Life in the Desert

Colder ‘n’ a by-gawd out there on the back porch. But…but…the thermometer reads 48 degrees….which just ain’t THAT cold.

Need to take the Savage Beast (all 30 pounds of her) for a walk. Now, not later. But my enthusiasm for that project is about nil.

And speaking of dawgs and jobs you’d druther not do: Ruby’s beloved Pool Dude was just here and gone. LORDIE, there’s a real you’d-druther-not!! Slopping around in cold water and chemicals when the air is so cold it makes your hands ache.

Ohhh well. Thanks to that lovely fella, the pool is sparkling clean (and it stays so!), and I do not have to lift one limp little paw to make it that way. Basically, he makes it possible for me to stay in this house.

Well. No: that’s not exactly so. True: I did used to clean the pool myself, which (as you may have surmised) didn’t kill me. My neighbor just to the west has drained her pool. And she leaves it sitting there empty. Actually, during the rainy season she leaves enough of a puddle in the bottom to breed hordes of mosquitoes, which fly in her other next-door neighbor’s windows and bite bite bite bite bite. They put that poor woman (known in her family as Other Daughter, she being the youngest of two) in the hospital. (Mosquitoes carry all sorts of diseases, not just malaria).

I taught Other Daughter’s dad to throw mosquito repellent and insecticide over the wall into the puddle, which seems to have helped some. Hard to tell, though: it’s too cold for skeeters just now.

Why on EARTH would you buy a house with a hole in the ground in which to breed bugs unless you were gonna use the hole in the ground???

Contemplating the neighborhood bullsh!t returns me, irresistibly and unpleasantly, to contemplating the possibility of moving back to Sun City, where people don’t indulge this kind of bat-brained behavior. (Out there, they have other kinds of BS to play with.)

My parents dragged me to Sun City when my father made his first pass at retiring from his job as a sea-going tanker pilot. Even though young people are not allowed in that garden spot, my parents claimed (correctly) that I had weaseled my way into the University of Arizona at the age of 16, and so would be living in dorms in Tucson. But in fact, I spent all the university’s “vacation” time in un-lovely Sun city: winter break, spring break, and three months’ worth of summer break.

Just hated living there! 

Oh, well. Life ain’t what you pay for, is it?

Speaking of (un)lovely Sun City, I haven’t heard from SDXB (“Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend”) in ages. Called out there a few times: no answer. I hope he and New Girlfriend are OK.

Unless medical care in that place has changed a lot since my parents lived there, Sun City is no place to get sick. The horrific excuse for “care” my mother got during her last months is one of several reasons I refused to move westerly, ever westerly when SDXB sold his house here in the ‘Hood and moved out there. That and the gawdawful racket from Luke Air Force Base. And the hate.

Those people hate everyone and everything in any way different from them. Foremost, of course, is skin color. Then affluence: better not be busted & disgusted and try to live out there… Then politics: if you’re a damnfool liberal, you’d better keep your mouth shut. Then religion: Judaism is not high on the list of preferred systems of worship…though my parents regarded Judaism more as a racial category than as a way of thinking.

What an awful place! Even if my son hadn’t been living in central Phoenix, NO WAY would I have followed SDXB out there when he took off for the West Side.

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But…but…but…

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It is indeed much cheaper to live out there than it is to live in town.

So occasionally I do think...maybe I should sell the Funny Farm and move out to dreary…uhm…lovely Sun City.

But really…why? 

Unless you hate kids, there’s really no good reason to move out there.

My parents did, effectively. Hate kids, that is. My father was regularly and utterly infuriated when a neighbor’s brats went out in their backyard and hollered and carried on as they played. But…he had good reason: he worked the swing shift, and he often truly needed to sleep all afternoon.

But whereas he could (and did!) beat the bejayzuz out of me for waking him up in mid-afternoon, there was nothing he could do to shut up the neighbors’ li’l darlin’s. If there had been a place to live where kids were not allowed, back in the day, he’d have been living there! 😀

What he would have done with me escapes me. Boarding school, prob’ly.

Anyway, he thought he’d died & gone to hevvin when he learned about child-free Sun City. And that is why and how we got to Arizona.

Heh! What an outcome, eh?  I believe my mother thought they would retire down the West Coast, to a small town between L.A. and San Diego.

It was very pretty down there. But he decided it cost too much. (Life cost too much for my father’s taste, come to think of it…) So when they found Del Webb’s Sun City projects, they thought they’d discovered Nirvana.

And I imagine they selected the one in Arizona because Arizona was SO much cheaper to live in than was anyplace in California.

Infuriating…retrospectively speaking. I had figured I would go to UC Berkeley. With that goal in mind, I’d worked my a$$ off in high school, weaseling my way into the National Honor Society and racking up absurd grade-point averages taking 5 solids every semester. Instead, I ended up in Tucson.

Shee-ut! Why would you do that to your kid?

Oh: because you matter so much more than your kid, right?

😀  😀  😀