Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

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…

Moving Crabbily On…

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As we scribble, come 6:00 in the evening it’s freakin’ hot outside. Yeah: 98 degrees in the shade of the back porch, according to our thermometer. About right: Wunderground says it’s 99 degrees out there, “feels like 102.”

😀  Is THAT all?

***

A small fiasco is under way, one that will require the attention of my amiable lawyers. So: tomorrow it’s over to their office, wherein to have a chat. Just what I need to blow away half my day.

***

Meanwhile, the poor little dawg is about fried. Now that she’s had a few bites to eat and had a chance to flop on the kitchen tiles, she seems a little better. And as we scribble, she has retired to her favorite spot on the cool tiles under the toilet…

Dayum!  I hope she’ll be OK.

Give her half-an-hour or so, and then retrieve her from the toilet cave. Put her on the bed. And let’s see how she does.

Hope she recovers fully. I’m not sure where the nearest animal hospital is…which doesn’t matter, because Caligula has kiped my car, so I can’t get her to an emergency vet, anyway. If that’s necessary, though, I hope one of the neighbors will drive us.

Really….I probably ought to chat with the WonderAccountants (they live across the street) and ASK — in advance!! — if they will please help me get Ruby to an emergency vet should that ever be necessary. Maybe beg the same (in-advance!) favor from some of the other neighbors.

***

This mother/son squabble and automobile rip-off flap has gotten SO stupid that I’m thinking I probably need to sell the house and move to some other venue: one where I can buy and use another car to get myself to key destinations.

Where to go, where to go??  Well…Sun City probably.

Yuch!

My parents decamped to Sun City. They LOVED it…because that sort of stodgy atmosphere and whitey-white exclusivity was right up their alley.

Personally, I prefer a more liberal atmosphere and a more diverse set of neighbors. Plus (really!) I do love the sound of children playing outside. In Sun City, instead you get the melody of jet warplanes blasting out of nearby Luke Air Force Base. Loverly….

***

Oohhh gawd! Now Ruby has taken to choking frantically every time she laps a few sips of water!

KEEEripes! WHAT is causing that?

Well, she gets over it quickly. Now it’s stopped…

Tomorrow morning I’ll call the vet. Maybe I can put up one of the neighbors to driving us over there. Otherwise, it’ll be a half-hour hike, each way, though gawdawful heat. Carrying the sick dog in my arms…

What next, Lord?

Another Unlovely Day in Arizona…

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“…Leave us all NOT enjoy it.” 

Ugh. Not yet 9:00 in the morning and it’s 100 degrees in the shade of the back porch.

Some asshole has messed up my watering system. Spent altogether too much time trying to undo that fiasco and get water going on the plants. (Any amount of time on that mess is too much time…). Time spent in ungodly heat.

Goddammit! I hope it wasn’t Gerardo or one of his guys who did this! If I find out that’s the case, he is sooooooo fired!

Kinda doubt it, though. He has worked here for years, and nothing like this has happened before. I reckon it must have been a service man or a prowler.

How to keep any such worthies out of the backyard escapes me, though. The guys from the power company and the city water department have to get back there to fiddle with things. They’ve never done anything like this before, and since I’ve done nothing to offend them, I kinda doubt the perp was any of those guys.

Problem is, they have to get back there to do their job. So I can’t change the locks on the gates…it will keep them out as well as the sh!thead who f*cked up the watering system.

So now I’ve somehow got to catch Gerardo the next time he surfaces here — or else call him on the phone and pester him. He’ll need to untangle that mess and get the system working properly again. And…won’t he be thrilled!

Maybe I could sneak a motion-sensitive camera back there. It would run whenever ANYone strolled into the backyard, so would rack up Gawd Only Knows how much time wasted studying the images. But at least it might catch the jerk.

Hm. Another thought: how about installing a motion-sensitive bell back there? Then anyone who walked into the backyard would cause it to ring BING-BONG inside the house…then (assuming I was home at the time) I could see who was roaming around.

Or…I could just post a sign reading “SMILE! YOU’RE ON CANDID CAMERA!”

Chortle! If the jerk believed it, maybe he’d stand down.

Hotter than the Hubs…AGAIN

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Or maybe make that “STILL”?

At 11:30 in the morning, the thermometer in the darkest part of the back porch reads A HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES. 

Yeah: we’re talkin “in the shade.”

So. It’s another balmy day in Arizona…leave us all despise it. 

Seriously: I do have to say that if I could escape from this place, I would. RIGHT NOW.

Actually, I would’ve escaped some time ago…

Where would I escape to?  

Probably the San Francisco Bay Area, whither my mother and I emanated some years ago.

When my sea-faring father retired, the two of them betook themselves to Sun City, here in fricasseeing Arizona. Looked ideal to them: NO KIDS.

And yes, they did hate, loathe, and despise kids. And anyone whose skin color differed from their own.

To my mind, that communal sentiment out there makes Sun City a highly undesirable place. Hate does not seem like an ideal foundation upon which to build your life.

Ohhhh well. To each his/her own, eh?

My part of town — the North Central district — is considerably better educated and considerably more humane than [un]lovely Sun City. Hate is not the foundation upon which this part of town was built.

But still…it’s hot. It’s miserable. And it ain’t San Francisco.

If I could get back to the City, I sure would. But as a practical matter, I can’t see how that would happen: Just can’t afford it. And as a sentimental matter: my son is here and I ain’t movin’ away from him.

Lucky him, eh?  😀

***

Jayzuz! Just now we have water pouring –– and I do mean POURING– on one of the trees in front. Poor little plant looks like it’s about to keel right over.

Once the timer runs on that, I’ll have to drag the hose across the yard to another parched victim.

See what I mean when I say that I hate this place? Those trees, like all the other plants in the Funny Farm’s yard, are on an automatic watering system. Regular, timed watering is not enough to keep them alive in this f*cking heat.

That notwithstanding…you don’t even wanna know what the water bill is gonna look like.

Ugh. When I say I hate this place, I do mean I hate this place.

*****

…hose drag hose drag hose drag hose drag hose drag…

Okay, we got PART of half of the front yard watered. Meanwhile, other environs are more desperate. Sooo…

Dragged the hose into the backyard. Got it running on the paloverde tree and on one of the roses.

The rose plant is dying. I very much doubt that it’ll survive.

So much for the watering system’s timer, eh? It was set to water those damn plants every day, in this heat.

Yeah. Okay. After this, I’ll have to do a hose drag EVERY DAY until the weather cools.

  • Westside roses
  • Potted plants on the east-facing side of the west wall
  • All four citrus trees in the backyard
  • The mountains of cat’s-claw vines climbing on the north wall — vines that are struggling to survive

On and on and on. Apparently the watering system has crapped out in some way…but I can’t find the problem. That means I’ll have to hire an irrigation guy to come in, figure it out, and fix it.

Goodie.

And some moron butched up my rolls of masking tape. So, to post new charts for my guys, I’ll have to order more of that from Amazon. No, I cannot drive to the store: my son has kiped my car. No, I cannot walk to the store in 110-degree heat.  And Amazon gouges you upwards of $4 for delivery.

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Gaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Migawd. Nobody could have been this stupid! Nobody could have fu*ked everything up this elegantly without knowing what he was doing.

*********

Seriously: No one could have made a mess like this by accident. No. They deliberately dorked up everything in my yard!!!

Wish I knew who “they” might be…so I could fire them.

This is, no doubt about it, purposful vandalism.

 

Whew! Funny Is B-a-a-a-ck! And So Is Gerardo…

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Wow! For awhile there, WordPress wouldn’t let me back into the Funny about Money site…and…well… I wuz beginning to think Funny was about to be a thing of the past.

Ohhh well….  Here we are, back online…uhm…I think. We’ll find out after I go to post this squib.

Gerardo the Miracle Yard Dude and his cohorts are out in the yard, working like animals in Arizona’s UNGODLY summer heat. August is our worst month. But, for reasons I can’t imagine (most likely he has bills to pay, hm?), he volunteered to prune the (overgrown!) paloverde tree on the west side of the house.

Not a good time to hack up a tree, that’s for sure. But…you can be sure he wouldn’t have offered to do it if he didn’t need the money. Damn near killing your crew with heat exhaustion is not a normal strategy.

Let’s just hope this exploit doesn’t kill the tree. It is on the west side of the house, after all…so it serves its purpose in savings on air-conditioning bills.

On the other hand, even I could tell that it presented a serious risk of falling on the roof and doing some major damage. The amount Gerardo is charging for this venture (which he didn’t tell me beforehand…otherwise I wouldn’t have let him do the job) is fukkin’ ruinous…but a fraction of what it would cost to chop down the tree and then repair the roof and the attic if it fell on the house in a storm.

So I can’t complain too much.

On the other hand…that doesn’t make me like it.

And yes: trees.  MY GAWD, the man charged me FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS to prune that weed tree off the roof and away from the yard.

He said, though, that he’d talked to my son. And he claimed he told my young Hero (and Keeper…) how much he was gonna charge. So…one can only hope that was true. Because if M’hijito is blind-sided by a $450 landscaping bill, he is gonna be ENRAGED. Seven ways from Sunday.

Ohhhhh gawd! Never get old,, whatever ya do!  First off, you lose control of your life. Then, you’re assaulted by one hassle and one headache after another — none of which you personally can do a damn thing about. The person in charge of your bills has to do all that…and you may be sure, he won’t appreciate it.

***

Ohhhh well. I truly do like Gerardo and his guys. They’re all such nice men, each and every one of them. To say nothing of gentlemen who work like oxen (!!no exaggeration!) Seriously, you’ve never seen anyone work as hard and as steadily as those guys do. Just…freakin’…jaw-dropping!

They do hard work and good work. Whatever they apply themselves to, they do a great job on it. And they apply themselves to A LOT!

Amazing guys. No question of it. 

Eeep! That Was Close!

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Yep: I really thought Funny about Money was done for. That was IT. Never again would I be able to get into the site.

{chortle!} Yes, I indeed DO panic easily….

But this morning, things are working better and looking better.

What a fine few days these have been!

No kidding: over the past few days, not one damn thing has worked properly, whether has had to do with the computers, whether it was the bank account, whether it was the garage door opener, whether it was the pool equipment…WHATEVER, it busted or it stopped dead.

Good thing the kid made off with my car, eh? With that kind if miasma hanging over my neurotic little head, who knows what horrors would have transpired if I’d tried to drive through Phoenix’s rabid traffic.

😀

And now, speaking of “it don’t wanna work,” let’s see if this post will go online…