Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Good Morning, America! And…

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…DUCK FOR COVER!

LOL! 8:00 in the morning, and you can hear those damn fighter jets from Luke Air Force Base all the way over here in North Central Phoenix! 

What

A

Racket!

Yes, the Sound of Death is no lullabye. That’s for sure.

People who live in Sun City bitch nonstop about the noise from Luke, right up the road from the Old Folks’ Ghetto. That actually creates SDXB’s job out there: as a semi-retired PR guy for the Air Force, he volunteers to staff the phones in the base’s public relations office. Every morning, rafts of Sun Citizens call in to bellyache about the roar from the jet plane exercises.

Hilariously, my mother used to LOVE that racket. She’d sit on her back porch, there in Sun City, and take her morning coffee to the lullaby of F-16s taking off and landing. “It’s the sound of freedom,” she would coo.

There’s a wild-eyed right-winger for you!  😀

By a weird coincidence, my house was built by the same outfit that built out Sun City. And, although it’s designed for more than two people, it bears a weird resemblance to my parents’ Sun City house:

* gray slump-block walls
* aluminum-framed sliding doors and windows
* asphalt shingle roofing
* sloping roofs over attics

Well, at least we have actual garages. Webb apparently felt a place to put a car was unnecessary for an old f*rt…presumably the new residents would be too old to drive, right?

Well. No. Out there, the houses have cheesily built lean-to carports. STEAL THIS CAR! that sign says…. 😀

Actually, what the local thieves used to do was climb on top of the car, reach up to the carport ceiling, and slide open the door to the attic. From there, they’d hop into the attic, walk across the beams to the living-room or kitchen area, saw a hole in that ceiling, and drop down into the house. From there, they’d steal you blind.

Lovely.

Here, my dowdy li’l Sun City-style house does have an actual garage with an actual garage door. 

LOL! If I’d known this subdivision was built by the same outfit that built Sun City, I wouldn’t have bought a house here. Not on a bet.

But that prejudice notwithstanding…it’s not a bad little shack. Not at all. Construction is sturdy. Design is sensible. Lots are large enough to put plenty of space between you and the neighbor. Alleyways are included, and they’re lined with 8-foot-high block walls.

Sun City has no alleys, and no backyard walls. Take your morning coffee in your backyard, and you can watch your neighbor do the same as the jets scream overhead.

They scream overhead here, too…occasionally. But at least they’re far enough away to put some distance between the natives and the racket-makers.

Ugh!! This is gonna be another beautiful day in Arizona: 28 percent humidity under clear (hot!!) skies.

In the Department of Jobs You’re Glad You Don’t Have, Mr. and Mrs Wonderaccount (right across the street) have hired a team of painters to spiff up their shack. I need those guys over here, too. But…well…luring them to my house would require me to get up off my duff. And I ain’t about to do that!

Snoop Snoop Human

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Here we are on Truthfinder, searching out dirt on an old neighbor and sorta-friend of mine. Their “search” is in-freaking-terminable! On and on and on and on….  And, as we all suspect, very probably a waste of time.

This lady was married to a prominent lawyer here in town, at the same time my own husband was a prominent lawyer. Had a bodacious daughter who was given to using weed and generally getting into mischief. And a cute young son who wasn’t yet old enough to create much trouble.

Ohhhhh lookee here! They make you sit through INTERMINABLE computer clicketymumbledypeggedy and then, after 15 or 20 minutes of this, they tell you they have all sorts of miraculously scandalous information about your victim…uh…subject…and want you to pony up cash to see it!!!!

Eff that, dear Truthfinder. You might consider presenting the “truth” of your business model up front, before your victims spend half the morning waiting for you to gag up data.

Hmmm…. Looks like my old pal moved to Tempe.

SPECIAL OFFER!!!!
DOLLAR TRIAL!!!!!!
PONY UP JUST A DOLLAR TO GET STARTED!

Bye, Truthfinder.

God, I get tired of Internet rips. “Information is supposed to be free!” Remember that?

And I for one do NOT pay for DIY data searches.

A-n-n-d…by now wouldn’t you think I’d be smart enough to recognize an Internet rip when I first lay eyes on it?

😀

And moving on…

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Okay, so our call to the volunteer group that supposedly will help you get groceries and the like when you’re carless in Gaza: that was a FAIL.

What to do next?

M’hijito has offered to come over and get groceries for me. That is an exceptionally generous offer!!  As we all know, he has other things to do besides run errands for his mutther.

Other options:

  • Hire Wonder-Cleaning-Lady to make grocery-store runs for me. She comes in once a week anyway…maybe she’d be willing, for a little extra $$$, to pick up some things for me on the way here.
  • Try to get one of the grocery stores to deliver. Apparently, some of them will do so.
  • Give up! and hike to the nearest store through the unholy heat, stock up, haul the stuff home through the unholy heat.

If there’s another choice, I sure don’t know what it is. 

Tryin’to F’geddaboudit….

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Ever have memories that you seriously can NOT shake? You try to put events and stupid stuff behind you, but they just won’t go away.

That’s how I remember my childhood in Saudi Arabia, stumbling miserably through the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School.

It was a K-8 school for Aramco employees of the American variety. After you hit the 9th grade, they sent you back to the US (or to Switzerland), where you finished high school and, if you had something resembling a brain between your ears, either got a job or went on to college.

Growing up in Arabia — in a company town called Ras Tanura — I was the weird little kid.

What made me weird was that I was too damn stupid to understand that — especially as a girl! — I needed to cover up my intellect, pretend I was stupid as a post, and never EVER reveal my passion for science. Especially not for astrophysics.

Those kids in my grade were just so GODDAMN mean, and the teachers weren’t a lot better. In particular, the one I encountered when I hit the 5th grade, a Texas broad named Hatley, was just flat-out cruel. If I was sick of  b-o-o-r-i-n-g school by the end of the 4th grade, in Miss Hatley’s fifth-grade room I quickly learned to hate school — with a deep and abiding loathing.

Every now and again, I find myself musing over that time in my life. Not on purpose: the memories just bubble up like gas in some swamp.

Search the name and its variants on the Web, and a few candidates come up. She definitely existed. She definitely came from Texas. She definitely taught at the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School. But that’s about as much as you learn about her,

Probably just as well: some things, you don’t wanna know too much about!

She was a mean one, I’ll tellya…at least from my point of view. Seriously: she would actually encourage the horrid little brats in her classroom to torment me. I was the class pariah. And whenever an opportunity arose, I was reminded of that, teased about it and tortured over it.

What kind of “teacher” not only tolerates such behavior, but actually eggs it on?

Really, there was no excuse for it. I’d done pretty well in school until I reached her fifth-grade classroom. There was no reason for me to hate going to school. To hate my classmates. And especially to hate my teacher.

But hate is the word for it. I entered her class as a fairly normal kid, if one who wasn’t smart enough to keep her yap shut about what a wannabe brainiac she was. By the middle of that year, I hated school.

* Hated school.
* Hated the idiot teacher.
* Hated the mean little brats in my class.
* Hated the dim-witted, brain-numbing content that passed for subject matter.

Hated everything about it.

And then one day hated the horror of learning that the bitch who had tormented me all the way through the fifth grade was “graduating” with us to become our sixth-grade teacher.

Apparently, my mother figured out, sometime during that hideous fifth-grade year, WHY I had come to hate going to school…why I dreamed up every ailment I could possibly fake to get out of going…why I was so miserable I was passing beyond neurotic to damn near psychotic.

At the end of that school year, she announced that we were going back to the States. My father did NOT  want to come: he was working toward Aramco’s highly paid seniority, and leaving then put the eefus on that goal.

She must have told him that she and I were leaving, whether he came with her or not. He stayed behind for about six months, and then quit his job and joined us in San Francisco. My guess is, he must have reached some kind of lower-level seniority goal at that point, which made him feel he could leave without losing too very much.

It was pretty much in the nick of time, for me. I was so roundly hated by the little darlings at the school that I had no hope of ever making friends out there. And by then I had turned inward and become an odd — even weird — little hermit whose only serious interest in life was astrophysics.

Yeah. I wanted to become an astrophysicist. 😀  You see why the little darlings just loved me no end?

***

Back in San Francisco (at last! ), none of the kids at the school knew I was a weirdo. And apparently, an interest in science was not considered weird there, even for a girl. Well…and by then, I’d learned to keep my mouth shut; that no doubt helped.

 

Soggy Doggy Day

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Wait what? You say the sky is supposed to be blue??? Where DID you get that idea? 😀

Another gray, soggy day. Grayer, even, than the last two days, which have been passing grim.

When you are a corgi, though, you don’t put up with any bellyaching from the Human. So, at Ruby’s behest, it was out the door and off to circumambulate the park, as usual.

And to the Human’s surprise, that worked out pretty well! We did not get rained on. Most of the usual dog-walkers, having more sense than the Human, were hiding out. The cloud cover kept the temperature in the comfortable range. Gee…kinda reminded one of San Francisco.

We probably should go up to the nearby grocer’s and pick up a little more food. But that would require hauling out of our chair and walking around, which is more than the Human feels like fooling with just now. In fact, there’s more than enough chow for both the Human and the Hound to cover the next two or three days.

So…we’ll take our chances.

The hip does hurt, though. A lot: especially if I sit or lay around awhile. What makes it better — other than aspirin — is getting up and walking. But that, of course, is ominously like (gag!) work.

Passed the night in nightmares about living in an old-folkerie. My father, as I may have mentioned in an earlier post, signed himself into one of those. But…he didn’t mind institutional living, having gone to sea all his adult life.

He ran away from home at 17, lied about his age, and weaseled his way into the Coast Guard. From there, it was into the Navy, and after that, a life-long career in the Merchant Marine.

Me, I hate bad food. I hate the sound of the neighbors’ TV, radio, and shower running. I just don’t like living with people. Gimme a dawg as a room-mate, any day.

Ruby is now conkered out on the floor. Looks like tromping around in the sticky, humid heat is a bit hard on her. Hope that’s the issue, and not some ailment.

😮

Speaking of tromping around in the heat, though…  One thing that I’ve discovered, quite handily, through the late series of misadventures is the amazing fact that you don’t really need a car to get around this neighborhood just fine! 

Consider: Within easy walking distance of my house, we have THREE major supermarkets…and that’s if you don’t consider Sprouts a supermarket.

Me, I regard Sprouts as a kind of specialty store. And it’s just three or four blocks down the street.

We also have…

  • a dentist
  • a hair stylist
  • a computer store
  • a Walgreen’s
  • a discount clothing store
  • two major supermarkets
  • a car rental and tire shop
  • a car mechanic’s shop
  • a 24-hour doctor’s office
  • A veterinarian

And on and on…

So, I guess if you’ve just gotta get yourself crippled up, this is the place to do it!

One of Those Days, Continued…

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LOL! When I remarked in this morning’s squib that this was gonna be one of those days, I wasn’t far off the mark. 😀

Ohhh well. It’s entertaining, anyway.

Strolled up to a favorite store in the nearby shopping center, there to ask the sales clerk if my driver’s license actually is valid. He thought so. However he did suggest I should take it down to the Department of Motor Vehicles and ask them to confirm.

This — ohhhh delight! — will entail a half-hour drive each way, through fine city traffic, and then a wait in line that will consume half of eternity. So….next time I have a collection of hours to kill, I’ll take on that chore. 😀

Hotter than the Hubs of Hades just now, and very damp. So this was perhaps not the best of all possible mornings to engage a walk through the ‘Hood, across a main drag, and into a fairly dreary suburban mall.

BUT…. It was surprisingly entertaining.

This neighborhood, which was firmly middle-class when I moved in here some years ago, is MADLY gentrifying. Oh, my goodness!  Almost every house is being fancified in one way or another.

No kidding. Most of the houses have recently been freshly painted. Rooms have been added. Roofs have been redone. Yards have been relandscaped…on and on and on.

And y’know what?  If I stay in this place until I croak over — another ten or fifteen years, at the outside — my son is gonna inherit a house that is worth a sh!tload of money!

My shack is paid off. By the time he gets in here, his place probably will be, too — assuming he doesn’t move someplace fancier. So that means that barring a major financial depression, when he gets this house, it’s gonna be a substantial asset. He’ll be able to…well…think of the possibilities!

* Sell both houses (his and mine) and move to San Francisco!
* Rent one house and use the income to pay the mortgage on his house.
* Rent both houses and move to San Francisco…or Hawaii…or Paris…or wherever.
* Retire early, put his feet up, and never work again.
* Start a whole new career in a whole new business.

Or who knows what else?

So…I’m pretty excited for him.

Otherwise…what else to report? Rather little: it’s a hot, muggy, overcast, gray day. Even inside the (madly!) air-conditioned house, it’s dim and stuffy. Even with three table fans aimed at me.

Reclining in the fridge, a handsome slab of fresh salmon awaits the dinner hour. If it’s not raining by then, it can go right on the barbecue. Failing that, I suppose…what??? Well…I’ll think of something then, if I have to.