Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Soggy Doggy Day

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Just back from the a.m. DoggyWalk. What a morning! At 6:30: hot, wet, overcast, soggy. REALLY an unpleasant day. Feels like horrid Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the ever-humid Persian Gulf.

Sometimes I wonder how my mother survived nine years in that hell-hole.

Well. She didn’t, really. She came home with amoebic dysentery — a gift from a brainless neighbor who failed to soak the salad greens in Clorox before serving them up to guests. That evolved into the enteric cancer that killed her.

WHY are people so stupid?

WHY do people flat refuse to follow instructions (like “disinfect all raw vegetables & fruit before eating them”)?

WHY can’t people keep their damn dogs under control when they’re in public?

“Doggy-walk” means “dodge idiots and their rampaging animals”… In cooler weather, Ruby and I would wait until the resident morons get done hauling their dogs through the neighborhood, so we can go out in relative peace. Today, though, you can be sure will soon be even hotter and even more humid than it is right now. And so: out the door as dawn cracks!

Spotted a crew of workmen slaving away on the exterior of a house that’s being rebuilt. LORDIE! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have! How those guys survive in this swampy weather escapes me.

This is the kind of day that makes me deeply miss the San Francisco Bay Area. My relatives lived in Berkeley, which really was a lovely venue. My mother parked us in the City, in a bourgeois apartment development called Parkmerced. Not my favorite place…but about 110% better than unlovely Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia killed my mother. The amoebic dysentery that she brought home morphed into an enteric cancer. And so she lived horribly for 10 years out there, and then back here she died horribly in about 10 months.

Not before she and my father dragged us to Arizona, though. She thought it was some variant of Paradise. I think it’s a variant of the opposite venue…  What a place!

Ohhh well. The dog and I are back inside, where the air-conditioning is blasting away. The kitchen needs to be picked up. The house tidied. And the human driven to a grocery store.

Ugh. Another lovely day in Arizona…leave us all enjoy it!

 

Rasty-Nasty Day, Continued….

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So…yeah. The sweaty nightmare continues. As we scribble, Wunderground claims the temperature outdoors is 103°. The back porch thermometer, sequestered under the shade of a north-facing roof, reads 111°…. Yeah.

Yard dudes have screwed up the watering system. Had to fart with that and fart with that and fart with that some more, trying to fix it. Still don’t know whether I’ve got it right.

How do I hate this place? Let me count the ways.

Trust me: if my son weren’t here, I would be in the San Francisco Bay Area right now. That’s whence I emanated, and it’s where some of my relatives still live.

Wherever I might wander…you may be sure I would NOT remain in this superheated hell-hole.

Hmmmmm….  Where might I wander, anyhow?

* San Francisco Bay Area (fir$t choice)
* San Diego (a little warmer than I’d like, but it’s a neat place.)
* Prescott (an Arizona small town graced by a sophisticated private college. Pretty place to live.)
* Suburbs of Tucson (the University of Arizona provides a fairly rich cultural life to Tucson. And the weather’s not as hot there as it is in Phoenix.)

I can’t afford to live in the San Francisco Bay area, my first choice. And the truth is, none of those other places are any better than where I am.

In fact, where I am is better than those places, because my honored son is here. If he were to move someplace else, I very well might follow him. But I’m not likely to move away from him.

Because between the two of us, he’s the one who still has a functioning brain. ;-D

Seriously…he does navigate 21st-century society about ten times better than I do. He understands things that have come into being since I quit paying attention to those things. He knows how to resolve issues that mystify me. And he rides herd on the hired help one helluva lot more efficiently than I do.

So…whither he goes, so go I. If he stays put, so do I.

😮

A Rasty-Nasty Day in (Un)Lovely Arizona

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Yech!!!!!  This morning Ruby and I plowed through the heat and humidity reminiscent of the weather in Rasty Nasty, the horrid seaside oil & shipping colony parked on an Arabian shore along the Persian Gulf.

My father was a merchant seaman. Shortly after I was born, he got himself a handsomely paying job in Saudi Arabia, as a harbor pilot steering tankers and freighters out of the port at Ras Tanura. Horrible — truly horrible — place to live: hot, dangerous, disease-ridden, unwelcoming to the Yankee set. Hence, my father’s nickname for the place: Rasty Nasty.

It truly was awful, from an American’s point of view. My mother caught amoebic dysentery out there, which led to the enteric cancer that ultimately killed her. My father and I managed to escape it…apparently because neither he nor I ate the infected salad that an idiot neighbor served up to us for a farewell dinner.

No kidding: we were slated to go back to the States, permanently, when she came down with this horrible endemic disease…because one woman was too goddam stupid and stubborn to soak the goddam lettuce in Clorox before tossing it into a salad!

This was a habit the Company tried to instill in the ladies: when the wives got out there, they forthwith had to attend classes designed to protect Americans’ safety and health. That particular lady really was blindingly stupid…and she just ignored everything the Company tried to teach her.

Result: she killed my mother.

Think of that. We’d been out there 10 years, during which my mother duly sanitized every bite we put in our mouths, and in the LAST WEEK before we were to go home permanently, that bitch murdered her by failing to clean the goddam produce.

Her laziness killed my mother.

The treatment for amoebic dysentery, at the time, was fierce. And it was carcinogenic. Not surprisingly, then, she came down with cancer. By the time her doctors discovered it (women’s complaints of abdominal pain in those days were discounted as signs of hypochondria), her abdomen was filled with columnar growths. There was nothing they could do to save her.

As you can imagine, I could do without weather that reminds me of that horrible place. {chortle!} I can do without anything that reminds me of Saudi Arabia.

At any rate, those fine adventures were brought to mind as Ruby and I plowed through the swampy heat this morning, and passed men working like Arabs at a house where they were building an add-on.

Yeah: out there at the crack of dawn, climbing ladders and hauling lumber and pounding nails…augh! Surely there’s gotta be a better way to make a living?

WHO would do such a thing??????

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Holeeee GAWD!  I just went out in back and discovered that ALL of the watering system has been turned off.

When, I do not know. It sure as hell wasn’t turned off by me. Not in 110-degree heat, of that  you may be sure.

So either one of the yard dudes did it (not bloody likely) or some visiting workman vandalized my yard.

Think I caught it (I hope) in time to save at least some of the plantings. Just now, water is POURING to the citrus trees. They’re bone-dry…normally get water a couple times a week. But forgodsake: the hedges? The citrus trees — ALL of them? The climbing roses? The cat’s-claw vines in gay abandon….

WHAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD DO A THING LIKE THAT???

They had to have known what they were doing…because they turned off ALL the watering zones!  There’s half a dozen of them!!

And it has to have been someone who had a key, because the back gate is kept locked.

Holeeee shee-ut!

Well…I guess I’ll need to have all the locks on the exterior gates changed….how many is that?  Let’s see…

1…1…1…in back…plus the garage side door. That’s four. Oh, shee-ut! What d’you suppose it’ll cost to have a locksmith come in and do that?

More than I want to pay, you can bet. About four times more than I want to pay. 😮

Godlmighty. I hope they didn’t put any kind of poison on the trees and vines.

The plants look OK just now… Maybe the jerk figured just turning off the water to them would do the trick, in 110-degree heat.

Ohhhh man!  The hoses are POURING the water to them right now. It’s getting dark out, so I’m gonna have to turn off the faucets pretty soon. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll have to get back out there and turn the water back on.

This defies belief!

Why would anybody do such a thing????

Eeeek! Worser and worser!!

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{chortle!} If you were watching this space, you’ll recall that earlier this morning I was bellyaching about the heat.

THAT WAS NOTHING!!!

Yeah. As we scribble — at 1:23 in the afternoon — it is ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN DEGREES IN THE SHADE OF THE SHELTERED BACK PORCH!!!!!

Noooo kidding!  111º in the shade! 

Garden spot, eh?

Let’s see what our favorite weather site, Wunderground, has to say about that…..

Hmmmm…. Our thermometer understates! Wunderground says we’re enjoying 114 degrees, with 116 forecast!

Eek, I say to that…eeeeek! 

This is expected to go on for SEVERAL DAYS, with extreme heat forecast all over the Southwest. Holeee doggerel!

Well. So much for my proposed afternoon stroll! Silly of me, eh?

It also will cancel Ruby’s evening stroll. Even after dark, the superheated pavement will burn her little feet.

It may be OK to take her out as dawn cracks tomorrow morning. But pretty clearly she ain’t goin’ out at any other time.

Jayzuz! Highs of 115 degrees (Yes! you read that right: a hundred and fifteen!) are supposed to go on through the weekend.

Horrors! What a place!

Truth to tell, I don’t remember it ever getting this hot when we lived in Saudi Arabia — which was a certifiable hell-hole. Right now, as a matter of fact, it’s only 93 there.

Gawdlmighty, I do hate Arizona. Thank you, Daddy, for dragging me to your retirement paradise…you chucklehead! I should move away from here…but probably won’t, because I’m not leaving my son behind. As long as M’hijito is here, I’ll be baking here, too.

Welp…about all we can do right now is stay indoors and hope to God the air-conditioner holds up!

Brrr! A Brisk Day in Dumb-Ass Arizona!

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Brrrr! It’s a brisk 103º out there in the shade of the back patio.

A cold day in (un)lovely Arizona.

What a place! WHY do people choose to live here?

I’m here because my parents dragged me here when I got into the University of Arizona a year before my planned high-school graduation. My father wanted to retire, and he didn’t give one thin damn about the effect it would have on my education, my career choices, or my life. Yeah. No: he did NOT care what yanking me out of school would do to my future.

How would I rather be in California, where I belong? Let me count the ways….

Oh, wait! I can’t count that high! 😀

This is a horrible place to live — particularly if you don’t have pocketloads of money. The weather stinks. Politics are grim at best. The education system leaves a lot to be desired…like, for example, education.

No kidding: I had students in my junior- and senior-level college courses at Arizona State University who did not know what the Declaration of Independence was about.

Arizona: the Land of the Ignorant and the Home of the Dumb. Maybe not so much now as then…but then, that was what we ran into. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Arizona without lifting a finger, because I hardly needed to crack a book open to get an “A” in an undergraduate course. Just show up in class and look kinda like you were listening to the instructor, and voilà. Semester grade: A.

Google “has quality of education improved in Arizona”; skim the results; and you’ll get a real good idea of how well we educate our kids here. HOOOlee maquerel.

When my parents dragged me to Arizona so my father could take early retirement, I was a National Honor Society student in an upper-middle-class Southern California high school. Not surprisingly, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a Phi Beta Kappa key in hand…without having to lift a finger on either hand.

No kidding. I just sat through my college courses staring at the instructors as I daydreamed, faking them out so they would think I was paying attention to them. Any student who seemed to be listening to what the “professor” was saying most certainly would get an “A” — or at worst, a “B” — in the course. Phi Beta Kappa: What a joke! 

Is this place any better than it was back then?

To a degree (heh!). Today, if I had to move a family here for a job, I surely would put my kids in private schools for K-12. On the college level, carefully investigate the quality of the majors. Some of them are pretty good. Some are pretty bad. If your kid won’t enroll in a decent program at the University of Arizona or Arizona State University, then send him or her to an out-of-state college with credible standards.

Couldn’t pay me to come here now, if I were under retirement age and could get a decent job in a state that respects educational attainment. RUN AWAY!