Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

HOW do dogs know????

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Doggy telepathy, right?

Obviously, Ruby can see me sit down. Get comfortable. Open the computer on my lap. Start playing with it. But how does she know the exact moment when really, truly, I do not want to drop everything, get up, traipse across the house, open the back door, and let her out?

She does know. Absolutely.

And there will be no loafing for the human when this dawg is around. No chance!

Let her outside? Next chore is to wait around till she’s finished patrolling the backyard and then let her back in.

😀

Yuch! It is hot and wet out there. Not yet 9:30 and the weather is already ungodly. Way too hot and humid to leave the back door open so she can come back in at her whim.

The coyote issue is getting a bit more intense, too. As our local wild canids get more tame, I grow more reluctant to leave a 20-p0und corgi toddling around the backyard by herself, unobserved and unguarded.

****

Amusement 0f the day, later on, will be testing a new wine M’hijito showed up with. Uhm…make that “wine,” quote-marks included.

Understand: I have my main meal of the day between noon and 2:00 p.m. And because yes, I do like a glass of wine with a good meal, that is when I snort down my daily dose of what he regards as booze.

He gets all worried about this. Apparently he thinks I’m a lush, and that I’m swilling down half a bottle or more. Every day.

This is somewhat distant from the truth. Yes, I do snort down wine with lunch. I usually have a glass — at most a glass and a half — of wine with that mid-day meal.

Shocking, ain’t it?

This is a habit I picked up from an old boyfriend, a guy with European origins who did, indeed, start tippling his wine along about mid-day. Because…that was what his own people did.

Since it looked very much like I was going to marry this guy, “his own people” were fast evolving to become “my people.” And I wanted to fit in.

Lemme tellya: my parents about had 15 shit-fits. 

Not that they didn’t drink themselves. They did, indeed. In fact, my father could (and did) brew his own.

Long story short: after some months, it became clear that if I married our guy, I would never see my parents again. They just hated the man, partly as a matter of racism and partly because they genuinely thought he was a jerk.

I deep-sixed that relationship…but did not deep-six the wine. 😀

And so, over the decades (and that’s what it’s been: decades), I’ve been in the habit of swilling a glass or two (or three…) of wine every day.

Shocking, eh?

Well, my son pretty much abhors this habit. And I will say…he probably has somethin’ there. It can’t be good for you to be gulping down a couple of glasses worth of wine every day.

No! Baaaaad basselope!

So I can’t get irked over his resentment of my swilling habits. But…neither do I feel much enthusiasm to knock them off….  😀

He has tried to reform my evil ways. No luck, poor kid.

So now he’s found a new tack: deflect my boozing onto non-alcoholic booze!  

Don’tcha love it?

Seriously, if this stuff is drinkable, you may be sure I’ll be switching over to it.

He just showed up with it a day ago, so I haven’t tried it yet. But this afternoon I will, with dinner. Should be innaresting to see (uhm…taste?) what happens.

{chortle!}

The real truth is, what I need to switch over to is iced tea. Or iced water.

This would require me to behave like a grown-up. And we know I have a moral objection to that, right?

😀

Hotter than the Hubs

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6:15 p.m., and it’s 105 on the back porch.

The back porch wherein no sunlight penetrates….

{whine whinge!!} It’s SO hot, so miserable that it’s hard to believe this is Arizona.

Yeah, it does get HOT in Arizona. But as we like to brag, “it’s a dry heat.” Today the oven appears to be attached to the plumbing. We’ve got hot, all right. But also weirdly damp. 

An unpleasant wind has been blowing all afternoon, waving the trees around in the distance. And we have a weird, high overcast. Very thin clouds, gathered over us like a sheet on a bed. They’re keeping the heat close to the ground, and the wind is blasting that heat back and forth.

Saaaave us!

Ohhhh well. Ruby and I are barricaded inside the house. The AC is blasting away…we can only hope it keeps on blasting, and doesn’t crap out in the middle of the night.

My excellent son brought over some good things to eat, and so the human is stuffed. Presumably the dog is, too, since she just scarfed down a dish of pooch chow.

This junket to our house was very kind of him: it rescued me from having to walk to the Fry’s or the Sprouts. They’re close enough…but in this heat, nothing is close. So I was mighty glad to be spared the grocery-store hike.

Tomorrow the temp is predicted to hit 110. Again: not surprising at this time of year. But still…heh! lamentable. 

One of my neighbors — a great favorite of mine — has rented an apartment in Prescott: a cowtown and tourist trap up north on the Rim. It’s not far from where our ranch was. But…hmm ….  Y’know, the ranch wasn’t exactly balmy in the dead of summer.

Lessee…. Tomorrow Prescott is supposed to hit 113.

Well. It’s better than 120. I guess.

Not enough better, IMHO, to make it worth renting or buying real estate up there! 😀

 

Hee heeee! And I imagined I was drinking…WHAT?

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My goodness. Sometimes one does wonder if somehow one is absorbing a little whiskey through the air!  What on EARTH???????

Just now, I’m puttering around the Funny Farm and thinking, ohhhhh, I’d like to walk up to the grocery store and buy a cool li’l snack and also something for the Doggy-Woggy! 

Ohhhhhh, wouldn’t that be nice??

Uhm. Well. No. Just stepped out into the backyard to attend to some minuscule task and… MY GAWD!  It is ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN DEGREES in the shade out there!!!!!

Holeeee maquerel!!!!!!

So. Neither the Doggy Woggy nor the Wacky Human are getting any nummies this afternoon. CAN you imagine????

Seriously: I can’t remember that Arabia, that hell-hole of heat and humidity, was ever this hot.

Gosh, I hated that place. Didn’t know any better because I started out there at an age just short of three years old. But dumb as I was and inexperienced as I was, I did know when the air was so hot and thick you could barely breathe it. And I was happy — more happy than you can imagine! — when after ten years in that horrible place my father decided to quit Aramco and take a job in California.

Freedom’s just another word….

Now…California, I do miss! Arizona leaves a lot to be desired: like a livable climate and a sophisticated culture. It’s a helluva lot better than Saudi Arabia. But it still would not be my first choice of domiciles.

Why did my parents retire here, to Arizona?

Cheap, I reckon. Sun City offered decently built tract houses in a pretty safe setting, for a price that would have been half of what they’d have had to pay to own a place in California.

Well, I’ll tellya… Sun City was a helluva lot better than Saudi Arabia. But it still would never have been my choice of places to live.

Where my father was concerned, if it was cheap (yet middle-class in ambience), it was good. And yeah: the real estate was cheap there, out in the middle of the cotton fields.

It’s all built up now, and not a bad place to live — in a whitey-white suburban way. Not my taste, but he and my mother liked it. My mother loved it, actually, and that must have gratified my father.

Now…hmmmmm…. If we were in Sun City right now, would I be able to walk to the nearest grocery store and snab a bottle of white wine?

Yeah. I expect.

The walk would be much longer — that place only has a couple of small shopping centers, for acre on acre on acre of houses. It would be hotter: hardly any trees grow out there. But it could be done.

Given my ‘druthers, I’d stay here. The houses are similar, the prices aren’t much higher, and the amenities are far more abundant. Sun City: a ghetto for old folks.

A ghetto’s a ghetto’s a ghetto….

Hotter than a three-dollar cookstove…

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…as my father used to say about the lovely weather in the garden spot that was Saudi Arabia.

As we scribble, the back-porch thermometer claims the temperature is 108 in the shade.

Yeah. That’s degrees Fahrenheit.

Ye gawds! It makes Arabia look balmy.

But…but…seriously: it’s 12:30 in the afternoon. Earlier in the day — shortly after the local grocers and farmacias opened, our li’l thermometer was already registering 102.

And yes, that does make Arabia look pretty balmy.

Fortunately, we have actual air-conditioning, rather than the gummy swamp-cooling that Aramco installed in its residents’ homes in Ras Tanura. Even then, it’s damn hot and sticky in here.

Nevertheless, the brain continues to run on overdrive. 

All sorts of original, clever, and…uhm..weird ideas are drifting through my overheated little mind. And in particular, the most significant ones have to do with my son’s adventurous liberation of my car.

Yes.

The garage remains empty.

And y’know what?

I’m finding I just…don’t…give…a…damn. 

This neighborhood is overrun with guys who wanna get rich quick driving for Uber. A nearly brand-new train runs down Main Drag West, one that would drop me off six safe and quiet residential blocks from my son’s house, if I chose to ride it. And the city busses cruise right past the intersection of the nearest feeder street and Central Avenue, which would take me to the front door of the beloved AJ’s market. Or let me off a block from the kid’s house.

Personally, I’d choose Uber if I knew they would show up reliably.

That doesn’t appear to be the case…but…but…yeah. I haven’t tested any such thesis. I will, in the future…probably the slightly cooler future. But if I do find they show up when they say they will, then…well…

Wanna buy a nice used Toyota Venza?

Yeah. Y’know what I think about this caper? That kid did me a huge favor. He’s helping me to get rid of a tank that needs to be serviced (expensively) every six months, that needs to have $3.00/gallon gas pumped into it every time you turn around, that takes up space in a garage that could be used for any number of better purposes, that pollutes the air, that….

Uhm…and how am I gonna get the dog to the vet, in an emergency?

Uber.

Or the kid. He still has his car. If Ruby has to be rushed to a veterinarian, he can come up here and collect her.

Or on foot. A 24-hour veterinary hospital is right down the road: about six or eight blocks, on foot. She weighs all of 25 pounds: I can easily pick her up and carry her there.

Meanwhile, check out these contraptions! I happen to have one of these. As we scribble, it’s now all tricked out with cardboard panels, the easier to haul stuff without dropping anything.

Here in the ‘Hood, we’ve got not one, not two, but three major supermarkets within walking distance: a Fry’s, a Sprouts, and an Albertson’s. I can do most or all of my grocery shopping on foot, without ever leaving the neighborhood. And right across the street dwells an Uber driver. Matter of fact, we’re told the ‘Hood is over-run with Uber drivers.

Heh! I haven’t tested that hypothesis. But it wouldn’t take a mob of wannabe cab drivers to provide plenty of transportation to the nearby shopping. 

Summertime, And the Livin’ Is…

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…the livin’ is sauna-like!

😀

You should be here to enjoy a fine, humid 102-degree day… Uhm…well, no…maybe you shouldn’t.

Seriously: it’s like a steam-bath outdoors just now. Hotter than the proverbial hubs, and SOGGY.

It puts the eefus on my plan to walk over to the nearby Sprouts and raid their fruit and veggie bins. I may hire the Uber guy across the street to schlep me over there…but…hmmmm…..  

Don’t think so. The hound and I have plenty of food. The fridge is more than adequately stocked. We surely can wait a day or two.

Besides, what I’m MOST interested in is learning about the new(ish) delivery services of late offered by most of the major grocery stores around here. By way of experiment, I may call the Albertson’s and order up some chow.

Main drawback to that scheme: Americans are not fresh-food folk. Most of us eat packaged or frozen chow. As a result, we have NO CLUE what a decent zucchini squash or head of lettuce or ripe peach is supposed to look like. And since I eat mostly fresh foods (I know how to cook! Isn’t that weird?!?), I’m reluctant to pay to have someone shop for me.

Hmmmm… Uber…Uber…Uber…  I’m beyond fascinated with the whole Uber phenomenon. It reminds me, richly, of our ten-year experience in Saudi Arabia, where Saudi drivers ran a fleet of taxis. They would come right up to your back gate (front yards were bounded by sidewalks and hedges), whisk you down to the commissary, then drive you home and help you haul your bags of groceries into the house.

Not that I would expect an American driver to help haul grocery purchases. But the experience would be similar in many other ways. If it could happen. 😀

Why?

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I do believe that she knew what she was doing.

She knew smoking causes cancer. That revelation was in every print and broadcast medium in the English language.

She knew what dying of cancer was about. She had watched her mother die of it as she attended the woman on her deathbed.

She knew her sidestream smoke was making her little girl sick. And sick. And sicker.

She knew her effing cigarettes infested every air-conditioning system, from the car’s to their apartment’s to her new home’s. She knew the car stank and her home stank to high heaven because of her smoking habit.

If you knew your toxic habit was making your kid sick…if you knew it was stinking up your home and your car…if you knew it was killing you…WHY would you keep on with it?

Seriously: no matter how much your smelly habit pleased you, no matter how much it distracted you from the petty miseries of everyday life, no matter how much you loved the stink of burning tobacco…WHY would you stick with it when you knew it was poisoning your child? The child you wanted so much that you went through three failed pregnancies to get her?

That just mystifies me. She couldn’t NOT have known. And so the only conclusion you can draw is that at some level she was doing it on purpose. She wanted to die.

She smoked herself into the grave because she welcomed the grave. 

She welcomed it so much she didn’t care whether her daughter went there with her. Hey—maybe so much the better, eh? She wouldn’t be lonely there…

Seriously: I was sick all the time I was growing up, living in the stinky houses where she poisoned the air with her stench.

There really is no other explanation than that, at some level, she welcomed death — the death she knew those fukkin’ cancer sticks would bring her. Why she would put her beloved daughter and her fine husband at risk, too: that mystifies me. Suicide is one thing; murder is another.

She did succeed in killing herself. She died of a tobacco-induced cancer.

She seems to have failed at doing me in, too. So far, I haven’t developed a terminal cancer. That we know of…

***

I never could understand the stupidity of it. But I never did well at understanding stupidity in general.

Seriously: she wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew her habit would kill her and, at best, make her child sick. So…why??????

What on earth possessed her?

Yeah, I know: addiction.

But she was amply endowed with psychological resources. She was smart — you can be sure she knew what she was doing to herself. She was capable of making up her mind to accomplish something and then doing that something. She doted on her child and surely didn’t want to make the kid sick on purpose.

She was aware that I was sick all the time with chronic respiratory ailments. The connection between the mom’s cancer sticks and the kid’s constant coughing was obvious.

We live in a society that criminalizes self-harm by addiction to various drugs. Why do we tolerate self-harm by nicotine addiction? Why do deliberately harming children by choking them with toxic smoke?

Oh yeah. Why did I need to ask?

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