Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Round and Round They Go…

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And where they bite, no one knows. ARF!

Actually, this morning’s junket around the park was uneventful. Quiet. Arfifarious. Ruby declined to try to eat any of our fellow dog-walkers’ companions. (Either that, or the dog-walkers have finally wised up a bit…) Weather was hot, humid, icky — reminiscent of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.

Mornings like this remind me of oooohhhh how glad I am that I no longer live out there! What a gawdawful place!

Seriously: a swampy morning like this would be S.O.P. over there. Useta be: all summer long we’d wake to water dripping off the eaves as though it had rained half the night…under a clear blue sky. That’s how humid it was: the air SO WET that water would condense out of it and piddle off the eaves like rain.

LOL! Swamp or no, the park is always fun…or at least pleasant. This morning we encountered a handsome young father pushing his obscenely adorable baby along in a carriage. Awwwww! What could be cooler, eh? 

😀

Well. Maybe “cool” wasn’t exactly the term. But he and his urchin were indisputably charming.

Otherwise…what? Well…one “what” is that, as we hiked along a particularly affluent street in Lower Richistan, I was suddenly struck by the resemblance between the upscale section of the Hood and a historic Phoenix district called Palmcroft.

That tract is part of the larger, also highly historic area called Encanto: a place full of gorgeous old houses dating back as far as the 1920s.

Our area is much newer…but here in the 21st century, no one would dast to call it “new.” The houses are edging on to “historic” themselves, many of them very pretty, all of them handsomely maintained. The Young and the Affluent do adore “historic” houses, and they flock in here to buy them…bearing well-stuffed pocketbooks.

This pushes real estate prices up and up and up. I couldn’t even begin to buy a house down near the park — an area that I could easily have afforded a decade or so ago, when I moved in here.

Therein lies a main reason that I want to stay in this house till I croak over: if I can leave the place to my son, he’ll be able to afford to go anywhere he pleases. 

  • Fancy-Dan Scottsdale: no problem
  • Ritzy Paradise Valley: call in the movers!
  • Back to his dad’s home town, Grand Junction, Colorado: off to the scenic upscale(!) hills
  • San Francisco, where each of us privately believes we belong: California, here we come!

You name it, he can be there. Or…he may choose to just stay here and enjoy this handsome upscale tract.

And it is an exceptionally pleasant place to live. Centrally located. Handsomely built. Mature landscaping. Gorgeous park. Adorable kids. And nowadays: an increasingly awesome public transit system.

Seriously: you can live here now without a car. And, incredibly enough, I do! 

Such are one’s thoughts as one’s dog tugs its human around our park. I love it here…my dawg loves it here…we ain’t movin’…isn’t that the cutest li’l kid you ever saw!… I want my kid to get this place, lock stock & barrel…

Trudge Trudge Trudge

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Holeee maquerel! WHAT a day!!!

Trudged from pillar to post and back to pillar. Metaphorically, of course: most of the trudging was done in cars.

My excellent son, Ian the Great, drove me way to Hell and Gone, from one fine Valley Center (the Mayo Clinic in North Phoenix) and through one fine commercial district to another to another (shopping center after shopping center).

And…well…I’ll tellya: I could come to hate living in this place.

Seriously: the honored Valley of the Sun gets more and more like Southern California as each day passes. And yes, I sure as Hell did hate living in Southern California.

Well…at least we racked up the miles on his car, not mine. The Dog Chariot is still at his house, kiped from me a few weeks ago. No: I haven’t gotten around to buying another car, and I haven’t gotten around to leasing one.

And frankly…hang onto your hats, folks…I may not replace the Chariot, not with either a rental or a new purchase.

BECAUSE….hevvin help us!… I’m finding it’s bizarrely true that you may not need to own a car to get around in this city. 

No kidding.

First off, I live in a concentrated, highly commercialized area. Within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm, we have…

* 3 major grocery stores (Albertson’s, Fry’s, Sprouts)
* 1 full-service computer retailing and repair store
* 1 large, major  bookstore
* A car rental business
* 1 veterinarian
* 1 clinic, open for emergencies as well as routine care
* several clothing stores
* a Walgreen’s
* a Basha’s supermarket
* an El Rancho market
* a discount store
* a shoe store

One could no doubt go on and on…that’s as many as I can remember, but there are others.

Next off…the ‘Hood exists at the nexus of public transit in this part of town. Not one, not two, but THREE main drags pass right by my  house. I can walk to a bus or train that will take me anywhere from the ASU West campus in Glendale to the ASU main campus in far-away Tempe. Within six square blocks of my house, I can pick up a bus or train at over half-a-dozen stops! And if I walk another three blocks to the city’s central main drag, I can get on a bus that will take me all the way into the central business district — downtown — and from there into commercial and residential points south.

Which, I suppose, is a way of saying we’re in the middle of everything. 

Good Morning, America! And…

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…DUCK FOR COVER!

LOL! 8:00 in the morning, and you can hear those damn fighter jets from Luke Air Force Base all the way over here in North Central Phoenix! 

What

A

Racket!

Yes, the Sound of Death is no lullabye. That’s for sure.

People who live in Sun City bitch nonstop about the noise from Luke, right up the road from the Old Folks’ Ghetto. That actually creates SDXB’s job out there: as a semi-retired PR guy for the Air Force, he volunteers to staff the phones in the base’s public relations office. Every morning, rafts of Sun Citizens call in to bellyache about the roar from the jet plane exercises.

Hilariously, my mother used to LOVE that racket. She’d sit on her back porch, there in Sun City, and take her morning coffee to the lullaby of F-16s taking off and landing. “It’s the sound of freedom,” she would coo.

There’s a wild-eyed right-winger for you!  😀

By a weird coincidence, my house was built by the same outfit that built out Sun City. And, although it’s designed for more than two people, it bears a weird resemblance to my parents’ Sun City house:

* gray slump-block walls
* aluminum-framed sliding doors and windows
* asphalt shingle roofing
* sloping roofs over attics

Well, at least we have actual garages. Webb apparently felt a place to put a car was unnecessary for an old f*rt…presumably the new residents would be too old to drive, right?

Well. No. Out there, the houses have cheesily built lean-to carports. STEAL THIS CAR! that sign says…. 😀

Actually, what the local thieves used to do was climb on top of the car, reach up to the carport ceiling, and slide open the door to the attic. From there, they’d hop into the attic, walk across the beams to the living-room or kitchen area, saw a hole in that ceiling, and drop down into the house. From there, they’d steal you blind.

Lovely.

Here, my dowdy li’l Sun City-style house does have an actual garage with an actual garage door. 

LOL! If I’d known this subdivision was built by the same outfit that built Sun City, I wouldn’t have bought a house here. Not on a bet.

But that prejudice notwithstanding…it’s not a bad little shack. Not at all. Construction is sturdy. Design is sensible. Lots are large enough to put plenty of space between you and the neighbor. Alleyways are included, and they’re lined with 8-foot-high block walls.

Sun City has no alleys, and no backyard walls. Take your morning coffee in your backyard, and you can watch your neighbor do the same as the jets scream overhead.

They scream overhead here, too…occasionally. But at least they’re far enough away to put some distance between the natives and the racket-makers.

Ugh!! This is gonna be another beautiful day in Arizona: 28 percent humidity under clear (hot!!) skies.

In the Department of Jobs You’re Glad You Don’t Have, Mr. and Mrs Wonderaccount (right across the street) have hired a team of painters to spiff up their shack. I need those guys over here, too. But…well…luring them to my house would require me to get up off my duff. And I ain’t about to do that!

Wow! Not to Say Good Grief!!!

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Strolled down to the commercial corner at Main Drag South, there to find out if I need another covid shot…or what.

Chatted with the pharmacist at the Albertson’s. He said not. Apparently I’m now about as covid-proof as I’m gonna get.

Which, I suspect, ain’t 100%.

It is hotter than the proverbial hubs out there. Left me highly resenting my son’s having kiped my car…left me wondering how (or if) I could snare another car. Then, as I hiked off steam, I realized that if I want to be schlepped around in a car, I can call Uber…and not have to gas up, store, service, wash, and pay taxes on a four-wheeled gas-guzzler.

EGAD! INSIGHT!!!!!

Today has gotta be one of the worst days of the whole year for walking around the city streets. It’s effin’ hot and it’s effin’ humid. As we scribble, the back-porch thermometer reads 100 degrees in the shade…and no part of today’s stroll was in any shade.

And y’know what?  Walking through the heat was just not that bad. 

For one thing, I’m probably getting used to hiking around the place. And for another, all that walking is building strength and stamina. And that’s not a bad thing…it’s a good thing!

Yes. Strangely enough, as I swam through the swampy air it occurred to me that walking to the commercial parts of the neighborhood is about the best thing I can do for myself — healthwise, that is.

I’ve already built up a lot of energy…weirdly, an hour or more of hiking through unholy heat did exactly nothing to wear me out. Got home…waved to the neighbors as they climbed in their car…pranced into the house…fixed iced tea and lunch…  And thought, Well! That was no BFD!

So…yeah. That IS what I’ve about concluded: Not having a car is no BFD. 

At least not in an urbanized residential district full of shops and taxicabs… 😉

GRONK! Another sylvan day in Arizona

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Grrrr!!!  I AIN’T GOIN’!!! No, nope, nooooo way! Not goin’ out in that unholy swampy heat to hike three blocks to a grocery store. The dawg and I can go hungry, by dayum!

Truth to tell, neither of us is about to go hungry. The larder has enough dog & human food to tide us over for several days. After which, we may hope, my present spate of crabbiness will have passed.

Seriously: What DO we need?

* Not dog food: three or four cans lurk in the storage room.
* Not human food. What remains on the shelves may not be the most delicious chow on the planet, but it’s perfectly OK and it’s unspoiled.
* Not wine. We’re on the wagon.
* Not cleaning goods. Everything is in stock.
* Not anything that I can think of, offhand.

And I figure that if you can’t think of it, you must not need it very badly. 😀

Hope that’s true, because I just made up my mind to skip this morning’s planned grocery junket.

Seriously: The weather is REVOLTING this morning. Hot, soggy, hazy, uggh-leee. Probably won’t be any better tomorrow…but if I can put off this hiking trip until tomorrow, maybe I’ll resent it a little less

***

Check this out: Duet: Partners in Health and Aging.  Apparently this is a volunteer group that will send folks out to do your grocery shopping or drive you around the city or whatever.

I’ve tried to reach them: no one answers the phone at their office. Apparently the “group” of volunteers isn’t large enough to man the phones. But…what the hey! Later today, I’ll try again.

If I can foist the annoying errands onto someone else, that will solve a HUGE  part of the problems poised by those idiots at the Mayo Clinic having put the kaibosh on my driver’s license.

There may be some other volunteer organization of this ilk. If today’s effort to get through to Duet fails, I’ll see if anyone else out there is in the free-help biz.

*****  Later ****

Yes…I did get through to someone at Duet.

To avail oneself of their benefits, you have to sign up with them and give them a bunch of private information. And they demand your phone number.

I explained that, because of the outrageous number of nuisance calls I get — day in and day out — I’ve had to block incoming from all but a few area codes.

He just didn’t seem to “get it.” Truly: I don’t think he understood what I was saying:  eight or ten nuisance calls a day naturally leads to one rejecting most incoming calls.

So…I don’t expect to get far with that bunch.

Ohhhh well. The world hasn’t ended yet. Probably won’t, in the near future.

Soggy Doggy Day

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Wait what? You say the sky is supposed to be blue??? Where DID you get that idea? 😀

Another gray, soggy day. Grayer, even, than the last two days, which have been passing grim.

When you are a corgi, though, you don’t put up with any bellyaching from the Human. So, at Ruby’s behest, it was out the door and off to circumambulate the park, as usual.

And to the Human’s surprise, that worked out pretty well! We did not get rained on. Most of the usual dog-walkers, having more sense than the Human, were hiding out. The cloud cover kept the temperature in the comfortable range. Gee…kinda reminded one of San Francisco.

We probably should go up to the nearby grocer’s and pick up a little more food. But that would require hauling out of our chair and walking around, which is more than the Human feels like fooling with just now. In fact, there’s more than enough chow for both the Human and the Hound to cover the next two or three days.

So…we’ll take our chances.

The hip does hurt, though. A lot: especially if I sit or lay around awhile. What makes it better — other than aspirin — is getting up and walking. But that, of course, is ominously like (gag!) work.

Passed the night in nightmares about living in an old-folkerie. My father, as I may have mentioned in an earlier post, signed himself into one of those. But…he didn’t mind institutional living, having gone to sea all his adult life.

He ran away from home at 17, lied about his age, and weaseled his way into the Coast Guard. From there, it was into the Navy, and after that, a life-long career in the Merchant Marine.

Me, I hate bad food. I hate the sound of the neighbors’ TV, radio, and shower running. I just don’t like living with people. Gimme a dawg as a room-mate, any day.

Ruby is now conkered out on the floor. Looks like tromping around in the sticky, humid heat is a bit hard on her. Hope that’s the issue, and not some ailment.

😮

Speaking of tromping around in the heat, though…  One thing that I’ve discovered, quite handily, through the late series of misadventures is the amazing fact that you don’t really need a car to get around this neighborhood just fine! 

Consider: Within easy walking distance of my house, we have THREE major supermarkets…and that’s if you don’t consider Sprouts a supermarket.

Me, I regard Sprouts as a kind of specialty store. And it’s just three or four blocks down the street.

We also have…

  • a dentist
  • a hair stylist
  • a computer store
  • a Walgreen’s
  • a discount clothing store
  • two major supermarkets
  • a car rental and tire shop
  • a car mechanic’s shop
  • a 24-hour doctor’s office
  • A veterinarian

And on and on…

So, I guess if you’ve just gotta get yourself crippled up, this is the place to do it!