “hot”!)

This opens a whole new door. 

At 6:00 o’clock, it’s already hot here, but it’s not fukkin homicidal. If I show up with a list and my roller-cart, I should be able to get outta there by 6:30 — surely no later than 6:45 or 7:00 a.m. The walk home is only 20 or 30 minutes.

That means I can get back here before the heat turns truly homicidal! 

Think o’ that!!!

Not a very pleasant way to start the day. But it sure beats hiking through 100-degree heat! If I can get in the door by 6:15 a.m., I can get back to the Funny Farm by 7:00…maybe earlier than that.

At 7 o’clock, the heat will be in the 90s. But that sure ain’t 110.