Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Awww, jeez! Guys!!!!

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Dare to sit down to breakfast, and ARF!!!!

Get up to see what the Hound is arfing at, and see Gerardo’s wondrous gang of yard dudes out front.

Dayum!!!

Get off duff. Trot around: pick up junk, put junk away; set up pool so guys can work around it; pick up more junk, put more junk away; pick up and discard mounds of dog sh!t… Finally get the place ready for the men.

Stumble back in the house. Look out front to see if they need me to go out there and unlock the side gate…

and…

and….

THEY’RE GONE!!!!!!!

WTF??????  Nary a sign of a yard dude! Or a yard dude’s truck!!

ohhhh…kayyyy…. So where’s the dog?????

Ruby!

RUBY!!

R-U-U-B-E-E-E-E!!!!!!

Nary a small fuzzy corgi!

Ohhhhh shee-ut! Did they open the gate and let her out?

Frantically search around and search around and call and call and search around and search around and call and call and…and…

Lo!
Here she is! 
Ambling out from underneath the toilet.

ggrrrrrr….  This is gonna be one of THOSE days, ain’t it?

Still a GORGEOUS Monday

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Yep…we’re on the third blog post of the day. Tis true! and the truth is: telephone scammers notwithstanding, worries about old-age incarceration notwithstanding: this is an OBSCENELY GORGEOUS day.

  • Beautiful sunlight.
  • Beautiful mild temperatures.
  • Beautiful clean air.
  • Beautiful spectacular blue skies.
  • Beautiful little dog.
  • Beautiful glass of beer.
  • Beautiful beyond anything you can think of.

Beyond gorgeous.

Yes, you bet! I’m still damn scared of what the future holds. But when the present is this lovely, you can afford to divert your attention from tomorrow.

***

Ruby has waddled off to her favorite locale under the master bathroom toilet. Truth to tell, it’s the middle of the afternoon and we have yet to do our daily dog-&-human walk. And that is solely the fault of the lazy, easily distracted human.

Distracted today by memories of a beloved old boyfriend, a man I came within inches of marrying. 

Ohhhhh how my parents hated the man!!!

Ohhhhh how I loved the man!!!

In my then yet-to-be misspent youth, I assumed they hated him because he was The Other. Not American, hevvin help us. Worse yet: Eastern European. 

Paul was Bohemian. Real Bohemian, as in the nationality — not metaphorically so. Why they hated him, I failed to grasp during my naive youth. But now in my Old Age, I see…yeah.

As an example: Paul thought it was OK — just brilliant, actually — for his best buddy to be diddling a barmaid he’d picked up during a night on the town. Because, after all, his wife was eight or nine months advanced in pregnancy, and so  she couldn’t “give him any.”

Back in the Day, when I was madly in love, I thought my parents’ distaste for Paul was based in their distaste for other-than-Yankee roots. They must hate him because his parents were not 100% Yankee. Right?

Well.

No.

Actually, they hated him because he was a jerk. And because they could see, clear as day, that marrying the jerk would wreck my life.

Luckily for me, he made an ass of himself one time too many. And so I wandered away from him.

Sometimes God actually is on our side. Right?

What finally brought God’s Word — or at least, Her Thinking — to my attention was the time that Paul observed how VERY right his best buddy was in picking up a chippy in a bar and f*cking her…BECAUSE his wife was too advanced in pregnancy to accommodate his dong.

No kidding.

He thought his wife’s pregnancy with HIS child was an acceptable excuse to diddle whatever li’l darlin’ he came across in a bar.

No. I really DO kid you not. 

Dumb as I was, even I could see what was wrong with that picture.

Soooo…out he went, pore ole’ Paul. And good riddance to him. Since then, I’ve managed to scrape up a LITTLE more discrimination, when it comes to men.

How long that will last remains to be seen…

A Day Not QUITE from Hell…

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But close. Very close. 

Why?

Well…where on earth to start?

Let’s start in the neighborhood computer store.

My laptop crapped out; needed the attention of a computer tech.

My son has my car, so I can’t drive the computer across the city to the Best Buy, where I have a warranty that covers it.

Shee-ut. So I pick up the gadget and hike the six blocks to the neighborhood computer store, down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. Haul it in. Explain the problem. “Oh…” says the ninny at the service desk, “We don’t fix that issue.”

Wonnerful. I do have a warranty at Best Buy. But taking the machine to that august computer dealer entails a half-hour or forty-minute drive through nauseating traffic, plus a good 15 or 20 minutes of standing in line. “Know anyone nearby who can work on it?”

She sends me across the street to the electronics store over there.

Hike across six lanes of homicidal traffic. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand…

“I dunno what the problem might be. You need to take it down to the Best Buy.”

Yeah: the one I just passed over because I didn’t want to make the half-hour drive in each direction.

Hike back into the parking lot, mightily pi$$ed.  A military jet ROARS over, emitting a terrifying racket.

Reminds me of how much I hated living in Sun City, just down the road from Luke Air Force Base, which sent its ROARING jets over our homes every morning starting at about 6 a.m., and serenaded us for the rest of the day.

That reminded me of Sun City’s other horrors, not the least of which was its incompetent, misogynistic doctors. The bastards who made my mother’s final suffering ten times worse than it had to be.

Or maybe a hundred times worse. When does stupidity morph into outright evil, anyway?

By now, as you may have intuited, I was having a just LOVELY day.

Circled back to the Funny Farm. 

Here at the house, I stumbled across an ancient computer power cord. And LO! The damn thing fits in the laptop’s plugs!!!

We’re now attached to an outlet, and it looks like the critter is going to keep on working. Apparently the problem, such as it was, had to do with the present power cord, which must have broken or worn out.

Do miracles ever stop?

* The palms of the hands are still buzzing.
* The upper gums over the front teeth: still buzzing.
* The soles of the feet: still buzzing.
* The ears whistling at high volume, nonstop.

Somehow, none o’ that seems to matter much.

* Computer breakdown
* Idiots in computer store
* Roaring jet
* Sun City memories & horrors
* Persistent peripheral neuropathy

WHAT a wonnerful day!!!!

Gray Day Redux

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Another spectacularly, tropically rainy gray day. Weirdly beautiful. Ruby and I would be out traipsing through the ‘Hood if I could move my hip without eliciting a shriek of pain.

Alas, I can’t. So…instead, we loaf upon the bed, gazing out the big bedroom windows onto the cloudy skies and the burbling pool.

Dayum! If I didn’t hurt so much, I’d be out there paddling around in the drink.

Truth to tell, though, I’m afraid that if I got into the pool, I might not be able to climb out by myself. Would need to have a phone out there, to dial 911 if I couldn’t haul myself upright. And…

How do I not WANT to call 911 to drag me out of the drink? Let me count the ways….

My GAWD does this thing ever HURT!!! And there seems to be no position in which it hurts less.

***

The Haunts of the day take the form of memories of Saudi Arabia, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

My gawd! What a hellish place!

Even as a little kid, I think, I realized how horrible it was.

Well…that’s not quite the whole story. For me, as a kid resident of (un)lovely Ras Tanura, the horribleness was embellished by the fact that I was a weird little kid, whose eccentricity brought down on her all pure nastiness that grade-school children are capable of coughing up.

GOD, but those brats were monsters. And boyoboy, did they pour the hate on the weird little girl who imagined she wanted to grow up to be an astronomer. You just can’t even picture what nasty little horrors those junior Ras Tanura expats were. Evil, evil brats.

Now, in old age, one wonders where the moron teachers were. How come the idiot who ran the 2nd grade didn’t put a muffler on her little darlins’ mouths? How come the bitch who ran the 4th grade couldn’t bring herself to behave like a decent human being? How come my parents had to take me out of the school in the 5th grade so I could/would address the academic work and get through a whole day without collapsing into a nervous pile?

How did I hate that school? Let me count the ways.

And yes: the problem was the school and its monster brats and its idiot teachers. As soon as we got back to the States, I dived into the sixth grade in a San Francisco public school.   And weirdly, I did just fine there.

More than just fine, as a matter of fact. I thrived. In the California public schools, I hit the National Honor Society. And my performance excelled to such a degree that I started at the university at the end of the 11th grade — skipping my senior year in high school.

Must’ve been because I was a crazy nut case, right?

Oh well. Think about something else, f’r godsake!  

Clouds.

Rain.

Overgrown hedge.

Strange orange flowers.

Funny little dawg.

Sooooooo glad to be as far on the other side of the globe from Saudi Arabia as it is possible to get!

😀  😮  😀

It’s Taken Me 60 Years to Figure It Out??????

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Dear God!! It just dawned on me — here in 2025 — how my mother got herself and me out of Hellish Saudi Arabia. Only now,  lo! these many gerjillion years later!

Jayzuz! WHY did I never see this before? It was so obvious…

She and her best friend, Angie — a nurse in the camp clinic — convinced my father that I was too sickly to stay out there. That I needed to come back to the United States and be cared for by a stateside doctor at a stateside hospital.

That, my dears, was unadulterated bull puckey.

I was sick, all right: with social problems that made it virtually impossible to get along with the little sh!ts who were my classmates out there. Not that I wasn’t a little sh!t myself, after all. What kind of eight- or ten-year-old girl dreams of growing up to become an astronomer (no kidding! in the 1950s!!) and fantasizes that she lives in the jungles of India with Mowgli, Bagheera, and Akela?

Nope: I was never a normal little girl. But then, I was never treated like a living, feeling human being, either: not by those idiot teachers nor by the brats in their classes.

So…yeah. I was SO miserable in the fine Ras Tanura Senior Staff School that I dreamed up every ailment I could invent. And my mother bought just about every one of them. She let me stay home…and stay home…and stay home. When we left Arabia and took up residence in San Francisco, I was YEARS ahead of grade level, mostly because I spent most of my time reading and playing scientist.

I believe that she and Angie worked together to persuade my father that he needed to quit his job with Aramco and take me and his wife home.

Which, eventually, he did: He shipped out of the San Francisco Bay Area on tankers owned by Standard Oil — which was affiliated with Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). Eventually, he got another deck officer’s job working for Union Oil out of Southern California, and that’s where I escaped from high school a year early and made it into college at the age of 16.

Thank the heavens and all the Moslem angels above…

Eventually, as it developed, my mother and Angie did come up with a scheme to convince my father — and probably at least some of the doctors out there — that I really was SICK and needed to come back to the States to be treated. And eventually my mother managed to pile herself and me into an Aramco plane and head back to New York.

They did it by insisting that I was too sick to go to school. By keeping me out of class, claiming I was sick. SICK sick Ohhhh gawd, SICKER THAN SICK. 

Apparently my father fell for it. Either that or he didn’t want a divorce. WhatEVER.

And thank God!

What a horrible place. What a gawdawful childhood. What a joy to hit that grade school in San Francisco!

Stay Away from My Doorbell…Stay Away from…

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LOL! How’s about “Stay away from My House“?

This town is alive with door-to-door nuisances. I’ve pretty well learned never to answer the door. As policies go, that one leaves something to be desired: it causes you to miss calls from folks you do want to see. But…they number only about one in five of the hordes who show up at the house.

My neighbor to the west won’t answer the door at all. Doesn’t seem to matter whether she thinks she knows who’s out there or not. Ring her doorbell, and you get…nothin’.  If you want to see her, you have to call her on the phone and arrange to get together.

Ahhhh, the good ole days…when people were people and neighbors were friends. If you can imagine, my great-aunt’s house in Berkeley had — hang onto your hat — GLASS PANES in the front door. She could see whoever was out there, and decide on the spot whether to talk with them or not. Today, I wouldn’t have glass in an exterior door, not on a bet.

“Pleeze! Burgle this house!”

But…forgodsake, can you freakin’ imagine??? We live in a country today where you don’t dare answer the front doorbell.  Certainly not unless you know who’s out there. Not just who they are, but what they want.

Dayum, I miss Berkeley. What a pretty, peaceful, and civilized little burg.

Not that way anymore, of that you can be sure.

Seriously: I don’t think I’d feel safe living in my relatives’ pretty little Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house today. Too many druggies. Too many burglars. Too many wannabe rapists. Too many plain ole-fashioned pests.

Today, there really are only two nearby places I can think of where I would feel relatively safe:

One is dreary, boring, Sun City, baking away like a plate of cookies under the roaring path of Luke Air Force Base’s endless battalions of fighter jets. Horrible, whitey-white, hostile place.

The other is Fountain Hills: quiet, cheaply built, and baking away under the desert sun. Well. “Quiet” except during the breakfast hour and the dinner/cocktail hour, when HORDES of passenger and fighter jets pour into Sky Harbor airport, just to the south.

No, thankee.

Do I feel safe here at the Funny Farm?

Surely you jest…. 😀

Just now, though, the back door is hanging open, beckoning to every panhandler, druggy, and wannabe burglar who wanders up the alley. They have to make a special effort to see over the back wall, though: it’s topped with a good three feet of thorny, tangled vines. And if you wander into the backyard from any direction, you set off the Doggy Alarm, whose barkfest gives me plenty of time to shut and lock the door or to grab a pistol. Or both.

What.
A.
Place.

But…far as I can see, just about all of America is What. A Place these days.