Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

No Matter What….

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…it’s gotta be a hassle!!!

😮

I swear-ta-gawd! Everything I’ve touched in that damn backyard today has gone SPRROOOOIIIINGGGGG!  And kindly created an interesting new hassle.

Just spent a good half-hour or 40 minutes wrestling with pool equipment, for a chore that should’ve taken 10 minutes…at the outside. I’ll tellya: if I glance at it, it goes SPRRROIIINGGGGG!!! And breaks or creates a mess.

Y’know, my neighbor Josie drained her pool several years ago and has never refilled it. And….I’m beginning to think she’s got something there.

O’course, a maneuver like that wrecks the plaster and the equipment, so the damn thing has to be expensively repaired before it can be turned back on — basically rebuilt. But…honestly. Sooooo what? The savings in Hassle Factor may be altogether worth it.

Godlmighty, though….I do hate the thought of wrecking the pool and leaving it a wreck for years, then having to spend several thousand dollars in repair bills when the house goes on the market, lo! these many years in the future.

But honestly…IS that pool giving me my money’s worth? To say nothing of my hassle’s worth? I hardly ever use it any more. I haven’t been in it today. Or this week, or, come to think of it, this month.

Maybe it just oughta be drained…..

{sigh}

If I were gonna do that, though, I think I’d want to cover it with a plank deck. If that were sturdy enough, it could be part of the patio, and a table and umbrella could sit out there. It would look nice enough (a helluva lot nicer than a plaster hole in the ground!) and could be used for parties and picnic meals.

Now, as a potential seller of this house, I see that plan as a mighty drawback. But….but what if some potential buyer comes along and is enchanted by the idea of an expensive deck that could be used as a party venue? That might not be such a bad thing…

Hm. I may ask a Realtor friend about this idea.

Sheee-ut!!  The temp out there is 107 degrees, with rain y-cumen in!  What a fukkin’ garden spot! Almost as balmy as (un)lovely Saudi Arabia, where heat and humidity were linked together with hooks-and-eyes!

What a Place!

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Ugh! Arizona…WHAT a dump!!!

It’s 95 degrees in the deep shade of the back porch, under overcast skies. Wunderground predicts we’ll hit a crisp 100 degrees today, with 15% chance of precipitation. The skies are solidly gray, so…Funny’s Weather Service predicts one helluva lot better chance of rain than 15%.

I hate this place. (In case you hadn’t noticed…)

WhatEVER possessed my father to drag us to the middle of the baking Arizona desert after he retired?

Oh, yeah. I know: Cheap!

Compared to California, where we’d been living for the six years after we got back from Saudi Arabia, this place was a bargain on steroids.

* Housing: cheap
* Utilities: cheap
* Gasoline: cheap
* Doctors’ fees: cheap

On and on and on….

The fact that he cut off my opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. from Cal Berkeley? Meh! Who cares? She’s just a girl. Why does she need a Ph.D. to cook on a stove and wash dishes in the kitchen sink?

Yeah, I did eventually finish the doctorate…from Arizona State University.

And yeah: it most certainly DOES matter where you got your advanced degree!

Except for the ego gratification, I might as well not have bothered.

No, a guy who never finished high school could not be expected to understand why his kid would want a Ph.D. and what advantages it would present to her. Still…how pig-headed can you get?

So, yeah…I hate Arizona. Wish I’d never been dragged here. Wish I’d had the initiative and the ambition to get myself out of here while I was an undergraduate, or, forgodsake, at least for graduate school.

But…by the time I hit the Ph.D. program, I was married to a well established lawyer here in Phoenix. He wasn’t going anywhere (nor should he have!), and neither was I. So…Okay: Ph.D. from Arizona State. Whoop. De. Doo.

What a place!

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Yuch!!  Just back from this morning’s (soggy!) doggy walk. What a horrid morning! Gray, wet…yes, SO wet the air actually does feel soggy.

Feels like Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf, where we used to live while my father worked for Aramco — the Arabian American Oil Company. HORRIBLE. One of the nastiest places to live that you can imagine.

Ruby is panting frantically as she lounges on the kitchen floor’s cool tile. I’m covered with sticky sweat…thirsty but too tired and sore to get up and lumber into the kitchen after a glass of water.

WhatEVER possessed my father to move us to this ungawdly place when he retired?

Oh, yah: I know. CHEAP.

Del Webb was practically giving away the houses in Sun City — certainly by comparison with California real estate. But Sun City’s BIG appeal to him, IMHO, was NO KIDS.

Truly: he abominated kids. He hated the sound of kids playing outside. And when he heard of a whole housing development where no kids were allowed, he thought he’d found Nirvana.

He made me drop out of high school a year early, so he could send me to the University of Arizona…thereby getting around Del Webb’s rule that no one under some extenuated age could live in Sun City. If your kid was away at college, you were allowed to move in…even if the brat was under 21.

So that fucked up my education. But why should he care? I was just a girl. What did I need a degree for, since all I was gonna do was take dictation and type? And raise kids, of course.

Y’know, if he’d waited just one more  year, I would have gotten into UC Berkeley, and there I could have landed a decent degree that would indeed have led to an interesting job or a first-rate graduate program. But nooooooo….we had to move to f*cking Sun City.

What a place!

At any rate, here we are, enjoying a classic Arizona late-summer day. Wet, soggy, dark with overcast…just gross. I hate Arizona (in case you hadn’t noticed…). And really…I will resent him for the rest of my life for f*cking up my educational plans (I was lined up for a Ph.D. from Berkeley or UCLA!) and dragging me out to the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

But…yeah. So what? I was just a girl….

Aftermath

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Not much damage here at the Funny Farm from last night’s fierce storm. Leastwise, not that I can see. The WonderAccountants across the street were out inspecting their place, too…they also failed to find serious damage to the roof.

Wow! That WAS a fine freshet of a storm, too.

In Arabia, when we would get a storm like this (rarely, thank Gawd), it would blow roofs off the houses. So that was kinda what I expected to find this morning.

Apparently 21st-century roofing is stronger stuff! 😀

M’jihito is dragging me to the Mayo Clinic this morning. It’s an hour-plus drive out there. And GAWD how I hate that drive and hate that place!!!!!!!

As usual, you can be sure they’re gonna tell us there’s nothing much wrong with me. But they’ll waste as much of our time as possible in doing so. They’ll stab and they’ll jab and they’ll pester and they’ll muster, and the result will be: nil. 

They must make money based on how much time they spend with a patient. That’s the only explanation for the amount of time consumed in every nuisance visit out there.

When I go to young Dr. Kildare, my “Doctor in the Wild” as the Mayo set calls docs who aren’t on their staff, he asks a few questions, does an exam, tells me there’s nothing wrong with me, and throws me out. Today I will wait and wait in their waiting room, get quizzed, get jabbed and stabbed, maybe run through some horrible roaring tube, and then be told there’s nothing wrong with me.

That, I must say, gets tedious. 

A Fine Freshet

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wowWEEE!!! What we have here is the mega-rainstorm from Hell! You would not BELIEVE!!

No, it doesn’t come up to the level of tornado…or even to hurricane. The wind’s not that high. But the torrents of rain are…well…beyond my experience, that’s for sure.

Seriously: Haven’t seen a storm like this since I was in Arabia, when a storm came in off the Gulf that tore off people’s roofs.

Let’s hope Stateside roofs are a little sturdier. {heh!} Especially the one on my house! 😮

Dayum! This means tomorrow I’ll have to get someone up there to inspect that roof.

Yeah: me and 87,000 other locals, eh?

Goodie. I can start calling at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow.

We haven’t lost the power yet. Usually that goes out whenever we have a serious storm. And this IS a serious one.

Wooo HOOO! Just LISTEN to that thunder! :-0

Really, this one sounds a lot like the Biggie we had in Saudi Arabia, all these many years ago. One year we had a monster storm roar in off the desert. Tore off people’s roofs. Blew boats ashore. Scared the bedoodles out of everyone.

Be glad you’re not an Arab living in a tent out on the desert when one of these things blows through.

***

Looks like the thing has already lost its clout.

Can’t see the pool through the back windows in the dark. And am not going out there in the rain to inspect. Whatever mess is out there will still be out there come sunrise.

And won’t Pool Dude be pleased…. 😮

Yet Another Lovely Arizona Day….

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Jayzuz!  THIRTY-SEVEN PERCENT humidity! Temp: 111º … “feels like 114º,” saith Wunderground. Supposed to chill down to a crisp 106º some while after 6:00 p.m., after which time we supposedly will get a thunderstorm.

Ahhhh, lovely Arizona! What a garden spot! Just now, over a third of the air out there is…water.

Can you imagine my father dragging us to this place?

Actually, my mother rather liked it. She used to go on and on about how she loved the sound of the accursed fighter jets roaring out of Luke Air Force Base (just down the road from where we lived) and how wonderful the weather was and…yeah. On and on. Which goes to show, I reckon, that some folks can adapt themselves to anything.

If my son weren’t here, I wouldn’t stay in this garden spot. 

Where would I go?

San Francisco, whence my family emanated. My maternal grandmother’s family lived in the East Bay. After my mother’s paternal grandmother, situated in upstate New York, died of diabetes, my mother was shipped to the California relatives.

This was a lucky break for her. The New York set, who had assumed custody of my mother, were dirt farmers. The California clan, though, was fairly affluent. Not zillionaires by any means, but comfortably set.

Getting shipped off to the Californians after the New York grandmother died was one of the great lucky breaks of her life. Suddenly she was riding to school on a school bus (she told me she’d never seen such a thing Back East!) and eating three squares and wearing decent clothes.

Eventually, my mother did come to regard Berkeley as “home.” And though I wouldn’t go that far, I will say…I could happily live the rest of my life there. Well. If I could persuade the son to move up there, too! 😀