Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Lovely Morning in Uptown Phoenix…again

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<snark!>  Wunderground tells us our humidity is a mere 22%. Shoot! You can’t even swim in that!

Hot. Wet. Gray. Boring.

Waiting for my son to pick me up and take me to see a new-to-me doc, one whose practice is way to Hell and Gone out near Sun City.

Stupidly, eagerly…I picked this guy off the Internet because he has good reviews and he’s NOT way to Hell and Gone halfway to Payson.

The august Mayo Clinic is just that: on the road to Payson, a good hour’s drive from the Funny Farm.

Afraid the guy’s office is just about that far in the other direction, so this is gonna be a futile trip.

…

I sit here un-enjoying this balmy day and think…how miserable my mother must have been, living by the sea in Saudi Arabia. It was like this about 80% of the time: hot and humid. 

It’s also not surprising that my mother, a girl from Upstate New York, would not survive 10 years on the shore of the Persian Gulf. The accursed place was hot and humid: most of the time just like today’s gray and sticky weather in this place and in this time.

Yeah. Ten years in Saudi Arabia killed her. Shortly before we were to come home for good, an idiot neighbor invited us over for a farewell dinner.

Understand: the company trained employees to sanitize all the produce they ate. Fresh vegetables were to be soaked in Clorox before you washed and ate them.

But there, as here, morons held forth: the type who imagines that if an authority says something, it must be manipulative and false.

So this stupid woman, our neighbor and the wife of a guy who worked on the docks with my father, had us over. I — then an 11-year-old — was dorking around in the kitchen with her and her son while she was preparing the meal. Several times, she sliced off a piece of cabbage and handed it to me as a snack…without sanitizing it. 

I must have been strong as a little horse, because I never got sick from it. But…my mother sure as hell did.

She almost died. She spent weeks in the company hospital as they dosed her with whatever poisons they had to try to beat back amoebic dysentery. More weeks in bed after we got back to the States. And really: she never was right again. She died of a gastric cancer shortly after my father retired and betook them to Sun City.

Ugh.

Anyway. Doctors are not my favorite people. No fault of their own, you understand: I just don’t like being reminded, vividly, of the gawdawful occasions when we needed to make use of their skills.

***

hmmmm…. 10:30 and my son’s not here. Could he have forgotten?

awwww…what a shame!

Do I have the wrong day?

* * * * * *

oh!!!! Yaaayyyyy!  YES , I DO!!!!!!

Today is Tuesday. Our appointment with New Quack isn’t until tomorrow: Wednesday!!!!

Joy joy joy!  Dance to spring! 

Well. Dance to mid-summer, anyhow.

*** *** ***

So! NOW what?????

What I’d like now is a fresh bottle of wine. We’re about out of booze here at the Funny Farm. But on the other hand…if M’hijito spots any such prize, he will have a sh!t-f!t that won’t quit. He imagines he’s heaving me onto the wagon.

{chortle!}

At any rate, to replenish the supply, I’d have to march through the humidity to the Sprouts…or down to the Albertson’s. And you wanna know what I DON’T want to do?

Yeah…tromp around Phoenix on a humid, hot day.

All the stores around here have announced that they’re taking to delivering groceries to your house. Nice, eh?

Except…I haven’t set that up with any of our fine emporia yet. To do so would require me to walk over to Main Drag West and up to Main Drag North, visit three or four stores, and dork around with making them understand where to bring the loot.

And good luck with that, eh?…

Seriously, I am enthusiastic about trying this new service…and, I sincerely hope, using it regularly. I do hate grocery shopping, that’s for sure.

But first off, I’m too lazy to get my butt over to the stores and dork with this stuff.

And second off (third off, fourth off, fifth off, and so on…), most Americans haven’t a clue about the nature and uses of fresh produce. Which is to say, they couldn’t pick out a decent head of lettuce if their life depended on it.

So, I expect that once I do get this system up and running here, the results will be less than sylvan.

Hmmmm…. Another frenzy of sirens echoing across the lands. Must be another wrecky-poo down on Main Drag South…no, sounds like the ambulance is on its way northward on M.D. West.

Ambulance driver. Now there’s a job I don’t envy anyone. What a hair-raising experience that must be…day after day after day…

Huffa puffa…WOW

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Hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there. It’s only 11:15 in the morning, but the thermometer on the back porch reads 100 degrees. Objectively speaking, that ain’t very hot…for Arizona, we mean. But it’s a little humid out. So the heat…or whatever it is…strikes one as a shade (heh!) on the uncomfortable side.

But FUN!!!! I do love walking around the ‘Hood, which is…well, just one great hangout. No question of it.

On the way home from the U.S. Postal Services official mailbox — whither I’d gone to drop a can’t-wait-on-it piece of mail — I passed a couple attending to their BRAND-NEW, GORGEOUS, HUGE, FIRE-ENGINE RED MINIVAN. Parked in their driveway…to die for.

Seriously, I think the only reason they weren’t in the cooler reaches of Payson or Flagstaff or parked beside a Pacific Coast beach is that they had just bought the thing.

When I stopped to admire it, the woman owner who was tidying the thing up said they’d bought it for their road trips — soon to be a regular feature of retirement — and because it had a nice, safe place for their little dog.

You can be sure that if it were mine, it and I and the dawg would be ON THE ROAD, right this minute. 😀

Many years of grand fun to you, folks! <3

***

No grand fun here, just this minute. Well…unless grand pain is the same as grand fun… 😀

Seriously, the hip seems to be dislocated. At some points, you can almost feel that the femur doesn’t fit quite right into the hip socket. At other, the joint works smoothly and with very little pain.

I was gonna drive out to the far west side to try to snab a new doctor. But my son having snabbed my car put the eefus on that. Not far from here, we can rent cars…but…on reflection…how much DO we want to walk through 100-degree heat on a hip that hurts every time you move it? Hmmmmmm…..

So: called the proposed new quack and canceled that appointment. Not an easy trick: the guy apparently is too cheap to hire a receptionist/phone-answering lady, and I had a bitch of a time reaching a machine that would take a “won’t be there” message. I hope he doesn’t try to charge me for the missed meeting.

‘Cause he ain’t about to get paid for it…

*****

And now Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, pushing dirt and dog hair around the tiled floors. What a fun way to make your living, eh?

Idle conversation about our predecessors. Hers, of course: largely Native American mixed with Spaniard types. Seemed unclear to her what tribes might have made up the native set…but if her people came from fairly deep in Mexico (as they probably did), you can be sure they weren’t Chocktaws and Chickasaws.

My father, as far as we can tell, was largely Chocktaw. Apparently his mother was a member of the tribe who married a gringo buffalo hunter. We know his family came out of the deep South, though they had landed in Texas by the time he was born.

What was my mother? The surprise gift of a spate of naughty adventuring on the part of her mother and…some guy. Raised by her paternal grandmother and, later, by my maternal great-grandmother, my mother was amazingly staid. One would never know the maternal line of the family was composed largely of March hares who subscribed to a crackpot religion called Christian Science. 😀

A lot of strangeness lurked in that branch of the family…but none of it had to do with being Native American.

Glub!

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Wow, what a horrid morning. 

By the time the dawg and I got home from peregrinating around the park and Lower Richistan, I was soaking wet. It is so humid out there that you come inside with your clothes soggy.

Meanwhile, fighter jets ROOOOOAAR out of Luke Air Force Base, preparing for the next World War,

My mother used to love to sit on her back porch in Sun City and listen to them charging back and forth. Didn’t ever seem to dawn on her that the nuclear war they were built to engage would mean the end of her sweet little Sun City house, the end of  American life as she knew it, and the end of her.

I guess she either didn’t believe World War III was gonna happen (and fortunately, she was right in that…at least, so far) or she just didn’t care. The war racket used to terrify the bedoodles out of me. But really: why? Once it started to happen, you weren’t gonna live through it. So why get all exercised about it, eh?

And now that I’m old, I suppose I don’t care, either. At  least, I don’t get so alarmed at the prospect. Once it starts to happen, I’ll be dead. So…what’s to care about?

Dog & Human & Heat & Humidity

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8:25 in the morning. Back-porch thermometer says 95 degrees in the shade. And WET. Wet as fukkin’ Saudi Arabia. Wunderground says a mere 11% humidity…but I wouldn’t believe that. It is plain downright SOGGY out there in back.

Wanna fix coffee and food, but don’t feel like ingesting anything: it’s just too hot!

Ruby and I hiked around the park, through the neighborhoods to the east and south of it. Did not envy the workmen who had arrived in their pick-ups, preparing to heave, haul, prize, and hammer at one house under repairs & upgrades. Ugh! Physical work in this heat? Spare us, Lord!

Got a dentist’s appointment this afternoon. Will have to hire an Uber to drive me over there, unless I can persuade my son to knock off the job for the purpose. He’s the one who stole my car…so I guess he’s the one who oughta drive me to appointments. I may just cancel, though: I’m not up for dental hassles today.

Guess I need to call Financial Dude, extract a few thousand dollars, and go buy a car. This time, too, purchase a padlock for the garage door! Can you believe my kid stealing my car? Uhh…“protecting me from myself”….?

Real protective, trekking around on foot through 110-degree heat, eh?

Speaking of summer marvels… What the HELL is Trump doing in DC? Who does he think he is? Adolf Hitler Redux? And WHAT the Hell has happened to American voters’ brains?

Frankly, I suspect what we’re seeing there is a result of the long-term dumbing-down of America’s schools. It’s taken a few decades…but our wanna-be dictators are, indeed, winning out.

Oh well. This post is supposed to be about a dog and a human and heat and humidity. Not at all clear that Mr. Trump is human. He’s certainly not smart enough to be a dog. “Hot,” he’s not, in my book. That makes him “humid,” eh? 😀

*****

A-N-N-D… Just get yourself sat down to munch a little breakfast and swill a little coffee and it’s

R-R-R-R-R-R-O-O-O-O-O-O-A-A-A-A-A-A-R-R-R-R!!!!!!!!!

Gerardo’s boys show up! And now they’re out back ripping and roaring and banging and crashing and hauling and dumping and….awwww geeeez!

F*ck. Now I’ll have to clean the pool. Just what I wanted to do on a 108-degree morning.

Okay, Okay…yes, I surely am glad I don’t have to mow and dig and weed-whack and trim and haul…on any morning, to say nothing of one where the thermometer reads 108 in the shade of the back porch before 9 o’clock. But how do they KNOW when all I want to do is sit down and unwind?

Really. I should sell this house and move into a North Central high-rise. Let the Kid sell the apartment when I die and figure out what to do with the dog.

****

Forked over a hundred bucks for 20 minutes’ worth of yard work. But…he had five guys out there. One of ’em a newbie.

WHAT an obnoxious job. A hundred bucks is a freakin’ bargain, I’ll tellya! Especially on a 118-degree day…

So now we’ve got a new guy…nice-lookin’ fella, fresh out of Mexico. We’ll see long he hangs around.

Honestly, I don’t understand — not even faintly — how those guys hold up under the strain of physical labor in 100-degree heat. They must be strong as horses. Or crazy as loons…

Called the kid to tell him he’ll have to drive me to the dentist. He was less than thrilled. Maybe he thinks I’m going to hire an Uber to get over there?

Well. No. Just gonna let all my teeth fall out.

😀

Sauna City!

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It is hotter than a two-dollar cookstove outside — as my father used to say. Feels like Ras Tanura out there. That’s Aramco’s crummy little company town, perched on the shore of the Persian Gulf, about 40 miles out of Dhahran.

Horrible place. Horrible horrible place!

Damn glad I don’t live there anymore.  But sometimes I do wonder if there’s much difference…at least, at some times of year.

This is one of those seasons: hot, still, and wet. Just walked in the house from the morning doggy-walk, drenched in sweat.

Oh well: a morning like this is short on doggy-walkers. That means fewer encounters, fewer near-fights (or full-on fights), fewer morons to ask to puh-leeeze keep their dogs back. That’s something I guess.

Something else: today is NOT a day when my son is dragging me out to the damn Mayo Clinic. Thank goodness! 

What a waste of time: An hour’s drive through nasty traffic. They put me in these stupid workshop meetings where a dozen old buzzards sit around and bitch about how they can’t remember things. Is any advice offered on how you might keep track of things that you used to be able to manage?

Nooooooo. It’s just whine whine whine wine….I can’t remember where I put my shoes…. Not one person in the room — fellow whiner or medical/psychological professional — says “Well, then: get in the habit of always putting your shoes in the same place!”

Duhhhhhh!

My patience with that clap-trap is, shall we say, long gone.

Well, anywho…that frees up the day for my favorite activity: loafing. Ruby and the human are are now well-walked, and so we can loaf without guilt.

LOL! Sentimental-journeying through websites picturing Ras Tanura, the horrid company town where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Claustrophobic. Hot. Small-town mentality. Horrible place.

Mercifully, my father retired from Aramco when I was at the end of the 6th grade. My mother and I came back to the states six months ahead of him and settled in San Francisco…just in time for the big earthquake at the end of the 1950s.

My mother was absolutely terrorized by earthquakes. To capitalize on that, they stupidly rented a high-rise apartment — a very nice one — in a tony development called Parkmerced. He had gone back to sea, and so was floating around the ocean on a tanker most of the time.

Yeah: in a real earthquake, that swell Parkmerced building would sway back and forth! “How to terrorize your wife even more,” eh?

We hadn’t been there long when, during a school day, a major quake struck. I was in school — sixth grade. The teachers paraded us all out onto the playground, where flying debris and collapsing ceilings were unlikely to kill us.

Meanwhile, my mother totally freaked out. So much so, that she lost consciousness of her experience that day. Her first memory of it is finding herself in the middle of a street in front of our building, running around in circles! My father had gone back to sea at the time, so he wasn’t there to calm her down.

Ahhh, the good ole’ days, hm?

So…despite the gawdawful heat and the bat-brained right-wing politics, Arizona has a lot to recommend it. High on the list: no earthquakes. 

😀

I stay here because there really isn’t anyplace that I know of that’s any better. But primarily because my son is here. He stays here because his dad is here. And because he grew up here. And because he has a decent job here.

Actually, I can think of a number of better places. If M’hijito weren’t in Phoenix, where would I go?

* Berkeley, California
* San Diego, California
* San Francisco, California
* Paris (yeah: the one in France)
* Santa Fe, New Mexico
* Seattle, Washington
* Mexico City

I dunno. There really aren’t all that many places in the world that are much better than where I am. What would be the point of moving?

Except, maybe, to get away from the summer heat. Then you get…what? Winter cold?

Welp…the dog is walked. The human is hungry. Better get off my duff and fix some breakfast. Outta here!

Hotter than the Hubs

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6:15 p.m., and it’s 105 on the back porch.

The back porch wherein no sunlight penetrates….

{whine whinge!!} It’s SO hot, so miserable that it’s hard to believe this is Arizona.

Yeah, it does get HOT in Arizona. But as we like to brag, “it’s a dry heat.” Today the oven appears to be attached to the plumbing. We’ve got hot, all right. But also weirdly damp. 

An unpleasant wind has been blowing all afternoon, waving the trees around in the distance. And we have a weird, high overcast. Very thin clouds, gathered over us like a sheet on a bed. They’re keeping the heat close to the ground, and the wind is blasting that heat back and forth.

Saaaave us!

Ohhhh well. Ruby and I are barricaded inside the house. The AC is blasting away…we can only hope it keeps on blasting, and doesn’t crap out in the middle of the night.

My excellent son brought over some good things to eat, and so the human is stuffed. Presumably the dog is, too, since she just scarfed down a dish of pooch chow.

This junket to our house was very kind of him: it rescued me from having to walk to the Fry’s or the Sprouts. They’re close enough…but in this heat, nothing is close. So I was mighty glad to be spared the grocery-store hike.

Tomorrow the temp is predicted to hit 110. Again: not surprising at this time of year. But still…heh! lamentable. 

One of my neighbors — a great favorite of mine — has rented an apartment in Prescott: a cowtown and tourist trap up north on the Rim. It’s not far from where our ranch was. But…hmm ….  Y’know, the ranch wasn’t exactly balmy in the dead of summer.

Lessee…. Tomorrow Prescott is supposed to hit 113.

Well. It’s better than 120. I guess.

Not enough better, IMHO, to make it worth renting or buying real estate up there! 😀