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Pets

July 4 Moron Frolics…Jeeez!

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The evening has barely begun — it’s only 8:35 p.m. — and of course, it being the Fourth of July, every moron within earshot is out there with their bang-bangs.

LOL! It sounds like half the city is exploding… BOOM! bam BAM BAM bang bang whiiirrrrr (helicopter buzzes over) BAM! boomp boomp boom BANG….

On and on and on…. 

We can expect this racket to continue until a little after midnight. Phoenicians love to play with fireworks. And the things are easy to obtain, Mexico being just a few miles to the south of us.

Ohhhhh shee-ut! Some idiot just exploded a fukkin’ BOMB outside the back fence — probably in our alley. Scared the bedoodles out of the dog. 

Y’know, I can understand how idiots think it’s fun to set off bang-bangs. But things that explode like a nuke? Not so much. Fireworks? Okay, okay…the cops can’t ride herd on dozens of nincompoops. But forgodsake, folks: at least TRY to engage your brain a little when playing with these toys!

Report from the Hub of Hades

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6:40 a.m. Dear Gawd, it’s HOT out there, and hideously WET.

Just back from the morning DoggyWalk. The weather is so nasty out there that I am literally DRIPPING wet.

No, it’s not raining. Nary a cloud in sight. Just hideous, Saudi Arabia-style humidity, so thick you’re practically walking through water. Horrible, horrible weather.

And purely NOT typical of Arizona. Dry is typical here. This kind of hideous humidity is so rare as to be regarded as nonexistent.

But…heh! It ain’t non existent…not today, anyhow!

What an ugly day. 

Worrying about my son. He lives in an older house, originally air-conditioned by what was called “swamp cooling.” That method sucked outside air into the ventilation system and (sorta..kinda…) cooled it by running it over vents bearing tap water. Better than nothing…but as you can imagine, there was a reason that everyone who could manage it decamped to the high country all summer.

Even though a real air-conditioner is now attached to his roof, the allegedly “cooled” air has to pass through the antique ventilation system…less than halcyon, shall we say.

Anyway, because the morning is so ugly, Ruby and I escaped running into any idiots with crazed, out-of-control dogs. That’s something, anyway.

I must say…at times I hate living in Arizona. If my parents hadn’t dragged me here when my father took a spectacularly early retirement, I’d be in California right this minute. Where I came from, and where I belong. This is truly NOT my place.

My place was San Francisco. There, we lived in an apartment development called Parkmerced…just a gorgeous place. My mother got herself and me in there when we came home a few months early from Saudi Arabia, leaving my father in Hell to finish out his contract with Aramco. I just loved the place — Parkmerced, that is: certainly not Arabia!

My father was just FURIOUS when he got back and discovered she’d signed a lease on a place that cost about eight times more than he was willing to pay. He flew into quite the little rage. 😮

After he went back to sea (he was a Merchant Mariner), she got a receptionist’s job in the Parkmerced front office. Pay was hardly enough to pay the exorbitant rent, but at least it defrayed the cost a little. And shut my father up…a little. She quickly moved us into a cheaper apartment, out of the elegant tower where we’d started. Not enough to smooth his feathers, but at least she tried.

At any rate…I miss Parkmerced. I miss my relatives’ home in Berkeley. I miss the houses and apartments around the junior high school I attended.

Arizona is really not my Thing…but I’m stuck here now. Not going anywhere else. 

Good Morning, Dogmerica!

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WHY, oh why are people SOOOO STUPID?

Just back from the morning (almost typed “moroning”….talk about your Freudian slips!) hike around the park. That’s a mile or so of trotting along  behind a very bossy corgi, dodging fellow dog-slaves around a lovely, grassy expanse.

Well. It would be lovely if my fellow humans could manage to cling to just a smidgeon of their brains.

Idiots.

The ones who take the proverbial cake are the nitwits who imagine their dog “just wants to pwayyy” with my dog.

Me: Please keep your dog back.

Nit: It’s OK. They just want to pwaayyyy…

Me: No, stupid. My dog just wants to eat your dog!

God, but I’m tired of stupid! 

Apparently we have a bottomless supply of it, though. Don’t seem to be able to escape it.

Please. When you’re out with your dog…

a) Keep your dog on its leash (!!!); and
b) Refrain from imagining that every other dog you encounter wants to be your doggy’s little pal!!!!!

Some of your fellow human idiots are mightily tired of being dragged into dog fights!

TIRED of Stupid!

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Just back in the house from the early a.m. doggy-walk. 

Trouble with Doggy-Walk is that every moron on the planet is out there on the sidewalks walking their doggies. And NO AMOUNT of repeating my dog doesn’t want to “pway” with your dog; my dog wants to eviscerate your dog will persuade the idiots to keep their damn dogs away from Ruby.

So that makes an early-moron walk a bit of a struggle.

God! I’m tired of stupid. 

WHY are people SO. DAMNED. STUPID???????

*****

Hot, humid, and sticky out there! That does nothing to enhance one’s patience with one’s fellow morons.

Oh well. It really is a nasty morning. Let’s see what the Weather Service says is goin’on…

????   Only 82 degrees! At 1% humidity(????).

Ahhhh, c’mon guys!

You sure couldn’t prove that by me. Google says the humidity level is 30% …. that’s a little more credible.

Ohhhh welll….

Ruby the Corgi and I kicked off the day by roaming around our local streets. When you are a dawg, you get to go out and sniff every square inch of asphalt…or else! ARF!

It is a nice neighborhood! Yea verily: such a nice neighborhood that I want to stay here until I die.

Letting old bats stay in their homes through their dotage is no longer in style. When I first moved here, an older generation of homeowners was still in place, and they tended to STAY in place until they died or until they truly could no longer live on their own, not for love nor money. I do miss those old ladies now — gone to their graves, every one.

Ohhh well, Before too long, I’ll be joining them.

Just hope I can stay in my home until the Great Reunion in the Sky happens! These days, older Americans end up in prisons for the superannuated: nasty institutions where you’re deprived of your freedom and kept in place until you die.

Horrible!

***

Hotter than the hubs out there just now!

Jet airplanes, probably from Luke AFB, roar overhead. Too lazy to get up and look at them: they could be an early-morning phalanx of passenger jets from Sky Harbor, the commercial airport to the southeast of here.

My stepsister and her family lived just up the road from Sky Harbor. You could hear the unholy racket inside the house with all the doors & windows shut tight. Roar Roar Roar all day long!

Crazy-making!

Hmmmm…. Maybe that explains something about her & her husband: demented right-wingers, they were.

😀

LOL! That notwithstanding…I did enjoy her so very much, and do miss her to this day. What an amazing woman she was! Back in the day when the highest and best use of a woman’s time was as a housewife, she went to law school and became a superior court judge.

A bit of a fascistic nut case, she was. But her politics notwithstanding, I surely did like her a lot, and admired her remarkable achievements, done during a time when women took undergraduate degrees in Education, because teaching in some high school was about the best any of us were ever gonna do.

****

Welp…I tire. A consequence, no doubt, of rolling out of the sack at the first glimmer of sunrise.

And so: back into the sack. 

A-w-a-a-a-y!

Eeeek-a-Dawg!!!

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Ohhhh my goodness!  This evening I truly thought the Pool Dude had left the side gate open, that Ruby had found it, and that she’d taken off for Yuma!

Couldn’t find her when I went to call her in for the night. 

The back door to the house, in lovely weather like we’re having now, hangs open most of the time, so she comes and goes as she pleases. Consequently, the side gate to the yard is normally closed and latched.

But…Pool Dude was here. What does he know of dogs and of gates???

This evening she disappeared from view. Didn’t come to call. Ohhhhhhh sheee-ut!

And yes, the side gate was unlatched.

Ho-leeee shee-ut!!

Called and called.

No dawg.

Went inside to put on the clodhoppers, so as to go out through that gate and trot off down the road, calling and calling and calling…no doubt fruitlessly.

Just when I got back to the side yard, though: she surfaced.

No, she had NOT run away down the road.

THANK YOU, GOD!!!!

* * * *

Whew! After this, forgodsake, REMEMBER TO CHECK THAT GATE in the wake of any workman who stumbles into the yard!!!!!

Weird, gray day

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First week of May and here we are submerged in a steel-gray morning. In Arizona, of all things!

Seriously: the sky is a weird, smooth, featureless gray lid. Ruby and I have circumnavigated the’Hood, returned, chowed down…now sit here wondering what to do next. If anything.

“What to do next” will probably amount to “go back to bed.” The Human is feeling unduly tired — sleepy, actually — and does not relish pretending to be alert and constructive. Wunderground predicts today’s high will have us sweltering under 80 degrees, followed by a bracing low of 66 degrees.

Yeah. We’ll believe it when we see it.

A jet plane roars overhead. The top of the neighbor’s tree sways gently in a breeze so vague we can’t feel it over here. Not that it matters.

Should pay a visit to one of the local stores. But am totally NOT in the mood to stroll around the sidewalks and the streets

Oh well: we won’t starve.

Not till tomorrow, anyway. 😀

{sigh} I find myself contemplating the possibility of returning to Sun City. 

My house, right here in the ‘Hood, was built by Del Webb — the entrepreneur who brought us Arizona’s Sun City tracts. So a move out there might not feel especially drastic…except that it’s too far from my son and there are no wonderful little kids frolicking around.

And course, except that you’re BLASTED all day long with jet airplane noise, emanating from nearby Luke Air Force Base.  That racket starts at dawn, rolling you out of the sack and souring your mood for the rest of the day.

So…no. Ain’t movin’ back to Sun City, no matter how much crime and B.S. we get here.

Errands to do this morning were skipped by the obligatory Doggy Walk. One opts that at one’s peril! 😉

Did you know that you can go into a dime store or a drugstore and buy a FAKE SERVICE DOG HARNESS for your canine sidekick?

No kidding! I was over at the neighborhood drugstore the other day, and damned if I didn’t see a whole bouquet of the things hanging from a hook in there.

For a fleeting shady moment, I actually thought GRAB IT! 

Then Ruby could come with me into the Albertson’s and the Sprouts and the computer store and…I could get my errands done in one swell foop with the daily doggy-walk!

By golly, THAT would make life easier!

In England — at least when we were there some years ago — they let you bring your dog in most retail establishments. And restaurants.

Yeah. You’d sit down at a restaurant table and there at the table next to you would be someone with a dog in a harness, pooch parked on the floor next to its human. Go into the equivalent of a drugstore or a dime store, and you’d be likely to encounter a similar pooch. Same, amazingly, in grocery stores.

I’m not inclined to fake my dawg’s status. But...hmmmmm…..  It’s somethin’ to think about! 😉

Seriously: it sure would make life easier: being able to kill two outdoor errands at once — doggy-walk and store visit.

But gosh. It really does seem like there’s a limit. Or oughta be, anyhow.