Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Report from the Hubs of Hades

by

Yow!!  Is it ever HOT out there!!!

Dawdled half the day away and so didn’t get out for the usual morning walk. Stupidly, I figured I’d go on out along about 3:00 p.m.

Bad idea. Extraordinarily bad idea.

As we scribble, it’s a mere 103 degrees out there, in full sun. 😀 Might’ crisp, eh???

Oh, well. Undeterrable, I take it into my feeble head to stroll past my old house and SDXB’s old house…not far from the Funny Farm, really: just a block to the north. My first house here was about two blocks to the west, on the same street as SDXB’s place.

Ye GAWDS!!!!!  

It must be a little damp out there, because it feels like the damn place has turned into an electric oven. Actually, Wunderground tells us the humidity is only 4%. So…dunno why it feels so unholy hot out there, except maybe because it’s late in the afternoon.

Ohhhhh well… Made it back to the Funny Farm without passing out, which just now seems like a bit of an accomplishment. We won’t pull THAT stunt again!!

***  😀 ***

Seriously, I do need to get off my duff and get that exercise walk in: EVERY DAY. Problem has been: various visitors and pests have been descending on me first thing in the morning, so I’ve had to sit around until they’re gone….and by then, a whole lot of other chores and tasks are waiting to get done. And by then, too, it’s already to goddamn hot to be frolicking up and down the sidewalks.

So:

After this, the Dawg and the Human shoot out that door no later than 7 a.m.  

That will get us back here by 8:00 — earlier, if we’re lucky. And though it’ll be getting hot by then, it won’t be paw-singeing or human-fainting. Yet.

Gosh, I miss SDXB.

Not so much as I’m willing to follow him to Sun City… Been there: ain’t goin’ there again. But I do wish he hadn’t moved away. He was a good neighbor and a pleasant friend.

He likes Sun City, though. Dwelling in a mausoleum never much appealed to me (hated the place when my parents lived there). But he and New Girlfriend seem to enjoy it and the unholy roar from the Luke Air Force Base fighter jets….loveleeee.

My mother loved it, too. She used to sit on her back porch every morning sipping her coffee over the morning paper and, when I was around, socializing with me. Incredibly, she actually claimed to LIKE that ungodly airplane racket.”Ohhh! It’s the sound of fweedom!” she would simper.

“Noooo, muther! That’s the sound of World War III, comin’ your way.” /eyeroll/

That was something I never could understand! The noise was just SO unpleasant…and forgodsake, first thing in the morning! 

Mysterious, people are….

So, anyway: After this, Ruby and I are out of the sack at dawn and on the road! That should get us back here before the worst of the heat comes up. Still will be hot: at this time of year we’re looking at temps in excess of 105 degrees. But nigh unto dawn, it should be tolerable.

Soggy Doggy Day

by

7:40 in the morning: Under a clear sky, the air is hot, wet, and soggy. Ruby and I  just shot in the front door, ahead of the babysitter by 20 minutes.

Yeah: that’s right: 20 minutes of peace and quiet, into which to jam one’s breakfast and coffee.

The Human stepped into a riot of ants as we stumbled along the sidewalk around the park. Got bit up royally.

Ah: The coffee is poured!

And so, to chow down…more or less…

8:00 a.m.
She’ll be here in minutes…

This is the thing about being a lone wolf all your life: You don’t want anyone around you!

That always has been my state of mind. Well…as long as I can remember, anyway.

Seriously: one of my very first memories is of sitting in a sandbox with the neighbor’s small kids, a boy and a girl. The sister brat takes her little shovel, scoops up a mound of sand, and SLAMS it into my face.

Instantly, my eyes are full of sand. And HURT? Lemme tellya hurt….

That was when I first learned to dislike and distrust other people.

We hadn’t left for Arabia yet…I just turned three years old on the day we arrived out there.

So…think o’ that: By the age of three, I hated my fellow humans. Already. Six miserable years in Aramco’s dreadful Ras Tanura grade school did not endear humanity to me any further.

So…yeah. Much as I appreciate whomever my son has hired to ride herd on me in my own home, I just don’t want anyone around me! Privacy is more important to me than safety.

Not a healthy attitude, I suppose.

****

Cripes. It’s twenty after eight. Where IS that woman?

Any chance (ohhh please, God!) that she’s not supposed to come over this morning?

Naaahhh…. More likely, she’s caught in traffic. I think she comes in from the far east side, which means she gets into profoundly hellish traffic jams on the way to the job. How glad ARE we that we don’t have to commute to work? Let us count the ways….

Hotter Than the Hubs….Still….

by

6:00 p.m. and the thermometer reads 101 degrees: in the shade of the covered back porch. 

Ugh!  What a garden spot we live in!

What was that I was scribbling, a day or two ago, about wishing I could be living back in San Francisco?  Where I belong….

And…what kind of worm could possibly have crawled into my parents’ brains to give them the idea that nothing would do but what we must move to Arizona?

….But what they must buy a house in ugleee Sun City, beneath the melodic roar of the Luke Air Force Base fighter jets?

….But what they must send their daughter to school at the University of Arizona? (That would be the daughter who was set to enroll in UC Berkeley…)

….And then, after she graduates, move her into their ugleee Sun City home and have her live there with them until she finishes trade school and gets a job in downtown Phoenix?

Well, I’ll tellya: for them, it was the right move. 

My mother dearly LOVED Sun City. Lived there in joy and contentment until her tobacco habit killed her.

My father evidently liked Sun City, too. He made no sign that he wanted to move out of their cute little house after she died. And when he remarried, he and the Dragon Lady lived there until they capitulated to old age and moved into an old-folkerie in central Phoenix. A prison for old folks, that was.

That place made Sun City look good, for sure. From my point of view, anyway.

My mother’s dying brought an end to the joy in my father’s life, pretty much once and for all. The New Wife did nothing to revive his happiness: she was a witch who tormented me and made him understand the value of what he had lost in my mother.

Oh well: 20 years later, here we still are in Lovely Uptown Arizona, baking away in the heat, luxuriating in bird-brained conservative politics, plodding along day by day.

As you might gather by the tone of this post, I’m not nuts about Arizona. If I could move away, I would. But as long as my son is here, I ain’t goin’ anywhere. Plus I doubt if nowadays I could afford to live in the Bay Area, which really is the only place on this earth I’d prefer to live.

{chortle!} Think o’ that…  Where have I lived? 

Long Beach, California
San Francisco, California
Alameda, California
Berkeley, California
Sun City, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Phoenix, Arizona
Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
Beirut, Lebanon
London, England
Tunbridge, England

On & on…helle’s belles, I can’t remember them all!

Nor, one might add, do I want to….

Too Hot for Little Dogs!

by

{chortle!}  So much for any proposed scam to take Ruby into the Sprouts or the Albertson’s with me, disguised as a “service dog.”

Without exaggeration, it is hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. Come ten in the morning, I take it into my fuzzy little head to make a pointless little circumnavigation of the ‘Hood: Incredibly stupid!

Walk a block in that heat, and you feel like you’re gonna pass out.

So, shortly, it was turn about and head back to the air-conditioned Funny Farm. Boring, but at least boring is unlikely to kill you.

At any rate, tromping around on those sizzling sidewalks surely is likely to kill the corgi…or at least burn the hide off her little feet. Fortunately, the human had the foresight to leave her home: foregoing the “service dog” boondoggle.

Y’know…I do hate this place. If I could find a better place to live that I could afford, I’d be outta here in an instant.

It’s the that I can afford that’s the operative term. Now that I’m old and retired, my savings will not buy into a lot of middle-class venues. Not within reasonable driving distance of my son, that is.

My parents retired from Southern California (where my father made a decent living) and betook themselves to Sun City, dragging me with them.

Of course, I wasn’t allowed to live there: youth being against the rules in lovely Sun City. No problem: they got me out of their hair by sending me down to the University of Arizona in Tucson. That took care of the problem for four years.

Thence, it was off to a real job for me, based in central Phoenix.

Another garden spot… /eyeroll/

Ugh!

Where would I live, if I could go anywhere I choose?

> Berkeley, California: whence my mother’s more affluent side of the family.

> San Francisco: the city of my dreams.

> The Gold Bar Ranch, up on the Mogollon Rim. We owned a share of it while my dear ex-husband was part of the law firm whose partners glommed it. When I divorced him, I divorced the ranch. That was stupid…

> Switzerland: A high-rise slice of heaven.

> Prescott, Arizona: Also up on the Mogollon Rim. Pretty town with a nice university campus that supports — can you imagine, here in Arizona?? — an intellectual life.

Really: not very many places, given that I’ve traveled all over the world and lived in the Middle East, England, and the north, the east, and the west of the United States.

Whew!

I’m exhausted, after the mid-morning tour of the ‘Hood. And so…

Awaaaayyy!!! 

Off to the sack, with a little dog to decorate the foot of the bed!

Cathedral Rock, Sedona, Arizona
Arizona, lovely Arizona…

Still Frolicking in the Hubs

by

Last time we were in these parts, Funny remarked that the weather was hotter than the hubs of Hades. No kidding….

Well, we’re still lurking in that locale.

Not yet 8:00 in the morning, and we have 93 degrees, with 21 percent humidity under “partly cloudy” skies. No rain in the forecast.

Dog and Human, having circumambulated the neighborhood as dawn was cracking, are perched on the bed. The Human sincerely hopes no nuisances show up at the door…as we scribble, the righteous and the well-meaning are out there trying to recruit her to an old-folks’ home.

How exactly I’m gonna evade that fate escapes me: Greyhound bus, maybe? Will they let me take the dawg on a bus???  Hmmmm…well, no. Not unless you can faze it past them as a “service dog.” Good luck with that…

At any rate, it’s definitely another soggy doggy day…even inside the house, the air feels damp. And that places Arizona smack in the middle of Hades!

So I consider: Do I really want to stay here?

Surely not if I’m likely to be nabbed and locked up in a prison for the elderly.

How likely is that to happen? Well…I’d give it about a 40 percent chance. Which is about 100 percent more than one would like…

Once again, we’re brought back to the fact that women in my family who didn’t smoke and didn’t catch amoebic dysentery in some god-forsaken Arabian desert have lived well into their 90s. And in pretty damn good health, we might add.

But as one ages, one tends to be infantalized. And that leads those around you to take over your life and decide matters like where you will live and how you will be treated.

And I for one do NOT wish to be treated as a child.

How exactly to evade that fate pretty much escapes me. 

 

Hotter than the Hubs…again…

by

LOL! Maybe what’s going on here is that we ARE the hubs???!?

It’s 110 degrees on the back porch….and overcast!

Can you imagine that? A hundred and ten degrees, and the sky wants to dump rain on us. Boiling rain, presumably…

Just pulled lunch/dinner off the grill: Lovely salmon and fine accompaniments.

Now we have to wait for the contraption to cool off before we can close it back up and replace the plastic cover. Doesn’t look like it’s gonna rain before the grill reaches that point…but we shall see.

Man! It is seriously hot out there!  

Could be worse: Thank your stars we’re not in Venezuela!  (uhm…assuming you aren’t reading this in Venezuela…)  HOLY mackerel! Thousands of people killed in earthquakes!

They seem to think the big one was magnitude 7.2.

Hmmm… I’ve been in one of those — in California, some decades ago. But because of the laws governing construction there, the damage wasn’t catastrophic…and few people were killed. But…it looks like this thing was HUGE. Don’t recall getting a ride like that!

At any rate…110 degrees under gray skies is about enough to complain about, eh?