Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

And as long as we’re enjoying the Valley of the Sun’s blandishments…

by

Pool Dude shoots in the gate. Bribes the dog. Throws himself around. Shoots out the gate. Bless that man!!! That pool has been crystalline GORGEOUS since the first day he showed up on the job.

Ruby dearly loves him. She knows when it’s Tuesday — Pool Dude Day — and lurks by the door or the gate waiting for him to show up. I suspect this is largely because he bribes her with treats. But in fact he seems to be a very sweet man, if somewhat eccentric.

I wonder if you can earn enough cleaning pools to actually make a living.

Hmmmm….  He charges me $110/month. This includes chemicals, though…so he’s not getting anywhere near that much. Let’s estimate that maybe he nets, after gasoline and vehicle upkeep, around $60/month…maybe $70. Hmmm…

If it takes him around an hour to drive from one customer’s house to the next, plus of course the drive time from wherever he lives, he can probably serve five to eight customers a day. So that would be, say, 5 customers/day times 4 (five-day) weeks/month: 20 paying trips per month.

ooohkayyyy…. 20 trips * $110 = $2200/month, gross.

That’s not a helluva lot less than I was earning at GDU. And he doesn’t have a Ph.D., 15 years of journalism experience, and 20 years of teaching experience. On the other hand, I didn’t have to purchase all the materials needed to do the job — and chlorine, in particular, ain’t cheap. Nor did I spend half the day driving from place to place…burning $4.25-a-gallon gasoline every inch of the way.

In other sylvan fields…

Yesterday’s freeway wreck, which I narrowly escaped, apparently was even more spectacular than reported. It looks like the cops actually RAMMED the guy’s truck to stop him! At freeway speed…

Wow! If I hadn’t gone into the Best Buy on that futile quest for…whatever I wanted, but instead had continued on north toward the Costco up the freeway, I would’ve been in the middle of that.

Y’know…I kinda doubt that I’d be real happy with a job that required me to drive allllll over the Valley every day. It is just too, too crazy out there to be in a car any more than absolutely necessary.

Phoenix: what a place!

 

Doglarming!

by

The human and the dog are loafing. Human is playing pointless games on its computer. Dog is snoozing in her nest behind the toilet. One of them on the far west side of the house; the other on the far east side.

All of a sudden:

ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF!!!!!!!!

Out of the back bedroom rings a frantic doggy-alarm…HOleee sheeut!

Human leaps to its feet, grabs a scimitar out of the steak-knife drawer, and proceeds post-haste to the back of the house, where Dog is indulging a little frenzy.

By the time I get down the hall, she’s calmed down.

Cat, I figure. The kitties get into cat-squabbles, thereby getting Ruby, who regards cats as her natural prey, akin to burglars, all doggy-exercised.

Peer through the bedroom drapes, lights off. Quiet out there. No sign of a cat. But…yes…here comes the cop helicopter.

But…

By damn, here comes another cop helicopter! Briefly. It moves on.

Those guys should set up a landing pad in our park. They could have a coffee shop out there, too.

Ruby remains doglarmed for awhile. I figure the whole flap is probably over one of Other Daughter’s cats, who frequently visit the yard. The remaining cop flies off to the north, there to hover over the dire slum above the canal.  Let Ruby out in back. Now she seems unimpressed. She strolls around briefly and then comes back in the house.

The windows are all locked. The doors and their heavy-duty security screens are locked. The human is armed.

The dog? Snoozing on the bed.

Morning in Arizona…

by
Breakfast-time, and the livin'(oughta be) easy…

A morning designed to amuse the bored gods and goddesses, hanging out over their morning gin-and-tonics in heaven. No doubt of it. They have nothing else to do, so decide to amuse themselves by inflicting intricately woven complications on their critters’ lives.  Athena, you may be sure, was highly amused this morning. And hevvin only knows what other shenanigans She has in mind for this day

Amazingly, this human slept in today. No kidding: it was almost 7 a.m. when I woke up! Can you imagine???

OoohhKayyyyy….  So the hot water is poured over the fresh-ground coffee in the French press. The dog is fed. The toast is toasted. The bacon is sizzled in the microwave. The food is on the table and the human is hunkered down in front of breakfast and…

BING BONG!

arf arf arf arf arf arf arf 

BING BONG!

kee-rap, NOW what? It’’s not even eight o’fukkin’clock in the morning!

arf arf arf arf arf arf arf  arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf arf 

SHUT UP, DAMMIT!!!!!!!

Grab yesterday’s blue jeans and jump into them.

arf arf arf arf arf arf arf 

BING BONG!

COM-i-i-ng!!!!!!!

Button jeans. Open door: it’s the new yard dude.

Jeez, Dude: you could’ve given me a li’l warning!

They’re here to clean up the yard.

Unlock the side gate. Point out new minor headaches that need their attention. Drag Ruby away.

Ohhhh well. Back to the breakfast table.

Sure. Back to breakfast: serenaded by the roar of a couple gas-powered blowers, a weed-whacker, and the dog barking.

Shortly, shovel the gentlemen back into their truck and wave them down the road. Find a dripper hose with the head broken off. Can’t find the baggie of dripper heads in the garage. Not at all in the mood to toss the garage cabinets and shelves in search of those things — make note to buy more next time I drive past the Ace Hardware. Meanwhile, clip the hose shut with a clothespin.

Grrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!

Cop helicopters take up the serenade. They roar back and forth….off in the distance, the wail of sirens — cops? fire trucks? ambulances? What. a. racket!

All. I. Wanted. To. Do. was sit down and have a modest, QUIET breakfast.

One unreasonable demand after another, eh?

Yipes! ANOTHER Cop “Incident”?

by

So the dawg is fed and I’m just about to throw on some clothes and take her for the morning doggy walk. It’s around 6:30.

Right. Sure.

Ruby is chowing down; I’m looking for a pair af marginally presentable jeans. And…ohhhh yeah:

R-R-R-O-O-O-O-A-R-R-R-R….

Cop copter flyover.

Round and round and round he goes. He’s looking for someone, and that someone is within a few blocks of the Funny Farm. The police dispatch website says nothing about it.

Based on past experience, the someone will be…

  • an ordinary burglar (not likely: they’ve been up there almost 40 minutes…they wouldn’t waste that much fuel on a workaday prowler);
  • a wanted criminal on the run from some other neighborhood;
  • somebody who actually did break in to a house here and raped or otherwise engaged the resident;
  • a bum who picked a fight with a homeowner trying to evict him from a garage or a backyard; or
  • a criminal, probably of the violent type, on the run from the cops, who chased him here after some other incident.

WhatEVER: it put the eefus on the Morning Doggywalk.

Fortunately, the weather has cooled dramatically. So, we can afford to wait an hour before setting out to defile the neighbors’ lawns.

😉

Yesterday the neighborhood association had its annual Giant Shindig in the Park, so we weren’t able to go over there during that. And now I”m not so sure about taking her into the park anyway, at least for the nonce. We’re enjoying a parvo plague. This fine and often fatal disease can be picked up off the ground. And Ruby, like any dawg, loves nothing more than sniffing every stink she comes across. Especially if it’s associated with a pile of feces.

Ruby has had her parvo shots, of course. However, I don’t get her shot up every year, because…a study showed that most of the routine vaccines last up to a decade. The researchers shot up a passel of dogs and watched them to see how long the initial rounds of shots worked. The vaccines were still protective nine years after the study began. At that point, the researchers ran out of funding and so dropped the study.

Thus we don’t know for sure how long the shots last, but apparently it covers the dog for as long as most dogs live. And also thus: I’m less than thrilled about taking her to our park, which everybody and their little brother uses as a de facto dog park. Not only are their little furbabies running around off-lead (some of them looking for a fight), but lead or no lead, any dog that’s been exposed to parvo is dropping viral particles everywhere it goes.

***

Hmmmm…. And this may have something to do with this morning’s Copter Flyover:

…the intersection of [Conduit of Blight and Main Drag South] is closed in all directions this morning and will not open until much later in the day. Please seek alternate routes. #PHXTraffic

Probably some idiot drove or walked out in front of the train.

Y’know…I love my neighborhood and all the wonderful young people who are moving here with their kids. I like being centrally located. I love the greenery and the park and the fancy houses in the Richistans and the cute little tract houses in my parts. But I sweartogawd, sometimes I think what AM i doing here?

My son is adamant that I should not move out of this house. But the truth is, there are safer districts, and they’re not all in the Sun Cities.

Fountain Hills is the most attractive of these. Problem is, it’s about as far away from everyone I know and everything I do as the Moon is. It’s halfway to Payson! Close to the Mayo Clinic…but otherwise, I know no one out there and have no great desire to get to know anyone. Sun City is quiet, if you enjoy the silence of the tomb. And mile on mile on mile of houses that look so much alike you can’t tell the difference between them.

Most areas in north Phoenix and Scottsdale do have fewer bums…we get inundated because we live at the end of the lightrail line. The bums and the indigent mentally ill climb on the damned train, ride it up here to the end of the line, get out, and fan out into the neighborhood. Of course we always had some crime before that thing was built. But we didn’t have a bum in every yard, and we didn’t have to be extra-cautious about taking the trash out in the alley (I have two sets of padlocks on the back gates!), and we didn’t have to walk around spaced-out bums sleeping off their latest fix in the park. These are largely functions of the idiotic lightrail project and the insertion of several drug clinics in the immediate vicinity of the neighborhood. So in theory one could escape some of the crime and ickiness simply by moving to a different district.

One of the magnets that calls the transients in: the FIVE drug treatment centers within easy walking distance of the lightrail stops at Main Drag South and at Gangbanger’s Way. One of them is right down the street from a grade school!

Drug abuse is pretty much endemic here. And it spans all social classes. So unless you live in a gated community such as the Biltmore or the Phoenix Country Club, you are going to have drug addicts wandering your neighborhood streets and sleeping in your yard.

Welp, Ruby is lobbying for a doggy-walk. I haven’t had anything to eat and am starved. And so, awawayyyy….to breakfast and then to brave the day’s outdoor adventure.

And tonight? HALLOWE’EN! Armies of cute little kids trucked into the ‘Hood from lower-income districts, here to collect the loot. We always sit in the WonderAccountants’ driveway to hand out candy…so that will be fun.

Yipes! Another Monday Already??? WaitWait…

by

Holeee Maquerel! A whole week has gone by since last I posted at Funny. How did THAT happen?

Hm.

I think it happened because precious little has been happening. The days shoot past in the present state of isolation and quarantine-like living. One after another…most of them identical. You would think time would feel slower under these conditions…but it doesn’t. To the contrary… It’s Monday, October 24. The last I knew, it was Monday…the 17th. A whole week is gone, and I’ve barely noticed it was here.

Now that I’ve quit the once-a-week volunteer job at the church, I literally have nothing to do, no one to see, very little that must be done to keep life trundling along.

For some reason I don’t feel especially bored, though. The church receptionist gig had to go because it WAS boring. Excruciatingly so. For some reason, when I’m here at the Funny Farm I never seem to be sitting around doing nothing, staring into space. Even when I’m doing nothing, though, I don’t feel oppressively bored. Why that would be the case escapes me…

What have I done today, for example?

Precious little, yep. Luis the Arborist is here. I’ve spent all of ten minutes aiming him toward the jobs to be done. Then got back out of the men’s way: they passed most of the day pruning the jungle in front.

Wasted a fair amount of the day playing computer games. Didn’t even take the dog for a walk this morning: too, toooo lazy.

Which is too bad, because the days have turned gorgeous. The spate of thunderstorms we had the other day broke the heat. So now the weather is cool and lovely and beautiful.

***

LOL! and now it’s Tuesday. I wandered off and forgot to post this thing.

Luis and his guys spent the entire darned afternoon beating back the jungle. The most signal of his achievements is to lawsuit-proof my front yard: One of those thorny trees likes to dangle a branch over the sidewalk, right at face height for the passing humans. People prance up and down that sidewalk day and night, without ever looking up from their damn phones. Sooner or later, somebody is going to get stabbed in the face by that thing — it’s actually poked me a couple of times, and I do watch where I’m going.

So I figure that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. I’ve nipped it back a couple times myself, but I’m getting too feeble to climb up on a ladder and chop away at tree limbs.

Anyway, now it’s fixed.

My friend VickyC is supposed to come by this noon. We were planning to go exploring in Cave Creek/Carefree, and upscale tourist trap on the north side of the Valley. That scheme crashed y’day; don’t know if we’ll try to do that, or just go out to lunch.

Which brings us to the current techno-hassle: I accidentally blocked VickyC’s phone number on my land line. It’s possible to unblock a number, but to do so…well…you have to find the number.

Literally hundreds of numbers are blocked on that phone. Without that firewall, as it were, I get anywhere from three to ten nuisance calls every day. They spoof local numbers, so the only way you can tell the call is from a pest is by not recognizing it. Apparently one time when she called, I succeeded in not recognizing her number. So she can’t get through to me. And now I can’t find it in the vast bank of blocked numbers, nor can I find a way to unblock ALL numbers and start over again.

In that department, entertainingly enough…it appears that SHRIEKING INTO THE PHONE AT THE SHRILLEST TOP OF YOUR VOICE is working to cut down the volume of nuisance calls. After a week or two of engaging that tactic, I’m getting many fewer calls per day.

At any rate, if I can’t figure out how to unblock VickyC’s number, I may have to buy a new set of landline phones.

Jeez. Ain’t life in te 21st Century fun?

Stop the World….

by

One of THOSE days again: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Finally get the spilled coffee cleaned up off the deck, the table, the this and the that. Drag stuff into the garage sink to wash. Pissed mightily.

I mean…really. All I wanted to do was sit down, turn on my li’l computer (assuming it will come on, no longer a safe assumption), and diddle away time on the Internet whilst swilling down the rest of the morning’s coffee.

Everything I touch goes SPROI-OI-OI-OINGGGGGG!

Finally ensconced. The mosquito coil I lit an hour or two ago seems to have chased off the effing mosquitos, bred by my effing neighbor’s eccentric habit of leaving a muddy puddle on the bottom of her empty swimming pool, which she decided to drain a couple years ago. Drain…and just LEAVE there.

Is the whole WORLD festooned with nut cases, or is it just my neighborhood?

This one, a freelance accountant who apparently has some emotional problems, is supported by her father, who bought the house next door and ensconced her in it.

Turns out Dad is a DIY real-estate magnate, and surprise! He owns the house next door to M’hijito! So that place is a rental, thereby depressing the value of the house the kid and I paid a hefty price to buy.

That puddle is no doubt what was responsible for Other Daughter’s case of Western equine encephalitis, which damn near killed her. O.D. is in the habit of leaving her windows open all the time, and, weirdly, she doesn’t have screens on those windows. No doubt so her tribe of cats can hop in and out at will.

Little details like epidemiology and safe maintenance seem beyond the scope of altogether too many of the Funny Farm neighbors.

Meanwhile, my own yard is still ankle-deep in debris from the late storm. Gerardo said he would come by today to deal with that and also some fairly desperately needed exterior repairs, which was very kind of him…

ahem…

ESPECIALLY since it dawns on me (if not on him) that today is Columbus day!

Even though his workers are his cousins, WTF? He shouldn’t be working those guys today,. Nor, given the way he throws himself around, should he be making himself work today. Give yourself a break, dude!

So, though I need Gerardo to come around, I do hope he doesn’t.

Speaking of cultural issues, I am really afraid that my neighbor J is about to get ripped off massively.

This is the lovely Latina lady the city gave SDXB’s house to when he sold it for a song in his furor to move away from Tony the Romanian Landlord. Seriously: they had a program where they were buying houses to move people out of the way of the airport construction, which was merrily leveling a barrio in lovely south Phoenix. The area, as you can imagine, was a slum of the first water, being directly under the path of incoming and outgoing jet aircraft…24/7.

So getting into SDXB’s 2100-square-foot house in North Central was an astonishing Godsend for J…but… You understand, she doesn’t have the income to maintain such a place. Her kids are helping, though.

I happen to be enamored of J. She is extremely nice, quiet, and pleasant to have as a neighbor. A-a-a-n-d…that’s why I’m worried.

The recent storm blew a couple of shingles off her roof, same as it did mine. But where my Roofer Guy said “nooo problem: I’ll be back next week to fix them,” hers said “ohhhhh dear! The whole roof must be replaced!”

Uh huh.

Well, I doubt it. That roof looks relatively new; if you study it, you see it’s in excellent condition. If anything, it’s in better shape than mine. I moved here in 2007, shortly after SDXB bought that house that Josie has now. I will say, I don’t remember his having the roof redone…but I don’t remember what I had for breakfast these days.

And…y’know…if you’ve lived in the barrio all of your days, chances that you’ll have adequate homeowner’s insurance — or any homeowner’s insurance — are practically nil, that being something you may never have heard of. Just hope she doesn’t get ripped off.

I did share my new Roofer Dude’s phone number and suggested she get a second estimate. And mentioned to RD’s wife/receptionist that I have a real bad feeling about the guy J is dealing with just this minute. Sure hope she’ll call them.

Speaking again of the ineffable Gerardo, back & forth…. I finally FOUND another much-needed rolling hose-winding stand, this one for the side yard. Amazon provided one for the front spigot and one for the spigot out back by the pool, but… go to order another one and poof!!! You make it disappear!

😀

So, not finding quite what I wanted in the remains of Amazon’s choices, I finally bestirred myself to traipse up to Home Depot. And lo! There it was…and only ONE of them left!

Grab!!!

So now we have a really nifty hose winder-upper gadget, easy to use and with plenty of room for a hose that will run alllll the way back to the alley fence. Looks pretty sturdy, so I’m hoping it’ll last for a few years.

That should please Gerardo: one less hose-wrestling hassle!

Hmmmm…

Some new Incident seems to be under way. Fire and police sirens have been wailing away from the direction of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s way.

Haven’t seen a helicopter…usually there’s at least one gnus helicopter in search of morbid content to fill TV minutes.

That’s a major intersection, seriously messed up by the presence of the Bum’s Railway, which carries any number of drug addicts and panhandlers into the ‘Hood. Several low-rent (read: “cheaply built and highly flammable”) apartment buildings reside in that area, as well as a trailer park.

Welp… No sign of Gerardo. Believe I’ll get up and head for Costco…via a different exit from the ‘Hood!