Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Doggy-Walk from Heaven

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INCREDIBLY gorgeous morning! Cool but not cold. Clear skies. Lovely, low morning sun. Neighbors out walking their dogs and taking the early air…  What a fantastic neighborhood we live in.

Ruby and I circumnavigated the park. Said “hello” to half-a-dozen other dawg walkers. Soaked in the gorgeous morning air.

Walked past the house where the family’s son f*cked some teenaged girl and got arrested for the favor. He went to jail. They lost their home. It’s been a wreck for awhile.

But now someone has bought it and fixed it up. Looks like about all that’s left to do is to repair (rebuild??) the swimming pool.

We hang a left onto that neighborhood street: a lovely upper-middle-class neighborhood of handsome, big houses, irrigated lots, and general toniness. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.

Shortly, we bear north, ever north…again past the lovely park with its expanses of green grass (!!!) and its handsome, mature trees, and its 87 gerjillion other dawg-walkers. 😀

What a place to live!

I hope I can hang onto my home until I croak over. Partly because I do want to live here for literally the rest of my life. And partly because I want to leave it to my son, so he can either move into this beautiful little house or sell it for enough to decamp to Tahiti.

No kidding: this place is Yup Central, the younger generation of the upwardly mobile having discovered it. So by the time I pass on to my furry fathers, the house should be worth a ridiculous amount of money. He’ll be able to sell his house and bank the cash income, or sell both places and move to Upper Richistan.

If things work out the way I hope, it will be a lovely gift to leave him, and something that has the potential to profit him seven ways from Sunday.

Yea verily: the thoughts that preoccupy you as you and the Killer Corgi stroll past a fine green park and piles of fancy houses and little patches of local history. Onward!

Bug Bite Bait!

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Arrrgghhh!  WHY do biting bugs sooooo love me?

No kidding. This human is walkin’ talkin’ Bug Bait! As soon as the li’l critters see me, they swarm in for the feast.

Interestingly, they also recognize the battery-operated electric bug-swatter I use to chase them around.

Just now, we’re in Arizona’s High Mosquito Season. The li’l monsters swarm in on me in a frenzy of Bug Joy. Bite-bite-bitedy-bite-bite-bite!

But…they recognize the bug-swatter, too. 

No kidding. When I pick that thing up to give one or two of them a whack, the rest of them shoot outta here like little bug rockets!

And no, I can’t spray insecticide all around the room, because the damn stuff makes me sick. (Maybe I’m a bug????)

What I need is…lizards. A tribe of lizards. Geckos, by damn!

The only question is…how to catch them and persuade them to linger in the house.

Ohhhhhh gooodie!  Just to make things perfect, the fukkin’ power just went off. And then, less than a minute later, came back on. Now I have to traipse all over the house and reset the clocks on every goddam electric appliance.

Ohhhhhh dammit!!! The power just came back on, but now all the electric clocks are hung up. None of them is working. And the phone is not working, either.

dammit dammit dammit!!!!! Now I’ll have to traipse across the street, lean on the neighbor’s doorbell, and beg them to let me call the phone company from their house. And NO, no indeed I still haven’t figured out how to use the goddam cell phone, because no one will take a few minutes to teach me how to use it.

………….

Nope! Now the land-line phone has come back on. That’s a relief: one fewer hassle for the day.

Well…heh! We’ll see how much longer THAT lasts…

*********

😀  Seriously, in Arabia (where I grew up, lo! these many decades ago) we had tribes of geckos living around the house. Wonderful little critters…they were.

Saudi Arabia, as you might imagine, is awash in flies, moths, and various other bugs. The place is Gecko Heaven. So those glorious little lizards used to take up residence around the humans’ habitations — and we, of course, would encourage them, to the extent that we could figure out how. And they did help considerably with the bug problem.

Flying bugs, that is.

Oddly, other than ants, there weren’t a lot of crawling bugs out there. You didn’t see armies of cockroaches, for example. I always figured the lizards ate the roaches…but surely do not know that to be a fact. Maybe it was just too damn hot out there for roaches, same is it was for gringos….

{sigh} There’s a roadside doctor’s office about six blocks down Main Drag West. I ought to get off my duff, walk down there, and try to get them to look at this nasty rash.

But meanwhile…

…the day is gorgeous…
…the pool beckons, come to me, come to m-e-e-e…
…and I yam hungry….

Hungry hungry hungreeeee…..  

How do I not want to trudge down to the neighborhood doctor’s office? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

Hmmmm…..  Welp…I can’t count that high. 

Life in Lovely Uptown Phoe…DUCK!!!!!

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LOL! Here we go again. 

JUST got my fanny sat down in a big comfortable overstuffed leather chair when ROOOAAARRR whirrrr whirrr whirrr… Yet another goddam cop helicopter soars over the house. 

Naturally, Ruby is peregrinating around the backyard, whither she wandered through the open back door.

Set aside the coffee. Leap up, race through the kitchen. Call the dog…..

Call the dog….

Call the dog….

Obedient beast ambles idly across the yard and in through the door.

Good daaawg!

Slam the back screen and kitchen door shut. Lock the deadbolts on both. Amble back to my easy chair, next to which a cup of (cooling…) hot coffee resides.

What.
A
Place.

And why do I persist in living here?

Well…I’d say because I’m here and I ain’t movin’. But the truth is, I do like it here in the northerly reaches of North Central Phoenix.

For one thing, there’s never a dull moment around this place. That’s f’r sure!

It’s centrally located but out from underneath the flight paths of the jets that roar in and out of Sky Harbor Airport all day and night.

We’re in a decent school district, which means the neighborhood hosts legions of laughing, cavorting kids. Not to be missed!!

It’s populated enough to support not one, not two, but three high-quality grocery stores within an easy stroll, plus a large bookstore, a nice hair salon, a computer store…and more that I have yet to explore.

Up at the corner, we have a superior car mechanic’s garage. Don’t have to get the clunk towed far to deliver it to those guys.

The city has installed a train that now glides back and forth between ASU West (on the west side) and the Tempe campus (on the east side). Truth to tell, for most purposes, you don’t have to own a car…or even borrow one.

The place gets more and more like a real city as the years slide past. In San Francisco, my mother and I didn’t even need to own a car: we could get everyplace we wanted to go by bus, by trolley, or on foot. Same in London. Same in Paris.

While that’s not true of everyplace in the L.A.-like Phoenix area, public transit here is already pretty good, and it’s continuing to evolve apace.

As a result, I no longer hate living in Phoenix (as I did in my early years stuck in this place). Matter of fact, I’m coming to rather like it. In another few years it will be a real city. And a pretty livable one, at that.

So that’s a good thing.

Then we have the ever-burgeoning crime level. The bloating cost of living. The mobs of people, people, and more people….

Oh well. You can’t not have everything, right?

The Big Apartment Adventure

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Well…make that “the LITTLE apartment adventure.” The hovel in question was the first place I rented all by my young self, with the proceeds from my first full-time office job.

LOL! Yes, it was tiny. A one-room studio with a fold-out bed that disguised itself as the sofa when it was put away. But oh my: I was proud of it. And I did love living there.

I’d finished the bachelor’s degree at the University of Arizona and come back up to the Phoenix area with no place much to live and nothing much to do. Quickly found that living with my parents in Sun City was decidedly not my speed. So I landed a receptionist’s job at a law firm (yeah: that’s what a B.A. and a Phi Beta Kappa key got a female college graduate in 1966…) and moved into that cute little apartment.

Yahoo! FREE from Mom and Dad, and NO ROOMMATE. 

What better way to define Nirvana, eh?

Well. Probably like you, I wouldn’t think much of it today. But boy oh boy, was it the business then! 

Ahhh, the good ole’ days!   😀  😀  😀  😀

Glorioski! Glorious Day, Glorious Future

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Wow! What a gorgeous morning. Intermittent overcast with big, fluffy, cottony clouds. Cool but not cold. The sky wants to rain, but can’t work itself up to that much effort.

Ruby and I frolicked through Upper Richistan, as usual admiring the big ole’ expensive houses and their big, expensive irrigated lawns. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Ours isn’t “gorgeous,” but it’s adequately pleasant. Mid-middle class homes on lots that put enough space between neighbors.

Ruby loved up some workmen…cuteness is like some kind of joy drug for most people. We went on our way eventually. Now we’re back at the house.

And the Human finds itself wondering what next? 

Despite the family track record for longevity, we can pretty safely bet that I don’t have all that much longer to go. Relatives who have lived into their dotage have uniformly been Christian Scientists…tee-totalers, that is.

I ain’t no tee-totaler and never have been. My first boyfriend introduced me to wine when I was about 17, and I’ve been lapping up the stuff ever since. As we know, anything alcoholic is a handy device for shortening your life span. So I think it’s safe to figure I’ve got maybe about 10 years left — at most. Probably a little less than that.

The best I can hope for, I think, is to drop dead…and thereby avoid ending up in some nursing home or prison for old folks. That’s not outside the realm of possibility — as I say, the forebears who dropped dead in their late 90s didn’t drink. I do (with élan!), and so it’s safe to assume I’ve probably cut a good 10 years off the inherited lifespan. But that still would leave me another 10 years. Ten years that I do NOT want to spend in an old-folkerie!!!!

And therein lies the challenge: How to stay out of one of those horrible places. 

They soak up your life savings…and I want my savings to go to my son. Not to a holding pen for old bats. But….

But I have yet to figure out how to protect those savings for him, especially if I live much longer. Even more especially if I live much longer and get sick. How to evade those eventualities, though, does escape me.

If I manage to stay healthy into my dotage, though, M’hijito should inherit enough to retire in comfort…forthwith. By then, it’ll be time for him to figure out how to evade life in the old-folkerie…  😀

Still a GORGEOUS Monday

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Yep…we’re on the third blog post of the day. Tis true! and the truth is: telephone scammers notwithstanding, worries about old-age incarceration notwithstanding: this is an OBSCENELY GORGEOUS day.

  • Beautiful sunlight.
  • Beautiful mild temperatures.
  • Beautiful clean air.
  • Beautiful spectacular blue skies.
  • Beautiful little dog.
  • Beautiful glass of beer.
  • Beautiful beyond anything you can think of.

Beyond gorgeous.

Yes, you bet! I’m still damn scared of what the future holds. But when the present is this lovely, you can afford to divert your attention from tomorrow.

***

Ruby has waddled off to her favorite locale under the master bathroom toilet. Truth to tell, it’s the middle of the afternoon and we have yet to do our daily dog-&-human walk. And that is solely the fault of the lazy, easily distracted human.

Distracted today by memories of a beloved old boyfriend, a man I came within inches of marrying. 

Ohhhhh how my parents hated the man!!!

Ohhhhh how I loved the man!!!

In my then yet-to-be misspent youth, I assumed they hated him because he was The Other. Not American, hevvin help us. Worse yet: Eastern European. 

Paul was Bohemian. Real Bohemian, as in the nationality — not metaphorically so. Why they hated him, I failed to grasp during my naive youth. But now in my Old Age, I see…yeah.

As an example: Paul thought it was OK — just brilliant, actually — for his best buddy to be diddling a barmaid he’d picked up during a night on the town. Because, after all, his wife was eight or nine months advanced in pregnancy, and so  she couldn’t “give him any.”

Back in the Day, when I was madly in love, I thought my parents’ distaste for Paul was based in their distaste for other-than-Yankee roots. They must hate him because his parents were not 100% Yankee. Right?

Well.

No.

Actually, they hated him because he was a jerk. And because they could see, clear as day, that marrying the jerk would wreck my life.

Luckily for me, he made an ass of himself one time too many. And so I wandered away from him.

Sometimes God actually is on our side. Right?

What finally brought God’s Word — or at least, Her Thinking — to my attention was the time that Paul observed how VERY right his best buddy was in picking up a chippy in a bar and f*cking her…BECAUSE his wife was too advanced in pregnancy to accommodate his dong.

No kidding.

He thought his wife’s pregnancy with HIS child was an acceptable excuse to diddle whatever li’l darlin’ he came across in a bar.

No. I really DO kid you not. 

Dumb as I was, even I could see what was wrong with that picture.

Soooo…out he went, pore ole’ Paul. And good riddance to him. Since then, I’ve managed to scrape up a LITTLE more discrimination, when it comes to men.

How long that will last remains to be seen…