Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Beerless in Gaza…

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Well, that was one of the weirder junkets I’ve made in the past few years. 😀

It went like this:

* Out the door
* Wander up Main Drag West past the Prod church
* Stroll on through the Albertson’s, planning to buy…
*…to buy?
*…to buy WHAT?
*How’s about picking up a six-pack of beer?
* Bah! Too much bother to carry home
* Exit Albertson’s, empty-handed
* Stroll around shopping center
* See exactly nothing of interest
* Walk back to Main Drag West toward the house
* Pass Prod church again
* Enjoy kids playing outside in their yards
* Hike up toward the Funny Farm
* Arrive back at the Funny Farm
* Shouldn’t I have bought a six-pack of beer?
* Bah! What on earth for? I’m gonna hike six blocks, then  turn around and hike six blocks back home, to buy…to buy…what? A bottle of beer?

I’m crazy. but I’m not THAT crazy. 😀

Seriously: It was a pleasant short hike on a beautiful afternoon, to buy…NOTHING. 

Yet there was something strangely pleasing about having gotten out of the house, strolled a half-mile down to the store, strolled another half-mile home, and spent NOTHING on anything! 

Meanwhile, there in the yards we have kids playing, grown-ups puttering, pooches frolicking, soft wind blowing…what a perfect afternoon!

This, I need to do more often!

A-r-r-g-h! Not to say OUCH!!!

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Wow! That really hurts!!! What exactly I did to bring this on escapes me: but just now, the right hip is SO SPAVINED I can barely hobble across a room.

Don’t recall doing anything to create any damage. So I imagine I must have slept crooked, and in doing so, sprained something in the groin area. WhatEVER: it does hurt colorfully.

Very tired of the never a dull moment phenomenon. Have you noticed that? All the damnfool things happen in a row: one headache after another after another…. That’s how things have gone hereabouts, over the past couple of days.

And now I’m so crippled I can barely hobble across the room.

What I oughta do is go back to bed. But…it hurts too much to limp to the back room where I can check the calendar, to see what I’m supposed to be doing today — other than loafing.

I have the worst feeling I’m supposed to traipse to the Mayo Clinic, on the far side of the galaxy. Ugh! How can I count the ways I don’t wanna?

If that’s the case — the traipsing, not the counting — my son will show up here shortly, all primed to drag me across the city.

And how CAN I count the ways that I am all doctored out? How happy would I be never to see another doctor again??? 

***

Welp! It’s quarter to noon. No kid. Hot diggety! That has GOT to mean the Mayo Clinic premonition was more like a hallucination. Surely do hope so.

Jet warplanes are zooming back and forth over the city’s northerly precincts: ZOOM ZOOM ROAR ZOOM!  What. A. Racket!!

When my parents lived in Sun City, a few miles to the east of Luke Air Force Base, my mother used to love to sit on her back patio, sip coffee, and listen to the early-morning commotion from those damn planes.

LOL! I remember remarking to her, one morning, how much I hated swilling coffee to that symphony. She corrected my socialistic error: “That’s the sound of Freedom,” quoth she.

Quoth I: Uhm…nooo, Mother. That’s the sound of World War III, comin’ your way. 

Never seemed to register with her.

Ohhhhh well….

HAH! Next Time….

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One ringie-dingie…two ringie-dingies…three… Sucker picks up the phone. Sales pitch commences. 

Sucker swears like a 19th-century sailor at the ba*tard on the other end and hangs up.

One ringie… Jerk on the other end calls back to harass….

JAYZUZ, am I sick of phone soliciting. Really: that’s about all my land-line phone rings for anymore.

And that leads me to think it’s past time — WAY past time — to get rid of the damn land line.

Seems like all that would accomplish, though, would be for you to blitzed with nuisance calls on a cell phone. BLECH!!!

I don’t carry a phone around with me, mostly because I really, truly do NOT want to be pestered with phone calls everywhere I go. By and large, {RINGIE DINGIE…the bastard calls back!)…by and large hardly any real calls come through anymore. Few of my friends call on the land line. Mostly, if they want to get ahold of me, they email me.

CAN you believe it? That jerk jangled up my phone again after I hung up on him. 

YELL INTO THE PHONE AT THE HIGHEST VOLUME MY VOICE WILL ELICIT: IS THERE SOME PART OF “NO” YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND? GET OFF MY GODDAMN PHONE!!!!!!!

Telephone soliciting is a prison industry. So…many, if not most of the nuisance calls you get are coming from convicts inside a jail. Just the sorta folks you want to chat with, right?

Try to dial the solicitor’s number back: Caller ID says he called from “010.”

Yeah. Ducky.

LOL! Years ago, when we lived in a big ole historic home downtown, we used to get oceans of nuisance calls. Our phone was connected by a wire telephone line. allowing it to sit near the kitchen where I could get at it quickly if I was cooking or cleaning, yet also letting it sit within reach of the furniture where we sat to watch the TV. The phone soliciting bastards usually called during the dinner hour…. When a pest called, I used to carry that phone into the kitchen, set it inside the freezer, and close the door on it.

{chortle!} To little avail…but ludicrously satisfying. :+D

Really, I probably ought to get rid of the land line. But truth to tell, I don’t WANT a cell phone. For one thing, I don’t want anyone — friend or hustler — to be able to reach me wherever I am, whenever I am. Plus I just don’t do that much over the phone anymore: not so much that I’m willing to pay a premium price for the privilege.

 

Ruminations on Ruination

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Egad! Get up and close that damn back door…NOW!

Seriously: the Dawg and the Human just sat down to take in the morning slack — coffee mug in hand, computer atop lap — and it dawns on the Human: Do not sit there with the back door hanging open, dammit!!!  Nay verily, not even if the screen door is closed and locked.

‘Cause, as we know, any clown and his/her little brother can kick or yank that screen open.

Sounds paranoid, eh? But I do hafta say: it feels more and more unsafe to me, living here in lovely Arizona. Especially in its (un)lovely cities.

Day or two ago, a Tucson woman was murdered at her home, apparently by a nut case. So…sitting around your house or patio taking in the morning air is decidedly NOT advised. Surely not around here.

So many of our fellow citizens are off the rails here in this crazy-making 21st Century — and it’s so easy for them (and us) to stock up on firearms — that really: You’d be nuts to loaf in your family room with the back door hanging open.

I never used to feel especially unsafe in my home, certainly not in the daylight hours. But lately that has changed…and I don’t think the change is a function of age.

No. It’s a function of the steadily growing insanity and violence around us. Not that humans haven’t always been crazy…but really, it does seem a lot more pronounced than it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago.

Sometimes I think I should move out of uptown Phoenix — surely the suburbs would be safer. When I mentioned that to a cop during the great home invasion adventure, he remarked that there aren’t any places in the Phoenix metropolitan area that can be regarded as safe.

Really…when you re-read the post I put up at Funny after that little adventure, you hafta ask yourself: Why am I still living here???

What the HELL is the matter with me that I haven’t moved somewhere else? Somewhere far, far from here! Really: this house should have been on the market the next day after that episode…

But…but…WHERE would I go that’s any better?

Sun City, that fine mausoleum on the west side? 

Well, no: this kind of stuff happens out there. My mother lived in white-lipped terror all the time she and my father owned their Sun City manse. And I’m not interested in living in a ghetto for the aged and the cranky. No, thanks.

A box in the sky? One of the high-rise apartments along Central Avenue or in Scottsdale?

Well…I’ve lived in such a place. And…no thanks. Don’t wanna do that again. I’m just not in to communal living.

No communal living, eh? Well, then: how about back out to the ranch, just outside the wide spot in the road called Yarnell? Right up on the Rim…cool weather, lots of cows and sheep, plenty of room for the burglars to spread out comfortably?

Hm. Yeah, I did love the ranch. BUT: we didn’t live there 24/7. It was more of a weekend retreat for us. And y’know: I don’t think I would want to live out in the middle of nowhere 24/7. Besides, if a burglar/rapist/murderer can visit you in your city subdivision, what’s to keep him from visiting you on your remote ranch?

Basically…where there be humans, you be not safe.

Yeah: I’m afraid that’s a fact.

Or, alternatively:  I’m afraid. That’s a fact.

😀

 

 

Back Online! And Chariot-Free

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Hallelujah! Funny appears to be back online. Why, when, where? No idea. At any rate, we’ll soon see if this post goes up.

Meanwhile, our li’l world is toddling off to Hell on a handcart. (Can you toddle on a rolling thing?) Everybody that I know, just about, is sick as a dawg.

(Why are dogs thought to be sick, anyway?)

The purloined car is permanently gone. The Mayo/driver’s license issue is, I think (but am not sure) is still up in the proverbial air. I do have another doctor who says the Mayo doc is ridiculous and there’s no reason I can’t be driving…but truth to tell, I don’t feel much like barging into battle over the issue.

As more time passes, I find (more & more) that, given where I live and given the commerce all around here, I really don’t NEED a car to get by just fine. More than just fine, really.

Everything I need or crave, day-to-day, is available within easy walking distance. And for the stuff that’s not right around the corner, an Uber driver lives straight across the street!

Matter of fact, I’ve learned that at least half-a-dozen Uber drivers live right here in the ‘Hood. So as a practical matter, it really is true that you don’t need a car to live in this part of town, comfortably and conveniently.

That is a HUGE money suck that goes away forthwith! Riding on the lightrail, the busses, and the local Uber autos costs a tiny fraction of what owning a car costs. I’m now thinking I’m not going to bother to try to extract my license from those idiots at the Mayo or to retrieve my car from my son’s garage.

If he gives the car back or reimburses me for it, I’ll sell it and bank about 10 grand. That will buy a whole lotta Uber rides, eh?

Gosh. It’s almost like living in San Francisco. When my mother and I lived there, waaayyy back in the day, my father’s swell Oldsmobile remained parked in the apartment’s underground garage whenever he was off at work (he went to sea and was gone for weeks at a time). The only time my mother and I got that car out was to drive to Berkeley: there to visit the relatives. Most of the time, we rode the trains and busses. Or walked.

This, interestingly, changes the tenor of life in Phoenix.

Until recently, living here was more like living in Southern California than anything: hot, traffic-ridden, bourgeois, boring. But as commerce builds up and it becomes more feasible to get around on foot, it feels more like living in San Francisco, where you don’t bother with a car unless you have a long drive to make.

And y’know….since there’s a car rental place about three blocks from here, I may just get rid of the Dog Chariot altogether. Why own a hole in the pavement into which to pour money when someone else can own and maintain the thing, and you can rent one whenever you feel so inclined?

A-a-n-d…just to make things perfect…

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Now Facebook has changed its settings in some weird way so that I can’t get into my page there, or if I can, it won’t let me post anything there.

SCREW YOU, FACEBOOK!

Seriously: that’s the end of my Facebook presence…and…I hafta say, I am so out of patience with this kinda BS and with sites changing up the way you work them every time you damn turn around that I reckon I’m just done with social media. F***ém all!!!

Seriously: I’ll keep Funny about Money until the website crashes (as it inevitably will,  dontcha know), and then that is IT for my online presence.

Gotta find some other way to amuse myself.

Maybe take up amateur astronomy again as a hobby.

Yeah: I still have my old telescope. If the lenses haven’t sagged (they should’ve, by now), I could break that out and go back to spending the evenings ogling the heavens.

That’s how I used to amuse myself in junior high and high school. Yeah: can you imagine: a girl kid who thinks she wants to become an astronomer??

Well, be assured that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the profession of astronomy wanted NOTHING TO DO a girl wannabe. Not…A…Chance!

So I could play with my telescope in the backyard but…no…I couldn’t take courses in the hard sciences…no, I could not sit anywhere but in the back row in trigonometry class…no…I could not sign up for a course in physics…no…no…no…NO.

Ahhhh, the good ole days!