Coffee heat rising

Health care

A Hundred WHATS????!!??

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HOLEE DOGGEREL!

Gerardo the Lawn Dude’s guys just finished blowering and raking the front and back 40. His head dude knocks on the Arcadia door and asks to be paid.

“How much?”

“$100.”

HOLEE SHEE-UT!

That’s up from the $80 they usually charge. Forgodsake: we’re not talking about any extra work here. Nothing special. Just blower up the leaves and wind-blown debris and trim whatever few plants need to be trimmed.

Once again: here’s a “house” thing that makes life in a high-rise apartment on North Central Avenue look a whole lot better.

Well.

It would look better if I didn’t have the dog.

Ruby would have to be paper-trained or litter-trained (did you know you can train a dog to use a cat-box?). That amounts to more hassle than I care to engage. For what?

For a box in the sky. No yard for Ruby to run around in. No peace and quiet for me. No private pool where I can go skinny-dipping…

Barf. 

Okay, okay…settle down! And let’s consider the things we imagine DO make the proposed Box in the Sky look good.

Bear in mind: I have lived in high-rise apartments, and in fact rather enjoyed them. But..that was a long time ago and I was a lot younger and my parents dealt with the management and they paid the rent and…. Today, to tell the truth: I don’t wanna. 

{sigh} Well…unless you’ve got someone to run interference with Life, The Universe, and All That, you’re always gonna have these hassles, right? And you’re always going to be paying for the hassles.

So…quitcher bellyachin’ … right?

Heh…  Another thing “I don’t wanna” is to take care of that damn yard in this heat. Gerardo’s boys earn their pay and earn their pay and earn their pay some more. A hundred bucks — let’s get real — is a bargain to get four guys slamming around in the heat for an hour.

Because he’s not just paying them for an hour of work. He’s paying for an hour of work x 4 … that would be FOUR hours of work. And he’s paying for the gas to run his truck over here (and the wear & tear on the truck). And for gas to run the blower and the mower and the tree trimmers and the shrub trimmers and the weed-whackers…. Arrrghhhha!

How am I glad I don’t own a yard-care business? Let me count the pestiferous ways…

****

On the ‘tother hand…

What with my son having purloined my car, I was gonna walk over to one of the nearby stores — maybe the Sprouts — and pick up some chow and assorted junque. That ain’t a-gonna happen now.

It’s 102º in the shade just now. And I’ll tellya…that does NOT inspire me to hike 8 or 10 blocks (x 2: make that 16 or 20 blocks, round trip) for the privilege of buying lunch and some ice cream!

The local grocery stores have recently announced that they’ll deliver. I haven’t looked into this offer yet…but need to do so.

In the Department of the Stuff of Nightmares…

Last night I found myself dreaming of visits to the terrifying Mayo Clinic. Auuugh! Arrogant doctors who presume that because you’re old you must be stupid. Endless waits in dreary waiting rooms. More waits in the doctor’s office. Wasted breath trying to explain yourself to said doctor, who’s only half-listening to you. And when a visit or three has happened recently, it’s a challenge to tell the difference between a memory and a nightmare.

Spare me, Lord!

It’s a bit of a drive over to the Mayo from the Funny Farm. Must say: more of a drive than I’d like to make. But the doctors and the facilities closer to home? Huh-uh!

My relationship with the adorable Young Dr. Kildare came to an end when I went over to his place shortly after a visit to the far, far-away Mayo Clinic. Figured I could get what ailed me treated there without having to drive halfway to Nevada for the privilege.

Yeah…I could. If I didn’t mind having him treat me for the wrong ailment! 

Hilariously so: he misdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and misdiagnosed with élan. Understand, this was something that not only had been seen by the Mayo but also by the high-powered St. Joseph’s, in mid-town Phoenix, added to a couple of lesser issues about which he simply made mistakes.

YDK has now moved to Sun City. The medical care out there is one of the main reasons you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City. My mother’s terminal illness was horrifically mismanaged by the quacks out there.

No doubt she wouldn’t have survived the cancer that was filling up her innards. But she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Telling her it was all in her fuzzy little head increased her suffering massively. And my father’s: he was at home trying to treat her as she lay dying of her “imaginary” ailment. And that IS the specific reason I would never buy a house in Sun City or Youngtown. Horrible!

One would like to hope that medical care out there has improved. But get real: we know what Americans think of the elderly. We know how elders are treated in this country. Why take a chance when you can stay in town and at least have a shot at decent care?

Ninety degrees at seven-forty…

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Yeah, you read that right, far as it goes:  Just now it’s 7:40 in the morning, and the thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch.

Ugh!

Dawg and I just returned from a stroll around the park — about a mile or so. Ruby is SO ridiculously cute and adorable that every passer-by has to pause and coo over her. So that tends to slow things down a bit.

Gawd, it feels like effing Saudi Arabia out there.

Not quite as colorfully wet, though, as when we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Come a summer morning, literally the humidity would drip off the eaves like rain. Houses out there had swamp cooling, so the “air conditioning” was marginally helpful, at best.

Jayzuz! What a place to grow up! 

And Jayzuz! What a pair to grow up with as parents!

Not that they were bad parents, exactly (except when they were pounding on me). What made me resent them was their idiotic smoking habit.

Both of them smoked and smoked and smoked! The house stank from rafters to floor. The carpets stank. The furniture stank. The drapes stank. The air-conditioning system stank. We stank. Ugh!!!!!

What possesses people to do that?

To be fair, at the time — the 1950s — people didn’t understand (or believe) that smoking causes cancer. Seriously: When the word came down and reports appeared in women’s magazines and on the news reports, my mother discounted the whole idea. She believed it was Big Brother trying to tell us all what to do.

And, to continue being fair, she was deeply addicted to nicotine. She would have had a bitch of a time stopping, even if she’d wanted to — which, you may be sure, she did not.

But…jeez…  Wouldn’t you think the fact that everything stank of tobacco smoke — your clothes, your hair, your kid’s clothes and hair, the carpets, the furniture, the draperies, the bedding, everything — would register with a person?

If it ever did, she didn’t give a damn. If her cigarettes burned down the planet, she was not a-gonna stop smoking.

Wouldn’t you think she would have made the connection between the house’s saturation with stinking smoke and her little girl’s chronic, awful respiratory infections? I was sick ALL THE TIME that I was growing up. “Ohhhhh,” she used to simper, “you’re so susceptible!”

Yeah. Not so susceptible to viruses, dear muther, as to the poison you puff into the air all day and half the night.

I have no clue whether the addictive quality of nicotine was widely known at the time. Hard to imagine how anyone could miss it…to get the picture, all you’d have to do is watch someone try to kick the habit. She knew, all right. She knew she was addicting herself and she knew she was making me sick. She just didn’t care. Those fukkin cigarettes were more important. Far more important.

Ugh! That’s what I’m led to think about, when the morning breaks to a hot, muggy, stuffy Arabia-like day. Fukkin’ cigarettes. And a woman laying in her bed dying in agony as her husband worked like an animal to care for her.

Guess I should have more empathy for her dying throes. But…she knew what she was doing. She knew tobacco could and probably would kill her. She had cared for her mother as her mother lay dying of cancer, so she knew what that was about, too.

{sigh} It’s hard to work up a lot of empathy for a person who deliberately kills herself with a toxic product. Just really hard.

Arfa -EEEK!!!

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OMG! Is there a reason I can’t keep track of dates and times?  Some sort of learning disability? WHAT?

Moment of panic just now: Calendar seemed to say I missed an appointment with WonderDentist.

Eeek thrash bang thrash eeeeek!!! Look stuff up. Call the kid. (He plans to drive me over to the doc’s office.) And…and…nope! It’s not until tomorrow.

Personally, I’d prefer not until the next lifetime…but WTF. At least I haven’t enraged that good man. And tomorrow afternoon I can go over to his place to be made miserable.

Goodie.

Y’know…it seems to me that the older you get, the harder it is to keep track of this kind of ditz.

Why?

Do you really get stupider as you age? Or what?

Actually, I think as you age you just plain get sick and tired of it all. The beloved dentist, for example: I would be happy if I never had to see him again!

Well, maybe over cocktails would be nice. But at his office, in his leather chair? Not. So. Much.

Oh well.

So my son was enraged because I interrupted his workflow by calling him in a tizzy. Just you wait, kid! Give yourself another 40 years, and you’ll know how it feels. 😀

 

Lone Wolf Howls at Moon…

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Aaa-rooooooo!  Leave me alone, goddamit!!! SNAP BITE!

LOL! Wednesday: Not sure whether this is a Cleaning-Lady Day. But I don’t think it is. Sure as Hell hope not, anyway.

Talk about your ingrates, eh?! Here I am, loafing in a spotless house, and WHINING because the person who keeps the damn place spotless is likely to show up and interfere with my beloved solitude.

What a nut case, eh?

Ay-yup. I am such a hopeless loner that I even resent having someone around when that someone cleans my house and hauls out the trash and makes my life altogether tolerable.

😮

My son is coming over this morning to drag me to the dentist. 

A crown fell off a molar. In theory, the dentist should have to in$tall another crown. But…waaaaiiit-a-minit here! Look at that tooth and you see nothing wrong with it!!! No cavity. No filling. No busted faces.

The alarming implication is that the dentist installed a totally unnecessary crown, and gouged me several hundred bucks for the privilege. So we’ll be having a little discussion with him today.

And boyoboy, am I ever NOT looking forward to that exchange.

So between the cleaning chaos and the looming dental confrontation, this is not shaping up to be a great day.

Ugh!

Hotter than the Hubs!

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Seriously: hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. At 7:20 in the morning, the shaded(!) back-porch thermometer reads 85 degrees…but you couldn’t prove that by me. Ask me, and I’ll guess 95 to 100.

* Wet.
* Overcast.
* And hot.

A humid day like this is NOT a typical Arizona number. Generally, “it’s a dry heat,” as the locals like to say.

Ruby and I: just back from dragging the human around the park. Sweltered!

This morning M’hijito is dragging me to the dentist, lhudly scream Goddam. A crown fell off a back molar. So won’t THAT be fun!

Frankly, I don’t think it needs any repair work…because when you look closely at it you see it probably never needed a crown to begin with. I suspect a lot of these li’l procedures are actually procedures on your pocketbook.

That is almost certainly the case here. You can see, absent the crown, that the tooth was never cracked and probably never broken, more than at the level of a small chip. If it were up to me, I’d go on about my business and leave it alone.

But when you get old, things are not up to you. The next generation takes over and pushes you around like you were an eight-year-old.

😀  Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. In some aspects, I probably do operate about on the level of an eight-year-old. After a certain number of decades, you lose patience with all the hassles, all the bullshit, all the unnecessary expenses, all the gouges and just let it go. And frankly: I’m long past that point.

LOL! One benefit of living at McCormick Ranch would be that it would be too far from my son’s house for him to justify traipsing across the city to accompany me to every little event and crisis. And you may be sure that if I were out there today, I would not be trudging to the dentist this morning. 😀

Lazy Hazy Crazy Day of Summer…

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LOL! Twenty after 9:oo in the morning — Sunday  — and the Human & the Hound are back from our daily perambulation of the neighborhood park.

It’s a nice, grassy spread, surrounded by rows of upper-middle-class homes. Very pretty, nice and quiet: Dawg Hevvin!

Today, though, is hot, stuffy, and overcast.

To perfect that scenario, somehow my son arranged a flickin’appointment with the flickin’ Mayo Clinic…for TODAY. Yeah. Sunday. 

Why escapes me. Just now, nothing is ailing me (except a sore hip, no doubt acquired by sleeping cattywampus).

Whatever the reason for this scheduled visit, I sure as hell could do without it. I’ve come to truly hate traipsing to the Mayo, clear across the north Valley, halfway to freakin’ Payson. It’s almost an hour’s drive out there, through homicidal traffic (you ain’t seen a homicidal driver till you’ve seen a Phoenix driver!). So…half the day is gonna be blown away for…what?

Far as I can tell: for nothing.

Besides the drive, of late another thing that has concerned me has been apparent misdiagnoses. The last few oh gawd! oh dear! diagnoses that have emanated from there turned out to have altogether different causes than the Mayodocs claimed.  Given some tests, the Mayodocs’ frantic claims turned out to be…wrong…wrong…and dead wrong.

So…I get less and less comfortable with these journeys to the East Side of Eden. And increasingly wary about diagnoses that may or may not be right.