Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Bang-Bangs in the Night

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{sigh} Two in the morning. Wide awake. Gunshots in the distance, emanating from Gangbanger’s Way. Pop pop pop sounding above the roar of wailing hotrods and motorcycles.

Lordie, how I hate living in Phoenix. Especially this part of Phoenix. It’s never quiet here.

Gangbanger’s delineates the middle-class zone flanking North Central Avenue from the dire slum of Sunnyslope (and I do mean “dire”: a drive through that place is like a visit to a Mexican barrio, where people live in huts and abandoned railroad freight cars). That balmy boulevard is frequented by bikers and gang members. The ‘Hood is technically part of Sunnyslope, though in fact most natives regard the area to the north of Gangbanger’s as the ‘Slope, and North Central as extending south from Gangbanger’s to about Camelback or Missouri. Whatever…the noise and the crime emanating from those northerly precincts are…well, characteristic.

That we are theoretically part of Sunnyslope (though no one who lives here would ever admit that) is what keeps real estate prices relatively low. I couldn’t even begin to afford this house if it were in a better part of town.

{moan!} Now Ruby the Corgi is awake. Is she going to demand to go outside?

Hmmm…not too insistently. Yet.

oook. whine.

Okay…i take that back…

Get up. Lift the dog off the bed. Follow her to the back door. Accompany her outside, barefooted. Not that cold out there, but still…surely there are other things to do at two in the morning. Well…2:30 now. Wait until she does her thing. Follow her inside. Bribe her with a dog treat to get back on the bed.

Gooood morning, America! {sigh}

Is this as terrible a place to live as I think it is?

Probably not. Our enclave, per se, is no slum, though we’re flanked to the north and to the west by districts that do deserve that accolade. You’d be crazy to put your kid in a public grade school here, though the high school (thanks to the efforts of one heroic teacher and her allies) is highly rated — nationally. People actually move here so as to get their kids into Sunnyslope High School. Which, when you think about it, is kinda bizarre.

Cheaper, by far, than having to put them in the Catholic or private high schools here. Brophy Prep, where we sent our son, will set your retirement date back quite a bit, as will All Saints Episcopal, the favored private grade school for the lawyerly and the doctorly set.

What a place! Cheaper than Southern California, no doubt, but still: Southern California Redux.

There was a reason I hated living in Southern California — several of them, as a matter of fact. When we first moved here, in the early 1960s, this place had its own character. Provincial, yes: but still…it was its own place. But now — largely thanks to our honored leaders’ pig-headed civic planning (they quite deliberately and openly modeled the Valley after the L.A. area), — it’s crowded, smoggy, hostile, noisy, and overall an unpleasant place to live.

Well. Unless you consider snow more unpleasant than the serenade of unmuffled engines and gunfire. And 112-degree summer days. 😀

I do not know that I would want to live in snow….matter of fact, I suspect I wouldn’t. But wouldn’t that be better than mobs and mobs of people, gunshots at two in the morning, and the serenade of gangbangers’ hogs?

There are quieter venues to live in this place. Sun City: there, you can enjoy the quiet of the mausoleum, punctuated by the roar of fighter jets emanating from Luke Air Force Base. Fountain Hills, way on the other side of the Valley, offers you the quiet of an upper-middle-class suburb, punctuated by the roar of passenger jets heading into Sky Harbor Airport. In between: noise, traffic, crime, and more noise.

The bikers have quieted down. Three in the morning. I’ve gotta go back to bed.

arrrrghhh!

Lemme Outta This Place!

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Seriously….  If my son did not object SO vociferously to the idea that I should move to some other precinct in the Phoenix area, I would be sooooo radically OUTTA here.

But he does. I think it’s because he wants his muther and his father and New Wife and himself to be within easy shootin’ distance. Just now we all live in the venerable North Central part of lovely uptown Phoenix.

If I had my way, I’d live one HELLUVA lot further from the noise, the crime, the goddamnable lightrail, the crime, the vagrants, the goddamnable lightrail, the constant cop helicopter flyovers, the goddamnable lightrail, the…you get the idea.

Although this neighborhood is on the fringe of tony North Central, it is decidedly fringe. The lightrail brings homeless, drug-shooting, thieving transients up to the end of the line, on the northwestern corner of our neighborhood, and tosses them off here to wander through our streets, alleys, and yards; to sleep in our carports; to steal anything that’s not red-hot or nailed down. Directly to the north of us is one of the toughest districts in the city, sweetly called “Sunnyslope,” an incubator of crime and long the hometown of the local Hell’s Angels. Consequently we have cop helicopters roaring overhead all the freakin’ time.

And y’know…  rrrrrrrrooooaaaaarrr rrroooaarr roar roar roar roar is not a very soothing lullaby. Earlier this afternoon we had a cop copter chasing around the neighborhood and then settling on the alley behind the Funny Farm. Back and forth. Forth and back. Around and around and around. Roar roar roar roar roar…  45 minutes of it…

Godlmighty, who and what are they chasing out there?

Get up. Check the doors. Lock the last door the pooch went out and then came back in. Set a phone next to the chair I’m loafing in. Cancel the plan to get in the car and drive off to the Costco, lest a sh!thead breach the defenses while I’m gone.

How tired am I of this stuff?

Seriously, it’s business as usual here in the’Hood, the cost of living in a centrally located middle-class urban neighborhood. And…

Am.

I.

Tired.

Of it!!!!

If I had my way, I’d move to Fountain Hills ((cheap construction; questionable whether the benefits outweigh the hassles). That’s assuming I wanted to stay in the crime-ridden Valley of the We-D0-Mean Sun. Alternatively, I’d pick Prescott (nice little burg, but a bit too tourist-ridden), Santa Fe (New Mexico), the Oro Valley (suburb of Tucson), Patagonia (artsy-craftsy community nigh unto Nogales, Mexico)…. Hmmm….

The truth is, few or maybe none of these places would be a huge improvement. You think you’re getting away from the cop fly-overs by moving to Sun City? Wait’ll you hear the fighter jets out of Luke AFB! Makes the cop helicopters sound like a lullaby.

Keeeripes! Where can you live in These Newnited States where you don’t have to keep deadbolt locks on every exterior door, alarms on every window, and a pistol close at hand? Where the ambient noise isn’t enough to drive you nuts?

IS there any such place?

Certainly not here. You don’t dare even drive down the street without locking your doors. Twice, I’ve had unsavory types try to pull my car doors open at stoplights — one of them was a guy who, according to that evening’s news, was a violent SOB on the run from the cops.

Surely there must be SOME place left in the good ole U.S. of A. where you can live in peace. Anybody know where it is?

 

Stormy Weather y-Cumin In…

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Looks like we’re going to get the leading fringe of that big California storm. Kind of a gray day now: high clouds coating the normally blue skies.

La Maya and La Bethulia came flying into town, leaving their retirement palace (a nice double-wide) behind in Sta Cruz. My escaped church friend Joan and her daughters, far as I can tell, are about in the thick of it, there in the middle of California’s inland valley. Yipes! Actually, in these parts it’s supposed to be overcast but calm until the middle of next week. Then: 75% chance of rain.

We’ve already had a little rain, but nothing much out of the ordinary. One night: enough to fill the pool almost to the scuppers. Otherwise: pretty low-key.

I could condescend to pick up the frost covers, since it never freezes here under an overcast and rainy sky. In fact, we’re in the 70s now. Kinda doubt temps will drop 40 degrees tonight.

On the other hand…if in fact it gets much chillier tomorrow night and the next (never believe Phoenix forecasts that predict temps in the mid-to low 40s: depending on where you are in the Valley, that can easily translate to the 30s), I’ll just have to lay all those covers out again. Probably better to wait until the Season’s Drama blows over.

***

And now we see that what has transpired here weather-wise is…nothin’ much. A whole day of high clouds. No rain, no wind — at least in these parts. Apparently the water falling out of the sky is confined to California so far. As you see on the news, that is quite the spectacular drama: floods, sinkholes.. WHAT an unholy mess.

Mighty glad I don’t live over there anymore! 😮

 

Electronic Run-arounds in the Wild New Year

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Well, if starters are any clue, it looks like 2023 is gonna be one helluva year. We have…

  • a monster blizzard blasting away at most of the country, which has…
  • blocked air traffic and no doubt much of the highway traffic nationwide…
  • Covid resurgent in China, which has obligingly reopened its borders(!)…
  • a major storm bearing down on Northern California, whose residents by and large do not know what is meant by the term “major storm”…
  • starving refugees from garden spots like Rohynga
  • a pair of tourists stroll out across a frozen lake in northern Arizona, fall through the ice, and drown (what is it about Arizona that reduces tourists to morons?)
  • a-n-n-n-d…on the micro-level: my jaw hurts, possibly dislocated

It’s supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow, with temps in the 50s — which here in the low desert is passing crisp.

Naturally, whenever you need to talk with a doctor, it’s ALWAYS a weekend or a holiday. Called the dentist’s office. Got a runaround. He was supposed to call me back. Nary a word…probably because he’s calling from a blocked area code. My phone is set to block calls from several of the area codes around Maricopa County, where I know no one and which are regularly spoofed by nuisance phone solicitors to disguise pestering phone calls.

So: electronic runarounds of the day #1 and #2: jump through hoop jump through hoop jump through hoop to finally get a human at the doctor’s office, and then get told he’ll call me back…which doesn’t happen, probably because I’ve had to disable part of my own phone system to block the nonstop barrage of phone solicitation.

Next: I need some more nose spray — the stuff that actually works, to wit: Afrin.

Big Brother wishing to protect us from ourselves, you can no longer buy Afrin in a sane size. You get half an ounce from any purveyor at Amazon. (Why? Because if you overdo the stuff, you just make your nose stuffier than it already was. Since you’re too stupid to grasp that concept, Big Brother must take it out of your sticky little hands…)

So any time now I do need to get off my duff and traipse over to the Albertson’s or the Walgreen’s and buy some more of the damn stuff. And…how can I count the ways I do NOT want to go out in the traffic, dodge fellow homicidal drivers, dodge stoned bums, dodge panhandlers for the privilege of buying enough nose spray to unclog my damn head???

This is likely to turn into another runaround, because you can be sure one or the other of those stores no longer carries the gunk at all. AND you can be sure that whichever store I enter first, that’s the store that doesn’t carry it anymore. Yep.

***

Woo HOO!

Wrongola! The journey down to the bum-infested corner was a success! Not only did the corner Walgreen’s NOT have any bums standing at the door (someone new bought the franchise and apparently decided to clean the place up a bit), but they DID have Afrin in a full one-fluid-ounce size!!!!

A miracle.

That’ll last me at least a year or two. I’m thinking maybe I’d better buy another bottle or two, because dontcha just KNOW this is the last we’ll see of that stuff…  Two more squirt bottles of that size would probably last me to the end of my life.

Hungry. The other day I (stupidleeee!) bought a microwaveable package of something billed as macaroni and cheese. Ohhhkayyy…

NOW, I figure, is the time to heat that stuff up. Num num, eh?

Well, no.

NEVER is the time to heat that stuff up.

😀

What on EARTH is the matter with Americans that we eat the sh!t you can buy off grocery shelves???

Ugh. Macaroni and cheese that was absolutely, positively devoid of flavor.

Who eats this stuff?

Why??????

After a few icky bites, I threw the whole thing out.

You — yeah, you, dear reader: you’re presumably American, right? Or more or less so?  Do YOU eat crap like that? WHY?

For less than the amount of time it took to drive to the grocery store, I could have condescended to make myself…you know…an actual sandwich. With real cheese on it. And a real tomato on the side. I could have fired up the barbecue and tossed on a slab of steak, a hamburger, or a chunk of chicken. And a fistful of asparagus spears, doused in olive oil and fresh lemon juice.

Why, really, do we sacrifice edibility for what we imagine to be convenience?

Cruising back into the’Hood… The homeless folks were resting in the bus stop’s covered bench. None of them seemed to be hitting up passers-by, probably because there were no passers-by — the locals having grown wise to the ecology in those parts. One of them had what looked like an iPhone, but it might have been a cheaper smartphone of some other brand.

Before we squawk YOW!! I CAN’T AFFORD ONE OF THOSE THINGS, in fact, they don’t afford them The local social services provide them, free, to the certifiably homeless. Yes, it would be significantly cheaper for the taxpayer to provide flip phones that could be used to dial around. But WTF. There must be better things to complain about. Somewhere.

Still. I do wish someone would pay my T-Mobile bill, so as to make using my cell phone free…

 

 

Bah! El Humbugo! said she…

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Mexican Christmas Light

Every Christmas, the neighborhood gung-ho group — who are great, no question of it, and a real asset to the ‘Hood — flogs a busy communal display of luminarias. These are traditional Mexican Christmas decorations made with paper bags and candles. You pour a layer of sand into the bottom of a paper lunch bag; then insert a short candle into the sand. Line the driveway or sidewalk or porch wall with these light them, and voilà! Christmas cheer.

To say nothing of voilà! Fire hazard.

Being a crabby old lady, I do NOT want these things set up along my courtyard wall or driveway. Because yes, I do think they’re potential fire hazards, especially if a wind comes up — as winds are wont to do at this time of year.

In the past, enthusiastic neighbors have brought the things around and set them up along sidewalks and driveways, free of charge. This is very fun and cool…but it kinda puts us humbugs behind the eight-ball. If you don’t light the things, you out yourself as a Scrooge. 😀

This year, bless’em, they’ve decided residents should buy the things, and so they’ve set up a stand in the park where we can go pick them up and pay for them. And that is definitely Service Above and Beyond: it’s colder than billy-be-dammed out there, and threatening to rain.

Some Christmas season, add I to that. Grump!

Adding further: SDXB called an hour or two ago. Canceled our planned excursion, saying he’s come down with what he thinks is a cold. One can only hope that’s all it is! He sounded just awful…but whenever he gets a respiratory infection, he sounds like he’s pounding at death’s door.

He says he taken both the flu and the covid vaccines — and had three shots of covid. So…we’re looking at two possibilities: either whatever he has is neither of those bugs, or the vaccine he got for one or the other of them failed.

WhatEVER. Cold, flu, or vaccine-resistant covid, I don’t want it…so am grateful for his decision to stay home. Though sorry he’s sick…and hope he gets over it soon.

Meanwhile, in the Department of High-Risk Activities, I dropped out of choir soon after the plague began, choral singing indeed ranking among the highest-risk things you can do in time of contagion. This poses a problem of the First Water: I have nothing else to occupy my time and challenge what passes for my mind!

Tried volunteering for something else down at the Cult HQ. Ended up helping to staff the front desk and answer the phones one afternoon a week. All very nice, no doubt — sorta gives you a chance to meet the clergy and staff. Except they ARE busy and don’t have time to stand around socializing. So you sit there for four hours with not one damn thing to do!!!!! The phone, which is bizarrely complicated, may ring once during that time: nowhere near enough to allow you to learn how to operate it.

After the umpty-umpteenth week of brain-banging boredom, I quit.

Interestingly, the church’s accountant also quit at about the same time. She moved over to a church in the East Valley where our former pastor moved.

uh-HUH…

What is she tryin’ to say to me?

Tried rejoining the choir, but that was a lost cause. Because…I have no formal training in music. When it comes to voice, the best I can do is sing along (actually, I’m fairly good at that). BUT our new choir director (accountant was not the first to flee…) has a taste for music that is wonderfully sophisticated and so complex there’s truly no way I can learn it in the brief time the group has to introduce itself to a piece and practice it a few times. So: out that door.

The church has now completed its addition to the school — already one of the toniest schools in the state. This thing is a good three or four storeys high, as big as the high school I attended in Southern California…which had three thousand students.

UH–huh.

It looks suspiciously to me like our venerable, high-society church for lawyers, doctors, and society matrons is planning to go into direct competition with the Catholic schools just down the street: St. Francis (K-8); Brophy (boy’s high school); and Xavier (girl’s high school).  If that’s the case, the church will become basically an adjunct to the school operation. Which is all very nice, no doubt, but….??????

I could follow our perspicacious accountant out to the east side. But…how CAN I count the ways I don’t want to commute halfway to Payson a minimum of twice a week, once at night?

The local Episcopals have what they call a cathedral, smack in the middle of downtown. This is not an area where I would like to walk around at night, I must say. But….neither do I relish the prospect of melting away into a puddle of dead IQ points, which is where MayoDoc fears I’m headed. To survive, I’m going to have to find something to keep the brain functioning.

Which is worse: brained in a parking lot, or brainless in a nursing home?

Think I’ll try the parking lot, thank you.

Planned to go down there this morning, but I was simply too lazy to get up off my duff and fling myself around. Next week.

Meanwhile…what if they won’t let me onto their choir? Which, at this point in the season, they very justifiably may not?

We have two alternatives:

One is to take a course at Phoenix College, a nearby JC, in choral singing. Dunno what the status is now, but that school did have an excellent music and drama program, and one of our choir members/leaders taught there. Wonder-Accountant took a semester of choral singing there, and she was impressed.

Another is to go out to the Episcopal church on East Lincoln and try to weasel my way in there. Whaddaya bet some of our old choir members are already there, hm? It is halfway to Scottsdale, and truly I would rather not drive around this Godforsaken town that much. But hey…any port in a plague, eh?

A benefit to the second scheme is that one of the best Sprouts stores in the Valley resides approximately on the route between here and there. A high-test Safeway is just up the road from that place. So in theory, I could get most of my grocery shopping done on the way home on Sundays. That would be good. I guess.

WhatEVER. One way or the other, I’ve gotta find a way to get off my duff, plague or no plague. As the finest professor I ever met, Byrd Granger, used to say…

You must engage life!

Life in the Land of the Dumb and the Feckless

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Correct position behind steering wheel for driving on Phoenix roads.

So you say you’re bored? Life is too calm? People around you persist in behaving like normal, sane human beings?

Welp, there’s a way to get around that predicament. It’s easy: Come to Phoenix, get in a car, and start driving!

Gaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhh!!!!!

If Days from Hell are crazy in normal times, in the Christmas season they’re BATSH!T crazy!

So I make my way to the Best Buy at about Camelback and 20th Street, there to glom a gift card for my son, as something that will pass for a Christmas present. Wander around ogling the technological wonders. Finally lose interest and roam back to the car. Start driving toward the’Hood, westerly ever westerly, and….

Ohhhhh yah. Wouldn’tcha know it? Traffic jam, traffic jam…and traffic jam on Camelback, one of the biggest surface streets in the city.

Crawl westward. Crawl…crawl…cr…HOLEE sh!t they’ve got the whole dam road, east AND westbound shut down at 12th street.

Guy ahead of me, bless his heart, drives like an old-time Phoenician. He’s assertive (read “aggressive as a hyena”) and he knows where he’s going. I settle into his tailwind.

We jerk north on 12th Street and proceed ever northerly. North. North. North. Now we’re in a neighborhood that I’ve never passed through slowly enough to examine. Twelfth is bordered on both sides by aging single- and two-story apartment buildings (once rentals, no doubt, but now condos). Lookin’ around, I think holeee maquerel, THIS is where we should have put Tootsie (SDXB’s mother) when we were forced to move her out of her beloved little condo after the damn place went to Hell on a Handcart. Why on earth didn’t we look in this area?”

Why…why…why, indeed?

Well, to begin with, I did look for places like that, but everything in our part of town — i.e., the area I knew anything about — was way too expensive. These places look like they would have been in the general price range of her soon-to-be abandoned garden apartment…and since her daughter, who was in on the project, was married to THE premier cardiac anesthesiologist in the Pacific Northwest…well, yes: they certainly COULD have afforded to get her into one of them. None of these places looked any fancier than Tootsie’s place, except (ahem) for the location.

But noooooooooo.

Some friend/distant relative of hers had bought a trailer on the far west side, where they would decamp to escape Michigan’s lovely winter months. Nothing would do but what, forgodsake, we had to put her in a trailer.

CAN you spell “stupid”?

It’s spelled t-r-a-i-l-e-r p-a-r-k,

So we get her into this tin can.

You understand: temps in the summers here range up to 120 degrees. Her relatives went home to Michigan in the summertime, so were unable to advise about the power bills in the multiple hundreds of dollars. You cannot air-condition a trailer…BECAUSE it effectively has no insulation.

Meanwhile, nothing would do but what she had to buy a trailer way to Hell and gone on the west side: a good hour’s drive from where SDXB and I were living.

You have not heard bitching until you’ve heard SDXB bellyache about having to drive (and drive and drive and drive and…) through the hideous westside traffic to attend to his mother. Wow!

Can’t say I blame him. It was a horrid drive.

He had an ex-girlfriend who was a Realtor. He asked her to advise…and…what a joke! She came up with exactly nothing viable. I looked around, but i are not a Realtor i are a english major…. I knew of a few patio home developments not far from here, but they were too expensive…and I was completely ignorant of the places to the east of 7th Street, where we could easily have found something that would have worked.

Picked up a Best Buy gift card for my son’s Christmas present. Now all I have to do is not lose it between now and the 25th. Easier said than done.

Son’s dog was surged yesterday. Nothing serious, he says: the dog grows these strange cysts…probably fatty tumors, I imagine. Greta the Gershep had a couple, but she didn’t develop them until she was well into her dotage. Charley the Golden Retriever has had these things since he was an addled-escent pup. M’hijito recently acquired a new vet — our old bunch having gone out of business and scattered to the winds.

Poor dog apparently was suffering somewhat yesterday. That — me being the skeptic that I am — would raise some real concern if he were mine. Not that I wouldn’t want to treat something that might harm him or cause him discomfort. But these things are apparently benign. Not at all sure I would subject an 11-year-old dog — who probably has just another year or two before the end of his normal lifespan — to any kind of unnecessary surgery.

ooooh wellll… Stop the world…i wanna get off!