Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

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.

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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! 😀

 

 

Another Yucky-Ducky Day in (un)Lovely Arizona

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ECCHHHH!!!!!  Hot and humid and sticky and just ICKY out there!  WhatEVER possessed my father to retire to Arizona and drag me and my mother to this dump?

Truly: I hate Arizona. If I could afford to move someplace else…well…you may be sure I’d be someplace else.

We’re here because of (un)lovely Sun City. When the old man and my mother found that place, they were beside their workin’-class selves with joy: CHEAP and NO KIDS.

Yeah. They didn’t like children — abominated the sound of kids playing outside — and they were inveterate penny-pinchers.

I was still in high school: you couldn’t live in Sun City with your kids unless they were sent off to college. So to get themselves into that ghetto for old folks, they applied to the University of Arizona, saying I was sooooooo bright I should be admitted a year early. And…forgodsake! The goddamn university accepted me!

Yeah: a year early.

So I missed my senior year in my Southern California high school. Lost all my friends. And landed in Tucson with no friends and no credible preparation for a university curriculum. Totally uninformed, I majored in French — for no other reason than that I was fluent in French and could get straight A’s in the courses just by showing up in class and snoozing through each session.

Understand: I wanted to major in astrophysics or in microbiology…  In those days neither field was especially welcoming to women. Add to that the lack of a senior year in high school — no calculus, no fourth-year language, no final science course — and a major in anything that wasn’t “girlie” was pretty much out of the question.

Yeah. I ended up majoring in French. Why? Because I was fluent in it and didn’t have to put out a fraction of an erg of energy to get A’s in every course I stumbled into.

After that — with a Phi Beta Kappa key and an unsaleable major — I ended up answering the telephones and greeting clients as a receptionist at a law firm.

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Ohhhh goodie. WordPress is doing something weird here. Don’t see how to fix it.

Let us circumvent the frustration factor and bring this post to an end.

Weird!!!!

August 6 Grinds On…

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Egad! Just stumbled out back…glanced at the back-porch thermometer. A HUNDRED AND SEVEN DEGREES. Yeah, you saw that right: 107º… IN THE SHADE OF THE BACK PORCH ROOF!

Yep: 107 in the shade. 

Almost as balmy as lovely Saudi Arabia, whither my parents and I spent 10 years. Except it was damn humid there…I’ve seen rain start to fall out of a clear blue sky. Here, it really is “a dry heat.”

And the “dry heat” is significantly more tolerable than swamp conditions. Not anything that you’d like to frolic in…but at least it doesn’t suffocate you.

I see we’ve got a dead shrub out back. Looks like it’s not getting watered. Drag the hose over to it. Remember to ask the Yard Dudes to be sure the system reaches that part of the hedge. And have them take out the dead thing.

Yard Dude: there’s another of those fine jobs one is mighty glad not to have. Gerardo and the boys get started as dawn cracks: that’s so. But they’re sure not done before the heat comes up. I don’t see how they do it!!

We’re told we have a 15% chance of rain. Why do I doubt it? Maybe later tonight: like, well after dark. But not any time soon.

After dark…it’ll still be too hot for Ruby’s feet. So that’s another daily doggy-walk we’ll miss today. We did get out, as usual, along about dawn…even then, it was nigh unto too hot for her. I’m afraid this evening will be well beyond the pale for little bare doggy feet.

Yech!!  What a place!