Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

…and we did this…WHY????

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Chortle!  Today’s Moment of Stupidity seems to take the proverbial cake.

What on EARTH possessed me? 

Come about 1:40 in the afternoon, I took it into my feeble little mind that nothing would do but what I should take a little walk around the neighborhood.

Yeah. That’s the neighborhood where the back porch thermometer just now registers 115º in the shade. Don’t ask what that translates to when you’re out in the direct sun!

Okay…so, bein’ stupid as a post, we don’t ask that key question, but just pull on a shady hat and trundle on off down the sidewalk.

Extraordinarily bad idea. Got about a block before I smartened up, turned around, and came back to the house. Made it before we fainted and plopped face-down on the sidewalk….

Holeeee maquerel! It’s almost hot out there!

Welp...tomorrow’s exercise will have to occur at dawn. Again. And probably (again!) without our furry friend’s company. If the heat is still this fierce, outdoors will be no place for Ruby the Corgi.

What a gawdawful place!  WHY did my parents drag me here, lo! these many years ago?  

I should have headed back to Northern California on my own, the minute I graduated from the University of Arizona with the low-rent B.A. This was not the place for me to have stayed put!

Swamp?? Make That Quagmire!

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Wow! What an AWFUL, wet, swampy morning!!!

Ruby and I just returned from our daily circumnavigation of the neighborhood park. MISTAKE! We should never have started out on that venture!

At 7:45 in the morning, it’s 100 degrees out there, with 40% humidity. So saith Wunderground.

If anything, that’s an understatement. It’s as hot and as soggy out there as anything we used to see on the shore of the hideous Persian Gulf, when we lived there in Saudi Arabia. And believe me: that is NOT a place where you would want to live!

Dawg is flopped on the kitchen tiles, having swiggled a raft of water. I’m flopped in a leather chair, its upholstery covered with a cotton throw in an effort to keep the sweat from wrecking the thing.

Horrid morning in a horrid place. If I had any choice at all, I’d be living soooooo far from here!

Where would so far be? Probably the San Francisco Bay Area, whence my mother’s family emanated. Yes, the air gets wet there, too…but at least it’s COOL air!

Our relatives lived in Berkeley, then a middle-class to upper-middle-class district sprinkled over rolling hills. Such a pretty place! I sure do miss it!

What possessed my parents to move to Arizona…well, I can’t say that escapes me.

Yeah, I know what called them:

Money. At the time, the cost of living here was so much lower than California’s that my father figured he could afford to retire. And…yah: quit his job and knock off working was what he most craved in life! At least, at the time that was so.

Politics. Arizona is as far to the right as you can get outside of the Deep South. People’s hearts are filled with hate here. Especially in regard to anyone who is not white and middle-class. My parents made an Alabama politician look liberal.

Weather. Yes, summers here are gawdawful. But the other nine or ten months of the year are pretty lovely. In the low desert: temperate days, no snow, rare rainy days.

Cost of living. You can buy a house in Sun City or Youngtown for a fraction of what a similar place costs in California, whence we emanated. True: it’s not a place you’d like to live year-round: summers here embody Hell. But air-conditioning makes it possible to survive.

Cheap tuition at the state university. I got into the University of Arizona at the end of my junior year in high school. After we’d lived here for a year, the cost of “education” (as it were) in Tucson was a fraction of what any California college or university charged state residents there.

Well. My son is well established here, so I’m not about to leave the state. Where be my son, there be I.

That doesn’t make me like this place a helluva lot more, though….

😉

Summertime, and the livin’ is…EGAD!

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7:05 in the evening and, as we scribble, the thermometer in the shade of the back porch reads A HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES!

Egad! CAN you imagine?

It’s hard even for me to imagine…and I’m livin’ in it.

What an awful place. 

Wunderground tells us it’s actually 112 degrees out there. Supposed to chill down to a crisp 104 by midnight.

This is one of many factors that make me want to move back to San Francisco. And believe me: if I could afford it, I sure would!

Who’s That Knockin’ at My Door?

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Just realized…. These days, I never answer the door when somebody comes a-knocking. Or a-doorbell ringing, either.

Seriously: it used to be — back in the Dark Ages — that when you went to someone’s house and rang the bell or knocked on the door, they answered by opening the door(!!) and greeting you. Today, I won’t open the door unless I know who’s out there.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. My front door is secured by a heavy-duty prison-like screen door, on the outside of the usual decoratively wooden door. So, the exterior door — the real one — has a set of bars and outside that, a thick sheet of solid metal screen. Getting through that would not be easy!

My next-door neighbor has a camera installed above the front door. It relays an image of any caller to a screen inside the door. And no, she won’t answer the door unless she knows who you are and why you’re there.

Awful that we have to be that scared, isn’t it?

One might say times have changed and so our door-answering customs have changed…the implication being that in the good ole’ days you didn’t have to worry about who or what was out on the doorstep.

But no. I don’t think the folks who show up at your door are any different than they used to be. If they’re not a friend or neighbor, then they’re trying to sell you something or (of late) they’re census takers, surveying the locals. It’s a rare bird that poses a real threat.

That notwithstanding: These days I peer out a window before I go to the door. If I don’t recognize the person, I don’t answer. Or else I holler through the window to ask them what they want — and nine times out of ten, send them away.

Now I will say: I don’t want to be hustled by some door-to-door seller. Period. So one reason that door doesn’t get answered is to make it easier to repel those jerks. As for census takers and the like: they need to show me a mighty authentic-looking ID to get me to the door.

Fine times we live in, eh?

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Ugh!!!!!  Don’t know when I’ve seen a day this soggy since we lived in Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf. What a horrid swampy morning, under the glow of the morning sun!

Seriously: one wonders how the air could be this wet without clouds and rain. But…having lived by that gulf shore, one does know it’s possible. Horridly possible.

Out there, I’ve seen it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. No: no exaggeration. I’d be looking out my bedroom window, the swamp cooling that passed as air-conditioning pounding away, and all of a sudden water would just start to pour out of the air. No clouds. No sprinklers going. Just rain condensing out of the humidity.

That’s central Arizona for you!

Dawg and Human: just in the door after a stroll around the neighborhood, through the late pre-dawn hours. Made it back to the house before too much damage was done…though my hair is still wet from sweat and damp air.

Honest to gawd, WHAT possessed my dear parents to drag us to this Hellish place?

Oh, yeah: Sun City. No kids screaming outside your window when you’re tryin’ to take a nap! 

No joke: My father hated kids. And he especially hated them when they were set loose to play outdoors.

When he and my mother discovered Sun City as we were driving across the country one time, he thought he’d found Nirvana: NO KIDS!

Ugh.

So as soon as he could afford to retire, he quit his job, and they packed up and moved to beautiful (childless!!) Arizona. They got me into the University of Arizona a year early — I hadn’t yet graduated from high school, and no one under 19 is allowed to live in (un)lovely Sun City, unless they’re enrolled in college.

Anyhow…that’s how I got to this charming venue, stuck in Arizona when I should be living in the San Francisco Bay Area…where I belong.

Yes, I do hate it here. But my son is here. He has a job here. And I’m not about to leave where he’s living.

🙁

 

Not Exactly HOTTER than the Hubs…

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But at least VEERING toward hot as the Hubs of Hades. Outdoors: hot, sticky, gummy weather. Indoors: sticky and gummy.

July is the time of year when you do NOT want to be killing time in Arizona. The heat is fierce, and no, it is most surely not a “dry heat.” It’s as humid and sticky as (un)lovely Saudi Arabia used to be when we lived out there. Yuck!

Wunderground claims it’s only 94º outside. Supposed to get up to 107º during the day. If you asked me, I’d say we’d reached that goal already! At ten in the morning…

Ugh. If my parents were still living, I’d brain them both for dragging me to this hellish place.

They thought Sun City, over on the far west side of Phoenix, was just loverly. 

Yeah…

No accounting for taste, eh? If you love the sound of fighter jets roaring up and down, starting along about 5 in the morning: just loverly. If you love folks who hate kids and wish to live in a place where no such critters exist: loverly. If you love folks who hate people whose skin is darker than theirs and wish to live in a place where no dusky types reside: loverly. If you love grocery stores that sell nothing more exotic than a T-bone steak: loverly.

Ye gawds, did I hate living out there!

Finally got a job in town, one that supported a studio apartment’s rental. So…was able to escape loverly Sun City.

Now in my old age: here I am, parked in North Phoenix….most certainly not in the retirement environs of Sun City. To this day, the appeal of that place escapes me. Reckon it must be….what? ….

The whitey-whitness (No kidding: just a few months ago an African-American friend of mine bought a house out there. Within weeks he was literally HOUNDED out of the place!)

The ultra-tidy sameness of the architecture and of what passes for the landscaping. (Nothing like a gravel lawn to stay nice and neat, eh?)

The relative cheapness of the houses. (A comparable house in town would cost half again as much…or more.)

The remoteness from the rough-and-tumble noise of a big city. (Sun City is characterized by the silence of the tomb….when fighter jets aren’t blasting back and forth.)

One could go on and on, I suppose….but one would prefer not to.

Never was so happy as when I got into graduate school and made my escape to a university campus.

Ugh!!!