Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

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, a gent named Paul Prokop. 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.

Doggy-Walk-a-Roonies

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Honestly…circumambulating the park is only about a mile’s walk, assuming we don’t go through the Richistans. Dunno why that seems like a bit of a hike — because it isn’t — but for some inscrutable reason it felt like we’d trekked to Afghanistan and back  by the time we got home this evening. Ohhh well: we managed something resembling exercise, anyway.

Sooo many cute little kids! And o’course because corgis are notoriously cute, they think we’re even more adorable than  they are, so we pass any number of folks who coo and dote over Ruby the Corgi.

Out in the park, teams of Latin American athletes are always competing at this game and another, making the scenery even more scenic. Usually three or four games are going on at any given time, which provides a passel of handsome young men to admire as we pass through.

And WHAT a beautiful evening! Clear and balmy and blue…so lovely.

Now we’re back. My fingers refuse to hit the keyboard straight, so every phrase here is getting typed and re-typed and re-re-typed again.

I give up! AWWAAAYYYY!

And Another Lovely Evening…

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THIS evening made all the lovelier by the absence of perps fleeing cops in helicopters. 😀

Ruby and I perambulated our part of the Hood, plus Lower Richistan and Upper Richistan. What a hoot, right before Christmas.

The locals LOVE to decorate these old houses and their half-acre yards with their mature, beautiful trees. Kids are playing outside. Parents are puttering. Trees and shrubs and eaves and roofs are gussied up with colored lights for Christmas. It’s just a delight to walk around here at dusk.

A December evening in central Arizona really is lovely, except in the (unlikely!!) event of rain. The dusk sky glows in radiant shades of blue and orange. The air is sweetly temperate. The old 1950s houses are graciously handsome. And the kids are….

OHHHH! CORGIIII!!!!!

LOL! Here comes another kid!

My goodness, how the local urchins adore short, plushy, pointy-eared little dogs! Fortunately, she adores them back. So an evening walk can easily morph into a 45-minute love-fest.

That’s life in the ‘Hood. 😀