Coffee heat rising

House & Yard

Jobs We’re Glad We Don’t Have…

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Oh, my goodness!!!!!  How DO some folks survive?

Just visited by a lovely plumber, employed by the City of Phoenix. The guy is going around working on the water meters, which reside in holes in the ground in our front yards. As we scribble, Wunderground says it’s a chilly 85 degrees out there (and yeah: that IS chilly for this time of year…), overcast with a 32% chance of rain.

My water meter is installed underground. So the guy has gotta grunt and groan around to get at it. Then do the job. Then put the thing back together. Then get everything re-installed…underground.

Am I impressed by these guys? Lemme tellya impressed. 

He took the contraption apart. Did the work on it. Put it back together. I trotted out to tell him the terlet didn’t seem to be working right. He trudged inside the house. Tested everything. Saw to it that the system was indeed working. And…yeah: trudged back into the heat.

Man! Do I appreciate the work that guy does! Looks like the whole thing is now working perfectly.

Amazing!

Bing Bong!!$$!

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Yeah: come the middle of the lunch hour (you thought you were gonna be allowed to have something to eat??), BING BONG goes the doorbell.

Forgodsake. City water meter guy.

He descends on the equipment. Bop bop bang bang fix fiddle fiddle... They’re gonna bill me for his services, sez he.

Whaddaya bet that’ll be a couple hundred bucks. Or more….

No idea what he was supposedly repairing. No leak. No…nothing that I can tell is on the fritz.

Except, presumably, my bank account….

Where Are Ya Gonna Go?

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So the question of the day is…AM I gonna stay here, in my middle-upscale house in moderately affluent North Phoenix? Or am I gonna sell the house and move into some dreary old-folkerie?

Once again, this morning some sh!thead vandalized a hummingbird feeder in front.

REALLY??? You seriously have nothing to do but sneak onto a neighbor’s front porch and dork with her bird feeders?

Sheee-ut!  What IS the matter with people?

I love my home and I love my neighborhood — by and large love my neighbors, too — and I do NOT want to move into a holding pen for old folks waiting to die.

Yeah, I know: I’m an old folk myself, and yes, I’m just sittin’ here waiting to die, myself. But at least I’m doing those things on MY terms, not according to some institution’s rules.

Speaking of the’Hood, my GAWD, what a gorgeous day! And how do I not want to sit on a 5’x12′ balcony overlooking a parking lot while I sip my morning coffee? Nooooo thankee!

And ohhhh, that little dog! Sitting there with her funny corgi ears upright, soaking in the splendid morning…why would one live where one could not enjoy corgi company?

LOL! What an outrageously gorgeous day!  I should get off my duff, walk over to the Sprouts, and load up on some more edible loot.

But y’know, I’m just too plug-lazy! Seriously: right this moment I can’t work up any enthusiasm for springing to my feet and hiking over to the store. Or for calling the Uber-driving neighbor and putting him up to schlepping me over there.

No. The important order of the day is to loaf. Loafing, loafing, serious loafing!

And y’know: we now have a mechanism that makes that important chore possible. It’s called AMAZON. 😀  Truth to tell, I don’t have to trudge or to taxi to a grocery store or a drugstore. All I have to do is call up Amazon on the laptop, pick out whatever loot I desire, and have it delivered to my front door.

Amazon — seriously — has saved my tail when it comes to living in my home through my dotage. Time after time, now, they’ve sent stuff to me that I would have had to hire a cab to buy, or that I probably couldn’t have found in any store anywhere near my house, here in (un)lovely North Phoenix. Hardly a week goes by anymore that I don’t order something from Amazon.

So the question is: “Where are you gonna go”?  

And the answer is: Right here. 

I’m gonna stay right here in my shack until I keel over face-first, dead as the proverbial doornail. Until that day, if I need someone to help me day-to-day, I’ll hire someone to come in to the house.

Matter of fact, it develops that Wonder Cleaning-Lady has done that in the past. So…I may even be able to hire her! No one new to get used to…no poor soul having to figure out my eccentricities…what could be better?

Sprinkler-Mania!!!

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Well…and Old Bat Mania!  😀  Don’t get old, whatever you do!!!!!

In today’s episode of senility…ohhhhh, this is tooo good! Hang onto your hat! Today’s moment of what planet am i on entailed losing the lawn sprinkler. One of these cute little fellas:

These tiny metal numbers are about my faves, because they are quite small. You can fit them just about anyplace you please, but they emit a grand fountain of water spray, allowing you to water a quarter or half your yard in one swell foop.

But by this afternoon, the one I use all the time was GONE.

So I went to order one up from Amazon. They only cost about six bucks, so in theory this should be no big deal.

Except…every step along the way turned into a SPROOOOINNNGGGGGGG! 

No kidding. Whatever I touched, whatever I tried to do: I screwed it up!  Whaaaa???

FINALLY, after what seemed like endless dorking around, I got the damn thing ordered. Hope I didn’t screw that up… Amazon says it’ll be here tomorrow.

We shall see… /eyeroll/

Still haven’t found the missing number… Given our recent spate of bird-feeder thefts, it may be reasonable to suspect it was stolen. So, dammit…I guess after this, everything that is normally stored outside is going to have to be stashed inside the garage. What a PITA!

Well…made considerably less so by my son’s having purloined the car. 😀 Conveniently, the garage now stands empty. So…there’s plenty of room to store junk like sprinklers and whatnot. And therefore, I reckon I can’t complain. Much.

Who’d’ve thunk it, eh?

The Siege of the Front Yard

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So the sprinkler is running in the front yard, outside the walled patio. It’s the kind of cheap little metal sprinkler that screws on to the end of a hose. So…given our late experiences with our patio thieves, now I need to wait till the watering cycle ends; then RUN out there, unscrew the sprinkler, and bring in inside.

Or at least hide it somewhere in front.

Nahhh….prob’ly bring it in will be safest.

Can you imagine??  Having to run in circles and jump hoops to keep the local morons from stealing ordinary junk like sprinklers and bird feeders?

The hummers’ feeders are now inside, or, to the extent that some of them are still hanging up, ensconced in the backyard.

I’m assuming that any idiot who would steal a hummingbird feeder — over and over and over again! — will soon come along and steal the water sprinklers off the frontyard hose. So…need to let that water run about 20 or 30 minutes; then run outside and rescue the sprinklers from the front-yard hose. Bring them inside and hide them in the garage.

I ask you: How stupid IS this?

Really, it makes living in the Beatitudes old-folkerie look good: someone else can deal with the rampant morons!

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Y’know…this stuff is making me awfully depressed. 

Honestly: what kind of morons steal bird-feeders and lawn sprayers? And do I really want to stay here sharing a neighborhood with jerks like that? Maybe it’s time to move somewhere else!

Problem is, now that I’m old (with a vengeance!), about the only option for moving is to decamp to the Beatitudes: a dreary old-folkerie where they babysit you into the next world. And honestly: that’s not where I want to spend the last months or years of my life! 

Horrors!

Truly: I love my home, and I absolutely positively do NOT want to move into an institution. Horrors, indeed!

Yes, sooner or later it no doubt will be inevitable, unless I’m lucky and I drop dead. But I just want to put off that horrible inevitability as long as possible.

Jerk neighbors who dork with your yard ornaments and your sprinkling system sure as hell don’t make that easy! 😀

Hmmmm…..  Maybe a strategy might be to put up some small, discreet cameras out there. Let them run 24 hours or so. And see if they don’t capture our perps in the act. If I could catch them, I could report them to the police — or to their daddies — and bring a stop to the shenanigans.

 

Morning Gad-About

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Wow! It’s wet and hot over at the park, whence the hound and I just returned. Didn’t realize it was so hot and sticky out, or we probably wouldn’t have started out. Yea verily: once a Dawg has got you into the park, you’re not gettin’ outta there easily! 😀

But whatever the weather, it’s always fun to walk around that upscale neighborhood. One of the houses, harbinger of a long and strange history, is now vacant and under major renovation. They’ve gutted the swimming pool, and it looks like they’ve pulled out just about everything in the home’s interior.

It’s on an upscale and desirable street, but the problem is that, as a corner house, it faces on an east/west mini-main drag that connects with the larger main drag running north/south through  the ‘Hood. This makes for a ton of traffic and repeating serenades from ambulances, fire trucks, and cop cars. Handsome as the house is, it’s not one I would choose to buy. Or live in.

The previous occupants had a kid who got in trouble with the law, and that exploit bankrupted the family. They  lost their home, which has stood vacant for months. Apparently someone finally managed to glom it, and now it’s on its way to renovation and sale.

That young fella is not the first I’ve known to go to jail over a fling in bed with some chickadee. If you have a teen-aged son, teach him to use discretion about jumping into the sack with any female under the age of 21. The risk is just not worth the fun!

But…onward, onward: around the park. Many of those homes are on lots upwards of half an acre, so they’re spread-out and green and handsome and…expensive. It’s a tony part of the neighborhood, indeed.

Guess I’m glad I can’t afford to live over there, though. The park, not surprisingly, attracts any number of undesirables (great place for bums to sleep!), plus there’s always some noisy, nuisancy event going on. Not the best of all possible venues for a private home.