Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Colder Than a By-gawd…

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…as my father used to say. Things were colder than, hotter than, faster than, slower than, pricier than, smarter than, stupider than…a by-gawd. 

And no, I don’t know if he knew what the word “bigod” meant. Or even that there was such a word. He wasn’t what you’d call a real eddycated fella.

At any rate, it’s passing crisp out there on the back porch: 40 degrees. For southern Arizona, that’s practically an Arctic freeze!

Was gonna take the dog for her (usual) daily walk this ayem, but decided agin’ it given the chill on the air. So…we loaf.

Actually, Ruby patrols the back yard, ever-hopeful that the beloved Pool Dude will show up. Oh, how she adores that man! 

And why? That escapes me. He looks like an ordinary sorta fella, a guy who got trained to clean pools while he was serving a prison sentence (as indeed is the case with many pool dudes). WHAT has he done to so ingratiate himself with that dawg?

Seriously: she does know when it’s Pool Dude day (how???), and she lurks by the door or by the pool fence waiting for him to show up.

Ooohh well. It’s after 9:00 ayem and still damn cold out there.

Probably should stroll over to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s and restock a few (un)necessaries. But my enthusiasm for traipsing through the ‘Hood and dodging bums to the left of me and bums to the right of me is…well…limited. So is the enthusiasm for leaving Ruby locked up in the house when she really does need a walk.

Occurs to me that I could order up a service dog vest for Ruby, so I can take her into stores and (apparently) even on busses and streetcars. You can buy them on Amazon, no questions asked. Apparently people are not allowed(!!) to ask you for any other evidence or proof that your mutt really is a service dog. If we had one of those li’l costumes, we both could go into any of the five grocery and drug stores within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm. Down at the church, one woman even used to bring her lap-dog sized little mutt to the services, gussied up in one of those vests, and park it next to her on a pew!

Heh heh…not to say {cackle!!}….  Has a certain appeal, doesn’t it?

LOL! I wonder if bums would leave you alone if you had a corgi with you. 😀

Seriously: when a German shepherd would accompany me on a stroll around the ‘Hood, NO ONE would pester me. Lacking such a bodyguard, o’course, the locals will hit you up for handouts, make passes at you, holler obscenities at you…  Blech! What a place.

Maybe I should follow SDXB to Sun City: a.k.a. Mausoleum West. 

[sigh} I truly hated living there when my parents had a Sun City house.

Nice loafing porch, eh? Looks just like my parents' place...At the time they were there, the place was Hate Central. If anyone of a darker persuasion dared to move in, they would be HOUNDED out. And yea verily: I kid you not. That happened, just a year or so ago, to a friend of mine. So I assume Sun City is still as Whitey-White as it was Back in the Day.

What an awful place!

Well. They liked it, though. The constant roar of fighter jets overhead (ooohhh, it’s the sound of freedom! my mother would coo) was a worthwhile trade-off, in their minds, for a housing tract fully free of brown faces.

And one benefit of it would be a paucity of jerks hanging around waiting for women to ogle.

 

 

A-n-d…here we have another December…

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More to the point, soon we will have another nuisance workman here.

Two of them are slated to show up. Neither has surfaced yet.

To add to the aggravation, my pore ole’ son is coming over to supervise at least one of these worthies. (Meaning, in the Department of Aggravation, that he has to drop his paying work and traipse over to my house, whereinat to waste half the afternoon.)

Arrrrghhhh! STOP THE WORLD! I WANNA GET OFF!!

😀  😮  😀

Further to the point, y’know…apartment living is beginning to look ominously good.

True, I was never fond of dwelling in rabbit warrens. But…at least the rabbit-warren owner had to deal with all the fixits and the upgrades and the endless episodes of BS.

Today we have a plumber and an air-conditioning guy on the menu. I can hardly wait.

😀

Weirdly, the thought did enter my mind — where it came from, I know not — that maybe I would rather be renting, so that a landlord or an apartment-house manager would be running interference with the endless flow of workmen.

LOL! In the Department of Weird…

How d’you like the sign I just posted on the front door?

NO SOLICITING OR PETITIONS!

Occupant is ill and will not buy from you or sign your papers.
Please do not ring the doorbell.
Please go away quietly.

We’ll see how well that (doesn’t…) work.

*****

Ugh!!!!!  We get people here EVERY DAY jangling the doorbell, hustling this scam and that scam. Or pushing this politician or that politician. Or trying to get you to sign this petition or that petition.

Hmmmm….. I seem to have dorked up the formatting for this post. Let’s wrap it up, attempt to post it, and see what happens next…..

Thank You, Good Realtor!!!

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Y’know, my good Realtor Friend, a guy named John Shackleford, did me one of the greatest favors anyone ever did for me: by bringing me to this house, in this neighborhood.

What a lovely, peaceful, pretty place to live!

Ruby and I just got back from one of our circumnavigations of the ‘Hood. And oh, my! What a pretty day.

The park: brilliant emerald green in the spring sunshine. The weather; insanely beautiful. The kids: playing magnificently in the park, kicking  balls and chasing around. The dogs: handsomely trotting along  beside their humans. The sky, delicately painted with fine, thin white clouds against a deep blue background. The birds: singing and flying around in avian joy.

What more could you possibly want, eh?

Just now, I can’t think of much.

It really is a beautiful, upper-middle-class North Central Phoenix neighborhood. Just about anything you want or need is within easy walking distance — as I’ve discovered to my amazement, now that my son has kiped my car.

Yes, it’s true: living here, I actually don’t need a car! Get rid of the chariot, and come to find out you have, within easy walking distance,

  • 3 top-flight grocery stores
  • a veterinarian
  • a computer store
  • a bookstore/computer software store
  • a hair stylist
  • a doctor (of sorts)
  • a magnificently stocked drugstore
  • 3 pharmacies
  • 2 major urban hospitals with top-rated emergency rooms
  • a fine young lawyer

One could go on and on…but basically, the message is, you can get about 95% of the goods and services you need without ever setting foot in a gasoline-powered vehicle. 

Y’know, this characteristic of the neighborhood never fully dawned on me until after my son kiped my car. I mean…well, of course I knew all these places were here. But until the car disappeared from my garage, it never really registered with me that I didn’t need to drive to these places!

Seriously: in the summertime, get going early enough and you can do your errands before the heat comes up. Raining? Call an Uber…like, the one whose owner lives straight across the streeet. (Turns out a half-dozen Uber drivers live right here in the Hood!)

It’s every bit as good as San Francisco in that way. When my mother and I lived there, back in the Dark Ages of the late 1950s and early 60s, we did have a car. But we never used it unless my mother and I had to drive across the Bay to pick up my father when his ship came in. (He was a Merchant Marine pilot.) I’d guess we never turned on the ignition more than twice a month.

And now, between Uber and just about every daily need within easy walking distance, I find myself in the same situation. I don’t really need a car! 

Mwa ha ha!!!

My son has it in his garage. And frankly, he can have the damn thing. I may sign over the registration to him, next time I have to pay for it.

Glub!

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Yeah, verily: It’s a glubifarious morning. You should see that rain pouring down out of the skyfull of dark gray clouds! Thank Gawd for coffee, that’s all I can say!!

It obviates my plan to traipse to the grocery stores this morning. What with my honored son having persuaded the stump-dumb doctors at the Mayo to cancel my driver’s license (!!!!!!), I can’t get to a store except on foot or by paying through the schnozzola to hire an Uber cab.

Our beloved Uber driver lives right across the street…and I can assure you that he will not want to be rousted out to schlep the Little Old Lady six blocks to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts. Fortunately, there’s enough Dawg-and-Humann food in the house to sustain Ruby and me for a few days. So whenever the rain stops, I can run (literally!) to the nearest shopping center and grab enough chow to tide us over until the weather clears.

Wow! What an ugleeeee morning! Wunderground seems to have missed the boat (heh!!) by predicting a mere 30% chance of rain today. Asleep at the switch, eh, folks?

Roar…Roar…Roaaaarrrr….

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Argha! Another cop helicopter, whirling around over the neighborhood to the north of us. At least, for a change, this one is not hovering right over the house. /eyeroll/

The ‘Hood isn’t exactly Crime Central, but neither is it a place of sweetness and tranquility. We reside on the southern edge of a suburb called Sunnyslope, which is Crime Central, swarming with drug dealers, delinquents, burglars…and even the occasional murderer.

This fine circumstance brings us cops. And cops. And more cops. Many of them riding in noisy, buzzy helicopters. Dare to go to bed, dare to go to sleep, and you’ll bring on the serenade: BRRRRooooaaarrrrrrrr…

Reassuring in that it lets you know the policia are on the job. Un-reassuring in that it lets you know they’re chasing some sh!thead around your neighborhood.

Get up. Walk through the house. Check that all the doors are locked. Turn on the outside porch lights, the better for the cops to chase their prey.

These regularly recurring events lead me to regularly reconsider whether I want to stay here.

Do I want to move back out to Sun City?

Ugh, no!

Okayyy…. Do I want to move down into the neighborhood where M’hijito lives? 

Hm. Those houses are 20+ years older than these, poorly insulated, expensive to run. Right in the middle of everything, which is cool in some ways — you can walk to the spectacular AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store from his house. But at what cost?

> Noise
> More Noise
> Still More Noise
> Traffic
> Traffic
> Still More Traffic
> Astronomical utility bills
> Higher property taxes
> Insane water bills
> Bums sleeping in your yard…

Naaaahhhh…. Ain’t goin’ there!

The Valley does offer other suburbs and other neighborhoods that are a little less…active, shall we say. Fountain Hills, for example. Moon Valley. Sun City: inactive to the point of stasis. But is that really worth spending thousands of dollars on selling the shack, buying another one somewhere else, and moving?

I think not. 

Soggy Doggy Day

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{glub!} Rain, rain, and more rain, pouring down from a lovely pearlescent gray sky. Dawg and Human are stuck in the house. From faraway Luke Air Force Base, we’re serenaded by the constant roar of fighter jets, practicing their take-offs and landings. Birds outside the back door squabble. The pool system kicks on: seems to be working OK.

Way, waaayyy too wet to take Her Dogship for her morning doggy-walk. Too wet for the Human to poke her own schnozz out the front door. Or the back door. Or the side door.

We’re trapped!

Carless in Gaza as we are here, now that M’Hijito has kiped my car, we have no way of even getting to the grocery store.

Well. That’s wrong: we could impose on the Uber driver who lives across the street. Wouldn’t he be pleased?

Or we could walk through the rain and the puddles, getting home good & wet and good & cold. Naaaaahhhh…

We could pester M’Hijito to take us to the store, since this predicament is his doing. That would interrupt the work he does for his employer….hmmmm…. Why do I suspect it might be better to swim on over to the grocery store all by my little self?

But weirdly: WHAT a beautiful day. 

Actually, when you live in Arizona, you think clouds are so rare and so exotic that whenever they lurk overhead, you fall into a trance of awe. 😀  It is, one must admit, a strange kinda place for human habitation. Made stranger by the presence of humans… 😉