Coffee heat rising

Hotter Than the Hubs!

No: I kid you not: it really IS hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there on the front sidewalk. Hotter than that on the asphalt pavement.

Fortunately, we still have enough of our marbles to stay off the ashphalt! 😀

Just back from circumnavigating the neighborhood. Spavined a tendon in an ankle a couple days ago. It’s getting better…and  now  needs to be exercised gently with some regular walking.

So…out the door, with our kewl Walking Stick in hand.

Excellent! No strain, no pain on the sore paw. Well…except for the extravagant heat. Wunderground claims it’s 108 out there just now…but waddaya bet Wunderground’s thermometers are not sitting on an asphalt road?

Thinking, contemplating to pass the hiking time…. Would I, Could I like to be back in San Francisco?

Well, yeah. Actually, I’d like to be in Berkeley, where my late relatives used to live. Pretty little suburb. Nifty gourmet grocery store up at the top of the hill, next to the tunnel where the light rail came in from the East Bay. Miss it.

Miss it a lot. But…

* Realistically, I couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area.
* Realistically, my son is here and I ain’t movin’ away from him.
* Realistically, I couldn’t afford California income taxes.
* Realistically, I couldn’t afford the nice warm clothes one needs when living there.

So…get used to HOT! 😀

O’course, I’m already used to hot, having grown up in lovely Saudi Arabia, and having been planted in Arizona at the age of 17.

So: kwitcher bellyachin’ lady. You ain’t movin’ anywhere!

😀

Exceptionally Yucky Day!

Yes: I stupidly elected to take the Li’l Dawg for a walk, along about 8:00 a.m.  When we say “stupid,” when it came to that maneuver, we DO mean “stupid”!

Exceptionally unpleasant day. Hot. Humid. The air so thick you could swim through it. About as ugly a morning as you can imagine.

No one at the park this morning: other locals having better sense than I. Ditto the neighborhood streets. All the other humans and their dogs are holed up in their air-conditioned digs.

Reminds me of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Where we lived — on the shore of the Persian Gulf — we got days like this all summer. Hot. Muggy. Ugly.

My mother, an erstwhile Upstate New York girl, was unutterably miserable there. Me: I didn’t know any better. I was only a little kid. That place — that hideous place — was just life, the universe, and all that.

***

Hope we’re not slated to do anything today. Don’t see anything on the calendar.

That, alas, doesn’t GUARANTEE that we’re free of jaunting, junketing, and time-wasting.

Ugh. I cannot deal with another pointless doctor’s appointment. Nor can I deal with another 40-minute drive to the Mayo Clinic.

It’s too hot to walk to the grocery store (my son having purloined my car).

Too expensive to visit my favorite computer store.

Too far to walk to the Phoenix Mountain Park, there to climb hills through the scorching heat.

Too hot to climb hills anywhere through the scorching heat.

My son was going to put the new pool vacuum equipment together. That didn’t get done over the weekend. If I had my act together, I’d call Pool Dude and ask him to do that. But…act? what act???

When Pool Dude visits — as he does once a week or so — he cleans that pool himself. As long as we don’t get a dust storm (which also includes leaves and debris), the pool stays clean between his junkets. So I feel little urgency to jump up and down and nag my poor son to get over here and put that vacuum into action.

***

Daydreaming of my college boyfriend, an Eastern European fella. Well, he had been born and raised in the US, and so as far as he and I were concerned, he was a 100% red-blooded American boy. My parents, chauvinists to the core, thought otherwise. They considered him a foreigner, an alien, most decidedly not a candidate for the fatherhood of their grandchildren.

My, how they hated Paul. I adored him, and if they’d kept their mouths shut, we undoubtedly would have married.

They didn’t, though — keep their mouths shut, that is. They complained and griped and hollered and threatened….  Yeah: they threatened to disinherit me if I dared to marry the guy.

I finally folded and sent him on his way.

Found him on the Internet. He looks happy! And I surely hope he is.

He became an administrator at the University of California. Had we married, I would have landed a mighty fine sinecure there, or failing that (conflict of interest, y’know), would have found a tenure-track job with one of the state colleges. But when it became evident that if he and I married, I would never see my parents again, I sent him on his way.

Was that a wise thing to do?

Dunno. To this day, I do not know. I dearly loved the man. His sites on the Internet show a happy-looking family man…if I were the wife in one of those photos, I’d be happy-looking, too.

Oh, well!

Yahoo! SAVED!!!

By golly, despite this morning’s earlier rumination, I discovered I’m NOT out of coffee after all. 

Yahoooo!!!   That means I don’t have to leave the house in this morning’s gawdawful humid heat. A whole bag of coffee beans resides in the freezer!

And you know what that means:

Yeah:  LOAFING. 

It’s a perfectly horrible day for walking around to the uptown stores: hot and stuffy and wet. Here at 8:15 in the morning, Ruby and I have already made an early perambulation of the ‘Hood. Humid, soggy…miserable morning.

We have a steak in the fridge: enough to invite M’hijito to dinner, or to load my own plate for two days. A lovely slice of salmon resides in there, too… So if M’hiito does come over this evening, there’ll still be plenty for tomorrow’s feast, without having to make another grocery-store run.

So. We shall see how things shake out….;

ANOTHER insanely hot day!

{chortle!} Yea, verily: some of us  have NO measurable IQ points!

Just stumbled back in the house from peregrinating around the neighborhood in the noonday heat.

Hey! Why not? It’s only 105 degrees out there!

No IQ, eh?

Ohhhhh well. At least I got the desired exercise.

Tony the Romanian Landlord caught up with me in his car. Handing out his religious propaganda!

boyoboy! 

WHY do people do that? Do they seriously think they can convert you to their faith by pestering you?

I assume he does: otherwise he wouldn’t bother. 😀

Certainly is annoying, though.

It is seriously hotter than the hubs of Hades just now! Got back to the house without fainting dead away…some kinda miracle, I reckon.

I had fantasized that I might walk down to one of the three nearby grocery stores to pick up a couple of idle necessities. But…ahhh…. No! Nope! No!Way too hot to hike several blocks and then haul a couple bags of loot back home.

Will have to wait till dawn cracks tomorrow. The Sprouts opens at 7:00 a.m. And I think the Albertson’s may, too. If I’m at the door as they unlock the place, I should be able to grab some loot and then get back to the house before the heat is at the make-you-faint level.

Daydreaming about my long-late grandmother. She was a fast one! Apparently she would fu*k anything that had two feet, and some that had more than that.

My mother once related a story of coming home from school to her grandmother’s house, walking into the living room, and finding her own mother on the floor — in action — with a current paramour. My mother was a grade-school kid at the time and had no idea of what they were up to! 😀

Her first adventure in sex ed, apparently.

If I’m not mistaken (big IF), the grandmother tossed the floozy out, having learned from my young mother of the day’s shenanigans.

Often I wonder what on earth you’d do if you had a daughter who was mentally damaged in the sex department — as appears to have been the case with my mother’s wild-a$$ed mother. You certainly couldn’t have her around an adolescent child.

So…yeah: I believe the grandmother evicted her daughter at that point. Really….what else could she have done? Evidently, the younger woman was mentally ill — to the point where she had little or no control over her behavior. The only way to protect the girl, one figures, would be to show the mother the door.

Welp….it’s too hot to breathe in here just now. So it’s off to the bedroom with a phalanx of fans working. Away!!!

Hotter than the Hubs…

Out the door before 7 this morning. Figured if Ruby and I got an early start, we could get back before the cleaning lady and the babysitter show up.

That appears to have been the case. No sign of any visiting women when we stumbled through the thick, wet, hot air to the front door. That’s something, anyway. I guess.

Hotter than the hubs out there. 

It may not be objectively so hot, but it’s wet and muggy and icky outside. Even Ruby, who normally wants nothing other than a beloved Doggy-Walk, was kinda reluctant to proceed.

Ugh. What I want today is just to be left alone.

But if I understand the new routine and the hideous new schedule correctly, THAT is not to be. My future apparently consists of a long series of babysitters. Women who come in and watch me. In my home. All day.

LOL! I’d run away to Sun City if I could. But don’t think that would succeed…m’hijto would just send the old-folks’ gendarmes after me. Then I’d find myself locked up in an old-folkerie.

My father moved to Sun City because the prospect of mausoleum-like silence appealed mightily to him. Seriously: Imagine a man who hates the sound of children laughing and playing…  That was my daddy!

Now, in his defense, I never had to work the swing shift, laboring all night and trying to sleep all day.

*****

Argha!  Babysitter showed up in the middle of the scribbles above.

😀

She IS a nice lady. I would find her particularly charming were I not a hopeless lone wolf. My problem is simply that I do NOT like people.

Growing up, I was the weird little kid: the girl who wanted to be an astronomer, never a mommy standing in the kitchen baking cookies. As you may recall from your own upbringing, “weird” kids are universally despised, and so I was treated cruelly by nine out of ten of the little darlings with whom I grew up.

And the result of that was a general dislike and distrust of other people.

Hilariously, our old-lady’s babysitter has a great deal of charm and is highly personable. That means, of course, that I’m reduced to having to behave myself. 😀  It also means I actually kinda enjoy her company.

Turns out she likes little kids. So…I’d love to bring her to the park, where Ruby the Corgi and I take our lengthy morning walk. Before office hours start, the park is full of young parents pushing their little ones around in strollers. It’s such a hoot! The li’l kids are hopelessly adorable, and the parents exude charm.

Just now, though, it’s HOT and HUMID and overall exceptionally icky out there. So we’ll have to wait until the weather calms a bit to haul her over there. 😀

Wunderground tells us it’s 103 outside now, at 16 percent humidity. I’d say it’s gotta be wetter than that: just ambling up the sidewalk, you break out in a flooding sweat.

Exploring Sun City on Zillowugh! Truly, I did hate living out there after my parents dragged me along when they retired, following my junior year in high school. Fortunately, I got into the University of Arizona in Tucson a year early, so I escaped Sun City within a few weeks of our arrival there. But even the relatively few weeks and months that I had to spend there: ugh, indeed!

But oh! My mother dearly loved it. 

No kidding: she thought Sun City was about the best invention ever to come along. Their little two-bedroom house was my father’s gift to her: a thank-you for the 10 unholy years she spent with him in gawdawful Saudi Arabia, and for the dozen or more remaining years that she supported him and loved him and housewifed for him, between the time they married in Southern California and the time they came back to the United States some 20 years later.

You couldn’t give me the place. When SDXB moved out to Sun City, he invited me to come along. I declined.

Nothing exactly wrong with it… Especially if you don’t mind hate and exclusiveness and whitey-whiteness and the roar of F-16’s blasting through the sky starting at 6:00 in the morning. Not my style…

So here I am in lovely, sweaty North Phoenix. Missing the boyfriend. Absent our friends. Wishing I lived somewhere else…but not knowing where that might be.

Well…yeah, I do: the San Francisco Bay Area. More specifically, Berkeley or Sausalito, where my relatives lived. But…har har!!! I couldn’t even begin to afford to live there. Besides, my son lives here…and so here is were I’m staying. 

Yipes!!!!! Hotter than the Hubs…

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!