Coffee heat rising

Dogs

The Morning of the Morons!

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No kidding: Every moron on the planet is out there on the sidewalks with their dog! Come 7:00 in the morning, they all pour out of their houses and prance back and forth around the park.

Gawdlmighty, am I tired of stupid! 

The favorite Idiocy Trick hereabouts is to come bounding up to you and try to set their dog loose on your dog. They just want to p-w-w-a-a-y, the idiot coos.

No, dear…. My dog just wants to eviscerate your dog.

WHY, why in the name of GAWD are people so effing STUPID!?????

Well, we got out into this very lovely morning, around the park, across the road just south of it, back up into our part of the ‘Hood…surprisingly, without an overt dog fight. That, primarily because the Human dragged Ruby away from several impending altercations.

I do love to walk with Ruby through the neighborhood: it’s such a lovely venue. It would be made a lot more lovely, though, by the presence of humans with functioning brains….

Weird, gray day

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First week of May and here we are submerged in a steel-gray morning. In Arizona, of all things!

Seriously: the sky is a weird, smooth, featureless gray lid. Ruby and I have circumnavigated the’Hood, returned, chowed down…now sit here wondering what to do next. If anything.

“What to do next” will probably amount to “go back to bed.” The Human is feeling unduly tired — sleepy, actually — and does not relish pretending to be alert and constructive. Wunderground predicts today’s high will have us sweltering under 80 degrees, followed by a bracing low of 66 degrees.

Yeah. We’ll believe it when we see it.

A jet plane roars overhead. The top of the neighbor’s tree sways gently in a breeze so vague we can’t feel it over here. Not that it matters.

Should pay a visit to one of the local stores. But am totally NOT in the mood to stroll around the sidewalks and the streets

Oh well: we won’t starve.

Not till tomorrow, anyway. 😀

{sigh} I find myself contemplating the possibility of returning to Sun City. 

My house, right here in the ‘Hood, was built by Del Webb — the entrepreneur who brought us Arizona’s Sun City tracts. So a move out there might not feel especially drastic…except that it’s too far from my son and there are no wonderful little kids frolicking around.

And course, except that you’re BLASTED all day long with jet airplane noise, emanating from nearby Luke Air Force Base.  That racket starts at dawn, rolling you out of the sack and souring your mood for the rest of the day.

So…no. Ain’t movin’ back to Sun City, no matter how much crime and B.S. we get here.

Errands to do this morning were skipped by the obligatory Doggy Walk. One opts that at one’s peril! 😉

Did you know that you can go into a dime store or a drugstore and buy a FAKE SERVICE DOG HARNESS for your canine sidekick?

No kidding! I was over at the neighborhood drugstore the other day, and damned if I didn’t see a whole bouquet of the things hanging from a hook in there.

For a fleeting shady moment, I actually thought GRAB IT! 

Then Ruby could come with me into the Albertson’s and the Sprouts and the computer store and…I could get my errands done in one swell foop with the daily doggy-walk!

By golly, THAT would make life easier!

In England — at least when we were there some years ago — they let you bring your dog in most retail establishments. And restaurants.

Yeah. You’d sit down at a restaurant table and there at the table next to you would be someone with a dog in a harness, pooch parked on the floor next to its human. Go into the equivalent of a drugstore or a dime store, and you’d be likely to encounter a similar pooch. Same, amazingly, in grocery stores.

I’m not inclined to fake my dawg’s status. But...hmmmmm…..  It’s somethin’ to think about! 😉

Seriously: it sure would make life easier: being able to kill two outdoor errands at once — doggy-walk and store visit.

But gosh. It really does seem like there’s a limit. Or oughta be, anyhow.

 

A Minor Miracle(???)

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Wow!  This morning the spavined hip hardly hurts at all. 

Well. Yeah: it does hurt. But NOTHING like it has!

So…jeez. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe this gawdawful thing will clear up.

Soon as I finish swilling a mug full of water (too lazy to fix coffee just this minute), the plan is to take Ruby out for a Doggy-Walk. If we can make it to the park (that’ll be a miracle…), she’ll be beside herself with doggy joy. She does LOVE the feel of grass under her little feet. So adorable!

Last time or two ago that we visited the park, some sh!thead pestered the bejayzus out of me. That’s why you need a German shepherd, not a corgi.

Unfortunately, I’m no longer strong enough or patient enough to handle a GerShep, so nowadays I have to take my chances with the f**king general public over there. That day I dodged around to the front of a neighbor’s home and leaned on their doorbell. Asked them to call the cops. That shed the sh!thead, anyway.

Godlmighty, but I’m sick of living in Phoenix. Don’t know where on earth we’d go, though, if we tried to move out of here. I’m afraid these little phenomena are characteristic of the society in general: America has become the Land of the Sh!thead. About the only way you can deal with that is either never to go out without a male in tow (a male human, not a male Chihuahua), or never to go out at all.

For the luvva gawd, I’m an old, ugly woman! It’s not like I was a nubile young thing. What about an old hag attracts sh!theads?

Ohhhh well. On the positive side, it sure is nice to be able to walk up the hallway without hurting like the dickens. For a change.

Go-o-o-d Morning, America!

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Just back from a mile-plus peregrination of the ‘Hood, dragged along by my furry boss. How can I count the ways I just wanna sit down and swill a cup of coffee?

Stumble over to the easy chair. Flop down in it. And…

RINGY-DINGY-DINGY!

Goddamned phone. A Goddamned phone solicitor on the other end.

I tell him where to make his next phone call and slam down the receiver.

Honest to Gawd. Phone soliciting should be illegal. Seriously: I realize it’s “freedom of speech” and all. But shouldn’t the rest of us have something like “freedom of privacy” or “freedom of peace and quiet”?

***

The neighborhood park is so lovely! I adore this area. Beautiful, quiet, upscale, affluent, right in the middle of everything

O’course it ain’t perfect. Right across the street from the park stands a house whose occupants fled after a pair of home invaders barged in, grabbed them, tied them up, threw them in the bathtub, and proceeded to loot the house.

So. If you live here…yeah: you keep your doors locked all the time. And you do NOT answer the door unless you know who’s on the other side and what they want.

But then…come ON! No place is safe. Just the other day some sh!thead barged into a madly upscale home in Fountain Hills, a mighty swell dive. And I’ll tellya: before that happened, I would have said Fountain Hills is as staid and secure as you can get, this side of Sun City.

My mother, who was scared of her own shadow, cowered in terror all the time she lived in Sun City. She dwelt behind heavily locked doors and windows. And yet…really…she was less terrorized out there than anywhere else we lived.

Something must have happened to her. If it did, she never told me. But really: you wouldn’t act like that unless you had some reason to be scared.

Me, I find the company of a dog amply reassuring. Ruby is no German shepherd (not by a long shot!). But she does alert whenever anyone comes around.

And really, that’s about all a dog can do for you. You’re the one who has to take care of yourself: get to a safe place, grab your pistol, call the cops, whatEVER.

Ruby: the four-legged burglar alarm.
😀

And I stay here…WHY?

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Jeez.

Lift the dawg onto the bed: Happy Dawg!

Turn on the heating pad, get it warmed up. Happy Human!

Climb into the sack, apply hot heating pad to spavined hip. Happy spavined hip!

Fire up the computer, start to explore the Local Gnus, and….RRRRROOOAAARRRRR!!!!!!!!!!

Goddamned cop helicopter blasts over the house.

Presumably in pursuit of an even more goddamned perp…

What a garden spot!

Sick and tired of the unholy racket and crime and nuttiness and shit-headedness here in Lovely Uptown Phoenix.

Truly: if I could move away from here, I’d do it today.

But…but…where on earth would I go? Is there really any place that’s any better, and quieter, any less looney toons than this place?

Frankly, I think not.

One resident, for example, was attacked and apparently kidnapped from one of the most upscale suburban districts in the state. Like the cop said after my own neighbors were grabbed, tied up, and thrown in their bathtub so a pair of home invaders could clean out their house: “They’re everywhere. You can’t get away from them.”

Yeah: I’d remarked to one of the cops that I thought maybe I should sell my house and move to some quieter venue, and that was his response. “Don’t do that! They’re everywhere!”

Ugh.

I need to get Ruby a roommate in the form of a 90-pound German shepherd and me a new toy in the form of a .38…enough is enough! 

We’re IN! Not to say FED UP….

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SURPRISE!!!!!  Our honored computer let me into our blog site! It’s a miracle! 

Gray, muggy day. Reminds me vaguely of life in Berkeley, where my relatives dwelt. Only considerably warmer than the East Bay, which was usually pretty nippy.

Dog and Human traipsed around the park, by the light of a dawn best described as “dim.”

Grrrr! Afraid I’m going to have to stop taking Ruby to the park — her paws-down favorite venue! — because of the a$$holes that habituate the place. This morning we had some jerk hollering obscenities at me — AN 80-YEAR-OLD WOMAN! — as we strolled across one end of the park.

Swear ta gawd!!!  What IS the matter with people?

Looks like we’ve got three choices:

* Stay out of the park, now and evermore.
* Get someone, preferably a large and male someone, to walk with us.
* Adopt a German shepherd to accompany us.

None of those appeal:

* Ruby’s little doggy heart will be broken if she can’t ever go into the park again.
* I don’t know any bodyguard-shaped men any more, and even if I did, nothing about little old(!!!) me would motivate such a fellow to traipse around the park with me, flexing his biceps.
* And I’m past the time of my life when I can handle a 90-pound protection dog.

So…it’s pretty annoying. Frustrating, as a matter of fact.