Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

This, That, & the Other

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Hotter than the Hubs out there...and wetter than the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Seriously: it is SO hot and SO humid, you step out your (soggy) front door into a corner of Hell. Or…more likely, into a corner of Lovely Saudi Arabia.

Today and yesterday have been weirdly reminiscent of the balmy old days beside the Persian Gulf.

There, the air would get so wet that sometimes rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky. We’re not that bad…yet. And I sincerely hope we don’t get there.

Ugh! Gotta go to the store. Get stuff for me and the hound: stuff that can’t wait. Then another errand…while I’m running around, I prob’ly SHOULD run by the mid-town Best Buy and get another power cord for this li’l computer.

Because…AS YOU AND I BOTH KNOW….wherever you are, you can’t get there from here. Whatever room I happen to be in, when the power runs low on the MacBook, the power cord is on the other end of the house!

😀

Ogling real estate in Moon Valley, a sprawling Mittel-America tract where my friends La Bethulia and La Maya moved. Look at this shack, for example. It’s on the high side of houses out there: not the best available, but far from the tackiest. I’d say it’s comparable to my current hovel, in style and size and maintenance.

Guess if I wanted to run away from the Romanian Landlord, that would be a likely candidate. It’s not quite as large as my house…but truth to tell, my shack is one bedroom too much.

Relatively pretty, as tract houses go.

But…y’know…so is mine. And my house is closer to M’hijito’s, by some miles. And click through the photos to see that thing next door to it. That’s a weird lash-up, isn’t it? It looks, for all the world, like a commercial structure with an underground garage.

?????

Not likely, in a suburban middle-class tract. But…weird, isn’t it?

Dunno that I could live in Moon Valley: too much emotional baggage.

A dear friend of mine: her husband died out there. He had cancer, and he died excruciatingly. And…well…her behavior left something to be desired. So did mine, come to think of it. We should never have been socializing in the kitchen while he was dying in the bedroom.

Horrible.

After he passed, I never heard another thing from her. She sold the house in Moon Valley; moved to Scottsdale. Then, apparently as she herself sank into decrepitude, she moved back to the Midwest, where her adult kids lived. And that was the last I knew.

Moon Valley is a bland tract of bland, throw-’em-together stick-and-drywall huts. For my purpose, it’s kind of a sentimental journey, cruising the Web and eyeballing the overpriced ticky-tacky. But in fact, my house is far nicer: block construction, real walls that keep out the burglars.

Seriously: a good-sized man could break right in through a wall out there, simply by delivering a good-sized kick. When my friends moved into that house, I went out to help her paint and fancify the place. You would not have BELIEVED the ticky-tacky construction!

No kidding: you could break in with swift kick to an exterior wall. The walls, which were pretty much all stick-and-plaster, were so poorly insulated that as I stood on the tile floors painting the living-room (she had the whole house tiled before they moved in!), I could feel the HOT heat under my feet. You don’t even wanna know what their power bills must have been.

***

Here I am at the neighborhood doc’s office. Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting.

What I wanna do is ask him if he’ll refer me to the Alzheimer’s facility at Good Samaritan Hospital, in downtown Phoenix. That’s about a 10-minute drive from my house…as opposed to an hour’s trudge to get out to the Mayo.

Also, quite frankly, I want a second opinion. The Mayo is halfway to Payson from my house. Good Sam is straight down 7th Street: outside of rush hour, an easy shot. Soooo….we’re talkin’ two advantages here:

  • If the staff at Good Sam do indeed appear to be competent, then we have excellent doctors within easy reach; and
  • Good Sam is right on the route to my son’s house and to a dear friend’s house! Thereby producing an excuse for visiting. 😀

*****

Didn’t get far with that scheme. Oh well: I’ll have to keep at it.  A little peripheral neuropathy isn’t gonna kill me. Soon. And if my brain has turned to Swiss cheese, there ain’t much anyone can do about it.

 

 

 

Wednesday

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Seven-thirty in the morning: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch, humidity 44%.

Back from a mile-long walk with the Hound. Hotter than the hubs out there, and soggy. Ruby doesn’t seem to notice. She rockets along the whole route like she was shot out of a cannon.

The irrigation system is crapping out. Gotta try to track down the installer (if he’s still in business!) or find a new one. Probably will have to replace a fair amount of that fine plastic piping. Ugh! Not to say $$$!!!

At the park: not too many dogs to have to dodge around this morning, probably because the weather is constraining most of the strolling dog-lovers. That’s a relief: some of those folks are stupid beyond belief, when it comes to dogs.

I find it impossible to understand how you could conflate a dog with a  kid. Wake up, folks! It’s not your “fur-baby”! It’s a highly evolved wolf that has developed a co-dependent relationship with humans. It doesn’t want to “pw-a-a-ay” with your neighbor’s dog. It wants to EAT your neighbor’s dog.

LOL! Hafta say, at the time I moved into this house, I never would’ve thought that I would be here long enough to need to replace the irrigation system I paid heftily to install during my first weeks of residency. Rebuilding it does NOT sound like a great idea. But…if I’m going to stay here (am I???), the watering system has gotta work.

Personally, I’d like to move into a high-rise on North Central, thereby mooting the whole yard and watering-system issue. However, my son WANTS this house. and accordingly he wants me to stay here until I’m carted off to the nursing home. At that point he’ll sell his place and move in here. Sooo…one could regard the proposed new plumbing as a gift to him.

Besides which: despite the proximity to Crime Central, I do like this house and this neighborhood. LOVE having the pool to topple into on a hot day. Love the trees and the shade. Love the yard that lets me have a dog of just about any size.

***

7:30 p.m.

And here we are, twelve hours later! Another day…not a single ‘nother dollar.

Weather progress: it’s a hundred degrees in the backyard just now, under a light film of high clouds. Nine percent chance of precip.

In Arizona, that’s what we call “humid.” 😀

No, I did NOT get my dainty little self enough off the dime to call the irrigation dude, or even to try to track him down. This laziness thing is becoming…uhm…a thing.

It’s too damn hot to do an evening doggy-walk — the pavement would burn Ruby’s feet. So we loaf.

Loafing is our specialty. Ruby is stretched out on her doggy-blanket atop the bed. The human is stretched out on her human-bedding atop the bed. We rule!

Such Good Pay…

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Ah, yes. I remember it well: My mother landing a job at the business office of the apartment development where we lived in San Francisco: Park Merced. It was a pretty place to live — even a beautiful place: upper-middle class, with handsome, modernistic high-rise apartments and sweet little garden apartments. Priced on the high side of San Francisco’s ever-pricey middle range. My father agreed to let us live there while he went back to sea, pretty much as a reward to my mother for spending ten years in the Hell-hole that was Saudi Arabia.

He was a cheapskate of the first water, though. Resented having to spend any of his (truly!) hard-earned cash on much of anything. And so, though I never heard them arguing about it (they didn’t argue in front of the brat), I’m sure he objected to the cost of the rent there.

No doubt feeling guilty (if not bored), my mother took a job in the development’s rental office, as a receptionist.

She earned $300 a month…and was downright awed! “Such good pay for a woman!” she crowed.

My father was less impressed. As a sea captain, he earned a living wage and then some. There really was no need for her to go to work, and the peanuts they paid her made little or no difference to our living standard. That, in general, was true of what most women were paid, back in the Day.

But y’know…this afternoon I had cause to reflect that even today I would have serious trouble living on what I could earn, with a Ph.D., a string of published books, and a track record of university-level academic jobs.

I happened to peruse real estate ads in our neighborhood. And…

hooooleee shee-ut!

Prices have gone through the proverbial roof!

The first place I bought here, about a block to the north and a block to the west of the present Funny Farm, cost a hundred grand. That amount equaled the my father’s lifetime goal for the savings he figured he would need to retire on. Just for the house alone!

  • Not for a car.
  • Not for living expenses.
  • Not for taxes.
  • Not for locking myself away in a nursing home when I get too decrepit to take care of myself.

My house is now paid off, over my financial advisor’s objections. And I think there’s enough left in savings to support me until they cart me off to a nursing home.

But…

But…….

Meanwhile, the alleged value of this house has gone SOOOO high that frankly, I’m not sure I can pay the taxes on it. Real estate prices have Californicated madly. Realtor.com thinks my house is worth $528,700. Redfin begs to differ, pegging the reasonable price at $629,873.

You understand: I paid an even $100,000 to get into this neighborhood — in a house that is the same model as this one. And thought that was ridiculous. It’s less than 1900 square feet. It’s magnificently crime-ridden, thanks to the slums just to the north of us. And if you give a damn about your  kids’ education — and would just as soon not have them tripping over a dead body on way into the local school (yes!!) — you would put your kid in a private or parochial school.

And supposedly this place is worth almost SIX TIMES what I paid for it????

SDXB moved to Sun City partly to get away from Tony the Romanian Landlord (a threat who lived right next-door to him at the time), but partly to escape the soaring property taxes in this area.

Prices have shot up over in Sun City, too, but not into the stratosphere….largely, I think, because most people in our generation don’t relish living in a ghetto for old folks. Plus it’s pretty remote from the central part of the city, where those things that are of interest in these parts take place.

If in fact this house is worth what the real estate sites claim, when I croak over my son will inherit assets totaling well over a million dollars. And that doesn’t count the value of his house. Or the amount his dad will leave him.

If he sells both places, he can move to Colorado and live like a king — secretly, he’d like to retire to Grand Junction, whence his grandparents came. He not only will get the value of my house and his, he also will get whatever remains in my investment accounts. Plus whatever his dad leaves him.

{chortle!} The kid will be a freakin’ millionaire.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean what it used to. It may not mean very much, come to think of it. But…better than a hit on the head, I guess.

Real estate values in Grand Junction aren’t much less than they are here. In fact, some of them by comparison are outright crazy. Right: to live out in the middle of fu**in’ nowhere!

Come to think of it, though…. Given a choice between Sun City and Grand Junction, I’d take Grand Junction any day.

Mercifully, that is not I choice I have to make. Not at the time being, anyway.

*****

July 4 Kaput

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Gosh. A whole post was almost done here, dated July 4. And…egad! Apparently I never published it.

Out it goes.

Far as I recall, it wasn’t a truly horrible evening. Often July 4 is truly horrible here, with idiots setting off their bang-bangs way-y-y into the night.

The reason for this: Our honored civic leaders, in their Passionate Patriotism, legalized fireworks in Arizona, undoing a years-long ban on sales of the damn things. Of course, people used to smuggle them in across the Mexican border and over from neighboring states…but not every numbskull and his mentally retarded brother, sister and cat glommed the damn things every Fourth of July. Now, everybody can get them —  any kind of them — and so nitwits blast them off all over the city and the state. So we get BAM BAM BAM BAM WEEEEEEEUUUUUUUU  BAM BAM all. night. long.

Understand. It’s not that I hate fireworks. We had a friend — now a late friend — who used to get a license to shoot the things off. He would throw an annual party, and he had professionals who knew what they were doing fill the air over his neighborhood with lights and noise. That was fun. And it was OK, because the fireworks were overseen safely, and because his Paradise Valley home was not surrounded by flammable trees and grasses.

The people who put on that show DID know what they were doing. They weren’t putting people’s homes and yards and pets at risk.

What I hate is fireworks in the hands of flaming morons.

And that’s what we have now.

Last night I ended up standing on the street all evening, keeping an eye on the doings in the alley. To my amazement, two young gentlemen who have taken up residence across the street came out and kept me company!

Can you imagine?

I sure can’t. At any rate, we ended up socializing for the better part of an hour. After the loony toons settled down, we went back into our respective palaces, and that was that.

LOL! Truth to tell, I seriously did consider putting the dog in the car and heading out to the desert, there to camp until dawn. That was NOT the way I wanted to spend the night, but it sounded a lot better than dodging nitwits all evening.

But for a change, not too much nitwittery went on, at least not in the immediate vicinity. Probably, I think, because those two guys were standing out there.

Well, not too much nitwittery except for the drunk driving. Lushes killed one person and injured two on the accursed freeway up the road. Honestly.

It makes Sun City look good…if only that place weren’t such a mausoleum.

At any rate, today we’re back to normal: Hotter than the hubs of Hades. Just now we’re down to a chilly 111 degrees, according to Wunderground. And yea verily: that’s exactly what the thermometer on the back porch reads.

Pool Dude — the guy I hired to come around and take care of the Hole in the Ground Into Which to Pour Money — has about paid for himself in sheer labor savings. The damned pool is sparkling clean: not a sheet of green to be seen anywhere. He’s expensive, but IMHO paying for his service beats leaving the thing empty.

Because, after all, there is no “empty” with a swimming pool. It doesn’t have a drain that you leave open, like a bathtub. If you don’t actively keep it drained, it hosts a puddle in which to grow algae and breed mosquitoes. My next-door neighbor does that.

Other Daughter, who lives in the next house down from that neighbor, leaves her windows open at night. (Don’t ask!!) Result: the mosquitoes got into her house, chewed her up, and gave her a raving case of encephalitis. She almost died. For a while, the doctors thought that even if she survived, she would never walk again.

She’s one tough lady, though. Not only did she live through it, but yea verily, she’s trotting all over the ‘Hood again.

At any rate, this particular stupidity means, for me: keep the doors and windows closed. Keep screens on all the doors and windows. Do not leave a door open for the dog to come and go at will.

Isn’t having to make allowances for neighbors’ idiocy fun?

To my mind, this was the beauty of the ranch: living out in the boondocks, two or three miles from the nearest neighbor, meant you were pretty much out of reach of the idiot neighbors’ frolics.

If you want a job done right…

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…DO IT YOURSELF, dammit.

The problem with cleaning ladies is that when they don’t know what to do with something, they take it upon themselves to invent something to do with it. And that invention is rarely anything you or I would think of.

I like to hide a front door key outside, in a truly weird place, so that I can get into the house if I lose my regular keys. This has saved my tuchus twice in the years that I’ve lived here, and I have NO reason to want to change that.

Well, apparently Wonder-Cleaning Lady thinks that’s just silly. By this morning’s early light, I discovered she took the front door key out of its hiding place — inside a hummingbird feeder — filled up the feeder with sugar water, hung up the feeder, and put the key….WHERE??????

When I got home w/ the dog this a.m. I couldn’t find my key ring. So I went to look for the key in the bird feeder…and…NOPE

Holeee shee-ut!  Now I couldn’t get into the house, not for love nor money.

Eventually I did find a key. Not THE key, but at least one that works. Later on today, then, I’ll have to drag this key over to the hardware store and have a couple of copies made. Find new hidey-holes for them where the burglars and the delinquents across the street can’t find them. That’ll soak up half the day.

Why would you think a person would put something in a specific place unless the person WANTED the thing in that place?

This will form a nice little distraction from lunch with my son, as planned. Don’t know what time the hardware store opens on Sunday…probably not before noon: whatddaya bet? Maybe not at all, on a Sunday.

****

Next week’s Project from Hell will be to find out if I can get my parents’ “cremains” away from the mortuary in Sun City where the Evil New Wife’s relatives deposited them — without bothering to consult me.

These urns of ashes, I would like to move to the close in the church that I attend, where I wish to get myself deposited.

Turns out the rip-off artists in Sun City CHARGE YOU TO MOVE YOUR DECEASED PERSON’S ASHES out of their effing mortuary! It’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars just to get them out of there and move them down to the church.

I may be talking with a lawyer about that.

My father died of a stroke that turned him (briefly) into a vegetable. Between the time the stroke hit and the time he died, he had no consciousness of anyone around him.

Meanwhile, the hag that he’d married after my mother died was THE single nastiest person I have ever met. He was miserable with her. A number of tartly funny stories depend from those circumstances…among them his strategy of going out into the parking lot and sitting in the car all day long to get away from her, and his secret flight to another old-folkerie, where he contrived to rent a studio on a month-to-month basis, equip it with a TV set, and sit there all day in front of it.

He would tell the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be worked on. Day after day…. Incredibly, she was SO astonishingly stupid that she believed it!!!

Well.

She did...until some mutual friends came over for bridge one evening. As they sat there, the “friends” announced they had discovered THE MOST AMAZING COINCIDENCE!!!

They’d been over at the other old-folkerie to visit a friend, and while there had seen a list of residents’ names…that had my father’s name on it!

Ohhhh boy oh heee hee, wasn’t that the most AMAZING coincidence!

Pissed, my father growled that it was no coincidence: he had a place there.

😀

As you can imagine, this cast a bit of a pall over the bridge evening.

Incredibly, it did not bring an end to the miserable marriage. He was afraid to divorce her because, wailed he, she’ll get all my money!

Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to re-earn the $100,000 inheritance his own mother had squandered on spiritualists and on building a mansion in Ft. Worth. So…money was a bit of an obsession for him. So, incredibly, he was willing to spend the last years of his life in misery if that was what it took to hang onto the precious money.

She had inherited that amount from her father, who was a buffalo hunter, trading hides out of Oklahoma and Texas. Apparently a LOT of money was to be made in exterminating the native wildlife, especially when that wildlife’s hides could be turned into hats and coats. She herself was mostly Choctaw Indian…apparently one with no compunction about clearing the plains of her people’s livestock.

A hundred thousand dollars at the turn of the twentieth century would be like about a million dollars today.

Now….if I’d possessed even half a brain, I would have said to him, “Daddy, she’s NOT going to get your money. I’m married to a lawyer who’s with one of the most powerful law firms in the state — quite possibly in the Southwest. She will have no claim on an estate that you owned before you married her.”

But no. Of course not. Proof positive that I do NOT possess half a brain. It never entered my mind to ask the then-husband about this. It never entered my mind to ask him to assure my father that the Dragon Lady was not going to clean out his savings.

So, he stayed miserably married to her until a stroke carried him away. He managed to transfer most of his life savings to me, which is why I own my home outright and why I will have something to leave to my son.

Ugh. What a way to earn a living, eh?

😮

Ohhh well. When I talk with our priest next week, I’ll ask how I can extract their Cremains from the Sun City rip-off artists, and also arrange to have myself disposed of down at our church.

This is not very respectful to my father’s memory: he hated loathed and despised organized religion. But…he ain’t here, folks. I am. And I hated, loathed, and despised living in Sun City. I ain’t about to be disposed of out there. But since I have no other family but my son, I do want their remains with me.

It’s the principle of the thing.

Daily Doggy-Walk

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6:15 a.m.: Just back from a mile+ doggy-walk. Hot and humid: 98 degrees with 22 percent humidity.

The weather kept most the stupes inside this morning, though. So…that was nice.

We walked across a southerly street populated with big old classic North Central houses on big old classic irrigated lots. Whew! I am sooooo glad I no longer have to take care of one of those places! Even with a cleaning lady coming on once a week, keeping everything clean and running was a bitch of a job.

Here — in a house half the size of our li’l mansion and absent the kid, the husband, and the large dogs — the house stays pretty clean even with a cleaning lady surfacing only twice a month.

At any rate… We saw a white golden retriever over there, the spitting image of the Late, Great Charley the White Golden Retriever.

I don’t know if M’hijito is going to try to replace Charley with another golden...or with any other dog. He works out of his house, ever since his employer discovered how much moola is to be saved by shutting down the big offices and parking workers in front of their home computers.

That would, in theory, allow him to snab a puppy. Except…a puppy demands time, and all of his time is occupied with office work. In theory, it ought to be possible to socialize a pup to Life with Humans when you’re working from home…but…nice theory! He can’t be jumping up every half-hour to attend to a puppy while he’s supposed to be engaged in company work.

Welp…I’d better get up and get something to eat. Or…something…

And so, away!