Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Why I hate living in Phoenix

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Why? Because it gets more and more like Southern California every day. And boyoboy did I hate living in crass, sprawling, ticky-tacky, crowded, cuh-RAZY Southern California.

And today I kinda hate living here. Especially I hate driving here.

About 40% of drivers here aren’t paying much attention to what they’re doing; maybe 20% aren’t paying any attention at all. They jerk around, they stop and start for no discernible reason, they turn left out of the center lane, they cut people off…and cut people off…and cut people off. And everyone has gotta get there first!

Traffic either moves too fast for the volume packed onto the road, or it moves too slow for the size and quality of the road. Traffic lights are not consistent: some have left-turn lights and some do not; some turn green quickly, while others make you wait until you turn green. Certain main drags (but not all of them) have complicated no-left-turn rules that kick in during the rush hours. And the only rule that’s consistent is the Rule of the Emperor of Wackiness.

it takes forever to get from here to there. Evening rush hour starts around 3:00 p.m. and proceeds through until about 6:30 p.m.

Costco: insane any time close to a major holiday.

Not so forever. When I was a Young Thang, believe it or not, I loved to drive around. Yeah: that’s drive around and around and around, just for the fun of driving around.

Do you remember the coin-flipping game?

You’d get in a car with a pal. One would drive; one would ride shotgun. The person in the passenger’s seat would flip a coin whenever you came to a major intersection: heads, you’d turn left; tails, right.

One could call it the Aimless Driving Game. Aimless it was, but it was more fun…! Sometimes we would end up on the side of one of the Valley’s scenic mountains, slithering unnoticed (we hoped!) through some outrageously overpriced neighborhood. Sometimes we’d end up in the business district, or over in the middle-class residential environs of the east side or out in the not-so-classy neighborhoods on the west side.

Wherever: driving was fun then, not a freaking ordeal.

Today you can’t go from point A to point B without risking your life. And you may be sure that nary a journey is “fun.”

Every moment on the road hereabouts is a fight for your life. If you don’t have EVERY nerve on high alert, you’re likely to get smashed, to run a signal, to make a wrong turn, to hit someone else, to LOSE YOUR FREAKIN’MIND.

Today I drove over to Lowe’s in search of a birthday gift for M’hijito. He likes to garden and to putter with plants, so I thought it would be sorta cool to get him a nice high-gloss plant pot and a cool lí’l plant to go in it.

So it was up to the westside Lowe’s, along about noon.

drive and drive and drive and drive and… Dart into the parking lot, stash the car, and trot into the nursery department.

Search around and search around and search around and… NOTHIN’!

Saddest excuse for a nursery I ever saw. WTF?

. . .

Back in the car. Head up toward the Costco up on the freeway at about Bell Road.

Get parked, hike up to the front door…greeted by MOBS AND MOBS AND MOBS of people.

Sumbiche! We’re coming on to Easter. I forgot. Having abandoned the church choir in the face of the covid epidemic, I lose track of what season it is. Especially what ecclesiastical season.

Navigate through the madding crowds. Search and search and search and search and find…NOTHIN’!

Sumbiche.

Back in the car. Head back into North Central, figuring Whitfil’s nursery will have some sort of fancy pots and plants, it being — yea verily — nigh unto Easter.

Drive and drive and drive and drive, the traffic thick yet very fast. Bastards won’t let me change lanes so I can turn left into the nursery’s parking lot. Overshoot the parking lot, cut a bastard off, turn left into the neighborhood just east of the nursery, drive round Robin Hood’s Barn, and come back onto the main drag. Turn right to head toward the nursery, where at last I get parked.

Clearly, their latest shipment of Mexican pottery has just come in! Hallelujah!

Grab a fairly gorgeous plant pot and, long’s I’m there, a pretty flowering plant.

Exhausted, buy the stuff, trudge back to the parking lot, load the loot into the car, and head back into the traffic.

Horrific, bumper-to-bumper, INSANE traffic.

In the process of dodging my fellow homicidal drivers, I miss a green light that turns yellow. Hurry-up-and-go traffic narrowly misses me as I cruise into the intersection. The light changes, and I’m in the middle of crazed traffic — on the red!

Jayzuz!

Narrowly miss getting hit. Floor it, make it to the other side of the light, my fellow homicidal drivers hollering imprecations and obscenities at me. Holeee sheee-ut!

Even more exhausted, finally make it back to the ‘Hood without killing myself or anyone else.

And think…how MUCH i hate this place and especially hate driving around this place. I hate it for the same reasons I hated living in Southern California. Our City Fathers of the 1960’s got their way: this place is modeled directly on SoCal. And it’s equally hideous.

Southern California Redux.

WHY????

Stop the World…..

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Developed a fine sore throat during the night. And a keep-you-awake-till-dawn cough. Just got back from a junket to the corner Walgreen’s, where I grabbed a bottle of Robitussin DM.

Tbe generic stuff that was in the medicine closet last night did exactly nothing to soothe the hacking. Or much of anything else.

Today the bark has subsided pretty well, but I have a sore throat from Hell.

Can’t gag a whole aspirin down, so much does the throat hurt. So I had to cut it into quarters and choke down each quarter with an unwelcome swiggle of nasty-tasting Phoenix water. Yech.

I do hope this isn’t a strep throat!

So here we are at the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest — to wit, the Internet, first recourse of the neurotic. CDC says these fine symptoms typify strep throat:

  • Fever:  Nope
  • Pain when swallowing: Yep!
  • Sore throat that can start very quickly and may look red: Yep
  • Red and swollen tonsils: Sorta
  • White patches or streaks of pus on the tonsils: Not that I can see
  • Tiny, red spots on the roof of the mouth, called petechiae (pronounced pi-TEE-kee-eye): Nope.
  • Swollen tonsils. Who knows? How much time do you spend in front of a mirror gazing at the reflection of your freakin’ tonsils?
  • Swollen lymph nodes in the front of the neck: Not much

Hmh. Soooo…I’m hoping it’s “just” (heh!) a virus.

Awful, awful night. Coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed. CDC says symptoms do NOT include cough…so, paradoxically, the night of hacking is sorta positive.

I guess.

Problem is, I get preternaturally sick with bugs that make most people, apparently, only mildly ill. The next time some idiot says to me “ohhhh, it’s just a little cold,” I swear I’m gonna brain them.

That “just a little cold” does NOT  apply to me, most of the time. This one, given how much the throat hurts as compared with previoius experience, is gonna lay me out flat for a good week or ten days, and leaving me coughing and gasping for breath for about a month.

The Walgreen’s down at the corner of Conduit of Blight and Main Drag South changed hands about a year ago. WHAT an improvement!! That place really was a dump — you had to dodge a phalanx of panhandlers to get in the door. Now there’s not a single sponger pestering you between your car and the door. They totally cleaned the place up inside. Where before it was dingy and depressing, it’s now brightly lit, clean-looking, and well organized. THANK YOU, whoever bought the place.

It’s across the street from the Albertson’s supermarket, which has a full-service pharmacy…attached to a gigantic grocery store. So one wonders WHY people would go to that Walgreen’s, when you not only can get your Rx there, you can also pick up a cartful of groceries. WhatEVER: lots of folks were there. A long line extended back from the cash register by the door. Luckily, they let me buy the cough med at the pharmacy counter, so I didn’t have to stand and stand and stand.

That’s something.

I guess.

How D’you Know When It’s Time to Go?

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When the response to a call to your doctor’s office in which you remark that you hurt so much you’re contemplating a flying leap off the North Rim elicits, in response, a telephone call from a machine(!!)…that’s when you know you’ve outlived your time on this earth.

Yep: Time to go…we’re definitely gettin’ there.

My mother killed herself. Not in an obvious way: she smoked herself to death. Quite deliberately. She knew better than to puff down six packs a day. She knew exactly what she was doing. She worked at it for years after the U.S. Surgeon General explained to the American public, in words of one syllable, what any amount of tobacco smoking will do to you. With that knowledge in hand, did she cut down on the puffing?

No.

She doubled up.

I’ve thought for a very long time that she killed herself on purpose.

Do I think my father’s father was murdered out on the side of a rural Texas road, early in the 1900s, as the story has it? Or did he commit suicide, too?

My money’s on the latter. He ran away from his wife because she refused to abort a late-life pregnancy: my infant father. Apparently he regretted not only having impregnated her (if indeed it was he who did so) but also having abandoned her and the yet-to-be infant.

That’s one way to look at it.

He’d been a prison guard. If you know anything about what US prisons were like at the turn of the 20th century — especially in monstrously backward venues like Texas — you could easily imagine one of his former wards stumbling across him as he sat by his campfire. Doing him in. Making it look like suicide.

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it
If I please

How have I had it? Let me count the ways.

We live in a dystopia. No doubt he did, too.

It must have been difficult, living in a dystopia out on a remote frontier, wedded to a Choctaw woman in a society whose leitmotif was hatred of the Other.

Dirt road in the Texas boondocksBut one never knows. There he was, sitting by a campfire out in the middle of nowhere, noplace much to come from, noplace much to go to. Offing himself would have made sense. But, given how brutal my father could be, it makes just as much sense that some guy the old man had made an enemy of happened along, out there in the middle of nowhere, and took advantage of the opportunity. If the guy treated his prisoners the same way my father was given to treating children…well…yeah.

HowEVER…the story my mother told me — and presented as the story she’d heard from him — doesn’t add up. She said the father ran off after he learned his wife was pregnant and she refused to abort the pregnancy. However, it would appear that he didn’t die until 1927.  If that’s true, my mother’s bit of folklore doesn’t make any sense: my father was born in 1908. By January, 1927 he was 19 years old.

Isn’t that weird? I wonder where she got that tale.

She said that was what he had told her. Did she never question his story? Did he lie to her? Did someone lie to him? Why on earth would they have told a child a thing like that?

And if that old cowboy offed himself, how did he know it was time?

Tree Assassinated!

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Mwa ha ha! Yesterday I put Sr. Gerardo and his compañeros up to removing the shaggy, overgrown paloverde tree that has dominated the front yard since I moved in here.

Planting that thing was a mistake from the git-go. When I moved in I had the raggedy lawn torn out and replaced with desert landscaping: good move. Placing a desert shade tree on the south side of the sun-blasted front yard sounded like a good move at the time.

Problem is that paloverde — a thorny li’l fella — grows like a bustard when given even a small amount of water. Before long, it was bending over the sidewalk and poking the pedestrians in the eyes. And me in the eyes. More and more it looked like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Gerardo’s guys did a pretty good job of keeping it trimmed up, but the things grow so fast that keeping it out of the “menace to navigation” category was not easy.

That notwithstanding, by the time I made up my mind to get rid of it, the thing was JUST HUGE.

Gerardo bought his biggest trailer (which is big!), and the men filled it to the scuppers.

And now…my goodness!!! You can actually see the sidewalk from the front window. It’s a miracle.

The paloverde stood in the yard outside the walled front patio. Inside said patio, we have a large and handsome olive tree.

Olives thrive in Arizona, the climate being not unlike that of southern Greece. With the increased dose of sunlight, that thing should grow even larger, so we won’t be lacking for shade.

Or olives.

Lots and lots of olives…

Guess what I should do to thank Gerardo & his guys for Service Above and Beyond is harvest a ton of those things, pickle them in oil, lemon juice, and vinegar, and fork them over to la famiglia.

Meanwhile, speaking of the Excellent Mr. Gerardo: WHAT to do about the refrigerator situation?

I told him he could have the annoying fridge for which I was royally ripped off by the not-so-excellent B&B Appliances up in lovely Sunnyslop. This, in response to his request that I give it to him rather than sending it to the county dump, where it belongs.

So… that was the plan.

But… After grinding and moaning and howling and whistling for a week, the damn thing is settling down. Even though I think of it as Less Than Ideal, well…grrrrrrrrr….okay okay…i could probably live with it for a year or so.

Also, truth to tell, I’m none too comfy about giving that lovely gentleman an appliance that I regard as a Piece of Sh*t, even though he does know all about it. If I were going to give him an expensive gift, I’d druther hand him a $1500 gift certificate to Lowe’s or Home Depot, to do with as he pleases.

Are you getting a clue to how extraordinary this guy and his crew are?

Yeah.

Onward…

 

Fridge Fantasia!

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The Saga of the Singing Refrigerator gets ever more fantastic.

A fine and handsome refrigerator repairman came galloping in on his white charger yesterday morning. Not only was he pleasant to look at, he was very smart and quickly solved the problem.

Turns out a flap of plastic along the bottom of the unit’s back side had worked loose. One screwdriver was all it took to tighten the damn thing down, and voilà!  Buzzing, humming, banging racket GONE.

CAN you believe that?

It cost me $95 to fix it.

He didn’t seem to disapprove of the vendor, B&B Appliances, as much as I now do. But he did allow as to how it’s pretty evident that the unit was not brand-new, as alleged. He thought it had probably been run for awhile and then returned to the store.

Yeah. Waddaya bet it was returned because of the racket it was making?

Its motor still runs loud. But it sounds like normal motor noise, not some sort of loose screw.

Y’know…I’m an old bat and I’ve had a lot of refrigerators over my lengthy lifetime. Hm. Let’s think about that…

> Parents’ house: beach house outside of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
> Parents house: portable house in camp, Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
> Parents’ house: block house in camp, Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
> Great-grandmother’s house, Berkeley, California
> Parents’ apartment: San Francisco, California
> Parents’ next apartment: San Francisco, California
> Parents’ apartment: Long Beach, California
> Parents’ next apartment: Long Beach, California
> Parents house: Sun City, Arizona
> My & my room-mate’s apartment: Tucson, Arizona
> My apartment: Tucson, Arizona
> My apartment: Phoenix, Arizona
> Husband’s and my apartment: Phoenix, Arizona
> Husband’s and my first house: Phoenix, Arizona
> Husband’s and my second house: Phoenix, Arizona
> My next apartment: Phoenix, Arizona
> My apartment downtown: Phoenix, Arizona
> My next house: Phoenix, Arizona
> My present house: Phoenix, Arizona

Hmmmm…. That’s NINETEEN refrigerators! Oh, no: make that TWENTY. We lived in our house downtown long enough to buy a second refrigerator.

And this thing in the kitchen now is the only one that ever emanated weird noises. For whatever reason. Certainly not for any such flimsy reason as “a paper-thin piece of plastic was not bolted down tightly.”

  • Give.
  • Me.
  • A.
  • BREAK!

Not a single one of those other 19 fridges ever banged, rattled, or carried on. None of them sounded like a freight train a-rollin’ up the tracks.

If this kind of performance is “normal” or something like it, then…well… We are lookin’ at some serious degradation in the quality of our lifestyle. In fact, GE appliances overall are highly rated, despite a generous share of consumer complaints.   It appears that the 21st Century leaves something to be desired.

Like, maybe…competence?

Unstuck in Time!

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My Lord, but life in the 21st Century is a PITA. One of its least charming aspects — which effectively dominates anything you try to do — is The Endless Runaround.

The endless computer runaround. The endless phone runaround. WhatEVER it is that you need to get done, you can’t reach a person to explain what’s up and get them to fix it. Instead you hassle and you wait and you hassle and you wait and you  hassle and you wait and you repeat REPRESENTATIVE!!!!! over and over and over again, until after about five or ten minutes of steadily increasing infuriation, you finally reach a human. First, though, you get put on hold listening to ads or annoying, redundant messages.

I can remember when a human answered right away after you dialed a number. She would promptly direct you to the party who could help you with your issue. Yes: it was usually a “she” because the jobs were low-paying and women in the Good Ole Day were almost wholly consigned to low-paying jobs.

And no, that was not a good thing.  But it was what it was.

But in the “not a good thing” department, neither is FOR BLAH BLAH BLAH, CLICK 9… FOR BLAH BLAH BLAH, CLICK 8… FOR BLAH BLAH BLAH…..  uh huh. Click 8 and get stuck on hold for some interminable wait, during which you’re entertained with annoying ads or annoying Muzak.

I bought a refrigerator from a local vendor. It was junk: it makes loud noises:

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZRATTLERATTLERATTLERATTLE…

So I arranged for Gerardo take it back to the ba*tards, and I bought another refrigerator from Home Depot.

Aside: Never buy local just to make yourself feel righteous. That’s a recipe for disaster. Always buy from major corporations that have competent customer service and return policies.

I called AMEX and explained the situation telling them that I will need to buy a new fridge and don’t know what to do with the noisemaker in my kitchen. They said have no fear and charged into battle.

AMEX voided the $1376 charge to the crooks, even though said crooks refused to take the machine back.

So I figured to donate this thing to a charity (not so much: nary a charity in sight will accept a refrigerator!!!) and buy a new fridge at Home Depot.

After I had arranged to buy a Home Depot refrigerator, the noise emanating from the clunk slacked off. And…lo! What do I find online but a page remarking that sometimes refrigerators buzz and rattle when they’re new, but that effect goes away. Hm.

Since the local crooks told AMEX they would not take a return or refund my money, I decided I should cancel the HD fridge. (Bad idea, BTW).

So now I get an email from AMEX going on about how I will owe them $1400 for the refrigerator. That’s fine, as long as it’s going to work.

And it does work: noisily.

BUT…in addition to that, they’ve also got the charge pending for the Home Depot refrigerator!

Forgodsake.

So yesterday I had to drive up there and argue with HD about that. They supposedly canceled the charge.

This morning I get an email from Home Depot billing me $1400 for a new refrigerator.

GAAAWWWDAMMIT!!!  On the phone to American Express.

Calling AMEX involves a brain-banging run-around. You can’t get a person on the phone for love nor money. After what feels like half an hour of punching buttons and uttering words — I’ve found that SCREAMING REPRESENTATIVE!!!!!!! INTO THE PHONE does speed this process along, BTW — I get a person and explain the story. Their rep, who seems sane (how???), agrees that the charge will be voided.

So now here I am, sitting here in the family room listening to this fucking GE refrigerator humming to itself, occasionally still buzzing. If you go over and smack it, the noise stops — well, not the motor humming, but the damned crazy-making buzz.

And as if I didn’t have enough aggravation to fill the day, no doubt I really should go back up to HD and confirm that the refrigerator purchase really was voided.

Probably should have gone ahead with eating the $1400 bill for this thing, throwing it in the alley, and buying a new one. But…well…DAYUM!

Even when it’s not buzzing, it runs quite loud. In fact, I’d say I’ve never had a fridge whose motor noise was this loud. As for the buzzing…well…I’m thinking I’ll call a refrigerator repairman (if such creatures still exist) and pay him a trip charge to come look at this thing and see if it can be made to run quietly and skip the rattling episodes. If not, maybe he can recommend a replacement brand.

****

ohhhhh and just to make the day perfect: apparently my ad-blocking software has failed. Now I’m getting BLITZED with effing ads on every website. arrrerrghhhhhh!!!!!