Coffee heat rising

Common sense

Arf! We say…ARF!

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Back again from traipsing around the neighborhood: pillar to post to pillar. Dawg and I marched from here to the shops east of Main Drag Central; then home and into the Shack.

Dawg takes up her post on the doggy bed, in the lovely air-conditioning. Human goes back out to hit the Sprouts and waypoints.

Human has gotten surprisingly skilled at repelling panhandlers. Hot diggety!

Sprouts: amply supplied with nummies, and — more importantly — with beer. So now we’re handsomely armed for dinner.

***

Ahhh, Little Dog! What a lovely little dog. 

In hideous Saudi Arabia — where the Human grew up — we weren’t allowed to have dogs. Rabies, y’know.

Actually, the jackals (which invaded the camp after dark every night) carried the rabies. But if your dog got into a squabble with one of those canine intruders, your dog was gonna be exposed to rabies, and that was gonna be the end of your dog. And you were going to enjoy THE most gawdawful round of anti-rabies shots you can imagine.

Pain, pain, and more pain: from every direction.

So we didn’t have dogs out there.

And therein lies one of the chief of the many reasons you couldn’t pay me to go back to that place. 😮

***

So here we are, loafing in the living room…again. Ruby and I have become quite expert at loafing!

It’s a warm but not a hot day. Tolerable enough for traipsing. School has come and gone, so kids are outside playing: more than tolerable enough.

Sometimes I think I would like to move…

But where to?

Well: first choice would be to a neighborhood closer to M’Hijito’s house.

Heeeeee!  Wouldn’t he be pleased?

Well, before I chase him off to Payson, we’d need to rethink that idea.

Another possibility would be into the residential area adjacent to the area occupied by the Beloved AJ’s Fancy-Dan Grocery Store. Just imagine being able to walk to the best grocery store in the city! Whenever you feel like it!!

That also would be, in theory, within walking distance of M’Hijito’s house.

The location, though, is near one of the busiest intersections in the city, and right up the street from a complex of not one, not two, but three high schools. So…well…you can imagine the noise level!!

Don’t think I wanna move there.

So…ya look around and ya look around and ya look around…and eventually you think I don’t wanna move anywhere away from here! 

Yea verily: by sheer, raw luck, you happened to buy a house in THE ideal corner of the city. Truth to tell, there is no “where to” to move to.

What luck, eh!?

Wow! AWESOME!

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Which is to say: AWESOME afternoon!  What a beautiful day!

When my Realtor friend John Shackelford brought me to the ‘Hood, lo! these many years ago, he could not have done me a bigger favor. This middle-aged North Phoenix tract really is a beautiful little mid/middle-class neighborhood, perfect in every way.

Seriously! It IS in the middle of everything: you don’t have to walk far to get to any store, any professional’s office, any car shop, any ANYTHING you like. Drop the jalopy off wherever you please, wander away, and come toddling back…yes…whenever you please.

The ambience is safe. Thugs do not holler at you as they barrel past on a main drag. Every corner has a tidy little shopping center. There’s a church across the street. And a school across the street. And a car repair shop up the street. And….and…and on and on.

Seriously, indeed: I do feel like I just fell into it when I bought into this neighborhood.

This afternoon, it was over to my favorite little booze shop, thereinat to buy a six-pack of Kilt-Lifters. Then homeward, ever homeward…hereinat to love up the dog and fork over a couple of fistfuls of kibble as a treat for her. Then pour a beer, sit down, and put up the feet.

Gosh! What a day, eh?

We live in such a pretty little neighborhood! I’m SOOOOO glad I didn’t follow SDXB to dreary Sun City when he decided to escape Tony the Romanian Landlord by moving out to Old Folks’ Land. Gaaaahhhh!  When I lived out there with my parents, I learned to hate…

  • …the sound of F-16s roaring overhead all day
  • …the hatred of young people, creatures the locals moved out there to escape
  • …the ticky-tacky architecture
  • …the third-rate grocery stores (do old people not eat, not cook???)
  • …the endless, endless, FUKKIN’ ENDLESS drive into town, whereinat to buy a decent steak…

LOL! If you’re gonna live in a city, forgodsake LIVE IN A CITY. 😀

Reminiscences

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Achey this morning. Not sick: just tired from too much hiking around.

Crackpot neighbors are hollering at each other. Shut UP, folks!

Waiting for the toast to brown. Thinking….thinking back over my family’s life in Berkeley, California. Wishing I were still there. 

My relatives’ little house was right down the road from where the lightrail train came in from San Francisco and then shot through a tunnel to the other side of the hills.

My great-grandmother and her widowed daughter, my great-aunt, lived on Hopkins street, a long and mellow road that climbed up the side of a steep hill and ended where that tunnel carried the city train through from the far side of the Berkeley Hills.

Such a handsome place! I do miss it.

Their charming little house looked a lot like this one. CAN YOU BELIEVE that price!! Over a million bucks for an ancient, termite-ridden two-bedroom bungalow!

One thing you had to say for the neighborhood: it would keep you in shape. Where the relatives’ house stood, that road was mighty steep!

The relatives didn’t own a car, so just to go to the grocery store, they got a nice workout. And yea verily! Both of them lived well into their 90s, in excellent health. Without ever seeing a doctor.

Two blocks up that road stood what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. They didn’t: to them, it was just the corner market. WhatEVER: my great-grandmother (by then in her 90s) walked up there every day or two to pick up food and whatnot. Her daughter (my great-aunt), hiked up that hill five days a week to catch a train into San Francisco, where she worked for Crocker-Anglo National Bank.

On any given day, either one of them got about 20 times more exercise than we do. And it showed: they both lived into their late 90s, in excellent health. As Christian Scientists: they never went to doctors!

Heh. I guess the hill was their doctor, eh?

It was populated with pretty little houses. Walk the three blocks to the top of the hill and you came to what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. To them, it was just a corner store, a rather ordinary grocer.

Also on that corner were a dry cleaner and a set of concrete stairs leading up the hill into Sausalito, where my cousins lived. Next door to the cleaner’s was said gourmet grocery store: on the order of a Sprouts, only not so commercialized.

They were nice folks: the great-grandmother and the great-aunt.

Heh! Imagine having relatives who don’t think you’re a Communist because you’re active in the Democratic Party!

Yeah: the idiot woman my father married after my mother died dwelt somewhere to the right of Adolf Hitler. So did her her rabid daughter, who — Arizona being, after all, Arizona (Home of the Right-Wing Crackpot) — attained to the rank of Superior Court Judge. Both of them wild-eyed right-wingers, who regarded me and my husband as COMM-YOU-NISTS.

Yep. Our family life went straight to Hell after my mother died. 😀

My step-sister Marilyn, who merged into our family after my father married her mother (in the wake of my mother’s death), must have thought we were the next best thing to Communists. No doubt she and her mom just l-o-o-ved having us treasonous bastards in their home. But I enjoyed her and her kids. Politics aside, they were nice enough folks.

Dear step-sister died in 2018: IMHO much, much too young for a journey to The Other World. But that’s only from my point of view: in reality, she was some 15 years older than me. And a good 90 degrees further to the right than me! :-d

SEriously: I did enjoy Marilyn. Her mother, Helen: not so much. And ultimately my father turned out to be pretty miserable in that marriage. He was afraid to divorce Helen: “She’ll get all my money!!!” 

Yeah. Well. Some things are worth more than money, eh Daddy?

Actually, what I should have said to him was Daddy! I’m married to  a partner in one of the most powerful lawfirms in the Southwest. She’s NOT gunna get all your precious money!

Probably not so much as a penny of it…

Oh well. I was too stupid to think of that. So was he. And so they lived miserably ever after…

GGRRRRRR!!!!!

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SEVEN-FORTY FIVE IN THE MORNING and here’s some phone soliciting a$$hole on the phone to pester me!

Jayzuz!

Arizona doesn’t do Daylight Savings Time, so these clowns are probably calling from what seems like an early but marginally OK time for them. For me, there is NO time that’s OK to pester me with a nuisance call — marginal or not.

Really: telephone soliciting should be illegal. 

A perp should get 30 years in jail for rousting some poor victim on the G.D. phone. Add another five years for every minute they call before 10 a.m.

Phone soliciting is a prison industry. So a lot of these clowns are calling you from inside a jail (where they belong, presumably).

And that brings us around to the question of WHAT THE HELL do the state and federal authorities think they’re doing to sic their criminal charges on us? In our homes! At all hours of the day and half the hours of the night!

The proprietors of these operations also belong in jail, alongside their (presumably unpaid or underpaid) charges. Damn them all!!!!!

Zowie!!!

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CAN you believe it???  WordPress let me back into Funny about Money on the FIRST TRY!

Zowie! It’s a miracle! 😀

Just back from trudging around the park with Ruby the Corgi. Usually this is pleasantly fun, and today is no serious exception. Kids playing. Grown-ups loafing and socializing. Other dawgs walking their humans. Beautiful, sunny afternoon: bright but not too hot.

My son still has the purloined car, so any shopping has to be done within walking distance.

But…but… In the “can you believe it” department,  THAT is no problem. Everything we need IS within walking distance!

  • Two supermarkets
  • A pet store
  • A computer store
  • A Sprouts
  • A Bookman’s
  • A QT
  • A hair stylist
  • ….on and on

When Caligula made off with my car, really: I did expect to be seriously inconvenienced. Enough to consider selling my house and moving to a suburb on the far east or far west side.

But..nay verily! 

You don’t need a car to live in this neighborhood conveniently. 

I sorta kinda knew this. But had never tried it out. Now, though, I have…and what I’ve found is that I can easily walk to any of the many stores in this area.

LOL! That may not be so when the weather’s hitting 110 degrees. During that period, I’ll have to call an Uber or a cab. But that ain’t very long, in these parts. Even in the summertime, you have a couple hours in the morning when you can walk around without risk of heat stroke.

Truth to tell, though, this neighborhood is incredibly convenient, and well stocked with a generous array of retailers within easy walking distance.

So. That does away with the (horrible!) plan to move to Sun City or Fountain Hills, stodgy suburbs on the far west and far east sides of the city. Looks like I’ll be hanging out here until they come to lock me into the old-folkerie.

And with any luck, I’ll croak over before then. 😀

If this state of affairs proves to be permanent, I probably will ask His Lordship to sell that car, so I can pocket a few grand and no longer be hassled with licensing and insuring it. We shall see…

Ahhh! And now to LOAF!

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Dayum, but Olde Age has its compensations. 😀  The biggest is NOT HAVING TO GET DRESSED AND TRUDGE OFF TO WORK!!!

Wheeee! Here we are, dawn’s early light cheerily glowing in the window. The Dawg and the Human stuffed with breakfast. Human lingering over a cup of hot coffee.

Beloved Pool Dude has been here and gone, leaving the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money spotlessly, sparkling clean. Bless that wonderful man!

Ruby thinks he IS wonderful. And weirdly, she seems to know what day of the week it is. On Pool Dude Day, she lurks by the back door, waiting…waiting…waiting for the Moment of Joy when he shows up.

And yea verily, on that morning he does show up. Then we have a Magnificent Moment of Doggy Joy, after which Ruby must tear outside and stand there at the pool fence’s gate, admiring his magnificence.

Apparently many of these guys are ex-convicts. Pool cleaning is one of the…uhm…trades for which Arizona prisons train inmates. So, theoretically, when they get back on the street they’ll have some other way to earn money than by stealing your car, eh?

At any rate, I have no idea what about the guy makes him seem so splendid to a corgi. But without doubt, she thinks he’s about the best Human ever to stumble across the surface of the earth.

Whenever I get off my duff, I do need to trudge down to the neighborhood clinic to…uhmmmm…. wwwaaaaitaminit!

I wuz about to say, to try to get the doc to do something about the constant maddening ITCH in my feet and legs, and as the computer cruises happily across the Internet it lands on a page that tells us...

Vitamin B12: Common Side Effects (Oral Supplements and Injections)

  • Headache
  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Mild diarrhea
  • Itching or a skin rash/acne
  • Dizziness
  • Tingling sensation in hands and feet (peripheral neuropathy)
  • Weakness or fatigue 

And which Vitamin B-gulper do we know who has a mad itch and crazy-making tingling in the hands and feet?

For.
The.
Luv.
of.
GAWD!!!!!

Manufacturers of OTC nostrums should be required to list ALL a drug’s potential side effects on the label! In 14-point type!!!

Man! I just stumbled across that li’l blurb. Wasn’t looking for it. And now know why my hands and feet and lips and gums feel like an electric current is buzzing through my body.

GodDAMMIT. I wish I’d known this two weeks ago. 

Ugh!!! Wonder how long it’ll take for this stuff to wear off… Bare minimum two or three days, whaddaya bet? More likely a week or two.

Wouldn’t you think that by now, having arrived in the middle of Olde Age, I would KNOW BETTER????? 

Yea verily, by now shouldn’t I have figured out that just about every damn pill I drop down my throat has some untoward side effect?

Argh!! My Christian Scientist crackpot relatives may not have been crackpots, after all. Maybe they had somethin’ there…