Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Morning in Lovely(?) Arizona

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The Corgi is out back, sniffing every corner of the yard — her daily task, right? The Human loafs, feet on the hassock, computer on the lap. All is quiet…for the nonce.

Not looking forward to this morning, though. M’Hijito has hired a babysitter to come in and supervise me, forgodsake. Today, as I understand it, is to be her first day on the job.

It’s only a little after seven, and so we presumably have an hour or two before she surfaces.

Once the poor soul is welcomed into the Funny Farm and has a chance to look around, we’ll have to try to get to know each other. And since Funny is in fact One Weird Chick, …heh!!  We’ll see how long she lasts!

😀

Seriously: I am a strange little broad and always have been, since I was a little kid. As a child, I had hardly any friends, because I did not and could not fit in with the crowd.

Over half a century of life on this earth indeed has taught me to keep my mouth shut. But that’s easy enough when the victim…uh…companion isn’t living with you. When you’ve got someone in your face all day long…well…that’s a whole ‘nother story.

So, truth to tell, even though I’m interested to meet this new person, I’m sure not looking forward to it.

By now Ruby and I would have circumambulated the ‘Hood on our morning walk. Instead, we’ve had to sit here and wait for the babysitter to show up. Of course, she has not done so, and because June is one of the hotter months in lovely central Arizona, our chance for a doggy-walk is already lost.

Since it’s unreasonable to ask some poor underpaid soul to surface before 7 in the morning, I’ll have to go over to the locksmith’s shop and have him make another key, to give to this lady. That will allow her to get into the house while Ruby and I are out junketing around the neighborhood.

Just what I wanna do: hand out front-door keys to all and sundry…

Meanwhile, my office looks like a bomb dropped in there. WHAT a mess! Instead of loafing here playing with the computer, I should be back there shoveling out that room.

Ugh! Grand way to start the day, eh?

This is part of what makes my character weird: I don’t like people telling me what to do with my life or what to do with my time. 

Ever has it been thus. So…school was a PITA. Organized sports: PITA. Church activities: PITA.

Huh….  What happened over the years to incline me to dislike other people so?

Hmmmm…

Well: my earliest memory is of the time I was playing in a sandbox with a neighbor’s two brats. I was under three years old, because this happened before we left for Arabia…and we arrived in that sylvan realm a day before I turned three.

We’re sitting there in a sandbox in front of the house my mother had rented in Berkeley, California. The neighbor’s two brats are there, too, playing with me.

I imagine we’re all having a good time, when the brat girl picks up a load of sand in her little kiddie shovel and SLAMS IT INTO MY FACE. 

Slams it into my EYES.

Oh, my god! Never has anything hurt so much, before or since.

And there you are, folks:

That is how I learned to dislike and to distrust other people. That lesson, we might add, has never been forgotten.

And that’s why I don’t want strangers in my home. It’s why I don’t want the babysitter my son has hired in my home. It’s why just now I do not want to sit here waiting for the woman to show up; but instead I crave to be striding around the park behind a bouncing corgi.

Humanity: God’s gift to Satan.

Eine Kleine Paranoia…

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For reasons unknown, the possibility of a major earthquake in Southern California — powerful enough to affect lovely Arizona — has been lingering in my feeble little mind for the past couple of days.

No: I’m not clairvoyant. 😀  So don’t worry about any magical prediction. Some parties have been gnashing teeth about a possible major quake over here…but that is so unlikely as to be hilarious.

The thing is, though… Structures in California are built to withstand earthquakes. That’s not true in Arizona. Because o’course we don’t have earthquakes. Right?

Upshot: a quake of any noticeable magnitude would do some serious damage here.

MEANWHILE….

It’s 109 degrees in the shade(!!) of the back porch. Vast, towering white cumulus clouds are barreling down on us from the north. Dollars to donuts, it’ll rain like He!! this evening. That’ll cool things down a bit.

But until then: 109 and humid is no joke!

Hideously reminiscent of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia, where my parents dragged me to live for nine years on the shore of the Persian Gulf. You ain’t seen heat and humidity till you’ve enjoyed a summer in those parts.

At any rate, Wunderground is forecasting 100% chance of precip, with thunderstorms to rage into the night. Goody… 😮

 

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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No: I kid you not: it really IS hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there on the front sidewalk. Hotter than that on the asphalt pavement.

Fortunately, we still have enough of our marbles to stay off the ashphalt! 😀

Just back from circumnavigating the neighborhood. Spavined a tendon in an ankle a couple days ago. It’s getting better…and  now  needs to be exercised gently with some regular walking.

So…out the door, with our kewl Walking Stick in hand.

Excellent! No strain, no pain on the sore paw. Well…except for the extravagant heat. Wunderground claims it’s 108 out there just now…but waddaya bet Wunderground’s thermometers are not sitting on an asphalt road?

Thinking, contemplating to pass the hiking time…. Would I, Could I like to be back in San Francisco?

Well, yeah. Actually, I’d like to be in Berkeley, where my late relatives used to live. Pretty little suburb. Nifty gourmet grocery store up at the top of the hill, next to the tunnel where the light rail came in from the East Bay. Miss it.

Miss it a lot. But…

* Realistically, I couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area.
* Realistically, my son is here and I ain’t movin’ away from him.
* Realistically, I couldn’t afford California income taxes.
* Realistically, I couldn’t afford the nice warm clothes one needs when living there.

So…get used to HOT! 😀

O’course, I’m already used to hot, having grown up in lovely Saudi Arabia, and having been planted in Arizona at the age of 17.

So: kwitcher bellyachin’ lady. You ain’t movin’ anywhere!

😀

Exceptionally Yucky Day!

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Yes: I stupidly elected to take the Li’l Dawg for a walk, along about 8:00 a.m.  When we say “stupid,” when it came to that maneuver, we DO mean “stupid”!

Exceptionally unpleasant day. Hot. Humid. The air so thick you could swim through it. About as ugly a morning as you can imagine.

No one at the park this morning: other locals having better sense than I. Ditto the neighborhood streets. All the other humans and their dogs are holed up in their air-conditioned digs.

Reminds me of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Where we lived — on the shore of the Persian Gulf — we got days like this all summer. Hot. Muggy. Ugly.

My mother, an erstwhile Upstate New York girl, was unutterably miserable there. Me: I didn’t know any better. I was only a little kid. That place — that hideous place — was just life, the universe, and all that.

***

Hope we’re not slated to do anything today. Don’t see anything on the calendar.

That, alas, doesn’t GUARANTEE that we’re free of jaunting, junketing, and time-wasting.

Ugh. I cannot deal with another pointless doctor’s appointment. Nor can I deal with another 40-minute drive to the Mayo Clinic.

It’s too hot to walk to the grocery store (my son having purloined my car).

Too expensive to visit my favorite computer store.

Too far to walk to the Phoenix Mountain Park, there to climb hills through the scorching heat.

Too hot to climb hills anywhere through the scorching heat.

My son was going to put the new pool vacuum equipment together. That didn’t get done over the weekend. If I had my act together, I’d call Pool Dude and ask him to do that. But…act? what act???

When Pool Dude visits — as he does once a week or so — he cleans that pool himself. As long as we don’t get a dust storm (which also includes leaves and debris), the pool stays clean between his junkets. So I feel little urgency to jump up and down and nag my poor son to get over here and put that vacuum into action.

***

Daydreaming of my college boyfriend, an Eastern European fella. Well, he had been born and raised in the US, and so as far as he and I were concerned, he was a 100% red-blooded American boy. My parents, chauvinists to the core, thought otherwise. They considered him a foreigner, an alien, most decidedly not a candidate for the fatherhood of their grandchildren.

My, how they hated Paul. I adored him, and if they’d kept their mouths shut, we undoubtedly would have married.

They didn’t, though — keep their mouths shut, that is. They complained and griped and hollered and threatened….  Yeah: they threatened to disinherit me if I dared to marry the guy.

I finally folded and sent him on his way.

Found him on the Internet. He looks happy! And I surely hope he is.

He became an administrator at the University of California. Had we married, I would have landed a mighty fine sinecure there, or failing that (conflict of interest, y’know), would have found a tenure-track job with one of the state colleges. But when it became evident that if he and I married, I would never see my parents again, I sent him on his way.

Was that a wise thing to do?

Dunno. To this day, I do not know. I dearly loved the man. His sites on the Internet show a happy-looking family man…if I were the wife in one of those photos, I’d be happy-looking, too.

Oh, well!

One Li’l Catastrophe After Another

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Man! When we say it‘s one of those days, we ain’t kiddin’!

The latest news to crash on our skulls:  The Wonder-Accountants are freakin’ RETIRING!

And for an innumerate old bat like me, that is a freakin’ CATASTROPHE.

Because…in case you can’t imagine, eh?…my son is NOT innumerate. Not at all. Quite to the contrary. And…as with his grand-dad — my fierce and chronically angry father — my own inability to deal with numbers drives him up the wall. The frustration of having to watch an idiot like me try to figure out the simplest operations…well…it must be just awful for him.

It’s damned awful for me, that’s for sure.

Well. I can NOT figure my taxes: must have an accountant for that task, even when its stages are fairly simple. Tax prep is so far over my head, I have no hope of doing it right. Or doing it at all. And because my understanding of what the heck I’m supposed to be doing in said task hovers near the ZERO level, trying to connect brains with a new accountant is gonna be… Well…gawdawful, that’s what.

*****

In other sylvan vales: Mygawd, it is hotter than the proverbial hubs outside.

Went out for a quick walk around our part of the hood, mostly to try to run off some of the stress and worry. No dog with me, of course: the pavement is so hot it would scorch her furry feet right off her legs.

It’s such a pretty little neighborhood. Nothing really special, to tell the truth: 1970s tract houses, by and large. But everything is neatly cared for and handsomely painted and tidy and clean…I love this place.

Ideally, I’d like to stay here until I die.

****

That, alas, is no longer the American Way. Nowadays, we who lurk in the aging middle class are consigned to prisons for old folks, where we’re locked up and fed bad food until we finally get out of our family’s hair.

So about the best you can hope for, when you come unto my age, is a stroke or a heart attack that will carry you away forthwith.

Not the custom in my family, alas. My mother died horribly of a gut cancer, allegedly brought on by her incessant smoking  but more likely spurred by the hideous, gawdawful treatment she had for the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Arabia. It was a slow and ugly death.

My father wasted away in the excruciating company of the woman he unwisely married after my mother died. Took a good two years for him to die. Horrible.

My maternal grandmother supposedly died fairly young of cancer, apparently brought on by her flamboyant promiscuity. However, it appears that this story, as told to (or by…) my mother, was not true; in fact she lived to be 88 years old. Well…that’s if you believe the figures in Ancestry.com….a site that appears to be less than fully reliable.

The grandfather…well, if they’re facts, they’re pretty vague. If you believe the scanty data on Ancestry.com, he died at the age of 65.  Or not…who knows?

*******

Oh, well…. When we say side-tracked, we mean sidetracked, eh?

The reality of the day is the WonderAccountants’ decision to retire. A hair-raising contemporary reality that has nary a thing to do with all that historical, ancestral babble. 😀