Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Eeep! That Was Close!

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Yep: I really thought Funny about Money was done for. That was IT. Never again would I be able to get into the site.

{chortle!} Yes, I indeed DO panic easily….

But this morning, things are working better and looking better.

What a fine few days these have been!

No kidding: over the past few days, not one damn thing has worked properly, whether has had to do with the computers, whether it was the bank account, whether it was the garage door opener, whether it was the pool equipment…WHATEVER, it busted or it stopped dead.

Good thing the kid made off with my car, eh? With that kind if miasma hanging over my neurotic little head, who knows what horrors would have transpired if I’d tried to drive through Phoenix’s rabid traffic.

😀

And now, speaking of “it don’t wanna work,” let’s see if this post will go online…

Afternoon Report from the Hubs of Hades

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{Chortle!}  And now, comin’ up on 4:00 p.m., the outdoor thermometer registers 105º in the darkest shade of the back porch.

Garden spot, eh? Dontcha wish you lived here?

Oh, you do live here? My sympathies!! 😀

If my father were still living, I’d brain him for dragging me and my mother to this unholy place. Ohhhhhh well! Too late! 

She loved it, though. She even loved the unholy roar of the fighter jets from Luke Air Force Base, just outside of their home in Sun City. “Ohhhh,” she would simper,” “it’s the sound of freedom!”

Well. No, muther. That’s the sound of World War III, headed our way. 

Ohhh well. Whatever chimes your bells.

She did love Sun City, and incredibly, she did love the sound of those gawdawful war planes. Or at least, so she claimed. 😀

****

Hey! PRESTO CHANGEO!  Amazon just showed up at the front door with a package of wonderful Bigelow teabags. SIX BOXES of them!!!

Who’d’ve thunk it?

Now I won’t have to buy tea for a good year! One fewer hassle, eh?

Y’know…that isn’t something that I would’ve thunk, at the time I moved into this house here in (un)lovely Central Phoenix. But y’know… Amazon is some kinda Godsend.

By now I can’t even count the number of trips that outfit has spared me, traipsing around overheated, batsh!t Phoenix. I hate driving around this city, and you may be sure I like walking around it in 110-degree heat even less. Now that my son has kiped my car, Amazon’s deliveries pay for themselves many times over.

Without that car, at this time of year I’d have to make shopping trips at 6:00 in the morning, the instant the Albertson’s opens. And frankly, walking back and forth to the local stores, with our honored passing drivers hollering obscenities at me, is NOT what I wanna do at any time of the year.

If my son weren’t here, I would be SO GONE from this place. If I stayed in the Valley: probably to Fountain Hills. If not: to points in California, Colorado, or the Mogollon Rim. You couldn’t keep me here: not on a bet.

But…he IS here in lovely central Phoenix. So here I am, too.

And yeah: Amazon is one thing that makes this place more or less livable.

A Rasty-Nasty Day!

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Whew!!!  It is BEYOND hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there!! In the deepest shade of the back porch: a hundred and eleven degrees! 

My father would have called this a Rasty Nasty Day, after Ras Tanura, the hideous American oil outpost where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Twelve long years in that unholy dive!!!  He had figured he’d make enough to retire, if they saved every penny, in eight or ten years. Yeah…

Well…he almost made enough to retire on.

He wasn’t a real educated fella. Inflation, for example, was kind of an alien concept for him…  So, when he made his calculations for how long he’d have to work out there before he could retire and take us home to the States, he missed his goal by some six years.

About the time this projection unwound, my mother came down with a horrific case of amoebic dysentery. The doctors out there told her she needed to go back to the States –ASAP — to be treated for that fine ailment. This gave her an excuse to grab me and flee back to California, where her relatives lived. It also accelerated his retirement plans: he stayed for another year and a half, until his current contract ended, and then came back to join us in the States.

So that was a blessing (big-time!) for me and my mother. Couldn’t have been great for him, but at least she and I got out of that Hell-hole.

At any rate, where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf, the climate was hot, muggy, humid, and hotter than the Hubs. Just a HORRIBLE place, certainly for the gringo set. As a little kid, I didn’t know any better. But my mother, raised in Upstate New York, suffered terribly — from the climate as well as from the endemic disease.

And now, here on August 23 of Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, I indeed have been around long enough to know better. And believe me: if my son weren’t here, I would not be here in steamy Arizona. No how, no way!

But he persists, because his dad is here. His dad  persists, because Dad’s job planted him here…and because his present family is also planted here.

Well. Arizona ain’t as grim as Saudi Arabia was. But…it does have its trying moments.

And right now, we’re in the middle of them! 

A Rasty-Nasty Day

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Ugh!  This morning: hot, wet, sticky. Reminiscent of an early-morning summer day in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…where I was (un)fortunate enough to grow up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. What a hole! My father called the camp Rasty Nasty: a sobriquet that neatly describes life there.

And Lordie, I did hate living there! Not because of the Arabs or because of the eye-searing, brain-dulling scenery, but because of the nasty brats who populated the camp’s grade school. Ugh! Those creatures were truly little monsters. If you were “different” in any way, they ganged together and worked to make your life miserable.

And they were very, very good at making an outcast kid’s life miserable! If you were a girl who failed to grasp that the sole purpose of your life, other than spawning children, was to stand in the kitchen and bake cookies, you didn’t belong.

I didn’t  “belong,” with a vengeance. Back in the 1950s, when conventionality was the style of the day, I failed to grasp that I was supposed to grow up to cook and to sew clothes. Noooo…stupid me! I wanted to grow up to become an astronomer.

You know: a person with a Ph.D. and a lifetime career in astrophysics.

No. Bad, bad girl!! Females did NOT go into the sciences.

So growing up in Arabia meant nine years of utter misery for me. GOD, how I hated that place and hated those kids! The feeling was mutual on the brats’ part. What an awful time in an awful place!

Finally, when I was nearing the end of the sixth grade out there, my mother’s best friend — a camp nurse — persuaded her boyfriend — a doctor in the camp hospital — to convince my father that my mother had to be sent home, lest she die from the amoebic dysentery she’d picked up out there.

So. That got me and my mother out of that hell-hole and back to San Francisco, whence we had emanated. And it led me into a decent school where my classmates didn’t know I was the Weird Little Kid. So my life kinda sprang back to almost normal. My mother, after some weeks in a hospital, recovered from the amoebic infestation. And so there we were — at least in much better living conditions — until my father’s current contract ended and he joined us in the City.

From there we proceeded to Southern California, where he shipped out of a port down there. My mother’s dearest friend lived in Long Beach, so she — my mother — and I rented an apartment in that dreary garden spot. After several years there, my father retired and they betook themselves to Sun City, Arizona (talk about dreary!!). By then, thank God, it was time for me to enter college. Instead of sending me to Cal Berkeley, where I’d planned to go, they stuck  me in the University of Arizona.

This parked me in Tucson, the home of the bourgeois and the mediocre. But at least it was a good long way from Sun City! 😮

Rehearsing these events…well…it sure frosts my cookies! Where I had a promising start — a strong likelihood of entering UC Berkeley and then going on to graduate school from there — they got rid of that. Instead I got a bachelor’s degree from a third-rate school, and from there proceeded to marriage and graduate studies in an even lesser school.

What kind of people do that to their kid?

Well. Uneducated people, of course. They hadn’t a clue. I think they really didn’t know there was much difference between universities around the country. And they really didn’t know a Ph.D. from some third-rate school in the middle of the Southwestern desert was not the same as a Ph.D. — or any degree — from a four-year California university. And why should they? Neither of them went to college, and I don’t think my father even graduated from high school. From what I can tell, he ran away from home to go to sea before he finished his senior year.

So…yeah. I guess I managed to steer my life in the right direction. But still…I’m not fond of  being reminded of growing up in Saudi Arabia. And a wet, rasty-nasty day like today does exactly that.

Ugh!

What He Knew She Went Through…

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As my mother lay shucking off her last hours on her deathbed, I approached and tried to offer some comfort. Angrily — furiously! — my father physically chased me off. He wouldn’t even let me come into her bedroom.

He never was especially empathetic to me. I believe he always saw me as a weird little kid — which I was, to a degree. But not allowing me to be with my mother as she lay dying? Not even after she had said she wanted me there?

WTF? How cruel could a man get?

During all these years that have passed since then, I’ve resented him for chasing me away from her. I’ve thought (as I’d often thought in other circumstances) that he hated me because I was a weird little girl. And because of my eccentricity, he didn’t want me around her.

No kidding: decades have passed, and those decades did nothing to offer any insight to what he might have been feeling.

Recently, though, an insight has snuck into my feeble little mind.

He didn’t want me around her because he didn’t want my last memories of her to be utterly hideous. As they would have been, had I lingered by her bedside until she died.

She didn’t even know I was there, so out-of-it was she. So…what reason (other than to make me miserable) for me to linger by her bedside as she slid into death?

Now, in retrospect, I think he didn’t want me there because he didn’t want me to go through watching her die of a ghastly enteric cancer. The vomiting. The horror. The agony. Dear God!

He wasn’t a real articulate guy. It would have been exceptionally difficult for him to have said that to me outright. But now, after year and year and year have passed, it strikes me: what we were looking at was hideous. Truly hideous: a ghastly death by cancer. The best thing that could have happened to me, during that unholy ordeal, was to have been kept away from it.

And that is what he did.

He stood between me and the worst moments of my mother’s dying. And that, God bless him, was probably the kindest thing he ever did for me.

No Matter What….

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…it’s gotta be a hassle!!!

😮

I swear-ta-gawd! Everything I’ve touched in that damn backyard today has gone SPRROOOOIIIINGGGGG!  And kindly created an interesting new hassle.

Just spent a good half-hour or 40 minutes wrestling with pool equipment, for a chore that should’ve taken 10 minutes…at the outside. I’ll tellya: if I glance at it, it goes SPRRROIIINGGGGG!!! And breaks or creates a mess.

Y’know, my neighbor Josie drained her pool several years ago and has never refilled it. And….I’m beginning to think she’s got something there.

O’course, a maneuver like that wrecks the plaster and the equipment, so the damn thing has to be expensively repaired before it can be turned back on — basically rebuilt. But…honestly. Sooooo what? The savings in Hassle Factor may be altogether worth it.

Godlmighty, though….I do hate the thought of wrecking the pool and leaving it a wreck for years, then having to spend several thousand dollars in repair bills when the house goes on the market, lo! these many years in the future.

But honestly…IS that pool giving me my money’s worth? To say nothing of my hassle’s worth? I hardly ever use it any more. I haven’t been in it today. Or this week, or, come to think of it, this month.

Maybe it just oughta be drained…..

{sigh}

If I were gonna do that, though, I think I’d want to cover it with a plank deck. If that were sturdy enough, it could be part of the patio, and a table and umbrella could sit out there. It would look nice enough (a helluva lot nicer than a plaster hole in the ground!) and could be used for parties and picnic meals.

Now, as a potential seller of this house, I see that plan as a mighty drawback. But….but what if some potential buyer comes along and is enchanted by the idea of an expensive deck that could be used as a party venue? That might not be such a bad thing…

Hm. I may ask a Realtor friend about this idea.

Sheee-ut!!  The temp out there is 107 degrees, with rain y-cumen in!  What a fukkin’ garden spot! Almost as balmy as (un)lovely Saudi Arabia, where heat and humidity were linked together with hooks-and-eyes!