Coffee heat rising

Wow! I’m in!!

Dunno how, but for reasons unknown WordPress just let me back into Funny about Money.

Yeah. Here we are, coming onto midnight. The crazy-making Ailment is kicking up, making every tap on the keyboard HURT. And now the goddamn system goes down.

Yeah. Now I can’t get back into my li’l website.

Wander off. Go over to Dropbox. Mess with Google News. Dodge another gunshot. Wonder where the cops are (they usually show up when the bullets start to fly).

Put the dishes in the washer and turn on the machine. Come back to bed. Lift the dog onto the bed. Climb under the covers. Hear the cop copter returning…hmmmm…he’s a ways to the north.

That means the pistol-waving clowns are probably on Main Drag North.

Charming.

Oh well: at least they’re not in the back yard.

Rub CBD cream into the buzzing hands. Console self with reflection that the pain and tingling actually have backed off considerably.

Seriously: just now only the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands are buzzing like an electric current was flowing through them. Earlier, that buzz extended up the forearms to the elbow, up the lower legs to the knees, over the lips, and through the upper gums.

Palms and soles, I can live with.

Let the dog out. Wait till she does Her Thing and then call her back in — in addition to the melody of gunshots ringing out, it’s also the Coyote Hour. Those li’l pups jump over your backyard wall and will go after your dog if you’re stupid enough to let your dog out.

What. A. Place.

Dog gets on the bed.

Stick the new dirty dishes in the washer. Turn it on. Come back to bed. Rub CBD cream into the tingling hands.

Interestingly — oddly — the buzz of peripheral neuropathy has backed off a little. Not gone, by any means…but just now it’s significantly milder. BUT…whatever ails me is causing my fingernails to lift off their beds. That hurts, but not as much as one would expect.

Just what I need: to have my fingernails fall off!

😀

Ain’t life in Olde Age grand?

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a…NUT CASE!

LOL! Yes, I do believe we’ve ascertained that it’s a nut case, abetted by an industrious bird.

Or…who knows?…maybe  by a space alien.

Just now I’m perched on a kitchen chair in the garage, trying to ascertain whether a persistent beep!… beep!… beep!… is coming from the house-wide smoke alarm system, from something gone on the fritz in the car, or from the resident fruitcake’s imagination.

😀

And lo! It begins to appear that the perp is actually a bird. WHAT bird remains unknown: this is not a call I’ve ever heard from the local avian set…and I’ve lived here since 19 and aught-62. I think I would have learned to recognize a fire-alarmish beep coming from a bird.

****

Well… Yeah. And No.

It IS the flickin’ smoke alarm. Not the giant garage-based house-wide fire alarm system, but one of the cute little portable smoke alarms that you attach to your ceiling with a Velcro strip.

It’s sitting out there chirping to itself as we sit here, type, and guzzle coffee.

😀

So in a couple of hours — whenever I get off my duff, whenever the Ace Hardware store is open, I’ll have to traipse out and buy a new smoke alarm. Then figure out how to get it back up in the garage.

If that one is crapping out, it means all the rest of them are on the verge of crapping out, too. Hmmm…let’s see…. Hmmmmmm….

Not to say Uh oh….

Come to get up off my duff and check, and what do I see but that most of the li’l cheapo fire alarms have long been retired from service. FIVE of them have been removed from their stations.

WTF?

Welp. That’ll be a li’l chore for Bila the Handyman. He can climb up on a ladder and replace the darn things. Won’t he be pleased!

They must have crapped out one at a time, with lengthy periods in between. Otherwise I would’ve noticed that we…uhhhh….no longer have a functioning smoke alarm in most of the rooms.

/eyeroll/

Ohhhh well. I’ve got a bunch of other chores for him to do. So this will enrich his month’s income nicely.

*****

Along comes, of all things, a stray German shepherd!

She comes trotting up the street to the front patio and peers in the gates.

Ruby is beside herself with fascination. Neither dog makes a move to eat the other one.

Hmmmmm…. She has no collar. No ID. oboyoboy would i like to have THAT dawg!

uh oh… That’s not nice, is it?

Oh well. Before I can engage a plan to steal her, she trots off down the street.

The damn smoke alarms continue to beep. I begin to suspect it’s not the little portable alarms, but the ancient house-wide alarm that some previous owner installed, lo these many years ago.

I have NO idea how to turn it off or even if it can be turned off (thought it was turned off at the time I moved in here).

Seems like if you could shut it off, it would’ve been turned off by a prior owner, since it was nonfunctional when I appeared on the scene.

Cripes. The wandering pooch is after the neighbor’s stray cat. Oh well…it gets them both outta my yard, anyway.

The beeping continues. Could it be a bird, cheeping outside?

Hm. Anything’s possible. I guess.

If so, it’s a bird with an alto cheep. That’s kinda weird.

One of those days…

Wiley Comes a-Visitin’

Urban coyote

The ‘Hood is one of the northernmost outposts of a Phoenix district locally called “North Central.” The place consists largely of single-family homes on lots ranging from 1/4 to 1 full acre, with large lots watered by the city irrigation system installed when the former farmland was transformed into ticky-tacky.

LOL! Actually our houses are not ticky-tacky in the sense that more recent builds are. Mine, for example is not drywall and plaster but solid block: difficult to air-condition but too sturdy for an enterprising burglar to shove his fist through a wall.

{No kidding! That is how the burglars break and enter homes in newer tracts: they walk up to the front door; ring the doorbell; and then if no one answers, they just take their fist and shove it through the drywall. Reach in. Unlock the door. Make yourself to home!}

We have a different type of burglar hereabouts, though: a four-legged variety. We border a desert mountain preserve, and that place hosts families of coyotes. So unafraid of humans are they that we could almost call them “semi-domesticated.” They consider stray cats and cute short dogs to be gourmet fare. So…if you leave your 30-pound corgi out in the yard, she’s likely to turn up as breakfast for a distant furry cousin.

Just now, the neighbors — some of whom grow hysterical at the mere glimpse of a coyote — have been madly reporting sightings. And because neighbors — being only human — are remarkably stupid, they often fail to clean up the banks of shrubbery that serve handsomely as coyote hotels. We have one of those about four houses up the street.

No amount of heavy-handed hinting by neighbors haunting the local Facebook page has persuaded the couple on the corner to trim their shrubbery in front by way of evicting the four-legged tenants. Meanwhile, other idiots don’t grasp the concept of Cat As Gourmet Feast, so they leave their delicious kitties outside to call in the cat-loving coyotes.

Honestly. HOW has our species survived this long?

At any rate… I’ve set up a kind of coyote barrier along the top of my cinderblock backyard walls: strapped lengths of carpet tacks to the decorative block on top. This keeps the neighbors’ cats out nicely: they learn forthwith that when they jump over the wall, they get their feet punctured.

As for Wiley? Not so sure about that. In the first place, a coyote is a helluva lot tougher and smarter than a domestic cat. And…that notwithstanding, if Wiley tries to jump the wall, finds himself clinging to a length of nails, jumps down, and lands inside the yard…well, jumping back out will be highly aversive.

Not a coyote

So I’ve got to be careful every time Ruby goes out in the yard. Whenever I open the back door to let her out, I need to walk out there and look around, to be sure she’s the sole occupant. When you’re in the middle of fixing breakfast or dinner, that’s a PITA…

Wednesday

Seven-thirty in the morning: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch, humidity 44%.

Back from a mile-long walk with the Hound. Hotter than the hubs out there, and soggy. Ruby doesn’t seem to notice. She rockets along the whole route like she was shot out of a cannon.

The irrigation system is crapping out. Gotta try to track down the installer (if he’s still in business!) or find a new one. Probably will have to replace a fair amount of that fine plastic piping. Ugh! Not to say $$$!!!

At the park: not too many dogs to have to dodge around this morning, probably because the weather is constraining most of the strolling dog-lovers. That’s a relief: some of those folks are stupid beyond belief, when it comes to dogs.

I find it impossible to understand how you could conflate a dog with a  kid. Wake up, folks! It’s not your “fur-baby”! It’s a highly evolved wolf that has developed a co-dependent relationship with humans. It doesn’t want to “pw-a-a-ay” with your neighbor’s dog. It wants to EAT your neighbor’s dog.

LOL! Hafta say, at the time I moved into this house, I never would’ve thought that I would be here long enough to need to replace the irrigation system I paid heftily to install during my first weeks of residency. Rebuilding it does NOT sound like a great idea. But…if I’m going to stay here (am I???), the watering system has gotta work.

Personally, I’d like to move into a high-rise on North Central, thereby mooting the whole yard and watering-system issue. However, my son WANTS this house. and accordingly he wants me to stay here until I’m carted off to the nursing home. At that point he’ll sell his place and move in here. Sooo…one could regard the proposed new plumbing as a gift to him.

Besides which: despite the proximity to Crime Central, I do like this house and this neighborhood. LOVE having the pool to topple into on a hot day. Love the trees and the shade. Love the yard that lets me have a dog of just about any size.

***

7:30 p.m.

And here we are, twelve hours later! Another day…not a single ‘nother dollar.

Weather progress: it’s a hundred degrees in the backyard just now, under a light film of high clouds. Nine percent chance of precip.

In Arizona, that’s what we call “humid.” 😀

No, I did NOT get my dainty little self enough off the dime to call the irrigation dude, or even to try to track him down. This laziness thing is becoming…uhm…a thing.

It’s too damn hot to do an evening doggy-walk — the pavement would burn Ruby’s feet. So we loaf.

Loafing is our specialty. Ruby is stretched out on her doggy-blanket atop the bed. The human is stretched out on her human-bedding atop the bed. We rule!

Daily Doggy-Walk

6:15 a.m.: Just back from a mile+ doggy-walk. Hot and humid: 98 degrees with 22 percent humidity.

The weather kept most the stupes inside this morning, though. So…that was nice.

We walked across a southerly street populated with big old classic North Central houses on big old classic irrigated lots. Whew! I am sooooo glad I no longer have to take care of one of those places! Even with a cleaning lady coming on once a week, keeping everything clean and running was a bitch of a job.

Here — in a house half the size of our li’l mansion and absent the kid, the husband, and the large dogs — the house stays pretty clean even with a cleaning lady surfacing only twice a month.

At any rate… We saw a white golden retriever over there, the spitting image of the Late, Great Charley the White Golden Retriever.

I don’t know if M’hijito is going to try to replace Charley with another golden...or with any other dog. He works out of his house, ever since his employer discovered how much moola is to be saved by shutting down the big offices and parking workers in front of their home computers.

That would, in theory, allow him to snab a puppy. Except…a puppy demands time, and all of his time is occupied with office work. In theory, it ought to be possible to socialize a pup to Life with Humans when you’re working from home…but…nice theory! He can’t be jumping up every half-hour to attend to a puppy while he’s supposed to be engaged in company work.

Welp…I’d better get up and get something to eat. Or…something…

And so, away!

Wow! What a ZOO!!!!

LOL! Just back from the neighborhood park, along about 6.p.m. What a MOB over there!

So crowded was it, I was thinking it was a weekend. (When you don’t have to go to work, you never know what day it is…) But no! It’s a Tuesday afternoon!

You never saw so many people in your life! I counted EIGHTY cars parallel-parked along the north side. That’s just the street parking…along just one of the three bordering streets. Doesn’t count the parking lot in the middle of the park.

It’s kinda fun, because there are lots of kids, some of them playing baseball and soccer and volleyball, many just running around. But also there are a lot of dogs — some of them off-lead. And so I have to keep wrestling Ruby to evade fights.

The park is the crown jewel of our neighborhood. There’s only one other neighborhood in the city limits that has a park even faintly like it. Another one is out in Scottsdale, a long way from here. And there’s one on the west side, where the neighborhood around it is a little sketchier. So our park attracts folks from miles around.

At any rate, it was just crazy over there. Trying to keep Ruby from engaging in dog fights was…well…trying. Usually I do avoid the park on the weekends, because of the crowds. But…but…this isn’t a weekend day!!!!!!! It’s Tuesday.

So somehow I’ll have to figure out a way to avoid that mess.

Ruby dearly loves the park, because it has…WOW!! Grass! My yard, like most in these parts, is desert-landscaped. The grass must seem like some sort of miracle carpeting to her. But after this, we’ll have to go over there in the mornings or early afternoons, when the kiddies are in school.

M’jihito just called, having knocked off work along about 6:30 or so.

I do not think I would like to have to work from home — not to have any choice in the matter. That’s now the case with M’jihito: his employer, a large insurance company, shut down their offices, having discovered — thanks to the plague — that their employees can get their work down at home just fine, at no cost to the company.

When I was at the Great Desert University, I did manage to get them to let me put some (at first) and then (later) most of my courses online. That, I liked. But…it was my choice. I was not informed that I had to completely revamp my courses and my work habits so as to work remotely at all times.

Nor was I managing any underlings, unless you regard students as sort of like lower-level employees. He has to ride herd on a bunch of insurance agents, all of whom now are working out of their homes, too. That strikes me as not the best of all possible worlds.

***

And now it’s after dark. Quiet (not always the case in these parts). The dawg is zonkered out on the bed. It’s heading toward 10 p.m., so I reckon I’m gonna call it a day, too.

And so, awayyy!