Coffee heat rising

Dogs

Wiley Comes a-Visitin’

by
Urban coyote

The ‘Hood is one of the northernmost outposts of a Phoenix district locally called “North Central.” The place consists largely of single-family homes on lots ranging from 1/4 to 1 full acre, with large lots watered by the city irrigation system installed when the former farmland was transformed into ticky-tacky.

LOL! Actually our houses are not ticky-tacky in the sense that more recent builds are. Mine, for example is not drywall and plaster but solid block: difficult to air-condition but too sturdy for an enterprising burglar to shove his fist through a wall.

{No kidding! That is how the burglars break and enter homes in newer tracts: they walk up to the front door; ring the doorbell; and then if no one answers, they just take their fist and shove it through the drywall. Reach in. Unlock the door. Make yourself to home!}

We have a different type of burglar hereabouts, though: a four-legged variety. We border a desert mountain preserve, and that place hosts families of coyotes. So unafraid of humans are they that we could almost call them “semi-domesticated.” They consider stray cats and cute short dogs to be gourmet fare. So…if you leave your 30-pound corgi out in the yard, she’s likely to turn up as breakfast for a distant furry cousin.

Just now, the neighbors — some of whom grow hysterical at the mere glimpse of a coyote — have been madly reporting sightings. And because neighbors — being only human — are remarkably stupid, they often fail to clean up the banks of shrubbery that serve handsomely as coyote hotels. We have one of those about four houses up the street.

No amount of heavy-handed hinting by neighbors haunting the local Facebook page has persuaded the couple on the corner to trim their shrubbery in front by way of evicting the four-legged tenants. Meanwhile, other idiots don’t grasp the concept of Cat As Gourmet Feast, so they leave their delicious kitties outside to call in the cat-loving coyotes.

Honestly. HOW has our species survived this long?

At any rate… I’ve set up a kind of coyote barrier along the top of my cinderblock backyard walls: strapped lengths of carpet tacks to the decorative block on top. This keeps the neighbors’ cats out nicely: they learn forthwith that when they jump over the wall, they get their feet punctured.

As for Wiley? Not so sure about that. In the first place, a coyote is a helluva lot tougher and smarter than a domestic cat. And…that notwithstanding, if Wiley tries to jump the wall, finds himself clinging to a length of nails, jumps down, and lands inside the yard…well, jumping back out will be highly aversive.

Not a coyote

So I’ve got to be careful every time Ruby goes out in the yard. Whenever I open the back door to let her out, I need to walk out there and look around, to be sure she’s the sole occupant. When you’re in the middle of fixing breakfast or dinner, that’s a PITA…

Hot Day, Hot Stove, Hot Dog….

by

Out the door at the crack of dawn: get Ruby her shot at a doggy-walk before it gets seriously hot.

Not much chance of that, though. At 6:30 this morning, it was muggy as an Alabama day:  27% humidity a “dry heat” does NOT make. And it’s supposed to hit 117 today.

By that hour, the crazy-making Dog Parade was well under way. Everybody who has a dog AND a job shoots outdoors at dawn in an effort to get their pooch walked before they have to go to work. So the park and its surrounding sidewalks are mobbed by dogs and their dog-loving humans…and many of the latter are — dare we say it? — just not very smart.

They can’t seem to get the concept that dogs are not kids. Dogs do not think like children, because dogs are NOT children, because dogs are a different freakin’ species. I can’t count the number of idiots who could not grasp the idea that Anna the German Shepherd did NOT “just wanna pwayyyy” with their pooch. What she “just wanted” to do was remove their dog’s idiot head. After that, she probably would have mopped up the mess with the idiot human’s remains.

So…I do try to evade the mobs of dog-infested humanity that swarm through the neighborhood in the hour or two before work starts. Evade: often without much luck.

Today was OK enough in that department, probably because it truly is hotter than the Hubs out there. Wish I lived in SDXB’s former neighborhood. The houses are no better than mine, and the noise level couldn’t possibly be any better. But the entire area is mid- to upper-middle class, making it at least feel a little safer for walking around.

Nevertheless…

Our ‘Hood is bordered on the north by a dangerous slum, and anchored on the west by a decrepit apartment-house development that was nice when it opened, graced by a lovely golf course, but that declined rapidly. Now that area is just plain crummy, full of low-end types. Not so long ago, a cop was shot as he knocked on a door in one of those dumps. The golf course, once a point of pride, has gone to rack & ruin. The school over there…ugh! A few weeks ago, kids going to that school were greeted by a dead body — a murder victim — laying on the sidewalk outside the campus’s entrance.

My son has asked me not to sell this house, because…he wants to inherit it.

While it is newer and better constructed (in some ways) than his place, and it does have a pool (which you, too, can take care of 12 months a year so  that you can swim during three months), it does have some serious disadvantages compared to his place.

One is the proximity to Sunnyslope — said dangerous slum. Where my son lives, he can sit in his living room or front-of-the-house office with his front door hanging wide open. No need for a steel security screen; no need for a hardened heavy-duty deadbolt lock. I wouldn’t leave a door open without a locked security screen here, not on a bet! And no, there’s no chance in Hell I’d leave a window open.

So…because I don’t quack about that fact all the time, it’s unclear that he understands how risky this area is.

***

In other sylvan fields: Checking out the market for pr0pane stoves.  Our honored civic leaders want to force Maricopa County residents to replace gas stoves with electric models. To that end, they’re jacking up the cost of natural gas…through the stratosphere.

I probably can afford it…but highly resent it. The main reason is that I like to eat (well!!) and I like to cook. And an electric stove decidedly does NOT make it in the “like to cook” department.

You can get a propane grill with one (count it, one) cooking hob, but they’re not very efficient. It’s hard to regulate the heat on one of those things. And yes, ONE is the operative word. If you really cook, you normally will have a couple of burners in play when you’re making a decent meal.

On the ranch, we had a propane stove. The burners and the oven ran on propane. Come to think of it…I think the fridge was powered by propane, too. WhatEVER: the stove worked just like a natural gas stove. If you had that installed, none of our nosey city parents would have a clue that you weren’t running your whole kitchen on gas.

My house has a countertop stove with four gas burners. The oven is not part of it: that thing is built-in to a set of cabinetry. And it is electric.

I hardly ever use the oven, though: most of the time it serves as a storage cabinet.

So…hmmmm… I’m thinking now is the time to look in to the availability of propane stovetops here in the (un)Lovely Valley of the sun. Turns out even Home Depot has the things…and the price is reasonable. In fact, it looks like most, if not all of these things will run on propane. That suggests that maybe my beloved existing gas stovetop will run on propane, too.

So then the question would be…how do I get propane installed, and by whom? And how the hell much is THAT gonna cost?

Apparently a gas stove can be converted to use propane. It looks like a hassle — possibly an expensive hassle. May be cheaper and smarter to just replace the stove I’ve got with a propane model.

Now is the time to look into that, I’m afraid. Because you know what’s gonna happen, right? The instant the county forces this change, EVERYBODY AND THEIR LITTLE BROTHER is gonna be hiring workmen to convert their gas stovetops to propane. And that will mean a huge traffic jam…and a wait of Gawd Only Know how long before you can get your stove working again.

Never a dull moment, eh?

July 4 Kaput

by

Gosh. A whole post was almost done here, dated July 4. And…egad! Apparently I never published it.

Out it goes.

Far as I recall, it wasn’t a truly horrible evening. Often July 4 is truly horrible here, with idiots setting off their bang-bangs way-y-y into the night.

The reason for this: Our honored civic leaders, in their Passionate Patriotism, legalized fireworks in Arizona, undoing a years-long ban on sales of the damn things. Of course, people used to smuggle them in across the Mexican border and over from neighboring states…but not every numbskull and his mentally retarded brother, sister and cat glommed the damn things every Fourth of July. Now, everybody can get them —  any kind of them — and so nitwits blast them off all over the city and the state. So we get BAM BAM BAM BAM WEEEEEEEUUUUUUUU  BAM BAM all. night. long.

Understand. It’s not that I hate fireworks. We had a friend — now a late friend — who used to get a license to shoot the things off. He would throw an annual party, and he had professionals who knew what they were doing fill the air over his neighborhood with lights and noise. That was fun. And it was OK, because the fireworks were overseen safely, and because his Paradise Valley home was not surrounded by flammable trees and grasses.

The people who put on that show DID know what they were doing. They weren’t putting people’s homes and yards and pets at risk.

What I hate is fireworks in the hands of flaming morons.

And that’s what we have now.

Last night I ended up standing on the street all evening, keeping an eye on the doings in the alley. To my amazement, two young gentlemen who have taken up residence across the street came out and kept me company!

Can you imagine?

I sure can’t. At any rate, we ended up socializing for the better part of an hour. After the loony toons settled down, we went back into our respective palaces, and that was that.

LOL! Truth to tell, I seriously did consider putting the dog in the car and heading out to the desert, there to camp until dawn. That was NOT the way I wanted to spend the night, but it sounded a lot better than dodging nitwits all evening.

But for a change, not too much nitwittery went on, at least not in the immediate vicinity. Probably, I think, because those two guys were standing out there.

Well, not too much nitwittery except for the drunk driving. Lushes killed one person and injured two on the accursed freeway up the road. Honestly.

It makes Sun City look good…if only that place weren’t such a mausoleum.

At any rate, today we’re back to normal: Hotter than the hubs of Hades. Just now we’re down to a chilly 111 degrees, according to Wunderground. And yea verily: that’s exactly what the thermometer on the back porch reads.

Pool Dude — the guy I hired to come around and take care of the Hole in the Ground Into Which to Pour Money — has about paid for himself in sheer labor savings. The damned pool is sparkling clean: not a sheet of green to be seen anywhere. He’s expensive, but IMHO paying for his service beats leaving the thing empty.

Because, after all, there is no “empty” with a swimming pool. It doesn’t have a drain that you leave open, like a bathtub. If you don’t actively keep it drained, it hosts a puddle in which to grow algae and breed mosquitoes. My next-door neighbor does that.

Other Daughter, who lives in the next house down from that neighbor, leaves her windows open at night. (Don’t ask!!) Result: the mosquitoes got into her house, chewed her up, and gave her a raving case of encephalitis. She almost died. For a while, the doctors thought that even if she survived, she would never walk again.

She’s one tough lady, though. Not only did she live through it, but yea verily, she’s trotting all over the ‘Hood again.

At any rate, this particular stupidity means, for me: keep the doors and windows closed. Keep screens on all the doors and windows. Do not leave a door open for the dog to come and go at will.

Isn’t having to make allowances for neighbors’ idiocy fun?

To my mind, this was the beauty of the ranch: living out in the boondocks, two or three miles from the nearest neighbor, meant you were pretty much out of reach of the idiot neighbors’ frolics.

Daily Doggy-Walk

by

6:15 a.m.: Just back from a mile+ doggy-walk. Hot and humid: 98 degrees with 22 percent humidity.

The weather kept most the stupes inside this morning, though. So…that was nice.

We walked across a southerly street populated with big old classic North Central houses on big old classic irrigated lots. Whew! I am sooooo glad I no longer have to take care of one of those places! Even with a cleaning lady coming on once a week, keeping everything clean and running was a bitch of a job.

Here — in a house half the size of our li’l mansion and absent the kid, the husband, and the large dogs — the house stays pretty clean even with a cleaning lady surfacing only twice a month.

At any rate… We saw a white golden retriever over there, the spitting image of the Late, Great Charley the White Golden Retriever.

I don’t know if M’hijito is going to try to replace Charley with another golden...or with any other dog. He works out of his house, ever since his employer discovered how much moola is to be saved by shutting down the big offices and parking workers in front of their home computers.

That would, in theory, allow him to snab a puppy. Except…a puppy demands time, and all of his time is occupied with office work. In theory, it ought to be possible to socialize a pup to Life with Humans when you’re working from home…but…nice theory! He can’t be jumping up every half-hour to attend to a puppy while he’s supposed to be engaged in company work.

Welp…I’d better get up and get something to eat. Or…something…

And so, away!

A Miracle!!!!

by

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! WordPress let me into the Funny about Money site!

Who’d’ve thunk it? Especially given that this is a Whatever Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong day. Ugh!

After slamming around and bamming around and hurting like Hell and trying to figure out how to talk my son into driving me to stores (since he insists he doesn’t want me to drive) and realizing that ain’t a-gonna work and crashing the computer and re-crashing the computer and spavining the sore shoulder even more with the damn laundry and…gawdlmighty…here I am with the computer unplugged and for reasons incomprehensible the extension cord not reaching to where it usually goes (did Wonder-Cleaning-Lady move the cords? WHY?????).

Bang around and slam around and bang around some more. Figure out what W-C-L did to suit her taste in extension cords. Undo that tidy mess and reconstitute my own untidy mess.

Think maybe I can slither down to the Sprouts on the corner, where His Lordliness is unlikely to catch me, and get most of the things I need. If they don’t carry toilet paper (for unholy and unknowable reasons, the Funny Farm’s supply of TP is bare!), then I can sneak across the road to the Albertson’s, put my life on the line dodging panhandlers, and pick up the paper goods there. Whee. What fun.

So whenever the dryer buzzes again and the stuff in there is (painfully!) unloaded, it’s off to the store. Ohhhhhh goodie…I can hardly wait.

Y’know, I rather hate grocery shopping under the best of circumstances. But here in this state of Invalidism, the last goddamn thing I wanna do is take on the traffic, dodge the bums, find something (anything) that resembles a decent roll of TP in the Land of Politically Correct groceries, dodge some more bums to slither back to the car, trudge back up to the ‘Hood through annoying traffic and around stoners stumbling into the roadway,… AAAARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH!

***

Grrrr grrrr grrrrrrr….. This is just ducky. See that pile of cheap apartments? You can walk there from my son’s house. It’s right around the corner from his place.

Translation: Neither of our neighborhoods is safe. This whole damn city is L.A. Redux, a hole in the desert into which to house trash.

And mayhem has become pretty much SOP: business as usual for lovely North Central Phoenix.

This morning the neighbors here in the ‘Hood awakened at dawn to a serenade of gunshots. Nobody on the neighborhood Facebook page is fessing up, but apparently either a couple of sh!theads had at each other as they cruised the public streets, or one of the householders took off after yet another home invader.

{sigh} What a garden spot!

If my son were not living in the central district — by way of being close to both his father and to me — I would be soooooo GONE from this place. Really, it’s very dangerous. Centrally located and convenient: just dandy. But it’s also centrally located and convenient for every sh!thead in the Valley.

Truth to tell, the only Maricopa County districts I would choose to live in are Cave Creek/Carefree and Fountain Hills. Either is a good hour’s drive from here, through homicidal traffic. And that factoid makes Sedona and waypoints outside of Tucson look good. For that matter, Santa Fe looks mighty good by comparison, too.

But meanwhile…the centrally located districts where we live are OUTTA SIGHT when it comes to prices: as we see when surfing the million-dollar range for rather ordinary, aging upper-middle-class shacks. It really is L.A. redux. How are they getting people to pay these insane prices?

M’jito is now working 100% out of his home. This saves his employer vast quantities of money on office space — meaning the good ole’ days are unlikely to return. Meaning, further, that going forward, most white-collar folk may be working from homes, meaning…they can live anywhere they choose. And so…WHY would anyone choose to live here, when one could live in…

* Sedona
* Prescott
* The suburbs of Tucson
* Fountain Hills
* Flagstaff
*Anywhere but here?????????

Man! If I were a young person and in that fine position, you may be sure I would NOT be camped in mid-town Phoenix. Even if you wanted to hang out in this general area to be close to relatives, there are many better places to set down.

In fact, I would be trying to persuade the honored parents to move out of the central districts, since neither of them has a commute to worry about anymore. Get them to move where you want to live, and follow them there.

***

Egad! One of the neighbors has posted, on the local Facebook page, that their dog spooked, ran off, got hit by a car, kept running, and is now lost.

Ruby and I are on our way out, to search for the wayward pooch. Hope it has survived and is still in the ‘Hood somewhere.

Outta here!

WORSER & WORSER

by

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!  Want pain? Lemme tellya PAIN!

Spent the better part of y’day and this morning at the Mayo Clinic’s ER.

I fell face-forward on the tiled floor. Reflexively stuck out my left hand as I was going down. Whacked the Hell out of my hand. Busted the humerus, one of the long bones of the upper arm. Apparently didn’t break anything else (to my surprise). But oh!

Hurt?  Lemme tella HURT! 

And hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt… Holy mackerel, it hurts!

The little dog is accustomed to sleeping on the bed. But she’s too small to jump up here by herself: she has to be lifted.

They told me not to lift her onto the bed. (They who have no clue to what a corgi is…) So of course I’ve been lifting her onto the bed.

Just now: Slipped. Lost my footing. Dropped the dog. Wrenched the arm, And HURT!!!!!

Oh Dear GOD did that hurt.

This elicited a sky-splitting shriek of agony. Terrorized the little dog. She now refuses to come out from under the toilet.

That may be just as well. At least she won’t be out here banging on the bed trying to get up.

I don’t think Ruby got hurt. But I sure as hell did.

Ohhhhh well…  The worst of the screaming pain has about subsided

And hallelujah, brothers & sisters, Amazon carries little staircases to help a small dog climb on the bed!

heee! Have you ever seen such a thang?!?

I’m thinking that tomorrow, if I can drive (highly questionable), I’ll run over to the nearest Petsmart and grab one of these for Ruby. Failing that: order it up from Amazon.

Dunno, tho… Amazon shows several models that are cheaper. Oh, well. There’s plenty of time to think about that.