Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

{Pant} {GLUB} {Pant}!!!!

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😀  My goodness! The boggle minds!!!  

Stupidly, along about 2:30 in the afternoon I imagined I could stroll out for a short walk around the block.

Can you spell DUMB AS A POST?
How about CRAZY AS A LOON?
Or maybe WHERE DID YOU LEAVE YOUR MARBLES?

😀

Honestly: what was I thinking?

Not only is it hotter than the Hubs — 107 degrees, saith Wunderground, with the caveat that it “feels like 110” — it’s freaking humid. No kidding: 21% of that air you’re puffing in is water!

Feels like an obscene summer day in (un)lovely Saudi Arabia, on whose sands I grew up next to the Persian Gulf.

****

This place is just AWFUL in the summertime. That would be why anyone who can afford it takes off for far venues during July and August.

But most people here can’t. I sure can’t. So you suffer through two months(+) of unmitigated Hell.

Truly: if my son weren’t here, I’d be LONG gone. Once my parents both passed, I’d have shot back to California like the proverbial rocket.

But I’m surely not about to take off for distant parts and leave him behind. My parents dragged me here; he was born here and raised here, and now his career and personal life are here. Nothing is left for me in California. Everything is left for me in Arizona.

So as long as that dude is here, I’m here.

Lucky him, eh?

***

There are folks who come here for just the fall, winter, and part of the spring. Most of them are retirees: people who don’t have to stay in x or y venue for a job. And it is very pleasant during those seasons.

Not so much in the summer, though!

***

Do I wish my parents had never come here, never dragging me with them?

To a degree, yes.

I would have much better opportunities had I been able to stay in California. At the time they dragged me here and dumped me at the University of Arizona (in Tucson), I was all set up to go to UC Berkeley.

And oh, how I wanted to go to Berkeley! Even just an undergraduate degree would have opened so many doors for me. And that’s to say nothing of the Ph.D. that I eventually landed. Imagine where you could go with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley!

A far piece from freakin’ Tucson, that’s for sure!

So…I can’t say I hate it here. Or even dislike it. Just that it wouldn’t have been my first choice of places to spend my adult life.

Roarrr! Not to say “Question Mark?”

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Gerardo’s amazing crew of yard dudes showed up as I was in the middle of scribbling this post. And somehow in the course of chatting with him, I contrived to lose the entire draft.

Wonnerful.

How DO those guys manage to do their job in this ungodly climate? As we scribble, the sky is overcast and the thermometer on the back porch reads a hundred degrees. Our boys are out there roaring around like tractors!

Migawd. I can barely stumble out the back door into that heat. Much less push lawn equipment back and forth and haul away huge bags of debris.

Jeez. It’s already 11:30. I’m so tired I can barely hold my head up. Why is unknown. But M’hijito is supposed to come over for dinner tonight — a gorgeous steak awaits him in the fridge. So…prob’ly I should try to sneak a nap in, so I can stay awake through his visit.

What DOES it all mean, anyway????

Here in the Hubs of Hades…

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Actually, it’s hotter than the hubs out there just now. At 10 in the morning it’s 101º in what should be the shade of the back porch. But there’s no shade: the sky is overcast. So everything is sorta…gray.

Steamy gray.

Truth to tell, I like a gray day…if it’s in San Francisco.

Hereabouts: not so much. Our “gray day” resembles the inside of an oven.

Ruby and I opted the morning doggy-walk. Even at 7:00 in the morning, it was soggy enough and hot enough to extinguish the Human.

Ahh, but it does lead you to count your blessings. Think of all the jobs you don’t have, for example.

  • You’re not digging a trench across an excavated roadway.
  • You’re not driving a delivery truck: one that has no air conditioning and no windows or passenger doors.
  • You don’t work in a service station. (Or do you?)
  • You’re not walking dogs for your neighbors.
  • You don’t dock tankers at a pier.
  • You don’t mow lawns.
  • You don’t herd small children around a preschool playground
  • On and on….

 Seriously: today is an awful day. As ugly and as uncomfortable as I can remember, this side of unlovely Ras Tanura, the unholy oil camp where I grew up by the shore of the Persian Gulf.

At least hereabouts we can be confident that the air will cool down a bit over the next week or so. Or at least dry out!

M’hijito is supposed to come over for dinner tonight. I sure don’t want to go out in that swamp for a grocery expedition. Hmmmm….

Well, we have a VERY nice steak in the fridge.

***

Huh!

Yesterday I was feeling awful. Actually asked my son to tote me out to the Mayo today.

This morning, whatever that was is totally gone. 

Can’t even imagine what ailed me. But whatever it was, I’m mighty glad to be rid of it.

Weird!

Why?

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Why do people steal things out of people’s yards?

Just discovered that someone made off with the full-force plastic/fabric cover for my gas barbecue. 

“Just discovered” because it’s going to rain tonight, for the first time in Gawd Only Knows how long. Goddammit. So that makes the first time in G.O.K. how long since I’ve really needed to cover the ‘cue with a generously sized waterproof cover, made for the purpose and for the grill’s size.

I’ve been using a lightweight Home Depot fabric cover. leaving the heavy-duty number for…heavier duty. The lighter one keeps the dust off, but it won’t protect the grill from serious rain or hail. So this evening, having found that the I-mean-business cover was GONE, I had to jury-rig a sturdier cover out of large black plastic garbage bags. Then weigh it down with rocks so it doesn’t blow off when the wind comes up in a typical Arizona storm. One of which, this being mid-summer, we’re likely to enjoy tonight.

It’s hotter than the Hubs out there…so throwing myself around trying to come up with something to protect the BBQ equipment was less than perfectly fun. If I knew which one of my worthies stole that cover, he’d be fired forthwith.

But of course, I have no way of knowing. It may not even have been one of my regulars, but some one-trip repairman who was called to work on the A.C. or the plumbing or the pool equipment….or whatnot.

Y’know…what this says is that whenever ANY service or repair guy is here, I need to stand nearby and watch him as he works. All the way until he goes out the gate and gets back in his truck.

Jayzuz! What HAS this country come to?

Red-Hot or Nailed Down….

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That was what my parents used to say about the locals where we lived in Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the Persian Gulf: “If it’s not red-hot or nailed down, they’ll steal it.”

Uh huh.

Well, now you can say that about the Yankee set.

Honest to gawd. ANYTHING that you carelessly set down out of your sight or out of your house is GONNA get stolen.

***

This afternoon a UPS guy showed up with a package.

My hip still being somewhat spavined, I hobbled out to the curb on my hiking stick. It looked kinda like this…  Or this…

Got back inside the house. Went to pick up the stick, to put it away…and… Yeah. Gone. Nowhere to be found.

Couple of hours later: I still haven’t found it. 

So I must have dropped it by the guy’s truck and he took it, or else I dropped it on the ground out there and some damn passer-by grabbed it. WhatEVER: it’s gone. 

Replacing it via Amazon will cost about $30 to $50, and nothing there looks as nice as the one I had.

The Sprouts on the far side of Main Drag West carries them — or it did, last I noticed. But my gawd! As we scribble, the temp in the shade of the back porch is 103…and that’s at 6:30 in the evening!

If Sprouts is selling the things for less than Amazon does, it might be worth hiking to the store through the heat. Unfortunately, their website says nothing about canes or walking sticks or anything like that. And I sure as Hell don’t wanna plow all the way over there through the heat, only to find they no longer carry them.

So…. Helle’s belles. Looks like the path of least resistance is gonna be to pay through the schnozzola to buy a new one from Amazon.

Dayum!

Glub!

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Hot! AND muggy. What a gummy, awful day! Pushing 90 degrees at 7:15 a.m., in 39% humidity.

Oh! There’s pool dude…speakin’ of jobs you’re glad you don’t have! How he manages to clean pool after pool after pool in this hot, sticky weather, I can’t even imagine. Just cleaning my own pool is almost more than I can cope with: on a cool, dry day.

That guy is one of the crew that makes it possible to stay in my home…and not have to move into some baby-sitting old-folkerie.

Hmmmm….  Let’s see…how many folks DOES it take to keep me here?

1. Pool Dude
2. Cleaning Lady from Heaven
3, 4, 5. Gerardo and his crew
6. Plumber
7. Electrician
8. Uber driver

At least! And that’s not counting my son, who does the work (and the thinking) of about 10 people.

No doubt there are more. Fair number of baby-sitters, eh?

Don’t know when it’s EVER been so hot-and-muggy. What a nasty morning! Definitely not a day that you’d like to spend working outdoors.