Coffee heat rising

Dogs

When You Are a Dog…

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You most certainly do know how to loaf!

LOL! Ruby the Ineffable Corgi has been practicing her loafing skills all day…and by golly, it’s quarter after 1:00 in the afternoon!

And..there will be no distractions from the Ridiculous Human, by golly! 

It’s heavily overcast and just a bit chilly: 60 degrees or so. Rain predicted today and this evening; thunderstorms tomorrow.

Do we wanna go out and trot around the ‘Hood?

Hm. Prob’ly not. Normally, this cool, shady day would make a fine strolling occasion. But the agony in the right hip most certainly would not! OUCH! Dunno what on earth I did to hurt myself, but whatever it was, it inflicted a fine spavining job on the hip joint.

So I think rather than taking a chance on aggravating that — or on getting stuck several blocks from home, in the rain(!) — we will medicate ourself with heavy doses of loafing. Highly therapeutic, eh?

Boyoboy, is it ever gray out there. You just know, dontcha, that if we’re dumb enough to start hiking (heh! or limping) around the park, the heavens will open and dump BUCKETS of water on us. It’s supposed to rain today, tonight, and tomorrow, with thunderstorms tomorrow. So saith Wunderground.

This means we won’t be able to grill any of the meat that’s sitting in the fridge. However, and mercifully, my wonderful son bought several packages of delicious-looking prepared chow at the nearby Sprouts. So we have two or three days’ worth of meals sitting in the fridge!

Arf! we say to that.

Ruby is conkered out and seems not the slightest bit perturbed at the fact of missing out on the daily hike. I wonder if dogs realize that heavy clouds mean rain, and rain means (ugh!!!) getting wet?

One of Those Days: Adumbrated

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Hallelujah, brothers & sisters!  

Dunno what brought Ruby the Corgi under the weather last night, but this morning she seems to be miraculously healed! 

Yes. She’s scarfed down the usual dose of 1/3 can of dawg food. She’s patrolled the backyard — twice, come to think of it. Now she’s standing out there waiting for a burglar to chase off.

😀  Funny little beast. 

At any rate, today she’s acting like her old, healthy self, so I assume whatever ailed her must have been something she ate or some very fast-passing bug.

Whenever the human feels like getting off its duff, we’ll go out and patrol the neighborhood. LOL! The locals must be so glad they have a 30-pound protector looking out after them.

It’s a neighborhood that has much changed over the past few years, yet remains weirdly the same. Our dearest neighbor, locally known as The Ole Guy, disappeared with his wife some time back. He had told me he thought he was going to have to lock her up in an old folks’ home. And I’ll tellya: that guy would never imprison her in a place like that and then walk off, leaving her alone. If he put her in an old-folkerie, you can be sure he put himself there, too.

Meanwhile, SDXB has moved to Sun City, where he took up with New Girlfriend. He seems happy enough, though the last I heard old age has caught up with him and he’s been pretty sick.

I’d be sick, too, if I tried to live in Sun City. My parents proudly retired and moved to Sun City when I went off to college. They thought it was just the business. I thought it was abhorrent.

Seriously: you couldn’t pay me to live there: a ghetto for old folks.

But they thought it was The Bidness. His brother, Ed, and Ed’s harridan of a wife moved there. And my parents’ best friends from Saudi Arabia — Ruth and Hollis — joined them. My mother must have been thrilled to see Ruth move in. The in-laws: not so much, though.

But for me, the place had one major trait working against it: a kind of toxic sameness. All the houses looked alike. All the yards looked alike. All the people looked alike.

The people: old, middle-class, and white. Once a black couple dasted to move in there. They literally were hounded out by the locals.

Hereabouts: I haven’t seen an African-American type move in to these parts. Well, no: one bachelor bought a house a block or two away. But he moved on. Hounded? I doubt it: probably found it costs a lot more to live here than one would expect.

Property taxes are surprisingly high in these parts — probably, I suspect, because the houses are over-valued. Truth to tell, these same models occupy a fair amount of Sun City, which was largely built out by the same developer. A few are a little bigger than SC shacks — mine has four bedrooms, which you surely wouldn’t find out there. And the yards have six-foot walls, with city-owned alleys running behind them. (No alleys in S.C.)  But otherwise, the two developments are much the same.

Except…we have kids!

How can one live without the sound of kids carrying on outside?

Seriously: I love the racket of kids playing. Sun City — devoid of anyone under the age of 50 — was silent as a tomb. Well…except for the damn fighter jets blasting over from Luke Air Force Base. That was a racket.

Ugh!

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Quarter to Four….in the morning. The dog is sick.

She’s got sh!t stuck all over her rear end. Cleaned her up as best as I could…which ain’t very. If and when it warms up this morning…if and when morning ever comes…I’ll have to haul her into the bathtub, scrub her down, haul her out, dry her off…a good half-hour or forty minutes of dog-and-human struggle.

Yay. I can hardly wait.

Human is starved. Bolting down some bread and cheese.

Dog is now giving the Human the famous fork it over, you! look.

Oh, good, saith the Human Why don’t I arm you with bread & cheese so you can barf it all over the bed?

Craparoonies! Now she’s laying there moaning softly with each breath.

Puff…ook
Puff…ook
Puff…ook

Please, please dear doggie! DON’T barf on the bed at 3:53 in the effin’ morning!

Of course it’s Sunday, running up to Christmas. Name a vet that’s gonna be open…

THIS is gonna be One…of…Those…Days, isn’t it?

She Would’ve Loved….

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Oh, my goodness! How my mother would have loved this adorable little corgi. Ruby is…

…hopelessly cute(!!)
…sweeter than candy
…doggily persuasive
…richly funny

What a charmer. She surely would have seduced my mother within minutes of their meeting. And they would have been pals for life.

Or at least, for rest of my mother’s life.

She’s long-gone now. My father remarried; then he died in misery. The new wife was merrily ejected from my life…she’d be about 181 by now, I imagine, if she were still living.

My mother was murdered by the tobacco peddlers.

Yeah. If you have a kid…or anyone you care about or who cares about you…don’t get seduced into smoking. It truly is a murderous custom.

She deserved to see her grandson. She deserved to see the cuteness that is the corgi. She deserved to live out her husband’s life. But no. She smoked herself to death, and so never saw any of those things…or any of the other beautiful things that should have graced her later life.

Don’t let them kill you, friends!

But do get a corgi!!!! 😀  Everyone should have a corgi. Right?

Is there a REASON we never notice…???

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{chortle!} Just back from the early morning dawg traipse. It’s a little after 9 a.m.

I take it into my vacant little noggin that I should walk over to the Sprouts (a few blocks away, across Main Drag West), thereinat to buy a new bag of coffee beans and some beloved dawg food and…such-like. What time do they open?

Get online and discover they’ve been open since 7 this morning!

Argha!!!!  If I had a fake “disabled” dog vest for Ruby, we could have darted in there while we were trudging around the neighborhood!

Not quite my style… But…did you realize you can buy those things online? Amazon peddles alleged “disabled” dog vests for a dime a dozen.

Well…a large dime. But still: they’re easily available. Probably can get them in local pet stores, too.

LOL! I was sitting in the church one day when some lady came in with a ridiculous tiny pooch, gussied up in an alleged “disabled” vest. She picked the little guy up and set him on the pew next to her!

Holee holee maquerel!

You don’t see obvious fake “service dog” vests often. Mostly you see them in grocery stores around here, no doubt because dogs are considered too unsanitary to allow in a grocery store. In England, we saw companion dogs everywhere: not just in grocery stores and pharmacies but also in restaurants. Around here, a “service dog” vest is something you might see once every two or three weeks…probably because the things are kind of expensive.

And most people don’t have the chutzpah to tell someone who dares to challenge them to kindly fu*k off. Who needs that kind of confrontation?

😀
😮
😀

Colder Than a By-gawd…

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…as my father used to say. Things were colder than, hotter than, faster than, slower than, pricier than, smarter than, stupider than…a by-gawd. 

And no, I don’t know if he knew what the word “bigod” meant. Or even that there was such a word. He wasn’t what you’d call a real eddycated fella.

At any rate, it’s passing crisp out there on the back porch: 40 degrees. For southern Arizona, that’s practically an Arctic freeze!

Was gonna take the dog for her (usual) daily walk this ayem, but decided agin’ it given the chill on the air. So…we loaf.

Actually, Ruby patrols the back yard, ever-hopeful that the beloved Pool Dude will show up. Oh, how she adores that man! 

And why? That escapes me. He looks like an ordinary sorta fella, a guy who got trained to clean pools while he was serving a prison sentence (as indeed is the case with many pool dudes). WHAT has he done to so ingratiate himself with that dawg?

Seriously: she does know when it’s Pool Dude day (how???), and she lurks by the door or by the pool fence waiting for him to show up.

Ooohh well. It’s after 9:00 ayem and still damn cold out there.

Probably should stroll over to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s and restock a few (un)necessaries. But my enthusiasm for traipsing through the ‘Hood and dodging bums to the left of me and bums to the right of me is…well…limited. So is the enthusiasm for leaving Ruby locked up in the house when she really does need a walk.

Occurs to me that I could order up a service dog vest for Ruby, so I can take her into stores and (apparently) even on busses and streetcars. You can buy them on Amazon, no questions asked. Apparently people are not allowed(!!) to ask you for any other evidence or proof that your mutt really is a service dog. If we had one of those li’l costumes, we both could go into any of the five grocery and drug stores within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm. Down at the church, one woman even used to bring her lap-dog sized little mutt to the services, gussied up in one of those vests, and park it next to her on a pew!

Heh heh…not to say {cackle!!}….  Has a certain appeal, doesn’t it?

LOL! I wonder if bums would leave you alone if you had a corgi with you. 😀

Seriously: when a German shepherd would accompany me on a stroll around the ‘Hood, NO ONE would pester me. Lacking such a bodyguard, o’course, the locals will hit you up for handouts, make passes at you, holler obscenities at you…  Blech! What a place.

Maybe I should follow SDXB to Sun City: a.k.a. Mausoleum West. 

[sigh} I truly hated living there when my parents had a Sun City house.

Nice loafing porch, eh? Looks just like my parents' place...At the time they were there, the place was Hate Central. If anyone of a darker persuasion dared to move in, they would be HOUNDED out. And yea verily: I kid you not. That happened, just a year or so ago, to a friend of mine. So I assume Sun City is still as Whitey-White as it was Back in the Day.

What an awful place!

Well. They liked it, though. The constant roar of fighter jets overhead (ooohhh, it’s the sound of freedom! my mother would coo) was a worthwhile trade-off, in their minds, for a housing tract fully free of brown faces.

And one benefit of it would be a paucity of jerks hanging around waiting for women to ogle.