Coffee heat rising

House & Yard

Back at the Ranch…in the nick of time

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GAAAAAHHHH!  Go ahead: just try to sit down while the coffee steeps!

Hah. we say to that. Hardy-har-har!

Comin’ on to 8:00 of a VERY soggy morning. Thunder rolling. Clouds lurking. RRRR-O-O-A-A-R!!!! Just made it back in the house from this morning’s doggy-walk….

How can I count the ways…?

Seriously, this is one weird morning. We’re right at 8:00 a.m. and it’s so dark out there you’d guess it was around 6:00. Water all over the back porch: it must have rained during the night, ’cause it missed us while Ruby and I were traipsing around the ‘Hood.

Somebody’s burglar or fire alarm was wailing away…they must be out of town. Or all dead, presumably murdered by their alarm’s visitor. WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU !!!! What a racket! 

Inside our house, we can’t hear that serenade, though. Just the KER-BOOOOOOOM! of the present thunderstorm.

Man! It’s really roaring away out there! Wunderground predicts a high of 86 with a 98%chance of precip. That would seem to translate to HOT AND WET. 

Uh oh. Lawn blower racket. 

Puuuleeeze, Gawd! TELL me that’s not Gerardo’s boys banging around the yard!!!!!

Nope: they’re across the street, lucky guys. Thanks, God!

How would you like to be trying to mow and blower up a 1/4-acre yard as the sky is roaring at you? Sometimes even the most crabby-making days look just fine compared to someone else’s fine day….

Haunted!

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LOL!  Ya just think some damfool ailment is gone, and wooooooOOO, like Caspar the Ghost it’s b-a-a-a-c-k!!!

Here I thought the hip pain was magically healed…gone…free of limping and aching and whining!!!!!

Uh. No.

It’s back now, and with a vengeance.

What DID I do to bring it back?

Nothing, that I can think of. Just sitting here, loafing and playing with the computer. Get up to go to the bathroom and OOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!

By damn, I can barely hobble across the room!

No idea what kicked it off.

* Not sitting in any goofy position
* Not hiking around the neighborhood with the dawg
* Not loafing in the bed cattywampus
* Not scrubbing the floors
* Not climbing on ladders
* NOTHING!!!!!

And now, here we are: hurting like HELL!

DAYUM! I was gonna hike across Main Drag West to haunt the computer store. But now…well…I’d be surprised if I can walk that far. And if I can…whether I can walk all the way back home.

{sigh}

If I were a grown-up, I would get into the pool and exercise the thing a bit. And that might work the pain out.

Or…heh…it might cripple up the damn hip enough to leave me stuck in the drink.

So much for that idea….

Once I get up and start to move around, it feels better. Not cured, but not crippling either. So I assume (hope) it’s nothing serious.

This morning: discovered online that the Romanian Landlord has a nursing home of some kind, established on one of the residential streets to the south of us. Interesting. I’ve heard that Romanians tend to get into the nursing home and care business…didn’t realize he was doing that. Last I heard, he’d closed down the reform school for juvenile delinquents.

That one must have caused way too much trouble for the poor guy. You just can’t imagine how much static flapped out of that enterprise! He being no fool, he recognizes which side of the bread is buttered, so within a few months he closed that one down. Right now, he’s renting the house to a very bland young couple…and frankly, I think that’s a very smart move on his part.

As long as they pay the rent, he makes a profit on the place. And so far, they’ve been quiet and inoffensive. Let’s hope they stay that way…

DOUBLE Dayum!!!  Dare to sit down (wouldn’tcha think by now I’d know better?) and here comes Gerardo’s crew, descending on both the back yard and the front yard at once. ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR…that’ll be a hundred bucks.

Think o’that. A hundred dolla for about 30 minutes of work.

Y’know, he’s jacked up his price. Now…it’s true, costs are going up everywhere. So he probably NEEDs to increase his billing. But dayum!!! A HUNDRED DOLLARS for thirty minutes of charging back and forth around the yard???????

True, they do an awesome job. But…that seems like a lot for not very much time.

On the other hand, he does have four guys roaring around out there. So in theory, it’s really two hours’ worth of a single yard dude’s labor. But gosh.

It really does make a box in the sky look good. 

{sigh} I imagine the proposed high-rise apartment on North Central Avenue would have its associated monthly costs. Probably not a lot less than a hundred bucks — trash pick-up, hall clean-up, window washing, receptionist’s time, security guard, underground garage maintenance…yeah. Probably not a lot less than Gerardo bills.

But…geez!

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Beloved Neighborhood, Beloved Neighbors

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The ineffable Josie was out in her front yard, yanking weeds as Ruby and I ambled back home from our morning circumnavigation of the park.

Josie lives in SDXB’s old house. She came up from the daunting slums of South Phoenix — the house purchased by the city and donated to her after the city glommed her property to build an airport runway. (What a place, eh?) I do enjoy Josie: a denizen of an entirely different culture. Hope she hangs around for as many years as I last here. 😀

Meanwhile, neighbors were walking their dogs at the park. The sky is dappled with low-hanging cumulus, incredibly beautiful in the dawn light. Weather is on the high side of warm, humid, a bit sticky. But not really uncomfortable. Yet.

I do love this place.

And do NOT want to be moved out of here. How exactly I’m gonna manage to “age in place” with my son already beginning to lobby to move me to an old-folkerie kinda escapes me.

But…we shall see. I haven’t been legally declared non compos, so I imagine (hope) I’ll be able to stay put until such time as I can barely stumble from the bedroom to the bathroom. Or until I die, whichever comes first.

When I first moved into the ’Hood, back in the Dark Ages, a number of elderly women lived in these houses, on their own. One was right next door to my first house here. No doubt into her 80s, she was a lively character. Every day, she’d be outside blowering and sweeping her patio or fiddling with the yardwork.

I want to be that lively character. 

Now, it’s true: I don’t enjoy yard work. But I can afford to hire people to keep up the property:

* Yard dudes
* Pool dude
* Arborist
* Cleaning lady
* Electrician
* Mechanic…

On and on. So with any luck, I hope to stay put until I die. That would be ideal.

Second best would be to hang in here till I have a stroke and lose track of who and where I am.

And yeah: one can only hope…

Meanwhile: what a GORGEOUS morning. High cumulus glowing white and pearl-gray by the dawn sunlight. Temperature: perfect. Kids and dogs outside playing: moms and dads watering yards and getting ready to fly off to work. Crew of workmen heaving around the new mansion someone is building in Lower Richistan.

Amazing.

Why would anyone ever wanna live anywhere else???

Round and Round They Go…

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And where they bite, no one knows. ARF!

Actually, this morning’s junket around the park was uneventful. Quiet. Arfifarious. Ruby declined to try to eat any of our fellow dog-walkers’ companions. (Either that, or the dog-walkers have finally wised up a bit…) Weather was hot, humid, icky — reminiscent of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.

Mornings like this remind me of oooohhhh how glad I am that I no longer live out there! What a gawdawful place!

Seriously: a swampy morning like this would be S.O.P. over there. Useta be: all summer long we’d wake to water dripping off the eaves as though it had rained half the night…under a clear blue sky. That’s how humid it was: the air SO WET that water would condense out of it and piddle off the eaves like rain.

LOL! Swamp or no, the park is always fun…or at least pleasant. This morning we encountered a handsome young father pushing his obscenely adorable baby along in a carriage. Awwwww! What could be cooler, eh? 

😀

Well. Maybe “cool” wasn’t exactly the term. But he and his urchin were indisputably charming.

Otherwise…what? Well…one “what” is that, as we hiked along a particularly affluent street in Lower Richistan, I was suddenly struck by the resemblance between the upscale section of the Hood and a historic Phoenix district called Palmcroft.

That tract is part of the larger, also highly historic area called Encanto: a place full of gorgeous old houses dating back as far as the 1920s.

Our area is much newer…but here in the 21st century, no one would dast to call it “new.” The houses are edging on to “historic” themselves, many of them very pretty, all of them handsomely maintained. The Young and the Affluent do adore “historic” houses, and they flock in here to buy them…bearing well-stuffed pocketbooks.

This pushes real estate prices up and up and up. I couldn’t even begin to buy a house down near the park — an area that I could easily have afforded a decade or so ago, when I moved in here.

Therein lies a main reason that I want to stay in this house till I croak over: if I can leave the place to my son, he’ll be able to afford to go anywhere he pleases. 

  • Fancy-Dan Scottsdale: no problem
  • Ritzy Paradise Valley: call in the movers!
  • Back to his dad’s home town, Grand Junction, Colorado: off to the scenic upscale(!) hills
  • San Francisco, where each of us privately believes we belong: California, here we come!

You name it, he can be there. Or…he may choose to just stay here and enjoy this handsome upscale tract.

And it is an exceptionally pleasant place to live. Centrally located. Handsomely built. Mature landscaping. Gorgeous park. Adorable kids. And nowadays: an increasingly awesome public transit system.

Seriously: you can live here now without a car. And, incredibly enough, I do! 

Such are one’s thoughts as one’s dog tugs its human around our park. I love it here…my dawg loves it here…we ain’t movin’…isn’t that the cutest li’l kid you ever saw!… I want my kid to get this place, lock stock & barrel…

Ripped!

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…and ripped off?  

Criminey! Just had to order a new set of queen-sized sheets. The pair I’ve been using ripped up the middle (that’s a new one on me!!). Forhevvinsake: FIFTY-FIVE BUCKS for one set of cotton sheets!

This, because the G.D. Mayo Clinic took away my driver’s license, so I can’t in any sane way get to a department store to buy the damn things.

Is this weird (not to say infuriating)? I have never had a sheet RIP right out from under me. It looks like probably a toenail somehow got caught on it, so that in moving around in my sleep I pulled the fabric apart.

Grrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!  

Yes, I do have another set of sheets. But only ONE such set. Those quacks at the Mayo have invalidated my driver’s license(!!!), so I can’t even drive to a store to select a new set.

One needs two sets, so that one set can go in the wash while the Cleaning Lady from Heaven is making the bed with the already clean set.

And yes, I surely should feel grateful that Amazon exists. Ordering the things online is less than perfectly desirable (one would like to see and examine a purchase before dropping $55(!!!!!!!) on it. But it appears that I don’t have much choice.

There is a store within walking distance where you can buy linens. But it ain’t the kind of place where I’m used to buying that kind of stuff, and frankly it gives me pause. So does Amazon, of course: either way, you can’t be sure of the quality you’re getting.

Well…I hope this doesn’t turn into the disaster that I’m expecting. Rather little hope, I must say: when you have to buy something sight unseen, you pretty well guarantee a nice little fiasco for yourself.

A nice expensive fiasco!

Grrr! Makes a Landlord Look Good!

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Here’s another fine hassle to fart with this morning: check all the attic fans to see if they fall into this category.  And thereby need to be replaced….

Arrrggghhhh! This is the kind of BS that makes you feel that renting is a good thing, as opposed to owning your place. If I lived in an apartment — or, hell, if some other poor sucker owned the Shack and just rented it to me — someone else would be trudging around the perimeter eyeballing the roof. In the heat. When they’d druther be taking a nap…

***

Far’s I can see, the Shack is not equipped with these things. Its attic is vented with heat-driven whirligig vents.

Well, that’s something, anyway.

Y’know…much as I do enjoy the Funny Farm, with all its space for the dog and its nifty swimming pool and its central location and its (mostly) cool neighbors, sometimes I think…I just don’t wanna live here. Sometimes I think I’druther live in a nice high-rise apartment, with an awesome view  and an army of hired help doing battle with the maintenance.

Now: what next?

Mwa hah hah! Just you wait!