Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Another Balmy Day in Arizona…

by

“…Leave us all enjoy it,” as one beloved radio announcer (now extinct) used to croon.

Yeah. It’s 5:25 in the afternoon and A HUNDRED AND NINE DEGREES in the balmy shade of the back porch.

To gild that thermometer, a layer of overcast is drifting in from the east. So…it’s hotter than the hubs out there — and humid. 

Lovely. Feels like Saudi Arabia.

Anyhow…if there was ever a chance that Ruby and I could do an evening walk after the sun goes down, it’s rapidly melting away!

😀

What DO you suppose got into my parents, to drag us here to this balmy spot? Wouldn’t you think 10 years of 110-degree heat and sand by the Persian Gulf would have warmed the cockles of their souls enough?

ohhhhh well….  At least we don’t get hurricanes. Horrors!

Think I was supposed to go to the dentist this afternoon. That would have been impossible, as M’jihito still has my car. Just as well…I’m past my heat-and-hassle limit!!!

***

Ruby goes outside. Where is she? 

Call the dog.

No sign of her.

But also no sign that any of the PARCHED, FRICASEED TREES AND PLANTS in the backyard have been watered.

Call the dog.

Tear around trying to get the watering system to come on. Drag a hose to one especially fried tree.

Call the dog.

Set the water to running on the backyard orange trees.

Call the dog.

Bat my way back into the house.

Call the dog.

Finally find her: loafing in the bedroom.

Hot, hot, hot, hot, HOTTER THAN HOT. Air-conditioner is set to 79 degrees, and it’s pounding away.

Phone jangles. 

Leap up, run to the office, grab handset.

It’s M’hijito, calling to check that I’m OK in this unholy heat, and asking if I’d like him to take me to the grocery store.

<3

Hafta ask you: how nice is that??? <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Nothing needed here this evening. But tomorrow I may ask him to schlep me to the Sprouts or some such. No hurry, thank goodness!!

Arizona:
Garden spot

Muse Me No Muzak!

by

Daaayum, but I hate Muzak. Do you know anyone who actually likes to sit on the phone interminably listening to bing-bing-BONG-bing/bong bong BING bing pumped into their ear?

Tried to call Young Dr. Kildare’s new office, way to hell and gone out in Sun City, by way of canceling today’s appointment. Ring ’em up and get bing-bing-BONG-bing/bong bong BING bing blasting into the phone. Finally, after about five minutes of this annoyance, some poor office worker came on the line, just as I was about to slam down the phone.

Y’know, one of the problems with this endlessly annoying “system” is that by the time an employee answers the phone, your customer is in SUCH A RAGE that it’s almost impossible to muster a shard of politeness.

Another problem: since Dr. Kildare makes his (dis)respect for his patients/customers so obvious, you can be SURE this one will never show up in his environs again.

Y’know, I think the Mayo is just great. Love my doc out there, though sometimes question her opinions. But the problem is…their offices are WAAAAYYYYY over on the far side of north Scottsdale, halfway to freakin’ Payson. A drive over there takes upwards of 40 minutes — one way. So you’re on the road for 80 minutes to spend maybe 10 minutes with MayoDoc.

Annoying.

At the time I knew him here, YDK’s office was right up the street from my house. Literally: I could walk there, if I felt so ambitious. That and the fact that he’s reasonably smart and competent led me to schedule visits with him for any medical issue that looked fairly tame. Saved the Mayo safari for ailments that looked downright terrifying.

And when you get old, you DO get enough of those to help pay a doctor’s overhead…

At any rate…probably in search of an older, more ailing clientele, YDK closed his office in Moon Valley, a suburb just up the road from the Funny Farm, and decamped to Sun City.

A long drive from here. A long, crowded, unpleasant drive.

But…I like him so much that I decided I would follow him…westward, ever westward.

***
Uh huh. Tried that. Ain’t tryin’ it again. 
***

My parents lived in Sun City. My mother died there, under the care of the most UNcaring doctors I ever met. So, I determined that I would never, ever let a Sun City doctor have at me.

Needless to say, YDK’s move out there led to some agonizing second thoughts. 

A huge, brand-new, fancy hospital has sprung up in Sun City. One guesses that YDK and his partners decided to go out there so they could get in on the ground floor of that thing…and have access to some swell new office digs. All very nice.

But if I’m going to drive half my lifetime to see a doctor, I guess — oh, make that I know I’d rather go east than west. ANY day I’d rather go to a Mayo Clinic doctor than to Albert Schweitzer in Sun City! Hafta say: the experiences we had out there — in Sun City — while my mother was dying were just horrific. I swore I’d never go near another Sun City doctor or hospital…and…well… I reckon now is the time to honor that oath.

‘Bye, YDK…you will be missed!

<3

Freedom’s Just Another Word…

by

…for NEVER HAVING TO PUMP ANOTHER GALLON OF GAS into a hole in the ground into which to pour money.

Seriously.

Folks nearby seem to think I’m going to be stricken, heart-broken, ripped-off, and agonized at my son’s making off with my Toyota Venza, and at the (amazingly short-sighted) docs at the Mayo Clinic issuing an edict that I must not be allowed to drive anymore.

Heh. If only, folks. If only! 

This afternoon Mijito and I took an informal inventory of all the places I can reach on foot, without ever having to turn an ignition key, pump a gallon of gas, or dodge a fellow homicidal driver. Let’s see…

1. Albertson’s
2. Sprouts
3. Walgreen’s
4. Bookstore/video library
5. Computer store
6. Hair salon
7. Bus stop
8. Lightrail stop
9. Asian restaurant
10. Mexican restaurant
11. Church
12. Liquor store
13. Another hair salon
14. Vacuum cleaner shop
15. Variety store
16. El Rancho supermarket
17. QT store
18. Circle K
19. Auto repair and maintenance shop
20. Boston Market
21. Cricket Wireless
22. UPS store
23. Doctor’s office
24. Regional hospital, with emergency room

It goes on and on. There are more…I just can’t remember them all. Add the lightrail and the bus stops, and the marketing potential is endless!!

Seriously: Today we decided, after an eye-opening experiment, that the smartest thing we could do with that $34,000 rolling hole in the ground into which to pour money IS….to get rid of it.

No kidding. Today we reached the point where we agree that this old lady doesn’t need a car. 

Nope. I live smack in the middle of Commercial Paradise. And right next to a lightrail line and bus lines that swoop down the city’s central corridor connecting the west-side bedroom communities with the mid-and downtown commercial districts and onward to Tempe, home of the vast Arizona State University. Thanks to transportation upgrades the city has installed over the past ten years, I no longer need a car at all! 

Jeez. What does this place think it is? San Francisco? 😀

That’s what it was like to live in San Francisco after we came back from our ten-year sojourn in Saudi Arabia: you could go anywhere you wanted or needed to go and get any product or services you needed simply by using the public transit. 

Well, amazingly, the central parts of Phoenix have evolved along those lines, too.

The Mayo docs want me to quit driving. Not because I’m any more of a menace on the road than my fellow homicidal drivers. But because I’m older than the hills and they’re scared of what I can do these days. 😀  Consequently — did you know doctors could do this?? — they have told the State of Arizona to nullify my driver’s license!

Can you imagine?

Well…what I can’t imagine just now is that I don’t give one thin damn about their arrogant little order. Because I can go wherever I want to go and get to whatever I want to do by train, bus, or taxi…for, ultimately speaking, one HELL of a lot less than it costs to own and maintain a car with a gasoline engine.

Over the past couple of weeks, the kid and I have run a de facto experiment: stashing the car at his place and leaving my garage empty. And to our astonishment, I’m getting everywhere I want to go or need to go in about the same time, without having to pour money into a car!

Wow! 

If this continues for another two or three weeks, we’ll be selling the tank, and I’ll be getting around as though I were a real, live big-city girl.

 

Lovely Morning in Uptown Phoenix…again

by

<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

by

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!

by

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?