Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Ruby just dragged her human back into the house, after a circumnavigation of the ‘Hood. Gosh!  What an icky morning!

Be glad — be very glad — that you don’t have to work outside in Arizona’s heat and humidity. It is just sticky out there right now.

Ohh well. Ruby and I successfully traipsed around the neighborhood, with little ill effect. Wunderground says we’re enjoying 56% humidity…egad! Does that REALLY mean more than half the air out there is water?

😀  Hope not. But sorta suspect that’s the case. We have 81 degrees with rain showers predicted for this morning.

What, dear Gawd, is on the calendar for today? (Gets up and traipses back to the office…)

Nothing! Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

Hmmm…it’s Sunday. Thank goodness I no longer have to get up, throw on some decent clothes, and fly down to the church to sing half the morning.

No kidding: I do miss the choir. A lot. But on a day like this, I’m mighty glad not to have to go out into the traffic and the weather.

….ohhh goodie! Just to make the morning, my son sends an email reminding me that we’re traipsing out to the Mayo Clinic (again!!!!!!) tomorrow morning. 

Boyoboy, could I do without those junkets! No doubt he feels even more strongly about that: the Mayo is a good 40-minute drive from here, meaning a trip out there and an hour wasted talking to doctor about essentially nothing consumes half his working day. And since he’s contrived to get my driver’s license negated, he ends up having to drive me out there.

To me, it feels like such a waste of time. (Imagine how it feels for him!!) Their doctors never have anything to say that makes the slightest bit of difference for my condition….whatever that condition may be. They seem to have no clue. Basically, they’re charging me for getting old.

Makes Christian Science look better and better….

Ditch the Class Snobbery! I’M IN LOVE!!

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O…M…G… I just got a wonderful whack upside the head!

Did you read yesterday’s FAM post?  OINK, we say. Lady! Come down out of your classist eagle’s nest!!!

Okay…. Eventually I quit sitting here going oink oink oink and resigned myself to having to walk up to the (muy hispanico) corner at Main Drag West and Conduit of Blight North.

Trudge through the steamy heat and arrive in a classic corner shopping center. Barge into the El Rancho supermarket. Grab a cart and stroll around. And…

And…gosh.

I like this place!

Damned if it doesn’t have all the kinds of things I like to eat and to cook — bein’ WT myself, I guess, I fit right in. The staff: quiet, nice folks. The other shoppers: damned if they’re not my kinda people!

Suddenly, I’m NOT outside my social class…as is invariably the case at the ritzy AJ’s or the upscale Albertson’s.

I’m walkin’ around in there and thinking, “This ain’t real. IS it?”

But….yeah: it IS real. 

For the first time in I don’t know HOW long, I feel…where I belong. And that is not where everyone around me is better than me…

What fun! Omigawd! I felt like I’d gone home!

Gosh. I wish I’d found that place sooner…like when I first moved into the neighborhood, 87 gerjillion years ago.

Classism lives, folks!

Why Do I Hate Arizona?

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LOL! Truth to tell, I probably don’t. “I hate Arizona” is a jingle that intrudes into my dainty little mind any time anything here annoys me, inconveniences me, overcharges me, or makes me wish I were back in Northern California.

That’s a fair amount of jingling, to tell the truth. 😀 But the reality is…well…I don’t exactly HATE it. At least not most of it; not most of the time.

Let’s think about this…

What do I like about Arizona?

* Clear blue skies
* A swimming pool in every yard
* Warm winters
* Horses
* Two above-average universities: the University of Arizona and Arizona State University
* The Grand Canyon, and its hiking trails
* Sedona and its amazing scenery

What do I madly dislike about Arizona?

* Ubiquitous extreme right-wing politics
* Mediocre grocery stores
* Heat that’s enough to roast a pork loin
* Piss-poor public schooling
* Public transit that leaves a lot to be desired
* Phoenix
* Tucson
* Enough blacktop to coat half of Southern California…
* Too damn many people

This morning I really needed to take Ruby to the vet who practices about six or eight blocks down the road. But…

* I can’t take her on a bus.
* The pavement is WAY too hot for her feet to walk on.
* Basically it’s too hot for me to walk on, come to think of it.
* As we scribble, the ambient temperature outside is 104 degrees; headed to 107.
* I need some groceries, but what with Dear Son having purloined my car, I can’t get to the nearest market to buy those groceries. It’s just too hot to walk that far.

So, yeah. I hate Arizona. If I could get outta here, I would. And…well…come to think of it, I may.

 

Biggest Mistake of My Life…

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Loafing under gray skies, I find myself gazing back on the major decisions of my life. Ever-entertaining….

It strikes me that the single worst decision I ever made was NOT to have majored, as an undergraduate, in a subject that would have landed me a decent job. Without benefit of a graduate degree.

As it is — stupidly having majored in English and pursued not one but two graduate degrees — I can’t get a “decent job” for love nor money.

Consider the likely possibilities:

An Ed.D. would have gotten me a principal’s position in some high school in a desirable location — like the San Francisco Bay Area, for example.

An MBA almost certainly would have led to a decently paying corporate job. Just about anywhere.

An MS in microbiology (my favorite subject) would have landed a job at a hospital or a university, pursuing interesting challenges.(nevvermind that women were not welcome in the sciences at the time…TOTALLY not welcome!)

Any of those jobs could have led me to a career far, far away from hot, muggy, intellectually backward Arizona.

But ohhhhhh  no!  I had to chase a Ph.D. in English…so that I wouldn’t have to go back and change my undergraduate major to a subject that would have made economic sense.

What? Me? Make sense? 

Surely you jest…

Augh!!! The Joy of Living in Arizona

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Yeah. In the absence of a car, Ruby and I didn’t make to the vet through the 110-degree heat.

This morning she’s still squawking HORK HORK HORK! very time she laps up a drink of water. Dayum!!!!!  

It seems a little better today, though: doesn’t go on and on and on. Whatever the problem is, she may be throwing it off.

Sure hope so. I could do without another $100+ vet bill.

Arizona: what a horrible place!!!! 

My mother used to go on and on about how much she loved it here. And I suppose by comparison with Saudi Arabia, where we spent ten hideous years on the shore of the Persian Gulf, it looks…uhm…good.

To my mind, it looks like an outpost of Hell. You can be sure I’d be someplace else –– a good long way else — if my son weren’t here.

We’re here because his dad landed a job, fresh out of law school, with one of the most prominent firms in the Southwest. After 20 years of marriage to that guy, I was well established and in no position to seek a job anywhere else than in the Phoenix area. And our son had no desire to move away from where his dad and I lived.

So.

Here we are. 

Ugh.

There’s a fate for ya.

I do hate it here, and if I could escape, I’d head for the Bay Area in a trice.

But a) I ain’t leavin’ where my son lives; and b) I couldn’t get a decent job in San Francisco or the East Bay on a bet. A Ph.D. in English a decent job does not buy…

But honestly…

I hate Arizona!

Rasty-Nasty Redux

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Ahh! COLD TEA!!!  What a relief!

Just back in the house after a peculiarly unpleasant doggy-walk. At eight in the morning, it is SO HOT and SO HUMID out there that it feels like a day in Rasty-Nasty, the horrible American compound where my parents and I spent nine years on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

What a gawdawful experience that was! I can remember days when it would be so humid that rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky.

Oh, well. At least we don’t have any Arabs standing around hating on us here. That’s something. I guess.

Where would I go, if I could get away from this sylvan spot?

Well…

The San Francisco Bay Area for sure, if I could afford it. My mother’s family lived in Berkeley, which at the time was a lovely suburb of the City, up in the East Bay hills…just as pretty as could be.

But of course, I can’t afford it.

Where else?

Some parts of Colorado have their appeal. Problem is, it gets too cold in the winter there.

New Mexico, maybe…but I suspect the summers there are about as balmy as they are here…

All of which is about as irrelevant as irrelevant can get. Because… As long as my son is here, this is where I’m gonna be.