Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

And Another Lovely Evening…

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THIS evening made all the lovelier by the absence of perps fleeing cops in helicopters. 😀

Ruby and I perambulated our part of the Hood, plus Lower Richistan and Upper Richistan. What a hoot, right before Christmas.

The locals LOVE to decorate these old houses and their half-acre yards with their mature, beautiful trees. Kids are playing outside. Parents are puttering. Trees and shrubs and eaves and roofs are gussied up with colored lights for Christmas. It’s just a delight to walk around here at dusk.

A December evening in central Arizona really is lovely, except in the (unlikely!!) event of rain. The dusk sky glows in radiant shades of blue and orange. The air is sweetly temperate. The old 1950s houses are graciously handsome. And the kids are….

OHHHH! CORGIIII!!!!!

LOL! Here comes another kid!

My goodness, how the local urchins adore short, plushy, pointy-eared little dogs! Fortunately, she adores them back. So an evening walk can easily morph into a 45-minute love-fest.

That’s life in the ‘Hood. 😀

Sittin’ on the dock of the…uh…pool…

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Staggeringly gorgeous weather. This is one of the best times of the year in Phoenix…and most times of the year are exceptionally good. 😀

Thinking about…

* My father retiring.

He figured he had it made: their little house paid off plus enough in savings to carry him and my mother through the rest of their lives, even after they paid for my college education.

Heh…he didn’t understand about the vagaries of the stock market.

Poor man! He about had a coronary when the market crashed. As far as I could tell, he didn’t understand that if he just held steady, eventually the market would rally and all would be well. And yea verily, that did happen…but not until after he’d expended a great deal of adrenaline. And lost quite the pile of cash.

* The Mayo Clinic and how much I’m coming to distrust it.

They do a blood test on me; then come back to me (and the highly vulnerable son) squalling EEEK EEEK!! You have diabetes! EEEK!!!!!

No, I don’t. Been here, done this…let’s do it again…

Now I present myself to another doctor. “Will you please check me for diabetes? It’s in the family.”

JAB! STAB!! Test test test…

“No. You don’t have diabetes. You have prediabetes, which may possibly some day evolve into diabetes. Or not. This is why you should have annual physicals and they should indeed include testing for diabetes. But so far, you’re not very close to Death’s door.”

Uh huh. Same wind I’ve heard blow before.

* The beloved Young Dr. Kildare

Awww, poor babe. He’s fled the profession again. Come to find out, he’s no longer at the practice where I found him most recently, just up the road in suburban Sunnyslope. They ain’t a-tellin’ about where he’s gone.

My guess is, it’s far, far from the practice of medicine, and pretty damn far from Phoenix, too.

*****

Time passes a bit

****

It’s only 6:00 p.m., but my! What a beautiful — even glorious — evening.

A beautiful and gracious dusk elides into darkness, the room-temperature night air holding steady through the hours.

Arizona: what a place!

 

Kissy-Wissy…icky wicky???

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Bangin’ around, looking for a church whose choir someone of my modest skills could join. One whose customs and thinking do not make someone of my modest religiosity nuts.

Far’s I can tell, if any such institutions exist, they’re few and far between.

The choir at the Episcopal church where I sang for some years first dissolved (after the choir director left) and the came back much morphed into…what?????? Nothing I could sing for, thankyouverymuch.

The choir at the Unitarian church where I’ve been known to hang out is all very…{urk}…lovey-dovey. Ohhhh how we love each other. Just keep your hands to yourself, dammit! Love love lovey-dovey and NO, I am NOT gonna kiss you, for godsake!

Baptists are…well…you know: Baptists.

Catholics? I’ll never make the traditional desiderata.

So. Far’s I can tell, I’m done with choral singing. One option, I suppose, is to take a voice class at one of the local community colleges. Do I really wanna do that? And pay for the privilege? And once I have an AA in music — heavy on communal voice — THEN what?

Makes me sad. Very sad.

 

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a…NUT CASE!

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LOL! Yes, I do believe we’ve ascertained that it’s a nut case, abetted by an industrious bird.

Or…who knows?…maybe  by a space alien.

Just now I’m perched on a kitchen chair in the garage, trying to ascertain whether a persistent beep!… beep!… beep!… is coming from the house-wide smoke alarm system, from something gone on the fritz in the car, or from the resident fruitcake’s imagination.

😀

And lo! It begins to appear that the perp is actually a bird. WHAT bird remains unknown: this is not a call I’ve ever heard from the local avian set…and I’ve lived here since 19 and aught-62. I think I would have learned to recognize a fire-alarmish beep coming from a bird.

****

Well… Yeah. And No.

It IS the flickin’ smoke alarm. Not the giant garage-based house-wide fire alarm system, but one of the cute little portable smoke alarms that you attach to your ceiling with a Velcro strip.

It’s sitting out there chirping to itself as we sit here, type, and guzzle coffee.

😀

So in a couple of hours — whenever I get off my duff, whenever the Ace Hardware store is open, I’ll have to traipse out and buy a new smoke alarm. Then figure out how to get it back up in the garage.

If that one is crapping out, it means all the rest of them are on the verge of crapping out, too. Hmmm…let’s see…. Hmmmmmm….

Not to say Uh oh….

Come to get up off my duff and check, and what do I see but that most of the li’l cheapo fire alarms have long been retired from service. FIVE of them have been removed from their stations.

WTF?

Welp. That’ll be a li’l chore for Bila the Handyman. He can climb up on a ladder and replace the darn things. Won’t he be pleased!

They must have crapped out one at a time, with lengthy periods in between. Otherwise I would’ve noticed that we…uhhhh….no longer have a functioning smoke alarm in most of the rooms.

/eyeroll/

Ohhhh well. I’ve got a bunch of other chores for him to do. So this will enrich his month’s income nicely.

*****

Along comes, of all things, a stray German shepherd!

She comes trotting up the street to the front patio and peers in the gates.

Ruby is beside herself with fascination. Neither dog makes a move to eat the other one.

Hmmmmm…. She has no collar. No ID. oboyoboy would i like to have THAT dawg!

uh oh… That’s not nice, is it?

Oh well. Before I can engage a plan to steal her, she trots off down the street.

The damn smoke alarms continue to beep. I begin to suspect it’s not the little portable alarms, but the ancient house-wide alarm that some previous owner installed, lo these many years ago.

I have NO idea how to turn it off or even if it can be turned off (thought it was turned off at the time I moved in here).

Seems like if you could shut it off, it would’ve been turned off by a prior owner, since it was nonfunctional when I appeared on the scene.

Cripes. The wandering pooch is after the neighbor’s stray cat. Oh well…it gets them both outta my yard, anyway.

The beeping continues. Could it be a bird, cheeping outside?

Hm. Anything’s possible. I guess.

If so, it’s a bird with an alto cheep. That’s kinda weird.

One of those days…

A Seller’s Personality

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Yes, I do love driving around and around, looking at real estate...occasionally even getting out of the car and touring an open house.

It’s a trait I seem to have inherited from my mother. She also loved to look at open houses — in Southern California, before we moved to the desiccated spaces of lovely Arizona. Great fun, it is: to look at what’s selling for how much, and how the other two-thirds live.

She could have been exceptionally good at the job, because she did have a saleswoman’s personality: friendly, empathetic, interested in other people.

My house: perfect for two people. Good for two people and one or two kids. Probably tolerable for two adults and as many as four kids. Six would be pushin’ it…but an enthusiastic parent could do it. I suppose.

There’s so much good fun to look at, here in the ‘Hood.

Just got back from Ruby’s evening perambulation. We have to walk around the large central park, which encompasses several acres. This evening as we traipsed past, we got to watch a couple of serious soccer games in progress.

Several Latin American leagues show up at the park, come evening. These appear not, by and large, to be Mexican, but probably clubs from South America. The play soccer, they play soccer, and they play soccer…with élan. Great fun to watch them. If I had no dog in tow, if I had nothin’ else to do…I’d stop and watch a whole game. Could I converse with them in Spanish? More or less. But Portuguese? Prob’ly not so much. But oh my: they’re fun to watch.

What does that have to do with selling houses? Prob’ly nothing…except, I suppose, you have to like people and you have to engage their doings in order to persuade them to buy things from you. Especially expensive things.

Brrrrrrrrrrr!!!

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Not to say Grrrrrrrr!

Thursday, November 7

It’s amazingly cold out there on the back patio: down to a bone-shivering 45 degrees.

😀

Dontcha wish you lived in Arizona, where people think 60 degrees is too cold to get outta bed?

At 9 a.m. — well before it, actually — Ruby and I have circumnavigated the park. The neighbors fall all over themselves when they see her: ooooooooohh!!! CORGI!!!!! Which is kinda funny, in a weird way. Tony the Romanian Landlord is out shortly after dawn, proselytizing: he’s become a Seventh-Day Adventist and wishes to spread the Word. This project has vastly mellowed him, to the extent that it looks like he and I are in danger of becoming friends again.

****

Friday
November 8

This never got posted…and… Now it’s a day later & a dollah short…and… Ohhh well.

Still cold here, but overheated in California. The news media, Masters of Drama, make it sound like the whole damn state is burning down. Got all worried about La Maya and La Bethulia, who are hanging out in their luxurious beach-side trailer home in the vicinity of Monterey.

They say, though, that there’s nothing to worry about: the fires are a good distance from them and not headed their way.

Sooo we’re told…  and…

Soooo glad not to be living there anymore…. 😀

Actually, when we weren’t in San Francisco, my parents and I lived in  Long Beach, the garden spot where I was born, lo those many years ago. That place, being mostly block and plaster walls and asphalt roofs, is not at all susceptible to burning down the residents’ ears.

Could shake down, though.

We had a pretty serious earthquake in SoCal while I was in high school. It sent us all scurrying under our desks. Totally terrorized my mother.

***

Friday

Looks like this never got posted! That’s weird. I’m fairly certain, in my senile way, that I did post it.  Ohhh well….

Another day has passed, and again the grey hours of the early morning are extremely cold. Uhmmm…well, for Arizona, that is.

My feet are frozen. The dog is starving. Neither of us has been walked. Need to get off the bed and start charging around. And so, AWWAYYYYY!