Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

EEEEEEK! Be scared! Be VERY scared!!

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LOL!  People are SO freakin’ ridiculous!

Urban coyote

Ruby and I are perambulating the north-eastern quadrant of the ‘Hood. This area is sandwiched between a broad, green park to the south and a desert wilderness area to the north. As we stroll along, we run into Wile E. Coyote, a resident of that wilderness park. He presumably has trotted down into the ‘Hood in search of a delicious stray cat.

Because, after all, EVERYone has a Constitutional right to let their cat run loose, right?

Oh, my goodness! The FLAP that dawg caused!

Every third passerby felt called upon to warn me, in hysterical tones, that there’s a coyote up there! 

Eeek. Eeeek, say I. Eeek eeek eeeek.

Folks. Leave the damn dawg alone, and it will leave you alone. Keep your tame dog on a lead, and the coyote will leave your beloved pup alone.

Why on earth are people SOOOO stupid about such obvious things?

LOL! The coyotes around here want an encounter with you even less than you want an encounter with them. When they see or hear you coming, they turn tail and trot away.

Nevertheless, urban coyotes are among the reason we who have any common sense walk our dogs on a leash — along with the far more dangerous automobiles and unleashed dogs and stupid humans who think they must grab your dog, pet it, and feed it junk treats.

Am I the only one who’s flabbergasted and fatigued by the stupidity of our fellow humans?

July 4, 2025: 7:30 a.m.

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Accuweather:  Humidity 50% at 7:37 a.m., wind 3 mph Predicts a high of 103. Yeah…it’s gotta be that already!

Shindig in the park: July 4. Place is overrun with kids and dogs and grown-ups. Shenanigans under way.  IMHO, w-a-a-y-y too hot to be shuffling around out there!

It’s great fun to see all the little kids racing around in the park. All the parents chasing around after them. That place is gonna be mobbed at 8:00 a.m. Ruby and I got our morning doggy-walk done just in the nick of time.

It is sooooo hot and humid over there just now. Feels like lovely Saudi Arabia. At least that happens only a few days a year in Arizona. On the shore of the Persian Gulf, this kind of suffocating weather occupies a good third of the year.

Despite the mile-plus hike, I’ve hurt my hip bad enough that mild exercise doesn’t help. Yea verily: hurts like Hell!

Some years ago, a MayoDoc said I would one day need to have surgery on that thing. Looks like the day has about arrived.

Which raises the obvious question: HOW am I going to manage a four-bedroom house, a third of an acre, a pool, and an active little dog when I’m laid up with a bum hip?

No idea how that’s going to work out. Ruby, I guess, will have to stay at M’jito’s place. She hates that. Sits by the door the whole time she’s there, staring and waiting for her human to come back, open it, walk inside, and rescue her.

Meanwhile, my son — the Emperor of the Universe — has decided I’m too decrepit to be driving safely. (In that, he may very well be right…). So he has purloined the Dog Chariot and intends to sell it for me.

Ducky.

So, I’ll be thrown back on Uber drivers, or on surreptiously renting a car from the lot up the road. This, as you might imagine, will not be a good thing…seven ways from Sunday!

Argha.

Well, I can walk to a Sprouts and two large supermarkets — though I intend to investigate their skills at delivery.

Problem is, Americans by and large tend not to know how to select fresh produce. And fresh produce makes up the major portion of my diet. So…if I can’t get to a store to pick out my own food, I’m gonna have a major headache. But there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it.

Right now I can’t walk much of anywhere. I seem to have sprained a hip. This morning’s stroll around the park about crippled me!

Seriously: I don’t even know if I can make it into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee.

…Let’s try it…

Ooooohhh f’rcryin’ out loud!

It STOPPED! The pain suddenly, completely QUIT.

Why? No clue.

But it’s gone. 

Too weird.

Is this whole day gonna be bizarre???

Did She Know?

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The murder weapon…

Did the woman who murdered my mother know what she was doing?

Well…there is an element of ambiguity there. Luella was, after all, stupid as a post, a perfect match for her less-than-brilliant spouse.

But Jeez! How hard is it to understand “You must clean all produce thoroughly AND sanitize it, lest you come down with amoebic dysentery, which will put you in the hospital and may even kill you”?

Really, how hard IS that? Especially if you’re sat down in a classroom and made to WATCH the process, step by step, for sanitizing contaminated produce?

Back in the 1950s, American wives who were sent out to Saudi Arabia to accompany their spouses, on contract with Aramco, were required to take classes in how to prepare food safely and how to keep their families well. One point of those classes was to convince you to clean your food thoroughly before cooking it or putting it (raw, as in the case of salad greens) on the table.

There was nothing difficult about these lessons:

*Germs
*Germs make you sick
*Germs make your kids sick
*Germs can even kill you and your kids.
*So you must wash all your food thoroughly to get rid of the germs.
*This especially applies to things you eat raw, such as salad greens.

Does this seem hard to you?

Seemed pretty self-evident to the ten-year-old me. But I do remember my parents’ idiot friend, Luella, standing in the kitchen and preparing a cabbage salad…without ever so much as rinsing off the leaves. And I remember her handing me pieces of raw, unwashed cabbage greens to munch on, as she puttered about the kitchen.

This treat did nothing to me. Not unduly surprising, since I arrived in Saudi Arabia as a two-year-old and, during the time we spent there, was exposed to every Middle Eastern germ known to personkind.

But…that yummy salad made my mother very, VERY sick. Desperately sick.

The company sent her back to New York, where she was hospitalized for weeks and dosed with every treatment known and imagined to beat back the microbes.

She spent a good two or three weeks in the Ras Tanura hospital before the company doctors felt it was safe to fly her back to New York, where she spent the better part of another month in in treatment – drastic treatment.

That STUPID, evil woman apparently poisoned my mother on purpose.

What did she think it would do to her? Probably nothing. She was so stupid she didn’t understand difficult concepts like the germ theory. But she had been told about it. And told about it. And told about it again and again. If she’d had a synapse between her ears, she would have understood that unwashed produce grown in fields fertilized by human feces was likely to make you good and sick. How hard IS that to understand?

To this day, I remain convinced that Luella quite deliberately sickened my mother by quite deliberately neglecting to sanitize the dinner produce. What…A…Witch!

At any rate, my mother did survive, though she was never fully well again. Eventually she did die of a gastric cancer – to what extent it was related to the parasitic infection and the ferocious treatment, I do not know. But…I do remain convinced, to this day, that Luella killed my mother.*

I don’t get unconvinced easily, y’know…

*Actually, while Luella had a lot to do with it, the tobacco manufacturers went a long way toward killing my mother. She was addicted to nicotine, and so, thanks to that habit, she smoked herself into the grave. 

What Next, Then?

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Okay…no sign of Pool Dude. That’s not surprising, though. We’ve arrived at a Saturday in one of the hottest months of a Phoenix year. If you were a Pool Dude, would you be busily running from backyard to backyard?

So presumably, it’ll be Monday before the mess gets cleaned up. At the soonest: that calculation depends on the assumption that he hasn’t decided to can his freelance pool-cleaning business. The mess: remains of palm fronds, with their accompanying burden of dust and dirt, dropped into the drink when Gerardo’s boys climbed up there last week to prune the accursed palm trees.

My neighbor drained her pool. It’s been empty since she moved in, several years ago. And y’know…hmmmmm….it’s a thought.

Personally, I like the pool too much to convert it to a hole in the ground in which to breed mosquitoes. If I didn’t expect Pool Dude would show up at any minute, I’d be out there in the altogether, loafing in the cool water right now. Or at least sipping coffee and listening to the birds carrying on in the brush that surrounds the thing.

And speaking of those from whom we have no word: Mijito still has the Dog Chariot and is emitting no sign of returning it.

And y’know what?

Hang onto your hat….

The longer he keeps THAT hole in the ground into which to pour money, the less likely I am to demand to get it back.

No kidding.

I had no idea how easy it would be to get by without a rolling cash-burner. And that is in the middle of an Arizona summer, when it’s hotter than Hell and a bitch to move around outside. Not only that, it’s an assessment that has occurred before I’ve even started to take advantage of the new public transit system here. Two blocks from my front door we have a kewl, shiny, sleek light-rail train, gliding past silently on shiny new train tracks.

So the question arises, like Marley’s ghost slithering through the window: Why do I want to own a car?

Several times a day, that spook materializes and moans again: Why do I want to own a car?

And y’know what? About 99% of the time, I don’t have a good answer to that question.

Truth to tell: as I sit here, only about three or four things that I need to do would be majorly facilitated with a car…and that’s in 114-degree heat. Let the weather cool off, and you can cut that list to two or three.

1. I do need to go by the pool store and get Harvey fixed.

But y’know what else? I’m gonna foist that job on Pool Dude. Let him earn his pay, by gawd. Let me loaf, as I deserve to loaf.

2. I crave another bottle of halfway decent white wine.

But y’know what further else? That object can be had at the local Albertson’s (about three blocks to the south), at the Sprouts (two blocks down the street and across Main Drag West), at our vast Mexican supermarket (two blocks to the north), and at the local liquor store (a block to the north and a block to the east). So…uhm…I should own a $35,000 rolling hole in the asphalt into which to dump money?  Really?

3. If anything happens to Ruby — she gets sick, she eats an oleander, whatEVER — she will need to be seen by a vet ASAP.

But y’know what? M’hijito has a car and always will, at least until he reaches retirement age. In a real emergency, he can schlep the dog to a vet. But why break up his work day, when an Uber driver lives right across the street? Very likely that guy or one of his colleagues could whip us over to the nearest vet in a matter of minutes… Hmmm…for a lot less than 35 grand…whaddaya bet?

See what I mean? There really may not be much of a reason to own a car here in lovely North Phoenix, other than

* ego trip; and
* convenience.

The “convenience” part is balanced away by the repeated (and increasingly expensive) trips to gas stations, by the regular visits to the Toyota place for maintenance, by the taxes on the damn thing… Hmmm….

Really, you hafta wonder: why do any Americans keep their own cars? At the very least, why do any Americans who live free of commuting keep the damn things?

MORE Pool Dude Shenanigans

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So I stagger out to the backyard to be sure Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner is working properly…as he should be, after Pool Dude got finished with the job late y’day afternoon.

Should, eh?

Shoulda coulda woulda….

The damn thing isn’t hooked up properly. Nothing is working right. The bottom of the pool is showered in black dead leaves and debris.

Goddammmit!

Hotter….Than…The…Hubs!!!!

Shut down the system. Haul Harvey out. Clean the crap out of him, as best as possible. Disconnect the vacuum hose. Lay it out flat (so it won’t sear itself into a curled-up position like an angry cobra…). Burn feet on pavement. Some guy is outside the east wall. Check on that: apparently just a random workman.

Realize the debris all over the bottom of the pool is going to have to be vacuumed out. But I ain’t doin’ that in 112-degree heat. 

Hm. It’s almost 3:30. Sun blasting away. Sheeee-ut!

Decide to leave Harvey on the deck until sunset, at which time it may be a little cooler out there. At that point, get the hose vacuum, scoop as much debris as possible, and then put Harvey back in the drink.

What fun.

Makes a box in the sky look good, doesn’t it?

Roar! Roar!! Roar!!!

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Ruby and I take our morning stroll, serenaded by the roar of jet planes. Yea, verily: one of the reasons I hated living in Sun City: Luke AFB, just a few miles to the south and west.

Every goddamn morning: Blasts of jet engines greeted the rising sun.

Other reasons to find Sun City tedious:

* racism
* hatred of young people
* distance from decent shopping
* isolation
* ugly, cheaply built house
* ultra-tidiness
* gravel “lawns”
* no pets: nobody had dogs, though they were allowed.

We did: we had an annoying chihuahua…but my mother preferred cats. And you hafta say: cats don’t yap.

Way over here in North Central Phoenix, a good 20 miles away from Sun City and Luke, we can get the dawn jet blasts. Even though the planes don’t fly directly over the neighborhood, their engines are SO LOUD that you can hear the damn things INSIDE your amply insulated, solid block house with its double-paned windows and its attic blown full of insulation.

What a racket!

SDXB, a long-time newsman and then a PR guy, took a little job for Luke after he moved out to SC: answering the phone to citizens calling to bitch about the jet engine noise. It was a task that kept him busy.

My mother was one who did not bellyache about the racket. “It’s the sound of fweedom,” she used to simper.

No, Mom: it’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way. 

Of course I didn’t say that to her. She’d have backhanded me into the middle of next week for any such sass.

She did love living in Sun City, you hafta say that. So much so that she not only wasn’t bothered by the ungodly roar from Luke, she even claimed to like it.

Ugh. Never been so glad to move away from a place in my life.

And after 10 years in Saudi Arabia…that’s sayin’ something!