Pour a cup of coffee; prepare to sit down on the back porch to take the morning air; and you get RRR-R-O-O-O-A-A-R-R-RRR!!!!
Cop copter charges over the house. Circles around the ‘Hood,. Roar roar roar….
Meanwhile, twenty miles away, out at Luke Air Force Base, a squadron of fighter jets practices take-off and landing: rrrRRR-O-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R-R-R!!!!!
My mother, who used to take her morning coffee on the back porch of their little Sun City house, professed to love the sound of fighter jets taking off and landing by Dawn’s Early Light. All very patriotic, no doubt…but definitely not my favorite symphony score.
The atmosphere has quieted down a bit now. Whenever it gets to be after 9:00 a.m. — at which hour I can turn left out of the ‘Hood — I’m headed to AJ’s, there to buy some more coffee. And melon. And bread. And dog treats… and… Argha!!! The endless grocery list!
The Sprouts, which carries far more fake-gourmet items than the Albertson’s supermarket across the street, leaves enough to be desired to make the 20-minute trip to the overpriced AJ’s worth the journey. For one thing, I do NOT like being pounced and panhandled in the parking lot — pretty much inevitable at the neighborhood Sprouts. The Albertson’s has posted an armed, uniformed guard out front, which makes one feel safer there. Now…if only they’d carry a larger array of yuppified products, they’d never get rid of me. 😀
But they don’t. To get the fancy treats and overpriced dog food, I have to travel to the AJ’s. To get the rich black coffee: AJ’s. To get a piece of steak that’s worth the exorbitant prices most stores are now charging for beef: AJ’s.
****
SDXB on the phone. He and New Girlfriend live in Sun City, directly under the flight path of those Air Force jets. And like my mother, they regard the racket as “The Sound of Freedom.”
No doubt they’re right.
Too bad, though, that Freedom can’t turn down the volume a bit! 😀
SDXB loves living in Sun City, as my mother did when she was holding forth out there. It takes, I think, a certain mentality to like that lifestyle. Personally, I’ll take the sound of kids playing over the melody of F-16 engines blasting. But whatEVER: each to his/her own, eh?
Speaking of the which — sound, that is — the serenade of not one but TWO emergency vehicles wafts in through the screen door…. WTF d’you suppose is goin’ on out there now?
Looks like it was a good thing I dawdled over this blog post and killed time yakking with SDXB before I started out for the store. Fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, and I could’ve been in the middle of whatever that mess is.
***
And I would have missed the beloved Pool Dude, who just showed up at the door to collect his well-earned wages.
What a nice man! Probably a paroled murderer…but what the heck. He does a primo job of murdering pool algae.
Seriously: when a dear friend’s son got in trouble with the law (irrationally: not his fault!) and was thence thrown in the slam, we learned that one job regarded as “good” for paroled convicts is pool maintenance.
And considering what Pool Dude is earning — f’rgodsake, I just paid him $400!!! — if you worked at it and were even moderately competent at handling money and billing, you could in theory make a decent middle-class living at it.
Well, OK: part of the 400 smackers was for a large bucket of chlorine tabs. That stuff is expensive as hell, and if you’re buying a better quality product, it’s even more expensive than that. And the bucket the guy got — presumably from a pool product wholesaler — weighs more than I can pick up. So presumably it will be some months before we have to buy more chlorine.
Welp. I’d better get up and get outta here before the lunch crowd gets on the road.
And so, AWA-A-A-A-Y!
So Ruby the Incredibly Fierce Corgi