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Life in the Desert

Hotter than the Hubs…

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Out the door before 7 this morning. Figured if Ruby and I got an early start, we could get back before the cleaning lady and the babysitter show up.

That appears to have been the case. No sign of any visiting women when we stumbled through the thick, wet, hot air to the front door. That’s something, anyway. I guess.

Hotter than the hubs out there. 

It may not be objectively so hot, but it’s wet and muggy and icky outside. Even Ruby, who normally wants nothing other than a beloved Doggy-Walk, was kinda reluctant to proceed.

Ugh. What I want today is just to be left alone.

But if I understand the new routine and the hideous new schedule correctly, THAT is not to be. My future apparently consists of a long series of babysitters. Women who come in and watch me. In my home. All day.

LOL! I’d run away to Sun City if I could. But don’t think that would succeed…m’hijto would just send the old-folks’ gendarmes after me. Then I’d find myself locked up in an old-folkerie.

My father moved to Sun City because the prospect of mausoleum-like silence appealed mightily to him. Seriously: Imagine a man who hates the sound of children laughing and playing…  That was my daddy!

Now, in his defense, I never had to work the swing shift, laboring all night and trying to sleep all day.

*****

Argha!  Babysitter showed up in the middle of the scribbles above.

😀

She IS a nice lady. I would find her particularly charming were I not a hopeless lone wolf. My problem is simply that I do NOT like people.

Growing up, I was the weird little kid: the girl who wanted to be an astronomer, never a mommy standing in the kitchen baking cookies. As you may recall from your own upbringing, “weird” kids are universally despised, and so I was treated cruelly by nine out of ten of the little darlings with whom I grew up.

And the result of that was a general dislike and distrust of other people.

Hilariously, our old-lady’s babysitter has a great deal of charm and is highly personable. That means, of course, that I’m reduced to having to behave myself. 😀  It also means I actually kinda enjoy her company.

Turns out she likes little kids. So…I’d love to bring her to the park, where Ruby the Corgi and I take our lengthy morning walk. Before office hours start, the park is full of young parents pushing their little ones around in strollers. It’s such a hoot! The li’l kids are hopelessly adorable, and the parents exude charm.

Just now, though, it’s HOT and HUMID and overall exceptionally icky out there. So we’ll have to wait until the weather calms a bit to haul her over there. 😀

Wunderground tells us it’s 103 outside now, at 16 percent humidity. I’d say it’s gotta be wetter than that: just ambling up the sidewalk, you break out in a flooding sweat.

Exploring Sun City on Zillow…ugh! Truly, I did hate living out there after my parents dragged me along when they retired, following my junior year in high school. Fortunately, I got into the University of Arizona in Tucson a year early, so I escaped Sun City within a few weeks of our arrival there. But even the relatively few weeks and months that I had to spend there: ugh, indeed!

But oh! My mother dearly loved it. 

No kidding: she thought Sun City was about the best invention ever to come along. Their little two-bedroom house was my father’s gift to her: a thank-you for the 10 unholy years she spent with him in gawdawful Saudi Arabia, and for the dozen or more remaining years that she supported him and loved him and housewifed for him, between the time they married in Southern California and the time they came back to the United States some 20 years later.

You couldn’t give me the place. When SDXB moved out to Sun City, he invited me to come along. I declined.

Nothing exactly wrong with it… Especially if you don’t mind hate and exclusiveness and whitey-whiteness and the roar of F-16’s blasting through the sky starting at 6:00 in the morning. Not my style…

So here I am in lovely, sweaty North Phoenix. Missing the boyfriend. Absent our friends. Wishing I lived somewhere else…but not knowing where that might be.

Well…yeah, I do: the San Francisco Bay Area. More specifically, Berkeley or Sausalito, where my relatives lived. But…har har!!! I couldn’t even begin to afford to live there. Besides, my son lives here…and so here is were I’m staying. 

Yipes!!!!! Hotter than the Hubs…

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Yesh. Hotter for sure than the Hubs of Hades. Just now — coming on to late in the afternoon — it’s A HUNDRED AND NINE DEGREES in the deepest shade of the north-facing back patio. 

Augh, I say to that. AUGHHH!

Sooo…Ruby and I are trapped in the house, at least until the sun goes down.

More likely, until it comes up tomorrow.

I’m totally wilted, and probably should take a nap. But it’s after 4:00 p.m.  If I flop down on the bed now, it’s likely to be midnight before I wake up. And then I’ll be awake for the rest of the night.

😀

Well. That might be a slight exaggeration. But the truth is, it’s pretty much too late for napping now.

So, I reckon the Human will loaf in front of the computer until something resembling bed-time. Then hope for a decent night’s sleep.

Do need to get Pool Dude over here to check on the workings of that contraption. But later. Much later. Tomorrow, for example…

My son dragged me out to the Mayo this morning. GAWD, do I ever hate going to doctors.

LOL! Then, to my astonishment, he took it upon himself to answer some of the doc’s questions and to try to describe my ongoing nuttiness. 😀 That poor doctor!  

Ohhh well. He now has no clue to an accurate report of what’s going on with me. But that seems not to matter. Either he realized that, or he didn’t think whatever my body is doing is very significant. Didn’t order any tests. Didn’t ask me to come back.

RUN!

AWAY!!

{chortle!}

Anyway, it was an annoying traipse, but I felt like I got away pretty much Scot-free. Hooooray!

And…now, at 4:00 in the afternoon, it’s 109 degrees out there in the back yard. Too hot even to jump in the pool!

No doubt, too, the pavement will be too hot for Ruby’s little paws, even after the sun goes down. It can stay unbearably hot here until well after 10 p.m.

So I guess today’s doggy-walk will have to wait until tomorrow morning, along about 5:00 a.m.

But whenever the sun goes down this evening, it’ll be into the drink for the human!

Another Icky Day Comin’ Up the Pike….

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LITERALLY icky: Just got back from a humid walk with Ruby the Corgi. It is so hot and so wet out there that literally, the air feels sticky. Feels like Saudi Arabia: a hot and wet outpost of Hell.

Now some woman that my son hired to babysit me is supposed to show up pretty soon. Goodie gumdrops!

Not to say dayum! 

He thinks I’ve advanced enough into senility that I shouldn’t be left alone. Ohhhkayyy….

Meanwhile, I am a very private person. I don’t enjoy people lurking around me, and I especially don’t welcome strangers hanging over my shoulder. But the next stage, as you no doubt can intuit, is going to be locking me into an institution. And…well…I’d rather die, thank you.

So if a babysitter lurking around will forestall that horror, let’s do it.

Ugh!

It’s after 8:00 and the babysitter hasn’t shown up. Probably went to the wrong house. The resident there, a woman named Josie, repels all boarders. 😀

Seriously: she will NOT answer the door unless she knows the person who’s out therel.

We have identical street numbers on adjacent roads with nearly identical names: Erewhon Road and Erewhon Lane. So delivery people and assorted newbies invariably get lost here.

Meanwhile, Josie lives in terror. She got the house — which belonged to SDXB until he went into battle with Tony the Romanian Landlord and fled to Sun City. At that point the city purchased it for a song and GAVE it to her.

Yeah. The city was building an airport extension, which would place her house smack in the middle of a runway. So our honored civic leaders  bought SDXB’s house and gave it to her in exchange for her shack in South Phoenix.

More power to her. But…well….if you’re gonna live in a middle-class neighborhood, you need to learn middle-class customs.

😀

Speaking of the which…ohhhh gawd! The other day Josie reported that a pipe under a sink in the kitchen burst. FLOODED the entire kitchen, laundry room, dining room, and living room!!!!!

Holeeeee maquerel!

One of the advantages of being on the city’s dole, though, is that they cover little catastrophes like this. So apparently, other than being put out for a few days and maybe having some furniture damaged, this misadventure isn’t going to cost her much.

What a horror show…

Speaking of horror shows, mine has yet to start this morning. As I mentioned, M’jito’s proposed babysitter has yet to show. She’s a half-hour late. Was supposed to have been here at 8:00; it’s after 8:30 now.

Maybe I got the time wrong? If she was slated to surface earlier than 8:00 a.m., she missed me.

Well…frankly, I’m not up for a quarrel with my honored son, so I reckon I’ll refrain from calling him and asking about her. Later…but not right this minute.

Okayyyyy….I’ve got on my calendar that I’m supposed to go to the dentist today. Was he going to take me? Was this babysitter supposed to take me? No clue. Emailed to ask: so far, no response.

Maybe I should call and cancel the dentist’s appointment? I really can’t afford to pay for a missed appointment.

Here’s a yesterday’s email from him saying “expect me tomorrow.” Presumably that refers to this morning’s junket. So presumably he’s driving me to the dentist.

Goodie gumdrops.

Dayum! I don’t wanna do this today!

On the other hand…I don’t wanna go to the dentist any day. So what difference does it make?

 

Hotter than the Hubs…

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Ninety-eight degrees in the deep shade of the back porch, according to the thermometer out there. Wunderground says it’s 97, with a predicted high of 103. Ohhhhkay….whatEVER: just now it’s hotter than the proverbial Hubs of Hades. Google puts the humidity at 12 percent.

Hm. Well. Yeah. I could prob’ly believe that. It is, yes, hot enough to melt your hair out there. Yep.

Ruby and I: just back from circumambulating the ‘Hood, having left the house for that venture rather tooooo  late in the morning. It’s supposed to reach 113 today, if you buy the local newscasts. So much for Wunderground, eh? 😀

As nothing compared to lovely Saudi Arabia, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. There, the air got so wet that you could be loitering outside and find yourself standing in pouring rain that fell out of a clear blue sky. That’s right: no clouds. It was just so damn humid that rain would coalesce out of the air around you.

Yech! I do find myself wishing I didn’t have to stay here. Given my choice, I’d move right straight back to the San Francisco Bay Area: either to Berkeley, where my aunt, great-grandmother, and cousins lived, or to Sausalito, where my very brilliant uncle and his equally intellectual wife lived.

No, I don’t hate Phoenix. But it surely wouldn’t be my first choice of places to live. Alas, though, I couldn’t even begin to afford the “first choice”: Berkeley, of course.

My parents dragged me here when they took it into their pea brains to retire to Sun City.

They loved it.

You couldn’t pay me to live there: I thought it was just revolting, with its extreme right-wing politics and its atmosphere of hate and those damn jets roaring out of Luke AFB starting at six in the morning.

But whatEVER. Once they got me here, I was pretty much stuck: four years at university; then a job; and thence marriage to an established Phoenix lawyer.

Could I have left?

Probably. Wouldn’t have been easy, though: with a husband and a kid here and a career started and my parents parked out in the boondocks. No…didn’t want to take that on then, and reckon I don’t wanna take it on now.

Even with my parents gone and the husband out the door: My son is established here. I happen to think he’s The Best, and so I have exactly zero craving to move away from him.

No, I don’t like Phoenix and would not choose to live here. But with Dear Son engaged in a career and set in a nice house, I ain’t leavin’…

***

One the things that makes the Valley of the We-D0-Mean Sun damn near unlivable, to my taste, is the unholy summer heat. Back in the Dark Ages, when Gringos first set out to live here, we didn’t have air conditioning. So people who chose to work in the Phoenix area, for whatever reason, kept summer homes up on the state’s central plateau, locally called the Rim. “Cool” might not be the term you’d choose for the June/July/August temperatures there, but it was a helluva lot more tolerable than the sizzling heat in the lower-altitude Valley of the Sun.

Horrible place.

Yeah: if my son moved to someplace I could afford, I’d be out the door in an instant. But he has a good job, and I rather doubt that he’d take off into the urban boondocks somewhere else.

Heh! If he ever does, though, it’s outta here for the Old Bat!

😀

Ohhhhh CRIMINEY!  Save me, Lord!

Here’s the Wonder-Cleaning Lady at the front door! Now she’s started to charge around the house, flinging stuff and moving stuff and dusting stuff and cleaning stuff and changing sheets and washing things and MY GAWD HOW ON EARTH DOES THE WOMAN DO IT???????

No kidding. This amazing lady cleans several houses the size of mine (and larger) in one day.

I would drop dead on the floor if I tried to do that. Seriously: just cleaning my own house is as much as I can cope with in one day.

O’course, one reason for that is that I deeply, passionately HATE house-cleaning. Which is the single reason I do pay this marvelous lady some stupefying amount of (well-earned!) cash to come in here and bang around and thrash around and scrub around half the day.

How she stands it: mystifies me. The only explanation is that she’s a woman of steel.

At any rate: she just came from the neighbor’s place. My having spaced the fact that this was a Cleaning-Lady Day, the ambition to loaf atop the bed all afternoon just went straight down the drain. Darn it!

***

Look!!!!
A MIRACLE!!!!!

Just found a book of current checks! 

WhoEVER would’ve thunk it? Thought I was out of checks, and have been sitting here wondering how on earth to pay WonderCleaning Lady without begging her to drive me to the credit union.

Now all I’ve gotta do is persuade my son or the neighborhood Uber driver to schlep me to the credit union to get more checks before this new pile runs out. 😀

$$$$$

Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda…

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Stumbling around the ‘Hood through a superheated afternoon exercise walk, I happened to think of a long-ago near-miss in the Department of Real Estate. Videlicet: years ago — yea verily, a couple of decades ago — I very nearly bought a house in a distant suburban development called Fountain Hills.

It’s a pleasantly ritzy-titzy town — I would (and do) call it a suburb — clinging to the far east side of Scottsdale. My son had not yet moved back to Phoenix, and so the distance from central Phoenix wasn’t a concern. In fact, it was closer to where I was working — Arizona State University — than where I’m living  now. So, in some ways it would have been a practical move. And it would have put me into a piece of real estate whose value was headed for the stratosphere.

By random serendipity, I decided against that move.

And a good thing that was, since there was no way my son would have settled halfway to Payson at the time he moved back to Phoenix.

And by serendipity, too, SDXB bought a house in North Central Phoenix, just as we were becoming an Item. Consequently, I bought a house a block from his new place, and now…here I am, basically within walking distance of the kid’s house, altogether within walking distance of three major grocery markets, a doctor’s office, a dentist’s office, a computer store, a hair stylist’s, and…on and on and on!

I ended up in the middle of everything, happy to be here, and surprisingly close to my son’s place. What more could anyone want, eh?

But sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if I’d gone ahead and bought a place out there on the far side of Scottsdale.

* It would have been within walking distance of my best friend’s house: she who worked prominently and successfully at Scottsdale Community College.

* Between her influence and the that neighborhood’s relative proximity to Scottsdale Community College, I almost certainly would have landed a full-time job there.

* In Maricopa County (where we dwell), the community colleges pay exceptionally well — usually more than the university does.

* For a non-tenurable employee of the university (graduates of ASU or the UofA are ineligible for tenure in the state universities), the community college’s pay would have been much better. And a job at one of those colleges would have been much better better endowed with upward mobility than my job at ASU was.

No doubt by now I’d be retired from any such job, and living happily ever after.

* And if my son had been willing to subject himself to his freshman and sophomore years in junior college courses (not bloody likely!), I could have gifted him with two years of tuition-free college credit.

So…on reflection, one can see that moving into the community colleges would have had some substantial — even huge — benefits.

Ultimately, though…I think I’m glad I stayed with Arizona State University, glad I drifted into this neighborhood, glad I floated along here until retirement. I really do like this province of Phoenix, and like this specific part of the city. 

Real Estate Awe

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Wanna see something that’ll drop your jaw? 

Take a look at this mansion…

The place is in Fountain Hills, an upscale tract on the northeast side of Scottsdale.

WHAT A WRECK! And they want four hundred grand for it!

Hey. Fountain Hills is real tony and all that…and yeah, you could walk to the Mayo Clinic from there. But…good lord! EVERYTHING in this shack would have to be renovated, including the pool and the landscaping.

Well. I guess it tellsya: Rich people will let real estate go to wrack and ruin, too. 😀

***

But doesn’t it boggle your mind? I mean, when you consider what that place should be worth… Fountain Hills is one of the toniest subdivisions in the Valley — probably in the entire state.

I can’t even imagine letting a place like that…in a location like that!…go down the tubes.

Even if they used it as a rental, it’s hard to believe anyone with half a functioning brain cell would have turned it into a wreck.

Four hundred grand at auction. Hell, I wouldn’t give them four hundred bucks for it. Just imagine what it will cost to restore that place to a livable house in a radically upscale subdivision!

Clicking through the images takes your breath away, doesn’t it?  Really…the best you could do with this place is to level it and build a new house. And that would require you to get your hands on it for one helluva lot less than 400 grand.

Wow!!