Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

EGAD!

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Holee doggerel! Temps here are supposed to hit 117 today. Nice and cozy, eh?

Ruby the Corgi and I were out the door by 7 a.m. or so…and it didn’t seem any hotter than usual. Maybe it’s just that for most humans, our version of “no hotter than usual” is the same as “too damn hot”…  😀

Let’s bestir ourself to stumble out to the back porch and check the thermometer…  hmmm…. only 100 degrees. Sorry folks: that’s just not all THAT hot.

A little warm, maybe, for 9:11 in the morning. But not THAT hot. Gimme a break!

It is, however, a bit humid. Damp enough to be reminiscent of (un)lovely Ras Tanura, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Yea verily: Saudi Arabia was hotter (and wetter) than the hubs of Hades, not a place normal humans would choose to dwell. But…that was all the time, not just a day or two in the depths of a hellish summer.

And usually, the yak-festers here are not kidding when they say “it’s a dry heat.” When the atmosphere is just plain parched, a hundred degrees doesn’t seem intolerably hot.

Fellow dog-walkers this morning were whining and squawking about (ooooohhh eeeeeek!!!!!!) a terrifying coyote strolling up one of the neighborhood streets. The sheer horror, eh?

What IS the matter with people? Are they really so stupid that they don’t know all they have to do is turn around, glare and the beast, and holler “GIT!!!! B-a-a-a-a-d Dawg! GIT OUTTA HERE!” and the savage person-eating monster will turn right around and run away?

And yes, I do speak from experience.

Don’t know which is the most annoying experience: a confused coyote or a doltish human.

Ohhh well.

At any rate: yes, 117 degrees is passing warm. Hope the AC system holds up through the day. Hmm…  This is Wednesday…so if it doesn’t crap out between now and, say, 2:00 or 4:00 p.m., we should be OK. The repairmen should be out in force, so we won’t have much trouble getting someone to fix it, if need be.

After mid-afternoon, the atmosphere will start to cool a bit: not into the bearable range, but usually into the survivable range.

Meanwhile, we have a predicament: I lost my bicycle the other day.

In a moment of senility, I took it into my graying head to hop on my beloved bike and ride around the area. Stupidly crossed Central Avenue, cruised the upscale area around the parochial high schools over there, and ended up socializing with some neighbor on her front porch.

By the time we broke up that chat-fest, it was getting so hot she thought I should not ride home by myself. So we called my son. He showed up, piled me in his car, and…heh…we both forgot about my bike. 

Well. So I think.

I believed we brought it back here. But it’s not in the garage. And that tells you how fried my brain was.

The other possibility is that M’hijito took it to his house and locked it in his garage, to block me from taking off for any more two-wheeled fugues. Once again, he seems not to be speaking to me, so I dunno whether the bike is at his place or not.

But…if in fact I’ve LOST the bike, there’s a big store right across Main Drag West that sells the things. So I may just walk over there and buy a new bicycle.

Or not. Seems like more work than it’s worth, in this infernal heat. 😀

The city has had to close down all the local hiking trails, in the face of the normal stupidity of humans.

No joke: in 117-degree heat, the local cretins WILL go out in that desert and stumble around the rocky, often steep trails.

Don’tcha wonder how the human species has managed to survive this long?

Back!!(wards…)

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WHY does the Cleaning Lady do this????  No matter how many times she’s been here — and it’s been dozens & dozens — she invariably installs the roll of kitchen towels backward.

EVERY TIME. Backward: no matter what.

😀

I like paper towels to unroll over the top, with the loose end coming toward the user. This, to me, is the easy way to access them, and the least wasteful (because you have easy control over how many sheets peel toward you off the roll).

Luz, on the other hand, has other ideas. She installs the towels so they unroll away from the user, toward the wall where the towel holder is hanging. This, IMHO, is a PITA.  😀

Every time she’s here, she puts the towels in backward. Every time she leaves, I re-install them to fit my taste in paper-towel rolling. Every time she returns, she re-re-installs them backward.

{OOOOOh geez! Pool Dude just walked in, triggering a frenzy of Dog Joy. WHY does this dog love that man so much???}

He’s already done! Man! That guy does a job in 10 or 15 minutes that takes me half an hour or 40 minutes. And he does it about ten times better than I can.

My, how Ruby adores that man! And I have to say, given all the hassles he spares me, I’m in love, too!

{sigh} He just hyper-chlorinated the drink. So I won’t be jumping in there to cool down from the morning’s Dog Safari. But that’s OK…at least I don’t have to mess with toxic quantities of chlorine.

Fricasseed!

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And very likely, my toast is…toasted.

Yesterday afternoon I enjoyed a fine heat stroke. Yes, I do know what that is. Yes, I do know the symptoms. And Yes, I do know what it feels like… Because I’ve had one before.

In Arabia, when I was about 10 or 12 years old. It’s a hot and humid sand pit, Ras Tanura is. Horrible place, not meant for human habitation. That particular day — I remember it vividly — I’d been playing outside in the heat.

“The heat” was nothing new for the locals. And so even though it was hotter than usual and probably more humid than usual, I paid little attention to it. By the time my parents called me in for dinner, I was reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned. Especially steamed!

Today, your parents would take you to an ER or a doctor’s office if you did that to yourself.

Out there, though…not so much. There was no ER. No doctors on duty at 7:00 in the evening. And the clinic was way to Hell & Gone on the other side of camp, down by the refinery. Nor did we have a car: my parents would have had to call a cab to schlep me to the hospital.

So we had to sit down and wait it out. And y’know what happened?

Nothin’.

Yep: the usual. Nothing.

Today, with Pool Dude no doubt on his way, I can’t strip off my clothes and plunge in the drink. That would give the poor man cardiac arrest… So: get in the house and cool down in the AC.
S-l-o-o-o-w-l-e-e-e…

Gasp! Huff! Puff!!!

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Just back from about two miles through 105-degree heat. HOLEE shee-ut! Not only hot out there, but passing muggy. If I had any sense, I’d plunge into the pool. But…

a) No, I have no sense; and
b) It’s 107 in the shade out there on the back porch

Jayuz, it’s almost as miserable as Arabia.

And THAT, my friends, is bloody miserable.

On the way to and from the shopping centers, I walk past these blocks of apartments that my mother wanted me and DXH to move into when we first explored this part of town.

WHY in the NAME of God would your mother want you to move into a ticky-tacky pile sandwiched between a freeway on-ramp and one of the busiest, loudest surface streets in the Valley???

Never did understand her enthusiasm for those dumps, except that they superficially resembled apartments she and I inhabited in Southern California.

Ugh. Long Beach Redux. Who would choose to live in such a place?

Oddly, though, our Realtor found us a development to the east of the freeway, a tract that amounts to a pleasant middle-class neighborhood with a nice park, plus some distance between most of the houses and the traffic racket. And the structures in it are HOUSES, not tumble-down apartments.

Phoenix is kinda weird that way. Ticky-tacky tracts interspersed with reasonably decent middle-class developments wrapped around upscale neighborhoods. That’s our garden spot.

Ohhh well. 

It seems unreasonably hot out there. Just now, Wunderground tells us the temp is a balmy 110 degrees. Lovely.

Passed a truck driver in one of the parking lots, loading boxes — by hand — into his semi. Ugh!!!! Some people’s jobs, eh? Offered to help, but mercifully he declined.

Finally made it home and now am  loafing in the air-conditioning.

You don’t even wanna KNOW what the power bill is gonna be this month. My guess,, though, is around $300.

Summer bills run upwards of $200 here. But then, in the winter they’re practically nil…so it all levels out.

Welp…at least we don’t live in Texas. Have you seen the horror shows emanating from that place? Floods that wash people away, drown folks hiding in attics...augh!

That’s whence my father’s family emanated. I can remember my uncle relating memories of times when he and my aunt stood on their wooden porch and watched tornadoes sail past on the prairie. Never did understand how they escaped those storms…guess the weather must have been off in the distance.

Argh! As my father used to say: Texas is a good place to be from…as far from it as you can get. 

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???