Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

What is WITH people??????

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G*ddammit! I just went out in back to tidy things up, and there I discover some moron has dragged my gas barbecue OUT INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE GRAVEL-COVERED YARD and effin’ LEFT IT THERE!

It’s out of reach of the gas canister, so I can’t even turn it on to grill a piece of hamburger.

And it’s way, way, WAY too heavy for me to heave around!

What the F*CK is the goddam MATTER with people?

Seriously: WHY would a person do anything so stupid?

The only thing you can figure is deliberate maliciousness. Haul the thing away from where it belongs and make the Bitch Homeowner drag it back all by her birdbrained little self.

Goddammit. Now I’ve got to find a male neighbor or worker to come over here and haul the thing back into place.

If I knew which yard worker or pool worker pulled this stunt, I’d call them on the phone and FIRE them. RIGHT NOW.

But of course, I have no idea. We have…

  • Pool Dude
  • Three or four landscape maintenance guys
  • Possibly some guy I called to work on the Que (don’t recall just now)

Goddammit!!!
And further goddammit: the link to the ‘Cue image suddenly doesn’t work!

******trying again*******

Okay….I shanghaied the neighbor —  who works out of his home — to come over and drag the grill back into place. Being male and pale — and about 100 pounds bigger than me — he was able to do this without too much trouble. Other, of course, than the interruption in his day.

Anyway, he was kind enough to traipse over here with me, reposition the BBQ, and make sure it works. It does seem to be operating the way it’s supposed to (…i hope), and so in a few minutes — after my rage settles down — I’ll go out and grill a piece of salmon and some frozen French fries.

Wish I knew which worker caused this little snafu. He’d be looking for another customer… But I haven’t a clue. 

“Hotter Than a By-Gawd!”

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LOL! That was one of my father’s favorite turns of phrase:

  • Hotter than a by-gawd
  • Hotter than a two-dollar cookstove
  • Hotter than a three-dollar pistol
  • Hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk

On and on…. He was a good Texas boy, a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, and he had a suitcase full of little sayings like that.

😀

Who knows what he’d pull out today, if he were still among us! Thermometer in the shade of the back porch reads 103.  And yeah: he’d regard that as passing warm. Wunderground says we’re supposed to reach 109 today, though.

Me: just back from a dog-free stroll around the ‘Hood. No doubt not my wisest move of the day…. 😮

Probably ought to take a shower to cool down. But…well…I’m too lazy just now to regard cleaning the bathtub afterward as a lovely way to spend time this morning. And o’course, you fail to wipe down the plastic walls after a shower…at your peril. A giant scrubbing job is NOT what I want to tuck into the cards.

Meandering up the sidewalk, I passed workmen at a couple of houses — guys who looked like they were engaged in carpentry or painting. LORDIE! Can you imagine doing that kind of physical work in 110-degree heat?

And yes, it soon will be 110°…at least. Just now, it’s only 10:30 in the morning!

WhatEVER possessed my parents to drag us to Arizona???

Well, they thought Sun City was about the greatest innovation the human race ever devised: “No kids screaming outside my window when I’m trying to take a nap,” my father intoned, with pleased awe.

Adding to that bit of charm, Sun City was then and is now as whitey-white as  you can get. To my parents, that was a positive trait of the first rank.

That was in 1962: sixty-four years ago! 

Even today: an African-American friend of mine — a business professional — had the brazen nerve to buy a house out there. He was literally HOUNDED out of the place. Within six months, he sold up and moved out.

I suggested he buy the house for sale across the street from the Funny Farm. He declined. Apparently felt moving his blackness into our neighborhood was not a kind thing to do. Or maybe he didn’t care to dodge bullets flying down from the slum to the north of us…  😀

We are, after all, parked in lovely Sunnyslope: a crime-ridden slum of the first water.

No kidding. Parts of it — such as our neighborhood — are on the high side of upper-middle class. They qualify as North Central Phoenix, a tony district, indeed. But get six blocks to the north of us, and…hang onto your (hard-)hat!

Lordie! What a place!

Soggy Doggy Day!

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Yuch!!!  It is SO HOT and SO WET out there, it feels like horrible Saudi Arabia, where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Wet, hot, and miserable.

To gild that soggy lily, war planes are busily roaring in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Nevvermind that they’re 20 miles to the west of us. We still get serenaded with the ominous melody of World War III, on its way to us: ggggRRRROOOAAAAARRRRRRR!

My mother used to sit on her patio, partaking her morning coffee to the melody of those damn warplanes. Ohhhhhh, she would coo. It’s the sound of fweedom! 

Yeah, Mom: the sound of Death, comin’ for you.

Why ARE people so stupid, anyway?

Ohhh well.  Ruby and I made it back to the house, finally, through air so thick you could practically swim through it. I’m now so hot and miserable, about all I can manage is sitting down and pounding on a keyboard. Had to put a throw over the back of the chair, to keep from wrecking the leather upholstery with the sweat I don’t feel like washing off myself right this minute.

I never could understand why my mother thought that jet warplane racket was some kind of sweet, patriotic melody.

Never did understand why she didn’t grasp the fact that the “melody” was a funeral ode to every civilian within nuclear bomb distance of our balmy home.

But then…I never did grasp what she thought was soooo wonderful about dreary, racist Sun City. Guess we just weren’t on the same wavelength.

Ugh!!!

Well, I’d better get up and brew a pot of coffee, before I fall down face-first on the tile floor….

WHY do people live here???

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7:38 p.m.  The sun has gone down. And it’s 105 degrees under the ventilated shade structure on the back porch.

Central Arizona. Maricopa County. What a HELLISH place to live! Why do people settle here, anyway?

I got here because my parents dragged me here, when my father attempted to retire. (Failed, thanks to a major recession: he had to go back to work for another couple of years, much to his despair.)

Yeah. They thought Sun City was about the most brilliant village the human mind had ever conceived. Fine ticky-tacky houses. Gravel yards — no grass to water! Kids prohibited: no brats screaming outside your window when you’re trying to take a nap. Blacks prohibited: no negroid types pushing down your property values.

Yech!!!!!

As soon as they got moved and settled into their new brick hovel, they sent me down to Tucson and enrolled me in the University of Arizona. Because I was a National Honor Society scholar, they accomplished this by pulling me out of high school a year early: I never even set foot in a senior-year classroom.

Sun City is grim enough. Central Arizona forms the cake beneath that frosting: hot, intellectually backward, graced with bigotry….what a place! The UofA is a more or less adequate intellectual institution…though nothing like the school where I was set to go: U.C. Berkeley.

So…my arrival in Arizona was an encomium to disappointment.

And I do have to wonder, sometimes: if you don’t have a well-paying job here, WHY would you come here, and why would you stay here? Given that you have any choice in the matter…which I did not.

Why do I stay here? Well…I’m pretty well glued in. Everyone I know these days lives here. My son lives here. My jobs have been here. My paid-off house is here. My freelance business is now based here. Reckon I’m set here.

But it wouldn’t have been my choice….

July 4 Moron Frolics…Jeeez!

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The evening has barely begun — it’s only 8:35 p.m. — and of course, it being the Fourth of July, every moron within earshot is out there with their bang-bangs.

LOL! It sounds like half the city is exploding… BOOM! bam BAM BAM bang bang whiiirrrrr (helicopter buzzes over) BAM! boomp boomp boom BANG….

On and on and on…. 

We can expect this racket to continue until a little after midnight. Phoenicians love to play with fireworks. And the things are easy to obtain, Mexico being just a few miles to the south of us.

Ohhhhh shee-ut! Some idiot just exploded a fukkin’ BOMB outside the back fence — probably in our alley. Scared the bedoodles out of the dog. 

Y’know, I can understand how idiots think it’s fun to set off bang-bangs. But things that explode like a nuke? Not so much. Fireworks? Okay, okay…the cops can’t ride herd on dozens of nincompoops. But forgodsake, folks: at least TRY to engage your brain a little when playing with these toys!

July 4? Really? And…then what?

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Here we are on our nation’s birthday. Strolled through the neighborhood, basically to pass the time and to eyeball the neighbors’ homes. And…well…

It’s overcast and gray and wet out there. Not raining…yet. But I reckon it will be, soon enough.

So much for watching the fireworks, eh?

Usually, a bunch of them are visible from our parts. A large housing tract to the north of us puts on quite a show. Neighbors here in the ‘Hood customarily blast the sky for a couple of hours. And the City (or some such entity) expends money and gunpowder on a big show in the central part of town.

We’ll see how that goes tonight, depending on the weather.

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Meanwhile, today’s sight-seeing stroll suggests the ‘Hood’s property values are holding strong….and probably rising. What I saw this afternoon, hiking from pillar to post, makes me feel very glad that I did not move out to Sun City when SDXB made his escape.

These houses — and this whole neighborhood — are looking better and better. Homes are not only being maintained handsomely, they’re being upgraded, enlarged, fancified. And you can bet their value is upgrading like crazy, too.

It would appear that, as predicted some time ago, the presence of the recently installed light-rail train has indeed jacked up the appeal and the value of the ‘Hood. If that continues, by the time my son inherits this house, it will be worth a sh!tload of money. He’ll be able to sell it and invest the proceeds; or sell his own home and move in here free & clear; or sell both houses and move to…where? San Francisco?

For sure.

Or, I suppose, he could turn one of the two houses into a rental and use that real estate to generate a steady income.

Interesting, eh?