Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Glub!

by

Rain all night, letting up  by light of day.

We still have high clouds, and the pavements are all soaking wet. But…it looks suspiciously like whatever this is will blow away.

Hmmm….  Reading the local news leads me to think I ought to blow away, myself. Good GAWD, has this place LosAngelized!

Cops shoot a sh!thead who was spraying the streets with bullets in our old neighborhood. This incident began in front of the Basha’s and Safeway stores where I used to do all my grocery shopping. Sixteenth Street and I-10 is right down the road from the first apartment I rented in Phoenix.

Phoenix “braces for fiscal challenges”: read “expect still higher taxes!”

Do I really wanna keep living here???

Hm.

Offhand, I can’t see anything better that I can afford. Scottsdale is outta my price range, by a long shot. Tempe, Mesa, Chandler: not my style. Sun City/Youngtown: been there, done that, ain’t doin’ it again. Other towns around the state: Boondock living is decidedly not my style.

Even when we had the ranch, up on the Mogollon Rim, we would drive into the city to do the shopping.

{sigh} I guess gunshots, stick-ups, and burglars are just part of Life in the Big City.

Sometimes I do find myself wondering, though: who needs it?

 

 

Gray Day Redux

by

Another spectacularly, tropically rainy gray day. Weirdly beautiful. Ruby and I would be out traipsing through the ‘Hood if I could move my hip without eliciting a shriek of pain.

Alas, I can’t. So…instead, we loaf upon the bed, gazing out the big bedroom windows onto the cloudy skies and the burbling pool.

Dayum! If I didn’t hurt so much, I’d be out there paddling around in the drink.

Truth to tell, though, I’m afraid that if I got into the pool, I might not be able to climb out by myself. Would need to have a phone out there, to dial 911 if I couldn’t haul myself upright. And…

How do I not WANT to call 911 to drag me out of the drink? Let me count the ways….

My GAWD does this thing ever HURT!!! And there seems to be no position in which it hurts less.

***

The Haunts of the day take the form of memories of Saudi Arabia, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

My gawd! What a hellish place!

Even as a little kid, I think, I realized how horrible it was.

Well…that’s not quite the whole story. For me, as a kid resident of (un)lovely Ras Tanura, the horribleness was embellished by the fact that I was a weird little kid, whose eccentricity brought down on her all pure nastiness that grade-school children are capable of coughing up.

GOD, but those brats were monsters. And boyoboy, did they pour the hate on the weird little girl who imagined she wanted to grow up to be an astronomer. You just can’t even picture what nasty little horrors those junior Ras Tanura expats were. Evil, evil brats.

Now, in old age, one wonders where the moron teachers were. How come the idiot who ran the 2nd grade didn’t put a muffler on her little darlins’ mouths? How come the bitch who ran the 4th grade couldn’t bring herself to behave like a decent human being? How come my parents had to take me out of the school in the 5th grade so I could/would address the academic work and get through a whole day without collapsing into a nervous pile?

How did I hate that school? Let me count the ways.

And yes: the problem was the school and its monster brats and its idiot teachers. As soon as we got back to the States, I dived into the sixth grade in a San Francisco public school.   And weirdly, I did just fine there.

More than just fine, as a matter of fact. I thrived. In the California public schools, I hit the National Honor Society. And my performance excelled to such a degree that I started at the university at the end of the 11th grade — skipping my senior year in high school.

Must’ve been because I was a crazy nut case, right?

Oh well. Think about something else, f’r godsake!  

Clouds.

Rain.

Overgrown hedge.

Strange orange flowers.

Funny little dawg.

Sooooooo glad to be as far on the other side of the globe from Saudi Arabia as it is possible to get!

😀  😮  😀

Can a day REALLY be this gorgeous???

by

Okay, okay…I do understand that some (benighted!) folks fail to recognize that a rainy day coated in pearl-gray skies is fukkin GORGEOUS. But… {sigh} their loss.

My goodness, it’s beautiful outside those big sliding glass doors.

Yes, the sky really IS the color of pearls: gray and glowing and effing’ gorgeous.

A sweet and gentle rain sprinkles briefly and intermittently, warm and lush and amazingly dog-friendly.

{When you are a dog, you are a bit ambiguous about certain meteorological phenomena, such as …hmmm… rain.}

Yes, even though Ruby strongly disapproves of water falling out of the sky, she has cheerfully trotted outside to patrol the yard through the…urk!…water falling out of the sky. And now she’s back in the house, where she has taken up her post on the end of the bed, guarding the backyard through those heavy sliding glass doors.

My goodness, this has turned into an astonishingly gorgeous day. We had a spectacular sunrise…but that’s not so unusual for Arizona.

Rain, however, surely is. And gorgeous rain, beautiful rain: that most certainly is.

Surely, when you’re not a dog, you’re inclined to imagine that a day like today IS gorgeous. And yep: if you asked me, I’d tellya it’s a freakin’ gorgeous day.

Vaguely, it reminds me of certain days in Saudi Arabia.

NO, no…I’m afraid I do not miss (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Yeah: I do miss my parents, who dragged me there as a toddler. Uh huh. And I do miss my crazy little friends. And ohhh yeah, I do miss our cats. (We weren’t allowed to have dogs: rabies, y’know. So we had cats. Cats and cats and cats…) Sooooo glad not to be in Saudi Arabia! S0 haunted by weather that brings back memories of that place.

If you’ve lived in Hell for awhile and are sent back to Earth for another lifetime, do certain kinds of weather remind you of Hell?

Whaddaya bet?

Ruby-doo is conkered out on the sack. The human is sipping wine… but not guzzling it, because it’s too darned wet out there to walk up to the store to retrieve another bottle of the stuff.

Just as well, one supposes. God tryin’ to tell you somethin’ no doubt. Eh?

LOL! I do wish my excellent son were here to socialize with. But…well…yeah: he’s working. 

Remember that? Work? 

How outrageous!

It’s still the middle of the afternoon, so his phone is at his ear and his nose is on the grindstone.

How happy ARE some of us that we don’t hafta do that anymore?

Tried to lure him in the direction of dinner out this evening, but he seems magnificently uninterested in any such scheme. For that, he can hardly be blamed. Venturing out in this weather is hardly worth a restaurant dinner. To say nothing of risking your life… I suspect what he looks forward to this evening is quiet and a peaceful mound of chow of his own making.

This is a guy who CAN make chow. Yeah: he really is a superb cook. So it’s kinda silly to invite him out to a restaurant. 😀

 

It’s Taken Me 60 Years to Figure It Out??????

by

Dear God!! It just dawned on me — here in 2025 — how my mother got herself and me out of Hellish Saudi Arabia. Only now,  lo! these many gerjillion years later!

Jayzuz! WHY did I never see this before? It was so obvious…

She and her best friend, Angie — a nurse in the camp clinic — convinced my father that I was too sickly to stay out there. That I needed to come back to the United States and be cared for by a stateside doctor at a stateside hospital.

That, my dears, was unadulterated bull puckey.

I was sick, all right: with social problems that made it virtually impossible to get along with the little sh!ts who were my classmates out there. Not that I wasn’t a little sh!t myself, after all. What kind of eight- or ten-year-old girl dreams of growing up to become an astronomer (no kidding! in the 1950s!!) and fantasizes that she lives in the jungles of India with Mowgli, Bagheera, and Akela?

Nope: I was never a normal little girl. But then, I was never treated like a living, feeling human being, either: not by those idiot teachers nor by the brats in their classes.

So…yeah. I was SO miserable in the fine Ras Tanura Senior Staff School that I dreamed up every ailment I could invent. And my mother bought just about every one of them. She let me stay home…and stay home…and stay home. When we left Arabia and took up residence in San Francisco, I was YEARS ahead of grade level, mostly because I spent most of my time reading and playing scientist.

I believe that she and Angie worked together to persuade my father that he needed to quit his job with Aramco and take me and his wife home.

Which, eventually, he did: He shipped out of the San Francisco Bay Area on tankers owned by Standard Oil — which was affiliated with Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). Eventually, he got another deck officer’s job working for Union Oil out of Southern California, and that’s where I escaped from high school a year early and made it into college at the age of 16.

Thank the heavens and all the Moslem angels above…

Eventually, as it developed, my mother and Angie did come up with a scheme to convince my father — and probably at least some of the doctors out there — that I really was SICK and needed to come back to the States to be treated. And eventually my mother managed to pile herself and me into an Aramco plane and head back to New York.

They did it by insisting that I was too sick to go to school. By keeping me out of class, claiming I was sick. SICK sick Ohhhh gawd, SICKER THAN SICK. 

Apparently my father fell for it. Either that or he didn’t want a divorce. WhatEVER.

And thank God!

What a horrible place. What a gawdawful childhood. What a joy to hit that grade school in San Francisco!

Coyote Jamboree

by

A pair of coyotes have found the neighborhood park. Ruby and I were over there yesterday…and kinda dodged out of the way.

{grump! crab!!}

Decided against taking her over there for this morning’s dog’n’human stroll. Not that I don’t think I can fend off a coyote (I do carry a shilelagh with me, partly for that purpose). But…well…just not in the mood for confrontation, whether of the human or the canid variety.

And so, we loaf.

Lately, I’ve daydreamed about moving back out to Sun City. 

Heh!

Know what roams around the streets and backyards of Sun City?

Ayup! Coyotes!

Two legs, four legs…what’s the difference, eh?

Neighbor across the street — one of the WonderAccountants — reports that his neighbor on the other side from my house croaked over last night.

That makes me feel so sad. I didn’t know them well — just to say “hello” as the dog and I stumble up the sidewalk in front of their house. But they are unmistakably nice, kind, lovely neighbors.

I wonder if his widow will stay put, or move into some more elder-oriented digs? I hope she stays…but…you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, eh?

Heh… One thing I don’t gotta do is move out of this house…and surely not to horrible Sun City.

My parents bought a house out there when my father retired. I just hated that place!

Actually my present house was built by Del Webb, the guy who engineered Sun City. But for some reason, I find it a lot more comfortable than my parents’ place. Something about the design, the size…whatEVER. Plus the backyards are all fenced in (none o’ that nonsense in Sun City!!!!), and the house has a gorgeous pool. And it’s close to shopping — from here I can easily walk (!!) to a Sprouts, to an Albertson’s, to a Fry’s, and to a Walgreen’s. None o’ THAT nonsense in SC, either! 😀

And we have kids. That, IMHO, is a very big deal, indeed. I do love the sound of kids playing.

Anyway, I wonder what the surviving neighbor will do?

Wonder if my son would like to buy that house, if she decides to trudge off to an old-folkerie? How KEWL would that be?

Well.

I’d think it was kewl. He’d probably think it was a PITA. 😀

Ohhh well. One crazy idea after another, eh?

LOL! I don’t wanna move, that’s for sure. Main reason: I have moved altogether too many times in my life, between spending ten years in the Middle East and then gallivanting all over California for six or eight years. Never wanna fill up another cardboard box with newspaper-wrapped dishes again!

EVER!

And truth to tell… I think (hope!!) I’ll be able to engineer things so that I can stay here in the Funny Farm until such time as I croak over.

As long as I don’t have a stroke that seriously disables me, that should be possible. I’d have to hire someone to come in — probably every day — but given the cost of an old-folks’ prison, the expense might not be any more than having to move into an old-folkerie.

Hire someone to come babysit — maybe even stay overnight in a spare bedroom, if necessary. Get someone to deliver food. And get Uber to tote me around the city…  And basically, that would be about it.

Yes, it would cost more than it’s costing me now to live here. But not THAT much more. And very surely nothing like as much as an old-folkerie would cost.

Well. It’s something to consider.

Stay Away from My Doorbell…Stay Away from…

by

LOL! How’s about “Stay away from My House“?

This town is alive with door-to-door nuisances. I’ve pretty well learned never to answer the door. As policies go, that one leaves something to be desired: it causes you to miss calls from folks you do want to see. But…they number only about one in five of the hordes who show up at the house.

My neighbor to the west won’t answer the door at all. Doesn’t seem to matter whether she thinks she knows who’s out there or not. Ring her doorbell, and you get…nothin’.  If you want to see her, you have to call her on the phone and arrange to get together.

Ahhhh, the good ole days…when people were people and neighbors were friends. If you can imagine, my great-aunt’s house in Berkeley had — hang onto your hat — GLASS PANES in the front door. She could see whoever was out there, and decide on the spot whether to talk with them or not. Today, I wouldn’t have glass in an exterior door, not on a bet.

“Pleeze! Burgle this house!”

But…forgodsake, can you freakin’ imagine??? We live in a country today where you don’t dare answer the front doorbell.  Certainly not unless you know who’s out there. Not just who they are, but what they want.

Dayum, I miss Berkeley. What a pretty, peaceful, and civilized little burg.

Not that way anymore, of that you can be sure.

Seriously: I don’t think I’d feel safe living in my relatives’ pretty little Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house today. Too many druggies. Too many burglars. Too many wannabe rapists. Too many plain ole-fashioned pests.

Today, there really are only two nearby places I can think of where I would feel relatively safe:

One is dreary, boring, Sun City, baking away like a plate of cookies under the roaring path of Luke Air Force Base’s endless battalions of fighter jets. Horrible, whitey-white, hostile place.

The other is Fountain Hills: quiet, cheaply built, and baking away under the desert sun. Well. “Quiet” except during the breakfast hour and the dinner/cocktail hour, when HORDES of passenger and fighter jets pour into Sky Harbor airport, just to the south.

No, thankee.

Do I feel safe here at the Funny Farm?

Surely you jest…. 😀

Just now, though, the back door is hanging open, beckoning to every panhandler, druggy, and wannabe burglar who wanders up the alley. They have to make a special effort to see over the back wall, though: it’s topped with a good three feet of thorny, tangled vines. And if you wander into the backyard from any direction, you set off the Doggy Alarm, whose barkfest gives me plenty of time to shut and lock the door or to grab a pistol. Or both.

What.
A.
Place.

But…far as I can see, just about all of America is What. A Place these days.