Coffee heat rising

Common sense

There’s Hope! (?) !

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Apparently Amazon is about to hugely expand its grocery delivery service. If that’s so — speaking of “huge” –it would solve a vast problem for me.

My son has purloined my car, believing that old bats shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Never mind that I’ve never been in a serious accident. Never mind that I haven’t even been in a fender-bender in years. Ohhhhhh no!  Old bats mustn’t drive!

Well… The truth is the main reason I do drive around here is to pick up groceries and drugstore items. This New! Improved! delivery service from Amazon (whose service already is pretty amazing…) will virtually eliminate any need for me to drive around at all, except to get to a doctor or a dentist.

A-a-n-nd-d….right across the street we have an Uber driver. He or one of his colleagues can schlep me to appointments. Meanwhile, if Amazon delivers, I’ll have almost no need to drive anywhere at all.

Jeez.

It’s like going back in time. 

When I was a kid, we didn’t own a car. Didn’t need one. Taxis and public transit took us everywhere we needed to go.

If that holds forth again any time in the near future, it’ll save a huge amount of money…and the PITAs of car fueling and maintenance, and repair will GO AWAY!

Can you imagine?

notes

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In retrospect, I resent people — esp my parents and teachers — for maneuvering me into positions that I wouldn’t have selected if I’d understood them better and that now I can’t get out of. Positions that affected my entire adult life.

If I had understood that as a National Honor Society student I could almost surely have landed a scholarship or fellowship to Berkeley or Stanford, you can be sure I wouldn’t have skipped my senior year in HS to go straight to the dowdy University of Arizona…so that my father could retire a year early. I would surely have gone to the University of California at Berkeley or, if my parents insisted on staying in So Cal, to UCLA.

Even if I’d stayed in secondary school one more year, he could have retired. He could have dragged me to Arizona and enrolled me in an AZ high school…allowing himself to quit his job that year early. To get me and them into Sun City (where young people were officially unwelcome), all they had to do was say I was living on a college campus, not with them!

Now, the truth is, he could hardly have been expected to understand the mediocrity of a degree from the UofA: to him a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. My mother probably understood that I would have been about 100% better served with a bachelor’s from UC…but she did have enough sense to keep her mouth shut around him.

What other things would I have done differently if I’d had a fukkin’ clue??

  • Majored in a subject that would get me  decently paying job, not a receptionist’s position + a high-earning husband
    • Such as????
      • Business
      • Accountancy
      • Justice Studies
      • Politics? Government?
  • Gone to UC Berkeley or even Stanford
  • Refrained from marrying the first decent man that came along
  • Continued directly from the B.A. to graduate school…but didn’t I actually do that?????
  • Gone straight into a Ph.D. program. Even though my undergrad degrees didn’t qualify me for graduate programs in anything other than English or French, a Ph.D. in either of those would have landed an academic job.

It feels incredibly stupid to me today.

But I wasn’t stupid. I was ignorant. I didn’t fully understand how the U.S. educational system worked. I didn’t understand how one university differed from another, and why. I didn’t understand why I needed to major in a salable subject, not in Mickey-Mouse woo-woo like English and French.

Still Frolicking in the Hubs

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Last time we were in these parts, Funny remarked that the weather was hotter than the hubs of Hades. No kidding….

Well, we’re still lurking in that locale.

Not yet 8:00 in the morning, and we have 93 degrees, with 21 percent humidity under “partly cloudy” skies. No rain in the forecast.

Dog and Human, having circumambulated the neighborhood as dawn was cracking, are perched on the bed. The Human sincerely hopes no nuisances show up at the door…as we scribble, the righteous and the well-meaning are out there trying to recruit her to an old-folks’ home.

How exactly I’m gonna evade that fate escapes me: Greyhound bus, maybe? Will they let me take the dawg on a bus???  Hmmmm…well, no. Not unless you can faze it past them as a “service dog.” Good luck with that…

At any rate, it’s definitely another soggy doggy day…even inside the house, the air feels damp. And that places Arizona smack in the middle of Hades!

So I consider: Do I really want to stay here?

Surely not if I’m likely to be nabbed and locked up in a prison for the elderly.

How likely is that to happen? Well…I’d give it about a 40 percent chance. Which is about 100 percent more than one would like…

Once again, we’re brought back to the fact that women in my family who didn’t smoke and didn’t catch amoebic dysentery in some god-forsaken Arabian desert have lived well into their 90s. And in pretty damn good health, we might add.

But as one ages, one tends to be infantalized. And that leads those around you to take over your life and decide matters like where you will live and how you will be treated.

And I for one do NOT wish to be treated as a child.

How exactly to evade that fate pretty much escapes me. 

 

Jumping on the Wagon!

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Once again, as happens occasionally here at the Funny Farm, I take it into my head that I need to abjure alcohol. Once and for all. Onto the wagon, and don’t jump off!

😀

Seriously: my mother’s family were tee-totalers (far from what my parents were!). But come the next generation, she and my father enjoyed swiggling so much that they learned to make their own booze while we lived in Arabia (where alcohol was verboten), and then continued to brew their own after they moved to Sun City, Arizona.

Do I believe I drink too much?

Well…no, not of late. In the past, without doubt I have. But these days, I never drink more than one or two cocktails or glasses of wine in a day.

Now that I’m getting old, though, I’m thinking even that is too much. So, these days I’m do believe it’s time to knock it off altogether.

Let us see, then, if we who are the funny-looking human can make that happen!

Count: 1
Today is the first 100% booze-free day of the current effort!

Watch this space!

Hotter & Hotter

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Another balmy day in Arizona: “only” 111 degrees in the shade of the back porch.

Got that right: a hundred and eleven in the shade. 

Ain’t goin’ out into the sunlight…wouldn’t matter, because I don’t have a portable thermometer.

Greater horrors await, though. 

Horrifically, indeed: the beloved WonderAccountants have just announced that they’re retiring! Of all the outrages!!!

This is a disaster for me, because I am innumerate. No: really and truly innumerate. It’s a kind of learning disability: haven’t ever been able to do basic  arithmetic. I understand the principles, but the process is just…blinding.

My father used to try to beat arithmetic into me, when I was a little girl. No kidding: he’d whip the bejayzuz out of me when I got things wrong…which was about every 30 seconds. This did nothing to enamor me of mathematical calculation. Today I can’t add up a column of figures without an electronic calculator

My son does understand about tax accounting, at least on a superficial level. So I may be able to foist the job on him…at the cost of a vast guilt trip on my part.

Truth to tell, though, I’m gonna have to find someone else to take on the noxious tax calculation task.

Well, the WonderAccountants have done this year’s tax job. That gives me a year to find some other victim to lure into the net. Sure not looking forward to it!!

So…mwa ha ha! I guess we could say things are heating up all the way around: on a literal level and on a metaphorical level.

Hotter Than the Hubs!

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5:20 p.m., Tuesday, January 16
Temperature in the deepest shade of the back porch: 111°

Holeeee Maquerel! Just stumbled in the house from (stupidly!) walking around the neighborhood.

If the unholy heat weren’t bad enough, I’ve managed to inflict a whole lot of equally dangerous behavior on myself: beer after beer after beer, every goddamn day!

Yes. My swizzling habit has returned. Not — mercifully — with a vengeance…but enough that I’ve been swilling two or three alcoholic drinks a day.

Holee shee-ut!  WAKE UP, ya dumb broad!

Staggering through yesterday’s heat, one clear thought finally struck me: GOTTA GET OFF THE SAUCE! 

Once.
and.
For All.  

So here we are, stone cold sober, sitting in a living-room chair emanating gawdawful heat from this afternoon’s (very stupid!) walk through the neighborhood heat.

Yeah. Wunderground claims it’s 105 degrees out there. But the thermometer in the shade of my back porch indeed does read 111 degrees. 

Floating in from the north and the east are banks and blankets of soggy-looking clouds. Ugh!! 

Well…I’ve managed to get into the air-conditioning while clinging to life. If I survive long enough, I’ll jump into the bathtub. But later. Not now.

New cleaning-lady surfaced today. Very nice woman! Smart and interesting. She worked very hard…oh gawd! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have!  At any rate, I hope she’ll be back, so I can hire her on a permanent basis.

If not…these woods are full of cleaning ladies: in less than two weeks, I’ll have someone permanent in here.

Meanwhile, though, the WonderAccountants have taken it into their heads to retire. 

Gawd help us!!!!

So now I’ve got to find a new accountant/bookkeeper. That’ll be a challenge.

One to take on tomorrow. Not now!