Coffee heat rising

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Go-o-o-d Morning, America!

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Just back from a mile-plus peregrination of the ‘Hood, dragged along by my furry boss. How can I count the ways I just wanna sit down and swill a cup of coffee?

Stumble over to the easy chair. Flop down in it. And…

RINGY-DINGY-DINGY!

Goddamned phone. A Goddamned phone solicitor on the other end.

I tell him where to make his next phone call and slam down the receiver.

Honest to Gawd. Phone soliciting should be illegal. Seriously: I realize it’s “freedom of speech” and all. But shouldn’t the rest of us have something like “freedom of privacy” or “freedom of peace and quiet”?

***

The neighborhood park is so lovely! I adore this area. Beautiful, quiet, upscale, affluent, right in the middle of everything

O’course it ain’t perfect. Right across the street from the park stands a house whose occupants fled after a pair of home invaders barged in, grabbed them, tied them up, threw them in the bathtub, and proceeded to loot the house.

So. If you live here…yeah: you keep your doors locked all the time. And you do NOT answer the door unless you know who’s on the other side and what they want.

But then…come ON! No place is safe. Just the other day some sh!thead barged into a madly upscale home in Fountain Hills, a mighty swell dive. And I’ll tellya: before that happened, I would have said Fountain Hills is as staid and secure as you can get, this side of Sun City.

My mother, who was scared of her own shadow, cowered in terror all the time she lived in Sun City. She dwelt behind heavily locked doors and windows. And yet…really…she was less terrorized out there than anywhere else we lived.

Something must have happened to her. If it did, she never told me. But really: you wouldn’t act like that unless you had some reason to be scared.

Me, I find the company of a dog amply reassuring. Ruby is no German shepherd (not by a long shot!). But she does alert whenever anyone comes around.

And really, that’s about all a dog can do for you. You’re the one who has to take care of yourself: get to a safe place, grab your pistol, call the cops, whatEVER.

Ruby: the four-legged burglar alarm.
😀

And I stay here…WHY?

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Jeez.

Lift the dawg onto the bed: Happy Dawg!

Turn on the heating pad, get it warmed up. Happy Human!

Climb into the sack, apply hot heating pad to spavined hip. Happy spavined hip!

Fire up the computer, start to explore the Local Gnus, and….RRRRROOOAAARRRRR!!!!!!!!!!

Goddamned cop helicopter blasts over the house.

Presumably in pursuit of an even more goddamned perp…

What a garden spot!

Sick and tired of the unholy racket and crime and nuttiness and shit-headedness here in Lovely Uptown Phoenix.

Truly: if I could move away from here, I’d do it today.

But…but…where on earth would I go? Is there really any place that’s any better, and quieter, any less looney toons than this place?

Frankly, I think not.

One resident, for example, was attacked and apparently kidnapped from one of the most upscale suburban districts in the state. Like the cop said after my own neighbors were grabbed, tied up, and thrown in their bathtub so a pair of home invaders could clean out their house: “They’re everywhere. You can’t get away from them.”

Yeah: I’d remarked to one of the cops that I thought maybe I should sell my house and move to some quieter venue, and that was his response. “Don’t do that! They’re everywhere!”

Ugh.

I need to get Ruby a roommate in the form of a 90-pound German shepherd and me a new toy in the form of a .38…enough is enough! 

Time to Move to the Old Folks’ Home?

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Stay? or flee?

Do Ruby and I want to sell up, pack up, and move? Shift our base of operations to an institution for the elderly, where staff babysit you 24/7? Or…well…stay here, keep dodging the burglars and the sh!t-heads, keep managing crews of yard guys, housecleaners, pool dudes, repairmen…on and on and endlessly on?

One advantage of living in an old-folkerie: someone else rides herd on the hired help.

Here, I do have a cleaning lady who does an excellent job. Most of them don’t: they appear not to know how to clean house, at least not to middle-class American standards. So the presence of Wonder Cleaning-Lady is a huge privilege…and very possibly a rarity.

You shouldn’t have to ride herd on a worker doing a job that your mommy taught you to do when you were nine years old. In Wonder Cleaning-Lady’s case, I don’t have to…but too dam many of them don’t even seem to know how to use a dustrag.

Move into one of those old folks’ warehouses, and (in theory, anyway) you have an employee riding the herd.

Whaddaya bet, though, that you still end up with imperfect cleaning, dust still sitting on the bookcase shelves, dust still hiding behind the sofa, grease still sitting on the stove burners…on and on and on…  Y’know…if I have to deal with that, I’d rather deal with it in my own home,  not in some unholy institution.

But…Jeez!!

This morning Ruby and I repaired to the neighborhood park for our morning perambulation. And there was some guy out there, yelling suggestive obscenities at us. Yeah: at an 80-year-old bat!!! 

You can’t get away from the bastards!

Wait…isn’t that what the cop said after the Great Home Invasion Adventure?  😀

Seriously: you CAN’T get away from them.

If I’m going to stay here and if I imagine Ruby and I are going to continue our walking routine, maybe I ought to get us a pistol. One that’s small enough to fit inside a pocket.

On the other hand, I don’t want to shoot some jerk just because he asks me if I wanna f*ck. That wouldn’t be nice, would it?

😉

We’re IN! Not to say FED UP….

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SURPRISE!!!!!  Our honored computer let me into our blog site! It’s a miracle! 

Gray, muggy day. Reminds me vaguely of life in Berkeley, where my relatives dwelt. Only considerably warmer than the East Bay, which was usually pretty nippy.

Dog and Human traipsed around the park, by the light of a dawn best described as “dim.”

Grrrr! Afraid I’m going to have to stop taking Ruby to the park — her paws-down favorite venue! — because of the a$$holes that habituate the place. This morning we had some jerk hollering obscenities at me — AN 80-YEAR-OLD WOMAN! — as we strolled across one end of the park.

Swear ta gawd!!!  What IS the matter with people?

Looks like we’ve got three choices:

* Stay out of the park, now and evermore.
* Get someone, preferably a large and male someone, to walk with us.
* Adopt a German shepherd to accompany us.

None of those appeal:

* Ruby’s little doggy heart will be broken if she can’t ever go into the park again.
* I don’t know any bodyguard-shaped men any more, and even if I did, nothing about little old(!!!) me would motivate such a fellow to traipse around the park with me, flexing his biceps.
* And I’m past the time of my life when I can handle a 90-pound protection dog.

So…it’s pretty annoying. Frustrating, as a matter of fact.

Spavined!

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OUCH! Ouch ouch ouchety-ouch OUCH, does that damn hip HURT!

Stupidly, the human took off for the park this afternoon with the corgi leading the way. We got about halfway around when I realized I was damn near crippled! 

Didn’t seem to hurt THAT much when we started out. But it just got worse and worse and worse as we proceeded.

This evening, in a couple of hours, M’hijito schleps me to the hated physical therapy studio. GAWD, but I loathe that stuff. An hour or 90 minutes of hup-hup-hup-hup-hup-hup, most of it hurting with every move.

It does seem to help though. Some. Trouble is. the “some” part doesn’t last any length of time. By the next morning (these sessions take place in the evening), once again I can barely limp from the bedroom to the bathroom.

A dose of ibuprofen seems to help. Some…. Trouble is, it seems to make me kinda sick, too. Which would you prefer:

*Can’t crawl across the room”?  or
“Get into that damn bathroom before you barf all over the floor”?

Ibuprofen makes my ears whistle, too. And just now, they’re wailing like an air-raid siren: WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Jeez! Stop the world! I wanna get off!

Ruminations on Ruination

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Egad! Get up and close that damn back door…NOW!

Seriously: the Dawg and the Human just sat down to take in the morning slack — coffee mug in hand, computer atop lap — and it dawns on the Human: Do not sit there with the back door hanging open, dammit!!!  Nay verily, not even if the screen door is closed and locked.

‘Cause, as we know, any clown and his/her little brother can kick or yank that screen open.

Sounds paranoid, eh? But I do hafta say: it feels more and more unsafe to me, living here in lovely Arizona. Especially in its (un)lovely cities.

Day or two ago, a Tucson woman was murdered at her home, apparently by a nut case. So…sitting around your house or patio taking in the morning air is decidedly NOT advised. Surely not around here.

So many of our fellow citizens are off the rails here in this crazy-making 21st Century — and it’s so easy for them (and us) to stock up on firearms — that really: You’d be nuts to loaf in your family room with the back door hanging open.

I never used to feel especially unsafe in my home, certainly not in the daylight hours. But lately that has changed…and I don’t think the change is a function of age.

No. It’s a function of the steadily growing insanity and violence around us. Not that humans haven’t always been crazy…but really, it does seem a lot more pronounced than it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago.

Sometimes I think I should move out of uptown Phoenix — surely the suburbs would be safer. When I mentioned that to a cop during the great home invasion adventure, he remarked that there aren’t any places in the Phoenix metropolitan area that can be regarded as safe.

Really…when you re-read the post I put up at Funny after that little adventure, you hafta ask yourself: Why am I still living here???

What the HELL is the matter with me that I haven’t moved somewhere else? Somewhere far, far from here! Really: this house should have been on the market the next day after that episode…

But…but…WHERE would I go that’s any better?

Sun City, that fine mausoleum on the west side? 

Well, no: this kind of stuff happens out there. My mother lived in white-lipped terror all the time she and my father owned their Sun City manse. And I’m not interested in living in a ghetto for the aged and the cranky. No, thanks.

A box in the sky? One of the high-rise apartments along Central Avenue or in Scottsdale?

Well…I’ve lived in such a place. And…no thanks. Don’t wanna do that again. I’m just not in to communal living.

No communal living, eh? Well, then: how about back out to the ranch, just outside the wide spot in the road called Yarnell? Right up on the Rim…cool weather, lots of cows and sheep, plenty of room for the burglars to spread out comfortably?

Hm. Yeah, I did love the ranch. BUT: we didn’t live there 24/7. It was more of a weekend retreat for us. And y’know: I don’t think I would want to live out in the middle of nowhere 24/7. Besides, if a burglar/rapist/murderer can visit you in your city subdivision, what’s to keep him from visiting you on your remote ranch?

Basically…where there be humans, you be not safe.

Yeah: I’m afraid that’s a fact.

Or, alternatively:  I’m afraid. That’s a fact.

😀