Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Wacka-Day…

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So the day started out looking like another long, lethargic loaf. Heh…Not so much. One wacky happening after another — on a low-key scale.

Dog-walk this morning: we encountered nine other pooches on our perambulation, not counting the several large dogs illegally allowed to run loose around the park. There were at least four of those, bringing the total to around thirteen. This is about par at that time of day: around 6 to 7 a.m. All of which is well and good, except it means I have to be on the alert to keep Ruby from lunging at any of them and triggering a reprisal sally. Nothing too wacky there, except for the sheer number of residents in this neighborhood who are out walking their dogs at dawn.

Two guys showed up at the door, wanting to trim the accursed palm trees. It’s been two years since I decided to belay trimming the filthy things. Every time the wind blows, they drop piles of debris onto the street, the alley, and the neighbors’ yards, which I then have to run out and pick up. And even when the air is still, they sprinkle tens of thousands of BB-like seeds that jam Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s innards and stop him dead.

Ordinarily I would ask Gerardo to do this job, and in fact this spring he and I have considered it, in a desultory way, but what with his wife’s illness and demise, needless to say he’s had his mind on other things.

So when these guys showed up and offered to do the job for $45 per tree, plus another chunk of dough to shave off the frond stems that cling to one of the four trunks, I thought…why not? And told them to PLEASE not drop the stuff in the pool.

Ohhh no, señora! No fronds in pool!

😀

Well, easier said than done. When I looked out there after they climbed down from the sky, they’d filled the pool with palm tree fronds and debris! What a mess!!

But…they managed to get all of the giant, wet, heavy leaves out, all of the sticks and floating crap, all of the dried out shreds of palm leaves. Piles of dirt and BBs and miscellaneous crap still lay on the bottom. So I got out the leaf bagger, screwed it on the hose, and started to vacuum the stuff up.

Well. Sr. Luis had never seen such a thing in his life, and he was delighted. Forthwith he took over the job, and before long the pool was spotless. He asked where I’d gotten it, and I referred him to the Home Depot. And I suggested that if he found clients who had these damn trees near the pool and offered to clean the pool after trimming the things, he could beat out the competition and also charge more.

And I paid him more than he asked, further flooring him. It still was well under $100 per tree, for a dangerous job that can best be described as horrendous. All told, each man earned about $100 apiece for three hours of hard physical work, by the time they bought gas to run their pickup and large trailer up the freeway to the county landfill and then paid the fees to use said landfill.

These guys are horribly underpaid to do a difficult and dangerous job. Every now and again one of them dies when a palm frond falls on him and he suffocates, or when he falls off three-story-high tree.

So there was that.

Then there was today’s saga of the shoes.

Our choir director asks us to wear closed-told black shoes to process up and down the aisles of the sanctuary. Sounds easy enough, eh?

I’m sure it is, if your feet don’t hurt all the time and if you don’t have to buy spectacularly overpriced European shoes so that you can walk without pain. Those shoes are usually sandals…with…yes: open toes.

Finally I decided that if that’s what he’s going to insist on, he’ll have to put up with Sanitas, since those are about the only closed-toed shoes I can manage without agony. But…the ones I have are about worn out. And to buy new ones, I have to drive to Tempe (40 minutes one way) and pay through the schnozzola for the things.

And so, away…to the Internet!

All the Amazon retailers are out of stock. But I found the Sanitas company itself! They also will ship your purchase to you. So I ordered a pair of black clogs, size 40.

Sanitas doesn’t seem to have the touch for overnight delivery that Amazon does. A week later, the shoes show up on the front porch. Eagerly I open the box and find…a pair of size 35 shoes!

Thank you so much, folks!

So I had to package these back up and schlep them through gawdawful afternoon traffic to the UPS store on the other side of the freeway, one bitch of a drive. Rush hour starts here at 3:00 p.m. Fortunately, they’d included a return label, so I didn’t have to pay to ship it back to them.

Homeward bound I remembered that I could cut through an industrial park to dodge some of the worst traffic on Conduit of Blight Blvd. So that was a small redeeming factor. Anyway.

After the sun went down, I dumped two gallons of liquid chlorine into the pool, which should help to beat back the algae deposited by the palm fronds and gunk.

And now, coming onto 9:00 p.m., a loud monsoon storm is blowing by to the south and east, with lots of lightning and wind.

A-n-n-n-d it’s beginning to rain. The dog and I have pulled the wicker chairs indoors (well: the human hauled; the dog oversaw), and now we’re going to crawl into the sack, before the power goes off.

Toooo late! Just as I was about to hit “PUBLISH” a bolt of lightning hit nearby. Knocked both computers down. Took 20 minutes to get the laptop back online, with a fair amount of data probably lost.

Oh, screw it! WHAT a day…

Saudi Arabia: SO glad to be gone…

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Back at the old homestead, I see, those who wish the Americans ill have bombed a refinery. Abqaiq. Oh, God: define Chez Pitts, and you’ve got it… We lived within driving distance of that garden spot, in another hole called Ras Tanura.

Rasty Nasty, as my father used to call it, was a port for oil tankers. At the time, the refinery was located there — I don’t know, really, whether there was also a refinery at Abqaiq…or what. At any rate, oil was loaded onto the tankers at Ras Tanura, and most of the Americans who lived there were refinery or port workers, plus a few support staff such as teachers, medical staff, and administrators.

Dhahran was largely occupied by administrative staff, plus there was an Air Force base there and also an airport for commercial traffic.

And Abqaiq, out in the most gawdawful desert you can imagine, was an oil field. Horrible places, each and every one.  At the time, Dhahran and Ras Tanura had gated residential communities for American families of company employees; these were isolated small towns, occupied exclusively by Americans, who were there on two-year contracts. The paterfamilias got a three-month leave every two years, for which the company would fly him and his family to New York, or, if preferred, to some European destination, and a two-week leave in the middle of the two-year contract, which most of us would spend in Bahrain or Beirut.

This kind of attack was exactly the kind of thing the company secretly expected, and for which it had plans. In the event of riots or revolution, American family members in Ras Tanura were to be loaded onto buses and driven to Dhahran, where magically we were to board airplanes and be flown out of the country.

Har har!

On the two-lane “highway” between Ras Tanura and Dhahran there was an oasis occupied by locals who were, shall we say, less than positive about Americans. Along that road, you could see a billboard that read, in Arabic, “Yankee Go Home.” A pipeline ran out of Abqaiq, which posed a chronic problem: it was always being cut or otherwise sabotaged by the locals.

My father, who was a harbor pilot at the Ras Tanura port, had been a merchant mariner for years before landing the highly paid job that took us to this garden spot. He made his own plans for us, in the case of unrest. We each — my mother, my father, and me — had a grab-and-go suitcase, always packed for a quick escape. (Mine contained my favorite stuffed animals.) Because of his long experience at sea, he knew most of the tanker captains well.

He had made arrangements with all of his tanker-commanding friends to take my mother and me on board should the need arise. We would be hidden until the ship could set to sea (which you may be sure would have been forthwith), and carried through the Persian Gulf, out the Strait of Hormuz, and thence to the Suez Canal. The company confiscated our passports when we arrived in-country, and so we would have no papers. We would have had to be taken someplace that had a US consulate to be let off the ship. Cairo, presumably?

My father had somehow smuggled a pistol into the country, which he hid somewhere in the house where even I couldn’t find it. (That was saying something: I could find almost anything in that place.) He planned to use it in the event riots got inside the camp.

But of course, when the time came…well…he wasn’t there. That night when rioters did almost break through the Main Gate, he and my mother were playing bridge at the home of another couple. My best friend Pamela was staying the night at our house. We slept through all the excitement, and neither we nor our parents had a clue until after the fact. Had the insurgents managed to get into camp, my father wouldn’t have had a chance to get back to the house to protect us, and of course we wouldn’t have had a chance to defend ourselves, either…because I had no idea where the gun was. Nor would I have known how to use it.

What a horrible place it was. Living there was like living in a remote small town in the Southwest — such as, say, Ajo — only with no access to a city, no escape from the social pressure-cooker, and little access to free news reporting. Summers were almost as hot as Arizona‘s, only it was not by any means a “dry heat.” When you would wake up in the morning, water would be dripping off the eaves and puddling on the ground — so humid was the air that once I was standing in the front yard when rain began to fall out of a clear blue sky.

At least the residents of Ajo are not universally hated by the locals — what few of them remain after our ancestors leveled the place. It’s hard to say that’s a “good” thing…but it’s one helluva lot better than having to live in fenced, guarded compounds.

Y’know, there are a lot of good reasons for America to reduce its dependence on oil. Climate change may be the foremost among them. But Saudi Arabia is a close second.

When they say “Empty Quarter,” they ain’t kidding. This is where we lived. For ten long years…

Any Bum in a Port…

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Or is that any port for a bum?

Lordie! Started the morning out with one of the ‘Hood’s signature Happenings.

Ruby and I headed out for the daily doggy-walk right at 5:30. We step forth through the side gate and lo! Out from the driveway of the house across the street comes this very shady-looking character. He has exactly zero business there, unless he had managed to get under the roof over their front-door entryway to get out of last night’s melodramatic storm. He has a backpack.

He sees me and says something to me — whatever he said was unintelligible at my distance from him — and then proceeds south on Tiny Lane, headed toward East-West Feeder Street. I don’t see the neighbors out there but can see a light on in their house. Our guy is wandering — not marching along but sniffing into one yard or another, roaming in a circle across the street, just…meandering.

It rained like Hell last night, first storm we’ve had up here all year long. Lightning like God wanted to disintegrate someone’s house. Thunder enough to raise the termites right out of the ground. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to spend that night in the rough. But he didn’t appear to be wet. Either he was able to keep some clothes dry inside his backpack, or he got into someone’s carport to stay out of the worst of the driving rain. Probably the latter: right around the corner, there’s a house with a large carport that, now that the owners have been shuffled off to an old-folkerie, stands empty. Great bum hotel! 😀

This guy has an invisible sign on his back reading BURGLAR SERVICES, CALL 1-800-999-1234. So, having once again forgotten to bring my cell, I turn around, grab a phone from indoors, and call 911. Go back outside to watch the guy’s progress.

While I’m talking to the dispatcher on the phone, the old gal comes outside. I ask if she’s OK, and she says they’re fine…she had no inkling that this guy was lurking in their yard. She says surely if he’d come very close to the door the dog would have barked. Well, they do have a dog, but he’s no yapper. He actually woofs quietly once or twice while we’re chatting and moving around the driveway, but he makes no fuss over my being on his property.

Their front entryway, thank goodness, has an iron gate across it, and it’s locked. I figure the guy was probably peering in their windows and maybe looking for a way to get in, but had decided to move along right about when Ruby and I came out our door.

Dispatcher gets off the phone. Neighbor goes back in her house. Ruby and I go on our way.

Two miles of doggywalking and a good 45 minutes later, we’re just coming up Tiny Lane headed back to the house, and lo! a police SUV cruises by. Floats around the corner and parks in front of the Funny Farm. We hurry to catch up with them.

They want to hear all about it, and apologize for the length of time it took to respond: their station is way to hell and gone off on the northeast side! Forgodsake, no wonder the cops never get here during the same lifetime when you call them.

(This, BTW, is why you’re taking our pistols and our German shepherds out of our cold, dead hands…)

I repeat everything I told the dispatcher to the two officers. They’re very nice. Shortly, they head over to the neighbors’ to ask them if they’re OK. They said they’d perform a “wellness check” and be sure none of the windows or doors had been tampered with.

Guy was probably harmless. Most of the homeless mentally ill drug addicts around here are harmless. But you never know. They’re sometimes very high on some very dangerous drugs. They might be fine when their voices are quiet and they’re sober, but…yeah. You never know with these guys. And this one was not acting even faintly straight.

Humid? Hot? Holeeeeee sheee-ut! It was a little cooler, at 5:30 this morning, than it has been. But the air was soggy. One of the humans owned by Sammy the Pound Puppy said the humidity was 64%. That sounds about right.

Normally, monsoon starts along about the end of July or the first part of August. But we haven’t had any rain all summer. This is the first noticeable storm in our parts — “our parts” being in the rain shadow of what Sonoran desert dwellers think of as (heh!) a mountain. If you’re a normal human, you’d call it a “hill”…but whatever it is, the thing is big enough to block most of the rainfall that threatens the ‘Hood’s  microclimate.

It’s a chilly 102° right now, along about noon.  There’s a slight chance of rain in the forecast for this afternoon, but those of us who know how to read an Arizona sky would say “not so much…” Saturday night we have about a 39% chance of rain, so they say, and Sunday night a much more promising 61%. Next week, predictions suggest more normal monsoon action, with a pretty fair chance of precip every evening through September 7.

 

Lost in Dystopia???

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Okay, I’ve either come unstuck in time or I’ve come unstuck in space. Or from reality. Quite possibly, in reality we live in some imagined dystopia, more horrible than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell or even Mitch McConnell could dream up for us.

The morning started with an unplanned appointment. I’d left despairing word on the voicemail of the supposed Stupendous Pool Dude favored by WonderAccountant and Mr. WonderAccountant. SPD only noticed my plaintive cry for help along about 6 this morning. He called to reply while I was in the backyard wrestling (again…still) with the damned pool and thinking it’s time to seriously consider filling the thing in and replacing it with a nice, big shade tree.

I call him back and he says “I’m on my way.” And he shows up here at 7 a.m.

Most of what he had to say was nothing new. Nevertheless, taken together his advice may prove helpful. One can always hope…

After much testing, discussing, and thinking, the old fella (he IS an old fella! been doing this for a LONG time) opined as follows:

  • The pool renovation dudes had indeed applied a stabilizer when they refilled the pool; the CYA levels are good.
  • Nevertheless, the pH is out of whack (no shit, Jose?)
  • This was likely caused by the use of granulated chlorine, which is highly acetic. Use that only to shock-treat, not for day-to-day chlorination.
  • Running the pool cleaner off the skimmer inlet rather than through the new port in the side of the pool is problematic; it dampens the speed with which the water can be recirculated, plus he truly hates it that the thing pulls debris into the pump-pot strainer basket.
  • Better circulation can be acquired by setting the thing to pull water through the main drain, which will move the water faster and should help to filter out the haze-making stuff, which he suspects is bacterial rather than algal.
  • The chlorine was just OK as of 7 a.m., but that was only because a half-hour earlier I’d poured in my last half-gallon of liquid chlorine.
  • Harvey might work better with a shorter length of hosing…

He sprinkled in another four or five pounds of soda ash. This brought the pH level up into the “ideal” range, and he said to keep applying liquid Cl a couple times a day. (So that means, oh hooray, I get to traipse to Home Depot between the lunch-time confab with VickyC and her collaborator in the nonprofit biz and the 4:00 p.m. spree with WonderAccountant that I’m committed to. Wheee!)

Shovel him out the door. Write a list of the 87 gerjillion things I have to do between the 11 a.m. meeting and the 4 p.m. meeting. Fly around trying to clean up, paint the face, disguise the hair, and throw on some socially acceptable clothing. Shoot out the door just in time to get to Windsor on Central, the designated restaurant meeting place.

I’m the first to arrive, a bit before the appointed hour. Get a booth. Order up some iced tea. Peruse the menu.

This is a trendy restaurant with trendy prices.

  • Soup: $4 for a measly cup; $7 for a bowl
  • Salads: $11 – $11.50
  • Sandwiches and hamburgers: $13 to $15.50
  • Hors d’oeuvres (called “starters” because apparently younger restauranteurs and their customers can neither spell nor pronounce the actual word): $11 – $15
  • Full meals: $15 to $19.75

Plus tax. Plus tip.

Yeah. Don’t s’ppose they have a side of onion rings? No. Of course not. 😀

So I figure I’ll have a $7 (plus tax, plus tip) bowl of soup for lunch. And I wait for the others to show up.

And wait. And wait. And wait…

By about the third wait, my ears are hurting seriously. WHAT is with the current fad for blasting restaurant patrons with loud, nerve-jangling, conversation-negating noise? Wherever you go these days, you get blasted with some excruciating excuse for music, which usually entails one or more performers screaming. And why do people persist in going to restaurants whose proprietors bombard them with ear-splitting, unpleasant noise? And who persuaded otherwise sane businessmen and women that this racket is music? Or Muzak?

It’s not just loud and unharmonic and ugly. It’s gutter “music.” It’s some guy  shouting about his cocaine use to a gut-banging background thump.

Dude! I don’t care about your cocaine habit! And I especially don’t care to have it shoved in my face while I’m trying to eat my $7 bowl of soup or my $20 hamburger.

Fifteen or twenty minutes into the wait, I can stand it no longer. I get up and leave.

Is it because I am old, I wonder? Do I think rap is ugly, is not music, is antithetical to a decent (expensive!) meal because I am old, passé, and out of it? Really?

What was trendy when we were pups? Northern Italian. For sure. Nothing would do but veal scallopini. Food was about the same: trendily stylish. Tasted about the same as the stuff you get now: restaurant food has always tasted pretty uniformly the same from one establishment to the next. That has not changed.

So what was the difference? Ambience-wise: instead of annoying loud music, you got annoying echoes rattling around a hard-surfaced cave-like interior. And yes, that racket tended to drown out conversation, too. Food-wise: though it was largely supplemented by pasta, most of the cuisine did not appear to have come out of a box, a can, or a bag.

My parents would have been capable of enjoying a Northern Italian-style restaurant of the early 1970s, even though they wouldn’t have appreciated the echo effect. It would, however, not have been their preference.

What was trendy when they were pups? Red velvet wallpaper with mahogany trim. White tablecloths. Muted lighting. And beef. A lot of beef. Roast beef. Grilled steaks of various grades. Stewed beef. Casseroled beef. Beef chili. A fair amount of potatoes accompanied these fine dishes. And coffee: they drank coffee with dinner instead of wine.

After what I felt was altogether too long a wait for my mysteriously absent friends, I concluded that…

  • I had the wrong day…
  • Or I had the wrong time…
  • Or I had the wrong place…

And I certainly had the wrong purveyor of Muzak. Out the door, into the accursed Venza, and down the road with me!

From there it was up to Home Depot, there to purchase eight gallons of liquid chlorine, which should tide the pool over for something like four to six days. Grabbed a few sundries, shot out the door, stopped by the Walmart long enough to grab a bag of bird seed to tide the doves over until 40 pounds of seed arrive from Amazon. Sailed home.

Dumped another half-gallon of the chlorine into the pool. Observed that it still looked very hazy.

Poured a bourbon and water. Threw a mahi steak on the grill along with an ear of sweet corn. Consumed this with half an avocado, a handful of campari tomatoes, and a glass of wine.

Another couple of hours have passed. The pool looks like it’s beginning to clear. The heat is weirdly miserable, inexplicably: it’s only 109 out there, which is just not all that hot. But for some reason it feels almost as excruciating as cocaine-obsessed rap.

Now I have about 15 minutes before I have to get dressed again, this time to visit a favorite hangout with WonderAccountant, where we are determined to cool off with Margaritas, guacamole, and chips.

Never more well-deserved.

 

Prioritize the Freakin’ Priorities!

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It is SOOOO hot that it is physically impossible for Person nor Beast to get anything done. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Actually, no: I’m determined to come unstuck.

The past few weeks have put me into a kind of coma. I get up, walk the dog, feed the dog, fart (interminably!) with the pool, then plop down in front of the computer and…and…yeah: sit there. Allll day long. Reading the news. Corresponding with friends. Reading the news some more. Reading those links that Google sticks in the pages upon which it forces you to rest when you enter a search. Writing a blog post (which is akin to writing a diary entry). Posting it to Facebook. Cruising Facebook interminably. Playing Internet games. Reading the news some more. Playing some Internet games some more. Fighting with the hazy swimming pool some more. Writing a Quora post or two. Driving to the grocery store or some odious appointment when forced to it. Fight with the pool again. Playing Internet games some more, again….and so on until around 6 p.m., when it’s time to feed the dog again, wrestle with the pool again, and waste some more time watching PBS news.

In short: I get exactly NOTHING done.

So…something’s gotta happen here. Decided it should be A Schedule: Set aside specific periods of time in which to do things. Write Ella’s Story, which I dropped and forgot about as I sank to the bottom of Lake Comatose. Post Fire-Rider segments, which also have languished. (Interestingly, revenues from Amazon have risen, suggesting the idea of posting freebie chapters from the various books actually does boost sales.)

And today I did, somehow, manage to drag myself around to preparing, finding images for, and posting Part VI of Fire-Rider and then posting links on Facebook and Twaddle.

Sounds great, eh?

Except that already tomorrow a fly will drop into that ointment: Not one but two workmen are slated to show up between 10 and noon. If one of them doesn’t soak up the entire day, the other will. Together they’re guaranteed to put the eefus on the “hour-a-day” scheme.

The pool is still foggy. A little better than it was this morning, but still a disaster area. I figured out it has something to do with the filter, which is operating in a suspicious manner.

The hand lesion that was found to be on the verge of flipping over into a squamous cell carcinoma is not healing. It hurts. It itches. And this morning I find a white spot — a very itchy white spot — right at the location of the original white nasty itchy actinic keratosis that send me to the dermatologist in the first place. And it’s growing. Growing very fast.

So, come Monday I’ll have to traipse halfway to Yuma AGAIN — just the drive there and back consumes almost two hours. This thing is going to have to be removed surgically…I can feel that in my bones. And how many gerzillions of hours will that consume? Don’t even bother to try to estimate.

Tomorrow morning will be consumed with trying to explain to the pool guy what has been going on — complete with photos — and, probably at the same time,. trying to explain to the Cox dude what the goddamn VoiP modem they stuck on my computer did yesterday, dragging me offline in the middle of an Amazon movie.

In the meantime, here’s something you can do for pore, pore pitiful me… 😀

This post at Quora is racking up more “likes” than any squib I’ve ever stuck up there. How’s about you visit that link, enjoy the anecdote (true story! 100 percent!), and if you so choose, click “like” at the bottom of the post? The thing is inching toward 1,000 likes…and I would get quite a kick out of it if it actually did reach that coveted goal. Share it on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other platform you haunt.

In the time-wasting preoccupation department, how cool would it BE to rack up 1.000 votes for that post?

Moving on: after about three hours of sleep last night, I cannot hold my eyes open even though the sun has yet to slide beneath the humid, hot horizon. And so…away….

 

Oddities of the ‘Hood, Oddities of Humanity

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Out the door at 5 a.m., in early July well after day has dawned. It is just gorgeous at that time of morning: cool, clean, and quiet. Most people are still in bed; the few who are stirring are not emitting exhaust fumes, yapping loudly at each other as they jog up a neighborhood lane, dragging their frustrated dogs along, or sharing their mediocre taste in music with everyone around them. Yet.

It’s amusing to observe how other people live. Have you ever noticed how much rolling stock your neighbors leave out on the driveway or at the curb? In our parts, each vehicle is in itself a big sign reading Burglars, Break into This. And have you ever wondered…why does a household without teenaged kids need three, four, five cars? And why don’t they park at least a couple of them in their two- or three-car garage?

Few of the residents here now have teenaged kids at home. Most are either older couples left behind after the offspring grew up and moved out, or  up-and-coming millennials with small children. Probably about 90 percent of the houses around here are occupied with no more than two licensed drivers. What do two teenager-free adults need with three or four vehicles? And why do they park them out where the local prowlers can easily rip them off?

It’s true that some residents here don’t have garages with doors. Most of the houses in Lower Richistan were built before U.S. levels of homelessness and drug addiction reached the heights to which we have attained.  Car theft and car break-ins, while of course they existed, posed nothing like the problem that they do today, and so builders cut corners by equipping even fairly upscale tract houses with carports. Indeed, a carport was considered a selling point: Look! If you live in Arizona, you don’t even need a garage to protect your car from snow, ice, rain, or salt sea air!

In Upper Richistan, most of the houses were either built with actual garages that included such amenities as garage doors, or homeowners have retrofitted the carports to make them more secure. Many of those houses can store two, three, even four cars out of prowler’s reach.

By the time my part of the ’Hood was built, drug use had begun to infiltrate the middle class and crime levels were rising — and with them, rates of car break-ins and theft. So in my parts, most cars have double garages equipped with garage doors.

Nevertheless, even here in the po’ folks’ section, people still park up their driveways and the streets with their rolling stock.

Why? This escapes me. In my part of the ’Hood, which comprises one street that goes from the tract’s north border to the south border and another that runs between the east border and Conduit of Blight Blvd., not one home houses a teen-aged driver. Yet almost every house has at least one car parked in the driveway, at the curb, or (illegally) in the yard.

Out of idle curiosity, this morning I took it into my head to count the vehicles sitting outside at dawn, presumably left out overnight. Between the entrance to Upper Richistan and my house (a distance of about 1/2 mile), I counted 96 cars & pick-ups (!!!!), 1 motorcycle, 1 boat, and 3 trailers.

Some of these homeowners have filled their garages with junk and so can’t fit a car inside. But most have not: walk by when a homeowner is out puttering around, and you see one or two cars inside the garage. This suggests that most couples here — i.e., one or two people — have at least three and often four or five vehicles, some of which they park outside.

What on earth could they be thinking?

Even if you don’t care if your car is rifled or stolen, consider the cost of owning the thing. A decent used car in our parts costs around 30 grand these days. A pick-up? Fifty thousand. Yes: that is “dollars.” Sure, the tank is insured against theft…but what does it cost you to insure the thing? What does it cost to register it every year? (Answer: a lot, in Arizona! Scroll down to “variable fees”…) Why you would use your garage to store junk and leave a valuable asset that costs you money just to own it sitting on the street inviting drug addicts to rip it off simply escapes me. It’s incomprehensible.

And what would possess you to own any more expensive, cash-sucking vehicles than you absolutely must have to get around. Whaaa?

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy…

Speaking of crazy people, Arizona’s wacksh!t legislators have removed just about all restrictions on fireworks. Where cities have tried to keep a grip on the craziness, the legislature has issued an edict stating that even if thus-&-such a hand-maimer has been banned in a municipality, towns and cities may not ban retailers from selling the junk.

Result: every moron in the city runs amok on the Fourth of July. And New Year’s. And Cinco de Mayo. And what the hell: any random Friday or Saturday night.

Last night I went over to the home of some friends who live on the 12th floor of a high-rise that overlooks the Phoenix Country Club and the Steele Indian School, both of which put on spectacular professional fireworks shows on the fourth. This was great fun.

In preparation, though, I had to take Ruby down to my son’s place and leave her there. She’s terrorized by the banging and whamming emitted by the neighborhood fireworks enthusiasts. Plus the neighbor’s dry grass collection still occupies the alley. All it will take is one moron’s firecracker to set the stuff ablaze, and once that starts, the vines along my back wall will catch fire within minutes. I do not want to come home and find my house incinerated, and even less do I wish to find my dog incinerated.

The country club’s display ended about 9 p.m. and the Indian School’s wasn’t slated to start till 9:30. I’d told M’hijito I’d relieve him of my dog along about 9:00, and also I was tired by the time the first act ended. Waking up at 4:00 a.m. during the 110-degree season, while it gives you three beautiful cool hours in the morning, makes for a very long day. So I left early and headed over to his place.

The racket from amateur bang-bang frolicks was distracting, even with the AC on and all the car windows closed.

And, in the crazy people department: our wise City Parents had closed Central Avenue, meaning all the traffic from the Steele Indian School shindig would be dumped onto 7th Avenue and 7th Street! Holy shit. My son’s house is right off 7th Avenue. I just got outta there on time: if I’d waited until after the second fireworks show, God only knows how long I’d have been stuck in the traffic jams.

So that was a lucky decision on my part.

The Indian School fireworks had started by the time I left his place…it really was something to see, even from three or four miles away.

Ruby, preoccupied by the company of Charley the Golden Retriever, was completely unfazed by the racket. Well…one explosion made her jump about a foot, but otherwise she was pretty calm.

Think I’m being neurotic about the fire hazard? Lemme tellya…  A few years ago, a couple of the neighborhood teenagers — these weren’t small boys, these were almost grown morons — were playing with fire in an alley over in the older part of Lower Richistan. They were behind a beautiful old property on about a half-acre. The house was occupied by an elderly couple aging in place, long after their kids had grown and moved away. They no doubt figured they’d live there until they died and then be able to leave an asset worth something over half a million dollars to their kids.

Well, the oleanders caught fire. The flames leapt from the oleander hedge (everyone has oleander hedges around here) to the mature trees in the backyard, and forthwith from there to the roof.

I happened to be driving down that street right about then. When I squeezed past with the other incidental traffic, I saw the old folks sitting in the neighbors’ front yard, watching their home burn down. And burn down it did: despite the fire department’s best efforts, the place burned to the ground.

So. Yeah. That’s why I’m not happy about the neighbor letting the grass grow up to his ass along the alley.

For a few extra bucks, Gerardo will go out there and spray pre-emergent on the ground along the guy’s fenceline, and occasionally he’ll hack back the weeds. But neither he nor I feel it should be our responsibility to keep the idiot neighbor’s weeds under control.