Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

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Remembering Paul P., my college boyfriend. How my parents hated him!!!  Mostly, I think, because of his ethnicity.

It would have made more sense to hate him because he introduced me to alcohol and sex when I was about 17 or 18. This was in my junior year, which would have been about 1964.

Paul was white, but he was Eastern European.

For reasons (if any) that escape me, my parents disapproved of Eastern Europeans. If you weren’t white and British or Western European – or a white American — you did not make the cut, in their world.

I was madly in love with Paul, who was handsome, fairly smart, and reasonably ambitious. His morals left something to be desired: fuc!ing an underage girl was questionable, as was his enthusiastic approval of his best buddy’s laying a barmaid because the buddy’s wife was so advanced in pregnancy that she couldn’t accommodate his dong.

If that latter episode hadn’t happened, I probably would have married Paul. It was just a little(!!) too revolting for my taste, though… Talk about your narrow escapes!!

But he seems to have turned out OK. He became a university administrator. And online there are pictures of him surrounded by his loving family (absent any barmaids). So I assume his life went reasonably well.

Hope he’s living happily ever after…

Weird Little Experience…

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Now, HOW on earth did I know?????  

Wonder-Cleaning Lady just emailed to say she wouldn’t be able to come shovel out the Funny Farm this week. And that’s fine…she has — you know — a life, if you can imagine.

But the weird thing is…yesterday evening and then again this morning I thought, clear as day, “Luz is not gonna show up this week”!

There was no reason to imagine that. She had said nothing. And yet somehow I knew she was not gonna come over today.

Isn’t that strange?

***

Oh, well. She does such a superb job that even after two weeks, the place is relatively clean. I’ll sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms. Since I keep the kitchen pretty clean all the time, she shouldn’t have too much extra hassle when she does resurface.

Ruby-Doo will miss her, but I won’t miss the roar of the vacuum and the bustle of the dusting, sweeping, bathroom-scrubbing, bed-changing…and whatnot.

😀

woo-WOO-woooo

Hotter than the Hubs & Crazier than a Loon

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Actually, it’s relatively cool out there on the back porch: only 105° in the shade. Which is just NOT that hot.

My son is on his way over here — or soon will be — presumably to scold the bedoodles out of me. Again. Apparently I was rude to one of my coreligionists. Again. Gawd only knows what I said this time!

My mouth runs loose all the time — always has, ever since I was a little kid. And I really never know quite how I offend. Only that I do offend.

All.
The.
Time.

God only knows what I said this time. All M’jito says is that I offended the woman.

He has a pile of other issues to chide me about this afternoon…what those are, we shall soon hear. And hear. And hear.

See, my problem is that I’m fundamentally not a nice person. The upshot of that is that people tend not to like me. And I tend not to like people.

Result: hour after hour after hour of blogging. And other kinds of writing.

This, you see, is why I’m a writer. Because I can’t speak to my fellow humans without setting them off.

The issue only became noticeable in the first grade. We didn’t have kindergarten in Arabia, and so I had an extra whole year in which NOT to make little toddling enemies. But as soon as school started, I quickly had everyone hating me.

That’s OK. Who needs friends, anyway? F**k’em all, I say.

Actually….it began earlier than grade school. The first time I became aware that other kids hated me, I was a toddler. It was before we went to Arabia (I turned three years old when we arrived out there). My mother and I lived in Sausalito, California, while my father, a merchant mariner, went to sea. One day the two neighbor kids and I were playing in the sandbox in front of our house, there in California. We were about two years old at the time.

All of a sudden, out of the blue, the little girl (they were brother & sister) scooped up a shovelful of sand and….WHAM!!!!

She slammed it into my face. Shoveled that sand right into my eyes.

Ohhh GOD! How that hurt!!! I remember it to this minute — one of the only things I do remember from that age. I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. My poor mother came running outside, horrified and mystified.

That was, I guess, the first time I understood that other people hate me. 

Why they hate me: that usually escapes me. I have no idea what set that kid off. Only that she did what she could to hurt me the most she could in that moment.

And…well…that’s the way most people have acted, over the years.

You see where I find my affection for humanity, hm?

So: fast forward to 2025. 

I don’t know what I said to my coreligionist, but apparently it wasn’t nice.

Seriously: I cannot recall saying anything that I can imagine would be offensive. But apparently I did. And apparently it was bad enough that she reported it to my son.

Most of the time I have no clue what I say to offend these delicate flowers. But I sure as hell DO offend.

Welp…I imagine I’ll get an earful of it pretty quick. He hasn’t shown up yet. But he will.

He will.

How DO they compete?

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Yea, verily: HOW do local stores compete with Amazon?

Just found myself running low on coffee grounds, something I’d ordinarily buy at AJ’s Overpriced Fancy-Dan Grocery Store.

But… but…

* My car has been purloined. No way I can get it back from the kid. And I can’t get to AJ’s without a car, or a 45 minute round trip by bus and hike.

* Until I can rent or buy another car — or threaten the kid with a lawyer (mine croaked over a few weeks ago…) — I’ll either have to take a bus to AJ’s or hire the neighbor’s Uber cab.

* It’s hotter than the hubs of Hades out there, and so you may be sure I’m in no mood to hike six blocks to a bus stop and stand in the 110-degree heat for 30 or 40 minutes waiting for a bus to show up; then repeat in reverse.

* This jacks up the price of a pound of coffee, to the tune of whatever the taxi driver across the street is charging for a ride to AJ’s and back.

Solution? It’s spelled A-M-A-Z-O-N

Mercifully, Amazon does sell fresh (supposedly) coffee beans. So whenever I get into gear, the first chore of the morning will be to order a bag of coffee from there. And here’s my favorite brand…only a little overpriced. Probably about the same as AJ’s charges.

So there’s the question: How do stores like AJ’s and Sprouts compete with Amazon?

Seriously: at some point it’s worth spending an extra buck or two to have stuff delivered to your front door. And the hotter it is outside, the closer that point gets.

Glub!!

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Hot! Humid. Light overcast. Not enough to rain — which might clear out the swampy effect. Just enough to create misery.

Dawg and I have circumnavigated the ‘Hood again…pretty much a daily ritual. My bike is still missing: either purloined by my son or stolen by a passer-by. The upshot is the same. Whenever I work up the energy, I need to go rent a bike at the nearby bicycle shop. Then, presumably, find a place to hide it.

Antecedent to that, Ruby and I have circumambulated the ‘Hood, traipsing from one end of the place to the other through a hot, soggy morning. Now we loaf upon the bed. Ruby is already conkered out, and — after this morning’s damp tramp — I wish I were, too. Swilling coffee and munching chocolate no doubt will militate against any snoozing on the human’s part, though.

Here inside the house, it’s hotter than the Hubs…and soggy. Aim the table fan at the Human and the Dog. Gaze enviously at the snoozing pooch…think turn off that light, shut down that computer, and go back to sleep!

Yet and still…even inside the house with the AC blasting and the fan whirring, it seems too hot and damp to doze. So we play electronic “card” games on the laptop.

Missing my mother. How dare she work up the nerve to DIE, f’rgodsake?

She killed herself, actually. Poisoned herself with tobacco.

Seriously: never was she conscious that she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. And eventually, the damn things did their job: killed her painfully and hideously. Put my father through the tortures of the damned: doting on her, tending to her through every agonized minute of her last three or four months.

Life is evil, y’know?

Speaking of the which, my bike is still gone — probably in my son’s precincts. But I don’t care.

There’s a Goodwill store across the road, and on the corner a retailer of bikes and such. I’m thinking I’ll go over to one of those and buy another bike.

That, however, would require me to get off my duff, climb out of the sack, and hike through the humid, overheated morning.

How do I not wanna do that? Lemme count the ways.

Gasp! Huff! Puff!!!

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Just back from about two miles through 105-degree heat. HOLEE shee-ut! Not only hot out there, but passing muggy. If I had any sense, I’d plunge into the pool. But…

a) No, I have no sense; and
b) It’s 107 in the shade out there on the back porch

Jayuz, it’s almost as miserable as Arabia.

And THAT, my friends, is bloody miserable.

On the way to and from the shopping centers, I walk past these blocks of apartments that my mother wanted me and DXH to move into when we first explored this part of town.

WHY in the NAME of God would your mother want you to move into a ticky-tacky pile sandwiched between a freeway on-ramp and one of the busiest, loudest surface streets in the Valley???

Never did understand her enthusiasm for those dumps, except that they superficially resembled apartments she and I inhabited in Southern California.

Ugh. Long Beach Redux. Who would choose to live in such a place?

Oddly, though, our Realtor found us a development to the east of the freeway, a tract that amounts to a pleasant middle-class neighborhood with a nice park, plus some distance between most of the houses and the traffic racket. And the structures in it are HOUSES, not tumble-down apartments.

Phoenix is kinda weird that way. Ticky-tacky tracts interspersed with reasonably decent middle-class developments wrapped around upscale neighborhoods. That’s our garden spot.

Ohhh well. 

It seems unreasonably hot out there. Just now, Wunderground tells us the temp is a balmy 110 degrees. Lovely.

Passed a truck driver in one of the parking lots, loading boxes — by hand — into his semi. Ugh!!!! Some people’s jobs, eh? Offered to help, but mercifully he declined.

Finally made it home and now am  loafing in the air-conditioning.

You don’t even wanna KNOW what the power bill is gonna be this month. My guess,, though, is around $300.

Summer bills run upwards of $200 here. But then, in the winter they’re practically nil…so it all levels out.

Welp…at least we don’t live in Texas. Have you seen the horror shows emanating from that place? Floods that wash people away, drown folks hiding in attics...augh!

That’s whence my father’s family emanated. I can remember my uncle relating memories of times when he and my aunt stood on their wooden porch and watched tornadoes sail past on the prairie. Never did understand how they escaped those storms…guess the weather must have been off in the distance.

Argh! As my father used to say: Texas is a good place to be from…as far from it as you can get.