Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Can a day REALLY be this gorgeous???

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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??????

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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

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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…

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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.

Ohhhh, the Terrror!!!

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Just back from the morning park circumnavigation. The place is overrun with dog-walkers…and…a fine pair of coyotes! 

LOL! One of the funniest things about living in the Hood is how brain-banging stupid the locals are about the coyotes that wander in off the desert — about six blocks to the north of us. Ohhhh the terror!! Ohhhhh the horror! Ohhhhh the panic!

The coyotes occasionally roam in off the desert preserve, about six or eight blocks to the north of the Hood. And yes, they will grab your dog if you leave it out in a place where they can jump a fence.

But no, they will not attack you or your dog as you stroll around the neighborhood streets. They’re more scared of you than you are of them.

Odd that people don’t seem to know that, isn’t it? Not as much fun to be un-scared, I guess. 😀

It was interesting, though, that the pair were roaming around the park, humans be damned. Clearly, they were not afraid of the local riff-raff. And that, to tell the truth, is not a good sign. You don’t want them to be unafraid of humans: you want them to exit, stage left the minute they see you.

So it was eye-catching that the two were just trotting about their business, smack in the middle of a human-infested park. At the height of the Doggy-Walk Hour….  Hmmmm….

I carry a shilelagh with me when I take Ruby out. Main reason is that I can wrap her leash around it, allowing her to drag me around without removing the hide off the palms of my hands. But it would do well to bat one of the wild pups, if they decided to try filet of corgi for breakfast.

Jets from Luke Air Force Base roaring around overhead this morning. Frankly, I find those avatars of World War III a great deal more alarming than a furry wild dog. WHAT a racket those planes make!

My mother, about as smart as the coyote-fearers, used to sit on her back porch in Sun City (right down the road from Luke), and soak up the racket from those planes.

“Ohhhhhhh,” she would simper, “it’s the sound of freedom!”

Uhm…no, Mom: it’s the sound of World War III, comin’ your way…

Never did understand why that rather obvious fact didn’t register with her.

Humans. They’re even weirder than coyotes.

Headin’ Toward Hallowe’en!

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It’s only the fourth of October. But o’course, that means we only have about twenty-eight days till HALLOWE’EN!  My favorite annual holiday!!!

People here already have silly witches and wizards set up in their yards. This is a neighborhood that embraces pagan rites, bless’em! So we get a great deal of fun hootenannying going on around here. I love it!!!

Dunno if my son will invite me down to his house for the door-to-door festivities. Sometimes his friends throw a party…so if he’s over on the other side of the Valley, he and I won’t be watching ghosts and goblins running around his streets.

That’s fine, because the WonderAccountants — neighbors across the road — love to sit outside on their driveway and hand out treats. I bring some to add to the booty and go over to join them.

That is MORE FUN than Carter has oats. The neighborhood just north of ours is a low-end affair populated largely by poor whites and Hispanics. And THOSE folks do know how to have fun with their kids.

Hordes of costumed terrors show up, driven into the ‘Hood in their relatives’ or neighbors’ vehicles. And ohhhh! The amazing, the wild, the CRAZY costumes! 

Also, o’course, having all of us sitting out in front pretty much puts the eefus on the vandalism. We have fun, they collect loot, and our yards and homes stay pretty much intact.

Ruby the Corgi has already dragged the Human from the neighborhood ‘s northerly posts to its southerly pillars this morning. That journey takes us past the former home of an old colleague, Jerry Jacka — a historically spectacular Arizona Highways photographer. He is, alas, long gone…as we soon will be, too, no doubt. But you can be sure no one will remember my house as the abode of a historically spectacular Arizona Highways and Phoenix Magazine sub-editor. 😀

Ohhhhh well. If ya wanna be famous, you’ve gotta pick your poison. Or so it appears.

YIPES!!!!!

Sprinkling system just sprang to life in the front courtyard, whereinat I was loafing while scribbling this…AUGH!

Hound and I darted into the house, barely in time to keep the computer from getting drenched.

DARN IT! Such a gorgeous morning: all I wanted to do was sit outside, absorb coffee, scribble random thoughts, and enjoy the day.

But noooooooo….   😀

{sigh}  Jerry Jacka: one of the great (truly!) landscape photographers of the Western World…. Ye gods, was that guy good at what he did! And what a privilege it was to work on staff for Arizona Highways when he and the rest of that crew were freelancing for us. I will say: that is the one paying staff job, anywhere, that I really do miss and I really do wish I were still doing.

But…ohhhh well. Now I am old. Now I am tired. It’s comin’ on to ten in the morning and…egad! I wanna go back to bed! 

When did it become the style to take one’s afternoon nap at mid-morning?

😮

Ohhh well, indeed….the Human will be better served by laying its spavined hip under a heating pad than by dodging sprinklers or loafing around the living room. And Ruby would rather do her loafing job atop the bed than anywhere else in the house or yard. 😀

And so…to work!