Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

WHY….?????

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Does EVERY GODDAM THING happen AT ONCE?

Holee mackerel!

It’s not even 6:30 in the morning and already I’ve had to deal with a new rat infestation; with a sick, angry, scared dog; and a new plumbing leak…UNDER the side deck!

Won’t be able to get the plumber on the phone for two or three hours.

Meanwhile, it’s hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there: Hot and Wet with a Vengeance.

Oh, and to frost those cookies? It’s Cleaning-Lady Day!

Arrrrghhhhhhhh!  I know this sounds callously ungrateful, but Cleaning-Lady Day drives me nuts…especially when everything else is going to Hell on the Proverbial Handcart. It means the Mess has gotta be picked up — fortunately there isn’t much mess this week.

Except of course that Ruby and I have been sleeping in the middle bedroom, because it’s right under the AC unit and so is the only halfway cool room in the house. That will confound her… Now I’ll have to explain why that bed is a mess — and, I remind myself, find a set of clean twin-sized sheets. If there is one. Since I don’t use that bed much, I prob’ly don’t have two sets. 😮

That will add ANOTHER layer of hassle: strip that bed, wash the sheets, and get them dry before she gets here. gaaaahhhhhhhh!

Meanwhile, I step out to the west side porch to start setting rat traps around the yard, and LO!

Water all over Satan’s do-it-yourself deck.

Since that thing is an amateur job (a pretty good job, but still….), that means the deck will now have to be repaired or replaced. Ohhhhhhh gooodie!

Someone seems to have pulled out all the steel wool I stuffed into the cracks around that goddamn thing. Gee thanks, Gerardo! So now I’ll have to get out there and stuff new steel wool in, allllll around that lash-up.

WHY do workers think you do things if you don’t WANT them done that way? WHY do they feel called upon to undo all your little do-it-yourself stop-gap (heh! literally!!) measures?????

Not sure enough steel wool is left to go all the way around the deck. If not, then I’ll have to drive to Home Depot and buy some more of that. Gooooodie!

Maybe I can get it at the hardware store. That place is about a quarter of the distance one has to drive from here to the Depot. That would help a lot.

Ruby has an eye infection. (So do I, come to think of it.) I’ve been dosing her with the OTC stuff the eye doc told me to put in my own eye. It’s hard to find and it’s expensive as Hell. Since we’re both …

…………………………………………………………………….

Gawd DAMMIT!

……………………………………………………………………

Now the damn computer dies!!!!!!

It’s out of juice.

Plug it in…. Nothing

Fight with computer cord

Fight with extension cord

Fight with plug-in outlet

Finally,  weirdly it comes back on.

Ohhhhhhh yeah. This is gonna be one of those days!

And now for a balmy afternoon….

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Heh! After yesterday’s 110° at 7 p.m., we’re having a balmy afternoon today. At 4:30 in the afternoon — usually about the hottest point of the day — we’ve only barely reached the 110 mark. Brrrr!

Taking advantage of the crisp temperature, I sallied forth to the Safeway, there to buy some eye salve for the poor little dog, plus a whatnot or two. Truly hotter than the hubs on those black asphalt streets.

Safeway has invented a new annoyance: if you want to buy wine or other boozy beverages, they try to steer you into a dedicated checkout stand in the liquor aisle. Took a second or two to figure that out…

Right, guys. Like I want to stand in line to pay TWICE! Once for food and household items, once for a bottle of Chardonnay.

Criminey. WHO thinks this stuff up?

Oh well. When I expressed my annoyance, I was excused from the booze department line and allowed to buy all my groceries with a single pass-through at the front-of-the-store cash registers.

Man! My air-conditioning bill is gonna sail through the stratosphere this month. Here in the front room, the temp is 80 degrees, with the AC unit pounding away nonstop. But in the front guest bedroom, where Ruby and I have taken refuge from the present heat wave, it’s 78. That’s because the room sits directly under the AC unit, and its vent is the first vent that comes out of the machine.

By the time it reaches the family room, where I’m poking away at the keyboard right now, it’s in the low 80s. And the unit does not go off. Nope. Not once, not alllll dayyyyy long! That’s even though the thermostat is in the hall right outside that refrigerated bedroom.

No sign of the mid- to late-summer monsoon weather. Usually by now we have rainstorms that coalesce late in the afternoon and hold forth from around 4 or 5 p.m. on into the evening. This phenomenon cools the air significantly, sometimes to such a degree that in theory you could cut back on the AC bill.

Not this year, though! Not so far.

No doubt Ruby wonders where her dinner is. Poor beast!

I’m holding off on feeding her until the sun goes down — that’ll be another 2 hours or so — so that if and when we go for an evening doggy-walk, the pavement will be cool enough for her to walk without burning her feet. Even so, if we wanted to cross the street, we would have to wait till around 10 p.m. for the asphalt to cool. The sidewalks we can manage awhile after sundown….the roadways: not so much.

Ruby has a low-level eye infection…i think. Either that or allergies. Nothing much grows at this time of year that ought to trigger allergies, so the hypothesis is either an infection or dry eyes. My doc has me wiping my own dry eyes with something called “iVisia,” which seems to help a little. Tried it on Ruby, and found that yes, it’s seems to work on her, too.

But…go ahead! Just TRY to find it.

Found it a few days ago at the Safeway….but today when I picked up another bottle and brought it home, I discovered the stuff I’d grabbed off the shelf is a gel, not the liquid drops.

arrrrghhhh! AM i going to traipse back through the heat and the lunatic drivers to return that?

I dunno. Really…some things are just. not. worth it.

Speaking of “not worth it,” have you seen THIS little bit of intelligence? Robert Kennedy’s nutty son is busy spreading crackpot conspiracy theories…as part, it appears, of a projected run on the presidency.

Holy sh!t.

Are there, d’you think, enough anti-vaxxer ignoramuses, enough paranoiacs who believe 5G networks are a tool to spy on us all, enough conspiracy theorists who imagine the CIA put out the hit on RFK Sr. to carry this nut case into the White House?

Holy sh!t. Truly. If there are, I am moving to Venezuela. Or better yet: to a desert island in the middle of the Pacific.

 

 

Glub! Underwater in Lovely Phoenix

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It is SOOOOOO wet out there that all you have to do is stand outside to raise a sweat.

wait wait! That’s true of standing inside, too!

Where does this city think it is? Dankest Georgia? Right now the sky is overcast — seriously overcast, as in “gimme 45 minutes or an hour to deliver the rain” — and we’re enjoying 90 degrees on the back porch. Wunderground says it’s 95, with 35% humidity…and I could buy that

Pool Dude surfaced this morning, shortly after dawn. I’d about lost hope…thought he’d disappeared from the scene. But nooo…here he is!

Did a nice job of cleaning the already pretty clean hole in the ground into which to pour money. Repaired some stuff. Chatted…sweet guy, IMHO. Probably a serial killer, but he can hold a nice conversation. And he’s cute. 😉

*****

A-a-a-an-d…. O’course I pick the most miserable hot day of the year to generate an Adventure in Frustration.

Hoooleeee sheee-ut!

The eye that had the cyst in it, lo! these several months ago — the eye that we thought was HEALED, ooohhh thank you gawd and billy graham — started itching and hurting. Again.

Can’t see anything in there. Apply the long-ago-recommended Refresh brand eye drops.

Nothing: no effect.

Wait a day or two, hoping Nature will take its course.

Nothing: no effect.

Hurts itches itches hurts hurts itches…and so on to infinity….

So I call the Honored Eye Doc. His staff directs me to trot out and purchase an over-the-counter product called Ivisia: eye drops of provenance unknown to me.

And, as it develops, unknown to about every retailer in the city.

Walgreen’s doesn’t have it.

Albertson’s doesn’t have it.

Walmart doesn’t have it.

Finally, after what feels like driving…driving…driving for hours through the 110-degree heat, I stumble into a Safeway. Stagger to the pharmacist’s counter. He points me to a stack of shelves down an aisle 15 or 20 feet from the his counter.

And lo!!!  THERE IT IS!

Grab. Trudge to checkout. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand…pay up.

Back in the car.

Heat makes Arizona drivers crazy. We shouldn’t find that surprising, though. Everything makes Arizona drivers crazy.

Trudge and dodge and dodge and trudge and finally make my way home. If the present discomfort didn’t make this thing feel ever so slightly urgent, I would’ve just come home and ordered it from Amazon.

Honestly. I don’t know how local retailers even begin to compete with Amazon. The hassle factor entailed in schlepping around the God Damned City to find ONE STUPID LITTLE ITEM is sooooooooooo aggravating, that given just a little more motivation, I would’ve succumbed to common sense and ordered it online.

But…the eye hurt, and I really really did NOT want to wait two days for delivery plus run the risk of our pet porch pirates stealing the stuff before I can find it.

Ohhhhh well! Now we have it.

****

I sweartagawd, it feels just like lovely Ras Tanura out there. That desiccated corner of Eastern Hell on the shore of the Persian Gulf…summertime was sauna time.

Seriously: I can remember waking up in the morning on those hot summer fucking days and seeing water dripping off the eaves. And no, it had NOT rained during the night.

I can remember standing in the front yard under a clear blue sky and watching RAIN condense out of the hot, cloudless air.

Like that: that’s how it feels.

My poor mother. How on earth did that hapless little Upstate New York orphan survive even her first 16 or 18 years on this pitiless earth, to say nothing of 30+ years of marriage to my globe-trotting, tightwad father? In her place, I would have died long before I gave birth to the first lifeless baby, to say nothing of the second one and the third brat that survived.

To say nothing of the man who dragged her to Hell (seriously…) and back again. She was, when you think about her, an amazing woman.

Damn! I wish I’d appreciated that while she was still living.

*******

Seriously: when I say it’s an inexplicable wonder that local retailers are surviving Amazon — if they are — I kid you not.

  • There were hardly any customers in the Walgreen’s.
  • Hardly any in the Albertson’s.
  • More in the Walmart, but not enough to keep a large retail enterprise alive.
  • Naught but a bunch of yuppifed egotists in the Safeway, creatures that were buying one or two items apiece…nary a week’s worth of groceries in evidence at any check-out stand.
  • Now consider what a hassle it was to get ahold of this magical mystery eye salve in person, from a brick-and-mortar retailer….
  • Why on earth would anyone want to go through that?

You may be sure that in the future I will remember. And when I can, I will order all the little necessaries online. Occupying a fricasseeing hot afternoon schlepping from place to place through nasty traffic is not something I want to do whenever I need this or that little retail item.

Never a Dull Moment

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Ohhhhhh lordie! IS there some reason why there’s never a dull moment around the Funny Farm?

5:00 a.m.: Roll out of the sack. Stumble around. Throw on some clothes, feed the dog preparatory to going out the door by 5:30 for the morning Doggy Walk, which at this time of year needs to be accomplished before the sun comes up.

5:05 a.m.: ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF GROWL ARF ARF SNARGLE GROWL ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF…

ahhhh shee-ut! NOW what?

Stumble out to the kitchen, where Ruby is banging against the back door.

Gerardo’s crew: they’re here to trim the damnable palm trees.

I forgot.

Now we’re stuck here while those guys wrestle with the Job from Hell, in the meantime trashing the swimming pool by tossing filthy palm fronds into the water.

Whenever they leave, I’ll have to call Pool Dude to get him over to clean up that mess. Do I even have his phone number? If so, where is it??????

Oh shitoshitoshitoshit this was NOT how I wanted to start the day!

As long as the back gate is open, collect and haul the garbage out to the alley. Another fine way I would hope not to start a day.

Someone has dragged the communal garbage can wayyyyy down the alley, so hauling this stuff is an annoying hike. I’ll have to ask these guys to haul that trash can back up where it belongs. That’ll be a trick, since they don’t speak English.

Better, probably, to wait till after the trash pickup and drag it back myself.

Trash pickup…ohhhhh sheee-UT if the city employees see my guys dumping stuff in the alley, I’ll get a citation!

Ohhhh well. At least our boys waited until after the July 4 festivities were over. Around here, morons set off fireworks right and left, often catching fire to houses and plantings. My house is surrounded with lots of flammables, so…this is my LEAST favorite holiday.

***

HOLEE mackerel, you’ve never seen a man WORK until you’ve watched a campesino working. What are those men made of?

And they don’t even seem especially fazed…not at a job that would kill me — very likely in a literal sense — if I tried to do it.

Soon as the gents are done, I’ll have to call Pool Dude to come help clean up the mess. Won’t he be pleased?

Mr. and Mrs. Wonderaccount, who live across the street, had their accursed palm trees removed. As I recall, they hired Gerardo’s guys to do that job. Whenever he comes around, I’ll have to ask him how much he’d charge to take the things out.

Hate to kill them…but GAWD they are a nuisance! Especially anywhere near a pool. They don’t cast any shade. They don’t do anything except drop seeds, dried blossoms, and dead fronds…and attract lightning bolts.

Just what everyone needs in their backyard, eh?

Whenever Gerardo comes around, I’ll have to ask him how much he’d charge to take the damn things out. Then have Financial Dude break loose some money for the purpose. I guess.

Meanwhile…too much coffee on an empty stomach. Gotta get some food!

i need a drink!

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Augh!  Is there EVER a dull moment around this place?

Another Day from Hell. So many of those pepper the temporal landscape that sometimes I wonder if live in Hell. A day like this leads one to suspect that’s true.

This place — the city of Phoenix and its tacky environs — gets more and more like Southern California every day. That’s not surprising. Twenty years ago, give or take, our honored City Fathers openly announced they wanted to model the Valley after L.A.

Ugh! was what I said to that then. And Ugh! is what I say to it now.

I just hated living in Southern California, after my father moved us down there from San Francisco. Tacky? You want tacky? The place defines tacky. The crowds, the traffic, the noise, the smog, the ticky-tacky, the worship of mediocrity…yuch! What a place!

In Long Beach, we lived in a dreary second-story flat in a dreary ticky-tacky plaster apartment building: no insulation — either for heat or for sound. Every part of it a study in cheesiness.

My mother, after a year or so, found a place that was somewhat better built and contrived to get us into it. That was an improvement. But it was still Southern California. Ticky-tacky Southern California.

I didn’t have to drive there, because I was still too young to get a permit. Thank gawd!

Driving here in (un)lovely uptown Phoenix is now just about the same as it was there. Crowded, dirty, dreary, streets never built to hold the volume of traffic, ticky-tacky apartment buildings lining many of the main drags; all the rest lined by ugly strip malls. It’s an ugly, ugly city with a dreary, dull lifestyle.

The ‘Hood was built awhile before full-scale LosAngelization set in. So even though our houses are somewhat cheaply built, they’re not outright junk. Not great. But not as awful as newer construction.

Oh yeah: the Day from Hell….

My laptop hung majestically as I was working on the files for the Olive Getten project.

Olive Getten was my wild-assed grandmother. From what I can tell, she was about as far off the wall as you can get and still stay in the troposphere. She was, indeed, one off-the-wall lady. And as I traipse around digging up data about her, I keep finding more and MORE off-the-wall stuff.

Olive supposedly died of uterine cancer in the late 1920s, allegedly the result of her wild and woolly lifestyle. Her family were Christian Scientists, so she didn’t get to a doctor until it was too late to save her life…if it was ever not too late. We’re told she remarked to my mother that she thought her agonizing death was God’s punishment for all the abortions she’d had.

My mother was her first illicit pregnancy — dignified by a marriage with the father that lasted…what? ten days? WhatEVER. 😮

Apparently they were divorced by the time my mother popped into this world, thereby defining a “flash in the pan” marriage.

The maternal grandparents — Olive’s immediate family — had moved to California from upstate New York long before my mother came on the scene. How Olive got mixed up with the boyfriend in New York–allegedly my mother’s father–I dunno. But she did. The Bay Area family made my mother care for Olive on her deathbed…you can imagine what a great adolescent experience that must have been? My mother said she saw her carted out of the house, dead as a doornail, and loaded into a hearse.

But…y’know…to the contrary,…

…apparently she lived until 1979.

It appears that Olive had an extramarital relationship with a San Francisco business magnate named Jack Sansome…and it appears that at one point she married him.

These antics add up, within the mores of the time. She couldn’t very well bring her illegitmate(!) daughter into a marriage with a prominent member of the business community. So…what to do? “Disappear.” And recoalesce under some other name.

Did the East Bay relatives know about this accommodation? My guess is that at least some did. The paterfamilias was a prominent businessman. He would have known Sansome well. Did he tell the distaff side of the tribe? Dunno. But in downtown San Francisco, there are two streets that merge in front of a large bank: Sansome Street and Olive Street.

Well…natcherly…

As soon as I start to write up this saga, the goddamn computer CRASHES!

So once again — for the how-manyth time over the last couple of weeks — it was traipse through the unholy traffic, trudge into Best Buy, stand in line, try to explain what the trouble is.

I hope they can at least retrieve my data. Stupidly, I didn’t back it up to iCloud…’cause I was still working on it.

Meanwhile, in the middle of all this, I am sick as a proverbial dawg. Gawdawful hacking cough, stuffy nose, 101.2 fever. I just wanna go to bed! And the real thermometer — as opposed to the touchy and wacksh!t digital one — is presently LOST. Had it this morning, but have no idea where it is now.

Driving around Phoenix, though, to return to our original premise, reminds me eerily of ticky-tacky Southern California in the late 50s & early 60s. WHAT a dreary place. Mile on mile on mile of cheesy, cheaply built apartment buildings, dreary, dull, and vastly mass-produced.

Can’t see how my son can stand living here. Think it’s because he wants to be near me and his father — that’s why he magisterially insists that I NOT move away. But if he ever moves — or if he ever can be persuaded to move to wherever I want to go — I am outta here!

Day from Hell…on Steroids!

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HOLY mackerel, what a day!!!

Along about late morning, I started enjoying some breathing and coughing problems. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Pretty much a dry cough — not hacking anything up. Well, actually, once or twice during the night I practically strangled. But…WTF? The coughing wouldn’t stop.

Nothing I tried beat it back one bit.

I’m thinking this does not look good. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Eventually I come to light long enough to take my temperature: 101 degrees.

Holy shit.

My normal temp is around 98.2.

I’ve already been charging from pillar to post out there in the heat. The last thing I wanna do is traipse to a doctor. Way to hell and gone up in North Scottsdale!

Try the mercury thermometer. It’s off the scale: over 106.

Oh, sher…

RE-try the electronic thermometer: 100.8.

Prob’ly not very drastic, after all the crap I’ve been through this afternoon.

Call the Mayo. Nurse Kim gets all anxious. She wants me to drive right out there, or else call an ambulance and have them cart me up there.

a) I do not want to drive halfway to Fountain Hills to get to the nearest Mayo facility.
b) There’s no way in Hell I’m going to our nearest full service hospital and ER: John C. Lincoln, the home of the careless and the incompetent.
c) Nor am I trudging downtown to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I’ve had a truly hair-raising experience.
d) I suspect these wacky swings represent…well…Looney Toons.

So we decide I should go to a nearby pharmacy or the neighborhood Urgent Care Clinic, which is right down by the Albertson’s. She wants me to get tested for covid-19.

Albertson’s has an excellent pharmacy, and straight across the street, Walgreen’s has one very similar to it. If it weren’t 96 degrees out there just this minute — at 7:20 p.m. — I could walk down there. In mid-afternoon, Wunderground suggests, the high was a balmy 99 degrees, with 19% humidity.

Garden spot.

No, Albertson’s pharmacy does not have covid tests. No, Walgreen’s does not have covid tests.

So I go to the Urgent Care Center next door to the Albertson’s. That fine institution has six people sitting in the waiting room. And outside, the most horrifying, pathetic bum…the poor guy is collapsed on the pavement, in the shade of the pony wall that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk.

Even if I had any cash — which I didn’t — I don’t give handouts to panhandlers. Many of these folks are dangerous, when they’re not making pests of themselves.

Inside the “Urgent” (yeah…) Care place, I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait, along with all the other “patients” (got that right) who are waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.

Finally I think oh fukkit! Get up, walk out, drive back home. Gasping for air.

Call the Mayo. They try to get me to drive out there. I bang around trying to manage that…but finally think, once again, oh fukkit!

I just. can. not. bring. myself. to. drive, a half-hour or forty minutes. and then get to a place where I have in the past waited HOURS for care.

If I die, I die. Kulawahed!

Right now the mercury thermometer won’t let me shake it down below 99 degrees. Screw it. The battery thermometer reads 100.8.

So presumably I have a low fever. Or I’m fricaseed in the heat.

Here’s what I’m gonna do:

First, I’m going to set up the steamer to blast

I’m a-gonna traipse into the backyard and take a dip in that cool but not at all cold swimming pool.

Well. Maybe not. Now that the steamer is put together, I feel a little cooler. The headache could go, though….

Reset the electronic thermometer. FRANTIC beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep!!!!!!!

WTF?????

Now it claims I have a temp of 101.1!!!

Make up your mind, ya damn thing!

WhatEVER: my mind is made up: throw on some clothes and head for the Mayo. DAYUM!

********

So…here I am, in the Mayo’s shiny, majestic new ER. Quite a place!  The computer’s iOs (or the surrounding architecture??) is not letting me save much to disk, or save copy written in Word or MacMail. My son is in the middle of a dinner party…offered to drive me out here, but that was not necessary.

How could I do without this little horror show? Let me count the ways…

I hate hospitals, to begin with.

Especially, I’m not fond of ERs, which are scary places…IMHO.

A little kid is back there being tortured: screaming her sweet head off.

My head hurts like hell, speaking of heads.

I need to go to the bathroom, but am afraid they’ll ask me to pee in a cup so I’d better not get rid of the present collection.

****

LOL! We’re now all pee’d out, X-rayed with a vengeance, ridden around in a chariot all over the new and old parts of the ER. Zowie! They’re still threatening to drain blood out of me with a damn needle: THE part of this sorta thing that I hate the most. But ohhh well.

This is a nasty li’l cough. I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that it’s GOTTA be a case of covid.

COULD be an ordinary cold, o’course. One could keep on hoping. BUT…I don’t get a fever with an ordinary cold. And rarely get a fever with the flu. So I think it’s pretty safe to guess that whatever ails me begins with a “c” and ends with a “d.”

My computer isn’t working right in here. Though I’m in Funny’s post-building function and it seems to be working…nothing else is functioning. This post is up and the system is letting me type in it, but other pages are nonfunctional. So it remains to be seen whether any of this copy ends up on the Web.

Lordie!!! All these professional folks with tattoos! About every second or third staff member is covered in skin artwork!

Heh… My mother would have been SO abhorred!!!! She thought tattoos were low-class even on men. And on women? Well! It just wasn’t done!

Another thing that would have sent my mother into a spiraling tizzy is the price of gas!

It’s well over $5 a gallon here. Yesterday I did manage to fill up at a QT: a bargain $4.99!

Back in the Dark Ages — this would have been in the late 1960s or early 70s, I think — my mother once remarked, reflecting on the State of the World, That when gasoline reached a dollar a gallon, we would have soooooo-shal-ism!!!

My parent were right-wingers, Goldwater types. My father: even more extreme than that. I recall him sitting me down one day to lecture me about the virtues of bigotry. He was, as you might imagine, an extreme bigot: anyone who wasn’t white like him was less than fully human. Not only white, but American of English and German extraction.

Ironically, though…as we’ve mentioned elsewhere in these precincts, he was a quarter Choctaw.

Soooo….how it came to be that he hated anyone who wasn’t lily-white is a great mystery.

Cultural thing, I expect. It was probably just the way people who lived in rural Texas were.

***

It’s almost midnight. I think they’re going to spring me out of here pretty quick. One of the staff was in here collecting my insurance information.

***

A-N-N-N-D…I was right. The disease of the day IS Covid 19.

Holeee sheeut!