Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Good {grump!} Morning, Arizona!

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Crack of dawn: out the door with the dog.

The derelict who set up camp outside the backyard wall was gone. And — surprise!! — he picked up after himself!! So there was no mess to shovel out after the sun comes up.

Circumambulate the park: beautiful morning. Hip hurts, but not as much as usual: reflect that the beloved, retired Dr. Tim Daley was no doubt right when he said eventually I’ll need a hip replacement.

Yay. I can hardly wait.

😮

Reflect, while hiking around the neighborhood, on where I might go if I actually did decide to move out of Bum Heaven. Only two places come to mind: the Arcadia district, where my now late stepsister used to live; and Fountain Hills, a Whiteyville on the east side of Scottsdale. Neither has much appeal: they’re just too damn far away from where my son lives.

Where else????

Down into my son’s neighborhood? Those houses were built before there was such a thing as air conditioning. They’re designed for swamp cooling (actually, they’re designed for the residents to spend their summers up north…). Plus the area is even noisier than mine.

Welp. Things could be worse: so far 11 people have been killed in the Kentucky storms…which aren’t over. Arizona can have killer weather, too…but not enough to take out a dozen locals at a time.

***

Too bad none of those 11 were goddam phone solicitors. Another one of them was on the horn just now. I try to have some kind of ear-blaster near the phone, so as to zap the bastards with something that will HURT when they call here. Didn’t have one nearby. SCREAMING into the phone as loud as you can may (or may not) be an effective substitute. This a.m. the SHRIEK was emitted in words:

GET THE F**K OFF MY GODDAM PHONE!!!!!!!

Man! Am sick, of goddam phone solicitors.

{gronk!}

Ruby trots out onto the back porch, picks up some piece of debris off the patio, and eats it!

Ohhhh gooodie. There’s another fine vet bill, comin’ up the trail. Assuming she lives long enough to get her to the vet…

***

Wonder-Cleaning Lady is still at the neighbor’s house. It’s three in the afternoon, and the woman has been there all day! I don’t understand how she does what she does.

Normally, she cleans WonderAccountant’s place and then comes over here. But typically, she’s done over there by about 11 a.m. or noon. She must be knocking herself out!!

***

Gaaaahhh! 4:30 in the afterno0n and the poor woman is still laboring away!! HOW does she do that.

I’ve been laboring away all afternoon watching the bubblers water the citrus trees, and I’m exhausted. ;-

The woman is amazing!

 

Fundamental Questions of Olde Age

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What am I doing?

What am I supposed to be doing?

Who the Hell am I?

And why am I here?

Yes. There we have the fundamental questions
that confront the aging mind.

😀

Was just about to fly out the door and trudge down to the ever-pricey AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store, there to buy some swell stuff for the mid-day dinner. Charging around, it occurred to me to wonder…

* Waitaminit! What’s in the freezer?
* Waitanotherminit!! Whats wrong with this spectacularly fancy piece of spectacularly expensive steak?

and…

* Is there some REASON I can’t add this fresh, crisp asparagus to the menu?
* What??? No potatoes? Really??? What’s wrong with a fistful of freshly cooked pasta?

Sometimes I do wonder what’s wrong with me. At least this noon I escape the vicissitudes of old-age brain haze (for once!!), come away with what will be a very nice dinner, and not have to shell out another dime for it.

***

Y’know…ten years ago — even five years ago — it would never have occurred to me to traipse out into the (pricey!!!!) wilds to buy the makings for today’s mid-day feast. I would have known what was in the fridge. I would have known there was no need to go charging out in the traffic and scoop up $30 worth of fancy food and wine at AJ’s.

So…

Now we scribble while we wait for the kettle of water to come to a boil for the pasta. We swill wine by way of passing the time. And we wonder which drain our IQ points trickled down.

<<sigh>>

Worrying about SDXB and NG (New Girlfriend). He says she’s under the weather…apparently seriously so.

This is highly worrisome: first because she’s a lovely person and does not deserve to be sick; and second because he’s transparently in love with her and needs to have her in his life.

***

And in the Department of Weirdness…

Last  night I dreamed of returning to the sweet middle-class Berkeley  neighborhood where the relatives who raised my mother lived. And…

…how much I miss those women
…how much I miss Berkeley
…how much I miss the San Francisco Bay Area
…Oh hell! How much I miss my mother

How dast she smoke herself into the grave?

If heroin peddlers and cocaine peddlers and even marijuana peddlers are regarded as criminals, why the Hell aren’t tobacco peddlers legally recognized as the craven murderers that they are?

Ah well…movin’ on.

Maybe we’re all craven murderers? is that possible?

Daydreaming on in this vein, I found myself remembering Berkeley and the oh-so-long dead relatives, so vividly that they seemed almost real, almost here: and I wondered WTF is wrong with me.

If this is senility, my friends…then senility is freakin’ weird!

Colder ‘n’ a Bigawd

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Jeez! It’s 42 degrees out there on the back porch. But for some reason it feels a lot colder than that. No doubt because it’s overcast — Arizona doesn’t do overcast well. 😀

Gray and a little damp.

Reckon that’s going to moot this morning’s doggy-walk. We’re already running way, wayyy late — it’s quarter to nine now. The human has gotta eat. And..and…??? Then what????

***********

And now it’s the next day. Clear and cold outside. The dog and I loaf in the bed, the Human knowing it needs to get up and get going but…well…too lazy to engage in any such ambitious throwings-around.

Diddling away time by looking up an old boyfriend on Internet. Mygawd, but you can find out a lot about people on the Web!

On the other hand…after a long series of come-ons, the damn site wants me to pony up cash to disgorge the information they claim to have on him.

😀   😮   😀

Forget that, White Folks!

Hilariously, my parents’ objection to this guy was that they evidently didn’t regard him as quite white. They were rabid bigots: no one who wasn’t white and Anglo-Saxon quite came up to their elevated standards. Nevvermind that my father’s grandmother’s people were Choctaw Indians… You never met a man who could hate with my father’s flair for hating.

Anyway, they hated Paul, I think because he was Bohemian by origin. Nevvermind that his skin was as white as mine. Nevvermind that he was born in the U.S. and grew up  in Chicago. Nevvermind that his parents and brother were born in the U.S. Nevvermind that he was busily getting a degree in public administration.

Indeed, he ended up going into academic administration…and, to my astonishment, here I learn that while I was running an academic publication at the Great Desert University, he was working in the university president’s office!

I had no idea! We must have crossed paths on campus many times, yet I never recognized him. I wonder if he recognized me?

O’course, by then I had a different name. A different major. Two advanced degrees. A kid. And fifteen or twenty extra years added to my face.

Eventually he resurfaces in Chicago, whence he came and where his family lived. Apparently he married and continued happily ever after. I surely hope so.

Life. Strange, isn’t it?

Conflagration!

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Wow! Can you believe those wildfires in California?

Wildfire in Kaibab National Forest, Arizona. Photo:  Mike McMillan, U.S. Forest Service.

When I was in high school, we lived not far from some of these venues — although in solidly urban, in-town areas. Not in combustible suburbs, that is. Though we were a goodly distance from fire-prone areas, I sure can remember, as a kid, worrying whether the current conflagration could come our way.

Unlikely: we were in the middle of Long Beach, a highly citified stretch of concrete and asphalt. Even in the good ole’ days, though, a barrage of media hoo-ha would make it sound like disaster was lurking at the next stoplight down the street.

La Maya and La Bethulia have a place by the seashore, somewhat south of San Francisco. Far as I can tell from reports on the Internet, the fires haven’t reached their parts…yet.

But even way over here in the depths of the Sonoran Desert, we’ve got a stiff wind blowing.

That suggests it’s at least as windy — probably more so — on the coast. And of course wildfires travel on the wind. Sure am glad I’m not there!

WHY restaurant food???

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As those who have followed Funny about Money for awhile know, dear Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend (SDXB) is a gifted and renowned cheapskate. The guy doesn’t diddle away money — any money — on much of anything. If the result ain’t worth the price, he ain’t spendin’ his cash.

Early on in our relationship, I learned that this principle applied to eating out. Dear Ex-Husband (DXH) and I ate out all the time, partly because over the years I had  become exceptionally bored with cooking and partly because it was somehow ever-so-much less annoying when the Kidlet refused to eat someone else’s cooking, as opposed to some damfool thing I’d spent half the afternoon preparing.

After I escaped our Home Sweet Home, I landed in an apartment complex where SDXB, his mother, and one of his daughters lived. And that was when I learned, to my astonishment, that he would not go out to eat restaurant food unless there was some dramatic special occasion for it.

Said he:

I cook better than about 95% of restaurants do.

  • Restaurant food is horrifically overpriced.
  • A nice home dining-room beats the ambience of a noisy, crowded restaurant, any day.
  • Why drive across the city when you can fix a better meal in your own kitchen?

Hmmmm… Well, thought I…yeah. But: anything to avoid work, eh?

Welp, over time I came to see the light. In fact, tossing a steak, a few French fries, and a veggie on the barbecue is one helluva lot less hassle than driving across the city to be serenaded by screaming brats, dreary Muzak, and a barrage of chatter while trying to communicate with some poor overworked waitress.

These were all in force the other day, when a couple friends of mine and I went out for lunch in a popular suburban restaurant here. And….

That was when SDXB’s lessons in fine cuisine came back to light and were mightily reinforced.

😀

WHAT a circus.

First thing you’ve gotta say about eating in restaurants: be grateful, be mightily grateful, that you are not an employee of any restaurant, especially not a worker of the “waitstaff” variety.

Migawd! Those women were working like the proverbial horses. Ambient noise was freakin’ unholy. The customers’ squalling, restless brats were terrible. The crowd, amplified by people waiting to be seated, downright defied belief.

Next thing you’ve gotta say: REALLY, truly…most of the time you’d do about 110% better to fix your meal at home. Or at least to buy take-out from a grocery store or maybe(!) a competent restaurant.

Next thing you can say: the food left a lot to be desired. Like…say…food. The mediocrity of what they served up: Good Gawd!

I could have prepared a meal out of a box that would have had more flavor and more interest than the puréed cardboard we received.

So…yeah. It’s true, what SDXB says: Better to eat at your own table, any day, than to trudge to a restaurant for a meal.

The Cracking of the Dawn

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Good grief. It’s all of 6:37 of a Sunday morning, running up to New Year’s Day.

One could say waaa! i wanna sleep in! Except that I’ve already done that. Went to bed with the sun last night, and now have had some unholy number of hours of uninterrupted sleep. That last adjective — uninterrupted — is the operative term.

When you get old, you can’t sleep at night. A rare occasion it is, when you manage to stay asleep until dawn.

Indeed, it’s not dawn yet, here in lovely uptown Phoenix. Dark as pitch out there, it is. Ruby wants to head on out, but I’m wary of running into a coyote or two at this hour.

That’s exactly what happened the other day: we strolled past a neighbor’s house and Wiley Coyote shot out from under a bank of shrubbery. Fortunately, he took off running down the neighborhood street…if he’d decided to grab a corgi to take to breakfast, there wouldn’t have been much I could do to stop it.

Before that happened, I had no problem taking Ruby out in the dark. The only coyotes that concerned me were the two-legged variety.

Almost 7 a.m. Still dark out there, or at least on the low side of dark. Too cold — in the low 40s — to enjoy a doggy-walk just now. We’ll need to wait until the sun comes up. If and when it ever does. Doesn’t seem to be overcast, so I reckon what we’re seeing out there is the tag end of the usual winter night-time hours.

Ruby, having stuffed herself with doggy breakfast, is again zonkered out on the sack. Wondering if I can manage to turn off the light and climb back under the covers without waking her.

Hung out with some friends yesterday afternoon. We went to lunch(oid) in a coffee shop on the west side.

You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a meal in a restaurant?  A long time, that’s for sure. DXH liked to eat in restaurants — and on a lawyer’s pay, he could afford it. SDXB hated restaurant food, and he resented paying for it. So after a few years in his household, I got out of the habit of eating out.

It was fun. SDXB is right, though: it ain’t hard to cook much better food in your own kitchen, for a whole lot less moolah.

Having picked up a number of his cheapskate habits, I must say that I do resent having to pay a hefty tip to the “wait-staff.” Seriously: if restaurants can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage, then they shouldn’t be in business.

Ruby has insinuated herself back onto the bed. Me, too: it’s cold in here, even with the heat blasting. And I’m sleepy…do not feel like getting up and rassling around. On the other hand…I’m hungry. And no one is going to hustle up some breakfast for me.