Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Moving Crabbily On…

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As we scribble, come 6:00 in the evening it’s freakin’ hot outside. Yeah: 98 degrees in the shade of the back porch, according to our thermometer. About right: Wunderground says it’s 99 degrees out there, “feels like 102.”

😀  Is THAT all?

***

A small fiasco is under way, one that will require the attention of my amiable lawyers. So: tomorrow it’s over to their office, wherein to have a chat. Just what I need to blow away half my day.

***

Meanwhile, the poor little dawg is about fried. Now that she’s had a few bites to eat and had a chance to flop on the kitchen tiles, she seems a little better. And as we scribble, she has retired to her favorite spot on the cool tiles under the toilet…

Dayum!  I hope she’ll be OK.

Give her half-an-hour or so, and then retrieve her from the toilet cave. Put her on the bed. And let’s see how she does.

Hope she recovers fully. I’m not sure where the nearest animal hospital is…which doesn’t matter, because Caligula has kiped my car, so I can’t get her to an emergency vet, anyway. If that’s necessary, though, I hope one of the neighbors will drive us.

Really….I probably ought to chat with the WonderAccountants (they live across the street) and ASK — in advance!! — if they will please help me get Ruby to an emergency vet should that ever be necessary. Maybe beg the same (in-advance!) favor from some of the other neighbors.

***

This mother/son squabble and automobile rip-off flap has gotten SO stupid that I’m thinking I probably need to sell the house and move to some other venue: one where I can buy and use another car to get myself to key destinations.

Where to go, where to go??  Well…Sun City probably.

Yuch!

My parents decamped to Sun City. They LOVED it…because that sort of stodgy atmosphere and whitey-white exclusivity was right up their alley.

Personally, I prefer a more liberal atmosphere and a more diverse set of neighbors. Plus (really!) I do love the sound of children playing outside. In Sun City, instead you get the melody of jet warplanes blasting out of nearby Luke Air Force Base. Loverly….

***

Oohhh gawd! Now Ruby has taken to choking frantically every time she laps a few sips of water!

KEEEripes! WHAT is causing that?

Well, she gets over it quickly. Now it’s stopped…

Tomorrow morning I’ll call the vet. Maybe I can put up one of the neighbors to driving us over there. Otherwise, it’ll be a half-hour hike, each way, though gawdawful heat. Carrying the sick dog in my arms…

What next, Lord?

Rasty-Nasty Redux

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Ahh! COLD TEA!!!  What a relief!

Just back in the house after a peculiarly unpleasant doggy-walk. At eight in the morning, it is SO HOT and SO HUMID out there that it feels like a day in Rasty-Nasty, the horrible American compound where my parents and I spent nine years on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

What a gawdawful experience that was! I can remember days when it would be so humid that rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky.

Oh, well. At least we don’t have any Arabs standing around hating on us here. That’s something. I guess.

Where would I go, if I could get away from this sylvan spot?

Well…

The San Francisco Bay Area for sure, if I could afford it. My mother’s family lived in Berkeley, which at the time was a lovely suburb of the City, up in the East Bay hills…just as pretty as could be.

But of course, I can’t afford it.

Where else?

Some parts of Colorado have their appeal. Problem is, it gets too cold in the winter there.

New Mexico, maybe…but I suspect the summers there are about as balmy as they are here…

All of which is about as irrelevant as irrelevant can get. Because… As long as my son is here, this is where I’m gonna be.

Hotter than the Hubs…

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Surely Hades was never this hot and soggy! 😀

Ruby is guzzling water (again!), panting, choking, gasping for breath. The human is hurting, hurting, and hurting some more: this peripheral neuropathy is no joke.

But at least we got our morning perambulation…  And ohhh my! Lest you ever feel sorry for yourself, all you have to do to perk up is to look around at other people.

This morning we passed a crew of laborers working on the renovation of a large house in Lower Richistan. Yeah: in the heat. In the humidity. Dear lord! What a job!  Hard physical work in absolutely ghastly weather.

At times like this, (un)Lovely Phoenix reminds me of Ras Tanura, the American outpost where we spent ten years next to the Persian Gulf while my father worked for Aramco. Just about the most gawdawful place to live on the planet! Hot, wet, miserable…and hostile to Americans.

My mother’s health was ruined out there — she came down with amoebic dysentery — and I was sick all the time.

Most of my “sick” was play-acting, a strategy to keep me out of the damned school and away from the horrid little brats who inhabited it. If you were “different” in any way (I was a girl who wanted not to grow up wearing ribbons and frills but to work as an astrophysicist), you were tormented, tormented, and tormented some more. So I was constantly trying to persuade my mother that I was too sick to go to school. About half the time, she fell for it.

And well she might have, since she was sick at least half the time; probably more.

Ohhh gawd! There goes the dawg again: choke choke choke CHOKE GAAAG!  Got to get her to a vet…but how to do that without a car beats me.

My son, despite having made off with my car (he thinks I’m too old to be driving!), cannot take time away from his job to schlep me to stores and the dog to veterinary hospitals. So exactly what I’m supposed to do here, isolated in (un)lovely North Phoenix, escapes me. Even though a doctor has said there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be driving, Dear Son is determined to keep me out from behind a steering wheel.

This, I assume, results from what he’s seen in his job as an insurance adjustor. You can bet he’s shuffled his way through some horrific car wrecks. And yes: it’s undoubtedly true that elder drivers with slower reflexes and weaker vision are more vulnerable to accidents than are the Young and the Alert.  Surely, though, there ought to be some way to test you to see whether you’re safe to be driving. My own doctor says there’s no reason I shouldn’t be driving…but the kid ain’t listening to him.

At any rate: the result is that I’m stuck here in the house and can’t even take my poor sick little dog to a vet.

Not.
A.
Happy.
Camper.
!!!!

Melted!!!

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Argh! I overestimated the heat when I went for today’s exercise stroll. As we scribble, Wunderground claims the temp is 111 just now. “Feels like 117.”

Is THAT all?

Yeah…well, I’d have guessed 119. 😀

It feels like freaking Saudi Arabia out there, where we lived on the edge of the Persian Gulf: hot, humid, and suffocating. And yes, that place was capable of reaching 120 degrees. Nooooo problem!

So, 117 degrees doesn’t seem THAT out of the ordinary. Eh?

This is one of many days that make me wish I were back in San Francisco. Where I belong.

Ohhh well. That ain’t ever gonna happen again. My son is here, and I’m not leaving as long as that’s the fact.

{sigh}

Most of the time, Arizona has a tolerable climate. It does get absurdly hot in the summertime, as we can see by today’s balmy afternoon. But the winters are lovely, as are most of the spring and fall days.

That notwithstanding, I do wish my parents had never discovered Sun City, the garden spot that drew them here. Boyoboy! Imagine a whole gigantic subdivision where NO KIDS ARE ALLOWED!

Goodie.

You were allowed to live there if your brats were over 18 or off in college. I was 16.  So…

They engineered a deal with the University of Arizona whereby I would start my freshman year there a year early. So it went: I dropped out of high school at the end of my junior year, and they dragged me to Arizona. Soon as we got here, they exiled me to Tucson.

That I was all set to go to UC Berkeley the following year meant nothing to my father. (Well…he himself was a high-school dropout, and the truth was he understood little or nothing about universities and university education…) They yanked me out of school, sent me off to Tucson, and with great delight moved themselves into a pleasant tract house under the flight path of the war planes from Luke Air Force Base.

The cute little Sun City house was my father’s lifetime gift to her. And she was SO delighted with it! Seriously: she even made herself relish the roar of those damn fighter jets: as the pilots practiced, she’d sit out on the back porch in the morning sipping her coffee and simper, “Ohhhh! it’s the sound of freedom!”

Yeah, Mom… The sound of World War III comin’ our way…

She loved it, though. So it was a beautiful thing he did for her, after decades of marriage living in difficult conditions.

Charging off to college a year early was a nice ego trip for me…though it wasn’t the greatest of all possible ideas. At 16, I really was too young to go off by myself. I did OK — the UofA was hardly the most challenging of all possible higher ed institutions.  But I would have been better off waiting a year or two. And FAR better off going to one of the University of California campuses.

Not that I did all that poorly: I did graduate Phi Beta Kappa. But my social life left something to be desired. Like, for example…a social life.

So…heh! I guess you could say my life was melted. Just as I was melted by today’s blasting heat on the sidewalks of the ‘Hood.

And that was one of the first reasons that the phrase “I hate Arizona” became my byword. 

Hotter than the Hubs…AGAIN

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Or maybe make that “STILL”?

At 11:30 in the morning, the thermometer in the darkest part of the back porch reads A HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES. 

Yeah: we’re talkin “in the shade.”

So. It’s another balmy day in Arizona…leave us all despise it. 

Seriously: I do have to say that if I could escape from this place, I would. RIGHT NOW.

Actually, I would’ve escaped some time ago…

Where would I escape to?  

Probably the San Francisco Bay Area, whither my mother and I emanated some years ago.

When my sea-faring father retired, the two of them betook themselves to Sun City, here in fricasseeing Arizona. Looked ideal to them: NO KIDS.

And yes, they did hate, loathe, and despise kids. And anyone whose skin color differed from their own.

To my mind, that communal sentiment out there makes Sun City a highly undesirable place. Hate does not seem like an ideal foundation upon which to build your life.

Ohhhh well. To each his/her own, eh?

My part of town — the North Central district — is considerably better educated and considerably more humane than [un]lovely Sun City. Hate is not the foundation upon which this part of town was built.

But still…it’s hot. It’s miserable. And it ain’t San Francisco.

If I could get back to the City, I sure would. But as a practical matter, I can’t see how that would happen: Just can’t afford it. And as a sentimental matter: my son is here and I ain’t movin’ away from him.

Lucky him, eh?  😀

***

Jayzuz! Just now we have water pouring –– and I do mean POURING– on one of the trees in front. Poor little plant looks like it’s about to keel right over.

Once the timer runs on that, I’ll have to drag the hose across the yard to another parched victim.

See what I mean when I say that I hate this place? Those trees, like all the other plants in the Funny Farm’s yard, are on an automatic watering system. Regular, timed watering is not enough to keep them alive in this f*cking heat.

That notwithstanding…you don’t even wanna know what the water bill is gonna look like.

Ugh. When I say I hate this place, I do mean I hate this place.

*****

…hose drag hose drag hose drag hose drag hose drag…

Okay, we got PART of half of the front yard watered. Meanwhile, other environs are more desperate. Sooo…

Dragged the hose into the backyard. Got it running on the paloverde tree and on one of the roses.

The rose plant is dying. I very much doubt that it’ll survive.

So much for the watering system’s timer, eh? It was set to water those damn plants every day, in this heat.

Yeah. Okay. After this, I’ll have to do a hose drag EVERY DAY until the weather cools.

  • Westside roses
  • Potted plants on the east-facing side of the west wall
  • All four citrus trees in the backyard
  • The mountains of cat’s-claw vines climbing on the north wall — vines that are struggling to survive

On and on and on. Apparently the watering system has crapped out in some way…but I can’t find the problem. That means I’ll have to hire an irrigation guy to come in, figure it out, and fix it.

Goodie.

And some moron butched up my rolls of masking tape. So, to post new charts for my guys, I’ll have to order more of that from Amazon. No, I cannot drive to the store: my son has kiped my car. No, I cannot walk to the store in 110-degree heat.  And Amazon gouges you upwards of $4 for delivery.

************************

Gaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Migawd. Nobody could have been this stupid! Nobody could have fu*ked everything up this elegantly without knowing what he was doing.

*********

Seriously: No one could have made a mess like this by accident. No. They deliberately dorked up everything in my yard!!!

Wish I knew who “they” might be…so I could fire them.

This is, no doubt about it, purposful vandalism.

 

Whew! Funny Is B-a-a-a-ck! And So Is Gerardo…

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Wow! For awhile there, WordPress wouldn’t let me back into the Funny about Money site…and…well… I wuz beginning to think Funny was about to be a thing of the past.

Ohhh well….  Here we are, back online…uhm…I think. We’ll find out after I go to post this squib.

Gerardo the Miracle Yard Dude and his cohorts are out in the yard, working like animals in Arizona’s UNGODLY summer heat. August is our worst month. But, for reasons I can’t imagine (most likely he has bills to pay, hm?), he volunteered to prune the (overgrown!) paloverde tree on the west side of the house.

Not a good time to hack up a tree, that’s for sure. But…you can be sure he wouldn’t have offered to do it if he didn’t need the money. Damn near killing your crew with heat exhaustion is not a normal strategy.

Let’s just hope this exploit doesn’t kill the tree. It is on the west side of the house, after all…so it serves its purpose in savings on air-conditioning bills.

On the other hand, even I could tell that it presented a serious risk of falling on the roof and doing some major damage. The amount Gerardo is charging for this venture (which he didn’t tell me beforehand…otherwise I wouldn’t have let him do the job) is fukkin’ ruinous…but a fraction of what it would cost to chop down the tree and then repair the roof and the attic if it fell on the house in a storm.

So I can’t complain too much.

On the other hand…that doesn’t make me like it.

And yes: trees.  MY GAWD, the man charged me FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS to prune that weed tree off the roof and away from the yard.

He said, though, that he’d talked to my son. And he claimed he told my young Hero (and Keeper…) how much he was gonna charge. So…one can only hope that was true. Because if M’hijito is blind-sided by a $450 landscaping bill, he is gonna be ENRAGED. Seven ways from Sunday.

Ohhhhh gawd! Never get old,, whatever ya do!  First off, you lose control of your life. Then, you’re assaulted by one hassle and one headache after another — none of which you personally can do a damn thing about. The person in charge of your bills has to do all that…and you may be sure, he won’t appreciate it.

***

Ohhhh well. I truly do like Gerardo and his guys. They’re all such nice men, each and every one of them. To say nothing of gentlemen who work like oxen (!!no exaggeration!) Seriously, you’ve never seen anyone work as hard and as steadily as those guys do. Just…freakin’…jaw-dropping!

They do hard work and good work. Whatever they apply themselves to, they do a great job on it. And they apply themselves to A LOT!

Amazing guys. No question of it.