Coffee heat rising

House & Yard

Yipes!!!!! Hotter than the Hubs…

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Yesh. Hotter for sure than the Hubs of Hades. Just now — coming on to late in the afternoon — it’s A HUNDRED AND NINE DEGREES in the deepest shade of the north-facing back patio. 

Augh, I say to that. AUGHHH!

Sooo…Ruby and I are trapped in the house, at least until the sun goes down.

More likely, until it comes up tomorrow.

I’m totally wilted, and probably should take a nap. But it’s after 4:00 p.m.  If I flop down on the bed now, it’s likely to be midnight before I wake up. And then I’ll be awake for the rest of the night.

😀

Well. That might be a slight exaggeration. But the truth is, it’s pretty much too late for napping now.

So, I reckon the Human will loaf in front of the computer until something resembling bed-time. Then hope for a decent night’s sleep.

Do need to get Pool Dude over here to check on the workings of that contraption. But later. Much later. Tomorrow, for example…

My son dragged me out to the Mayo this morning. GAWD, do I ever hate going to doctors.

LOL! Then, to my astonishment, he took it upon himself to answer some of the doc’s questions and to try to describe my ongoing nuttiness. 😀 That poor doctor!  

Ohhh well. He now has no clue to an accurate report of what’s going on with me. But that seems not to matter. Either he realized that, or he didn’t think whatever my body is doing is very significant. Didn’t order any tests. Didn’t ask me to come back.

RUN!

AWAY!!

{chortle!}

Anyway, it was an annoying traipse, but I felt like I got away pretty much Scot-free. Hooooray!

And…now, at 4:00 in the afternoon, it’s 109 degrees out there in the back yard. Too hot even to jump in the pool!

No doubt, too, the pavement will be too hot for Ruby’s little paws, even after the sun goes down. It can stay unbearably hot here until well after 10 p.m.

So I guess today’s doggy-walk will have to wait until tomorrow morning, along about 5:00 a.m.

But whenever the sun goes down this evening, it’ll be into the drink for the human!

Real Estate Awe

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Wanna see something that’ll drop your jaw? 

Take a look at this mansion…

The place is in Fountain Hills, an upscale tract on the northeast side of Scottsdale.

WHAT A WRECK! And they want four hundred grand for it!

Hey. Fountain Hills is real tony and all that…and yeah, you could walk to the Mayo Clinic from there. But…good lord! EVERYTHING in this shack would have to be renovated, including the pool and the landscaping.

Well. I guess it tellsya: Rich people will let real estate go to wrack and ruin, too. 😀

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But doesn’t it boggle your mind? I mean, when you consider what that place should be worth… Fountain Hills is one of the toniest subdivisions in the Valley — probably in the entire state.

I can’t even imagine letting a place like that…in a location like that!…go down the tubes.

Even if they used it as a rental, it’s hard to believe anyone with half a functioning brain cell would have turned it into a wreck.

Four hundred grand at auction. Hell, I wouldn’t give them four hundred bucks for it. Just imagine what it will cost to restore that place to a livable house in a radically upscale subdivision!

Clicking through the images takes your breath away, doesn’t it?  Really…the best you could do with this place is to level it and build a new house. And that would require you to get your hands on it for one helluva lot less than 400 grand.

Wow!!

Palm Tree Heebie Jeebies

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Should I have those trees taken out?

The WonderAccountants — my neighbors straight across the street — removed the palm trees that were growing along the edges of their pool. And they surely seemed not to regret it…yea, verily, Mr. W.A. was very pleased.

Whose idea was it, in the first place, to plant PALM TREES next to a swimming pool??? They don’t throw enough shade to matter. But what a mess those damn things make!!!

Every year, I’ve got to get someone in here several times per season to shovel out the palm tree debris. And once a year, someone has to climb 50 or 100 feet up each one of the damn things and prune out the dead fronds and seed stuff.

What kind of moron plants a palm tree next to a swimming pool? To say nothing of FOUR goddamn palm trees, which is what we’ve got surrounding that pool in the backyard!

Next big project, I guess, will need to be to hire a lumberjack to come in here and cut those damn things down. My neighbors across the street — the beloved and brilliant WonderAccountants — did exactly that. And they’re pleased with the result.

Accenting today’s palm tree conundrum, we have today’s unholy weather. Incredibly hot. Incredibly humid: 9 percent humidity, saith Wunderground (that, I would say, is conservative).

Truth to tell, though: I dunno that I’ll be staying here long enough to make it worth the cost of hiring someone to come in and chop down those damn palm trees. My son would like to consign me to a cringe-making old-folkerie called the Beatitudes. It’s better, as far as I can tell, than other places like it in the Phoenix area. But…it still is basically a prison.

Still…I hafta admit: it’s hard to see how I could manage staying in my home, on my own, until I reach the Last Breath. The cost of hiring someone to babysit me through these final years would be just brain-banging. Plus…who is going to ride herd on this worthy person? My son, after all, has a job, of all the astonishing things.

So he can’t be here keeping an eye on any such character.

Hm.

Here’s a thought. Wanna see me scare the bejayzus out of a young man?  😀  Picture this:

We could hire a babysitter for me, right?  Only instead of having her come here to ride herd on me, we have me and her go down to my son’s house (he works out of his home) and stay there during the week days.

Voilà! If I can be trained to stay out of his hair, he can do his work, and the sitter can fix lunch and dinner for us both and then drive me back to the Funny Farm.

Doesn’t THAT sound like fun?

😀

Mwa ha ha!

Good(?) Morning, America!

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NINETY-FIVE DEGREES in the shade of the back porch, at 7:00 in the morning!  Hoooleeeee shee-ut!  How hot IS it supposed to get today?

Hmmm….  Saith Wunderground: 108 degrees, with 23% humidity.

Dog and Human are just back from our morning stroll — around the park and through the hood, the air so thick you could swim through it. Yea, verily: it’s mighty hot and sticky out there.

Ohhhh well: at least we’re exercised. After a fashion.

What new horrors are on the calendar?  Checking…

Hmmmm… Doesn’t look like anything. One can only hope…

What I am hoping is that my son doesn’t have one of the housekeeper/babysitters slated to descend on me this morning. What a NUISANCE those women are!

Not through any fault of their own. It’s my eccentricity that creates the problem. I strongly prefer my aloneness. I really, really don’t like people underfoot. And especially not strangers. Not hired help.

Oh, well. If one of the poor dears shows up, I’ll make her drive me to the Sprouts and the Albertson’s. That’ll soak up the better part of her morning, anyway. Then maybe I can pretend to take a nap, which will extract an hour or two of relative privacy.

At any rate, at least the little dawg is exercised, and we got out before the pavement could burn her feet. If there’s any question in your mind about whether this place is a precinct of Hell, all you need to do to resolve that question is to visit in June, July, or August.

I could brain my father for dragging us here when he retired. Too late, though: his brains have been reduced to a pile of ashes. 😀

Seriously, I assumed that we would stay in San Francisco, near my mother’s relatives. Or at least in Southern California, where my parents had lived before we decamped to Saudi Arabia.

Jayzuz! TEN YEARS in that Middle-Eastern Hell-Hole. Can you imagine?

Actually, for my mother and me it was a mere nine years. Toward the end of his planned sojourn out there, she came down with amoebic dysentery. Almost died from it. But she did recover, at which point her doctors told my parents that she needed to get out of Arabia and come back to the States, where she could get better medical care and get away from the endemic parasites.

So, to his infinite disgust, my father had to quit the job that he figured would support him into early retirement. He sent my mother and me to San Francisco (where surviving members of her family lived); stayed in Arabia until the end of his contract (another nine months); and then got a first mate’s job shipping out of the East Bay.

Poor guy! All his plans went down the toilet. He’d figured to spend another year or two in Hell, and then retire — that’s how much Americans got paid out there. But alas, ’twas not to be!

Thank Gawd, from my mother’s and my point of view…

Anyway…the air here is not as soggy this morning as it used to be by dawn’s early light in Araby. But by comparison with what’s normal here, it’s darned sticky!

Lunch at the ‘Que…

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Got a steak and an ear of corn on the grill. But.. WTF? They don’t seem to be cooking!

It is horrifically hot out there in the backyard. The meat and corn oughta cook by themselves: just set ém out on the back table, eh? But they’re hardly browning…surely not charring, that’s for sure!

Hm. The grill is on. There’s plenty of propane. But it’s barely running.

Guess I’ll have to put this stuff on the stove to cook. Then call the BBQ guy to come fix…whatever’s wrong with it.

Goodie! Just what I wanted to do on a 100-degree day!

Arrrgh!!!! I hate computers!!!!!

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Round and round and round and ROUND Robin Hood’s Barn trying to get back online and back into Funny about Money.

WHAT an AGGRAVATING time suck!!!!!!!

Dammit! Now I’m so frustrated and so upset, I’ve forgotten what I was gonna write about!!

LOL! I hate computers. 😀

Ohhh well….  On the subject of nothing much: Ruby and I hiked all over the ‘Hood this evening. Beautiful night. Beautiful houses. We’re incredibly lucky to have landed in this tract.

We walked by one especially lovely house that until recently was occupied by a gentleman who used to sit out in the front yard and putter. He was a sweetie! Apparently he and his wife moved, though…or, more ominously, one of them passed away. No sign of either resident lingers.

They are much missed.

As for their handsome house: it’s for sale.

Too close to Main Drag North for my taste — the noise would be interminable and obnoxious. So, even if I could afford it, I haven’t inquired. And believe me: that house, I could not afford! 😀

Most of the ‘Hood is well outside my price range. Ruby and I live in the low-rent precinct, which is on the top end of what I could afford. Actually, values have shot up since I bought here: what were once normal, middle-class tract houses are now priced on the high side of ridiculous.

Oh well: we’re brought back to the long-range goal: to pass this house along to M’hijito. If I can hang onto it…if I don’t get consigned to some prison for the elderly…he will inherit this paid-off shack, lock stock and proverbial barrel. That will present him with some appealing choices:

* To stay where he is (he has a nice, centrally located house) and sell or rent this house, thereby collecting several hundred grand

* To sell  his own place, get completely out of debt and move into this paid-off castle

* To sell his place, invest the proceeds in the stock market (or some such), move in here, and watch his investments grow

* To sell it all and RUN!

Interesting….