Coffee heat rising

Security

Make. It. Stop, Lord!

by

Lock on the side gate: busted.

Latch on the kitchen door: busted.

Nails on both index fingers: lifting off their beds. Hurts.

Drag my computer into the bedroom, so at least I can put my feet up while playing at blogging and waiting for the locksmith: the phone’s gone.

Search search search around the house. Finally find a phone extension. drag it to bedroom; drop it in its cradle.

Phone jangles: repairman. Says he’s on his way.

Coffee: stone cold.

*****

Adorably handsome repair-dude shows up at the front door.

{sigh!}
Can I carry your tool kit for you all day?
<3

***

He charges off to Home Depot, there to do battle in the hardware department. He apparently imagines I’ll be irked because his bosses charge me enough to cover his gas and his time.

DUDE! If only they knew how much I’d be willing to pay to get you to do this job!

Fortunately, they don’t…

Spavined hip: EXCRUCIATING!

Don’t get old, whatever ya do. When you’re old, you hurt all the time.

Hmmm…

Y’know, another little pain that afflicts you in your old age is sentimentality.

Yesterday, I left the Dog Chariot off at the repair shop up on the corner. Getting home, then, required me to walk through the neighborhood of aging 1950s tract houses that stands just to the north of the ‘Hood.

Gosh, but construction was ticky-tacky in the Good Ole Days!

Prob’ly no worse than it is today, when you come down to it. Tract housing is tract housing is tract housing: is, was, and ever shall be. 😀

Walked past the former home of a favorite old neighbor. WHAT   a nice man! He and his equally pleasant wife moved out generations ago…I wanna say they moved into an old-folkerie. But don’t recall the details.

Sure do miss them, though. They were as nice as you could get.

****

Something there is about the modern American custom of locking up the elderly in old-folkeries. Ugh! What a fate to look forward to!

For what it costs to live in an old folks’ prison, you could hire someone to come in every day, pick up after you, fix the days’ meals, drive you to the grocery store or the quack…  Why lock yourself up to get those privileges?

Learned this from The Cleaning Lady from Heaven, who (it develops) has done exactly that kind of thing.

So…I sit around wondering about my father: could he have stayed in his cute little Sun City home until he arrived at his last days and hours?

Hm.

Possibly. But we have this huge difference between him and me: he went to sea all his adult life. Ran away from home at 17, lied about his age, and joined the Navy. From there on, he shipped out by way of making his living.

Hence, two major differences, temperamentally, between him and me:

* He did not mind institutional living. For him: bad food, annoying noise from fellow inmates, daily schedules determined by someone else: those were just normal life. For me: that kinda stuff drives me nuts.

* And he had a wife (until she smoked herself into the grave). She did the shopping. She did the cooking. She did the cleaning. She did the budgeting. She organized their social life.

Hm. As for moi…. I have no problem with cooking — actually, I rather enjoy it. I hire out the cleaning, the yardwork, and the bookkeeping. As for a social life…whazzat?

****
Ah hah!

Here’s part of my social life, right now: An adorable young workman.

He’s here to replace the worn-out deadbolt on the back door.

That’s good.

Also good: he’s more than adequately scenic.

*********

The gorgeous creature replaced the kaput deadbolt — and did so with a piece that matches the rest of the kitchen hardware in color and finish. To accomplish that, he made a trek to Home Depot, one of my very least favorite activities.

Came back with a new lock set, took out the sad old one, installed the new one…et voilà!

So…hmmmmmmmm…

Maybe we don’t wanna make it ALL stop, Dear Lord…

😀

E-freakin’ NUFF

by

Hey there, Sprouts management: lissen up!

I quit!!!!! Those weekly, biweekly, even triweekly trips to the beloved neighborhood Sprouts?

DONE!

GONE!!

NO FREAKIN’ MORE!!!!

This afternoon’s gamut-run marked THE LAST TIME, absolutely positively THE last time I will shop in the Sprouts just down the street from my house.

NEVER….

fukkin’

AGAIN

You cannot go into or come out of that store without being hustled by panhandlers.

And y’know what?

As a woman alone, the LAST effin’ thing I want, as I head home from the grocery store, is to be hustled by panhandlers.

Some of whom are bloody aggressive.

Today was it. I am simply NOT GOING INTO the Sprouts at 19th Avenue and Northern, ever again. And NOT COMING out of the Sprouts at 19th and Northern, ever again.

No. No way. No how. Never fukkin’ ever again.

*********************
LOL!!
*********************

Quite the li’l hissy-fit, eh?

I’m good at that. 😀

Well…one does hafta say that the constant hustle from the panhandlers at our neighborhood stores is…well…a bit of a nuisance. 😀

Across the street from the Sprouts et al., the Albertson’s has hired a full-time, armed (!!) guard to stand out in front and chase off the pests. That is, I’ll say, the main reason I shop there. Otherwise, I’d never go into the shopping center at all.

But the time is fast approaching when a ten-minute saving on the drive will not be worth the hassle of shopping in those stores.

Then what???

I will say, the main reason I still live in town — that is, in the central parts of the city — is to be close to routine shopping…to avoid the endless annoying drives.

***

My friend VickyC lives in a beautiful old — as in “seriously, elegantly antique” — house in the historic mid-town district. I’d love to have that place!

{ahem!} But maybe not love so much the burglars, the sex perverts, the constant airline noise, the police and ambulance sirens, the traffic noise, the… Aggghhh!

Too bad those districts can’t be a) safer and b) quieter! 😀

We used to live in that area. Never again!

You shouldn’t HAVE to own a live-in German shepherd and keep a pistol stored under the sofa cushions to feel safe in your home.

Holeee Shee-ut…

by

Waiting for the cops to show up.

And waiting…and waiting…and waiting….

Some charmer was sniffing around the front and the east side of the house. Seems to be gone now.

After SDXB chased off his burglars — caught them in the living room and waved his pistol at them — he called the cops. Said it was over 40 minutes before they showed up. At two in the morning…

That was a couple years ago…and one of the immediate causes for his moving to lovely, boring Sun City.

No sign of a gendarme here. Haven’t been tracking the wait time….

**
Okay
They finally appear.
***

Well, one lonely cop shows up. By the time he gets here, there’s not a soul around. Ruby is quiescent. Presumably our visitor has moved on.

I hope.

Garrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
Dammit, I have got to get out to the range and practice with my father’s pistol!!!

More to the point, I probably need to get a shotgun. Much easier to hit an uninvited visitor.

Cripes! Here’s a cop copter, a couple blocks to the north of us. That suggests Josie must have called them, too.

A uniformed officer showed up at the door about ten minutes after I called. That’s darned good  response time — usually it takes them at least twenty minutes to surface.

Phoenix…
What a garden spot!

Just a LITTLE peace and quiet, puhleeze?

by

Uh huh... 7:46 p.m…. and it’s

ROAAAAARRRR roooarrrrr buzzzzzzzzzzz whizzz roar buzz…

Cop helicopter overhead. Dayum! Am I tired of this routine or tired of this routine?

He buzzes around in circles over the northwest section of the ‘Hood: right above the house where SDXB and I lived together for a couple of years before parting ways, then buying our own shacks here in the neighborhood.

Lovely: I guess I should be glad we split up and moved away from that corner.

SDXB, I’m sure, is very glad he moved to Sun City, where the local crooks rarely feel it’s worth the effort to stage a home invasion.

Not altogether, though.

LOL! I can remember the panic my mother enjoyed when they had a couple of guys who would climb up on top of a car in a carport (there were no enclosed garages in that garden spot), slide open the ceiling hatch, climb into the attic, make their way across the rafters to the area of the living room, cut a hole in that ceiling, and hop down into the living room. Yes: dwelling in the land of the somnolent and the half-dead did not guarantee freedom from burglars.

😀

Hm. Sounds like the cop copter has already flown away. Must have chased our boys on down the road.

We live directly south of one of the highest-crime ZIP codes in the state. Every now and again the action spills over into the ‘Hood, which provides us a little entertainment.

Ruby will bark at our guests, but weighing only abut 20 pounds does naught for her potential as a threat. Really: one does need to be armed in these parts.

Arizona. What a friggin’ garden spot!

Ah, the Good Ole’ Days…

by

Well, lookee here. This charming event occurred within walking distance of our beautiful old historic home in the Encanto district — the first house DXH and I owned together.

The Encanto/Palmcroft district really is a lovely area. I miss its pretty streets and friendly neighbors and beautiful park with its lakes, every day. I could walk to the grocery stores and the post office from my house. And did.

Actually…I could do that here, too. Older and wiser, though: I’m not that foolhardy. Today I jump in the car and lock the doors before opening the garage door to travel the few blocks down to the stores and such.

This is, after all, the Big City. A big, crime-ridden city.

Occasionally, I’ll drive downtown and cruise through that area, house-shopping: thinking maybe I’d like to move back. But…

But.. No.

It really is dangerous. Did we ever have some adventures in that house! And that was with 90 pounds of fur and fang as our room-mate….

My present area, while its ambience is a little more repetitively middle-class, is less than REAL safe for a lone woman to walk around in…but it sure ain’t like that place was.

Oh my goodness, so many adventures.

There was the night our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Wilson, awoke, got out of bed to stroll around the house, and spotted some guy sleeping on her back patio. Right outside her living-room door.

The night Greta the Ger-shep awoke in the middle of the night to find a prowler coming up the bedroom hallway. Somehow, she got between him and the door he’d come in. The panic was quite amusing.

The night my mother came down to stay overnight with me while DXH was out of town. We set up the sofa bed for her and get ready to say goodnight, when…she pulls a .38 out of her purse and sets it on the TV table next to her!

The morning DXH pranced out of the house, hopped into his car, and prepared to back out the driveway, step 1 in the journey to his office…. And found some very angry guy in the back seat. The fella was irked that anyone would have such bad manners as to wake him up at dawn!!!

That was life in the Encanto District.

It was so beautiful, so conveniently located, and the neighbors were so grand. But really: I’d never go back there again.

Scared Witless

by

Nope. There really is no other explanation for my mother’s behavior and habits than that she truly was scared witless.

Yeah. I kinda knew it, largely because part of her motherly teaching was that I should be extremely cautious and yes, always, always, ALWAYS lock all the doors and windows before going to bed at night.

To a degree, if you’re female, that’s just common sense.

But…no. Her terror went way beyond that.

She was convinced, for example, that some guy was going to stroll into their carport one evening, climb up on top of the car, hop through the attic opening, crawl across the rafters, take out a saw, cut a hole in the ceiling, and jump down into the house — there to have his way as he pleased. One evening, it became evident that this was real fear and not just some silliness she picked up out of a women’s magazine.

She showed up at my house to stay overnight on the TV room sofa. What did she bring with her?

A .38.

No kidding.

We get the bed made and, after watching TV half the evening, shut off the idiot box and head into the night. And out of her purse she pulls this GUN.

Y’know… You wouldn’t do that unless you were terrified. And you certainly wouldn’t do it in front of your daughter. In your daughter’s home.

That was the point at which I realized she wasn’t play-acting. She was genuinely frightened.

Had something happened to her in the past that made her that scared?

I kinda doubt it. If so, she would have said so. Oh, hell: she would’ve gone on at length about it.

No. She didn’t hide things like that.

Whether it was the ambient fear in our culture — which is real and does affect many women’s thinking — or whether something had happened to her, I do not know. But there’s no question that she was terrified. She wouldn’t have pulled a stunt like that if she weren’t scared half to death.

My parents’ house in Sun City did have a carport, not a garage with a door you could close. So that meant, of course, that your car and anything in that carport were exposed to the evening air…

AND…that carport’s ceiling had a hatch-type door, whose purpose was to let workmen in to fiddle with the wiring, the plumbing, the insulation, and the drywall in the attic.

She was convinced — apparently because she’d read about this happening to some other Sun Citizen — that somebody was going to climb on top of the car, open that door hatch,  hop into the attic, make their way to the living room, saw a hole in the ceiling, and drop down into the house.

The better to rape some nubile 65-year-old, right?

Yeah. That’s what I grew up with.

That kind of thing has to affect you, over the long term. I don’t feel terrified. No: if I did, I wouldn’t live here alone in a four-bedroom house a mile south of a crime-ridden suburb and two blocks east of some very alarming apartments.  But yes: I do remember it. I remember it as not just strange, but as fundamentally alarming.

As for my mother?

There really isn’t much explanation for the chronic terror that afflicted the last couple decades of her life.

* Don’t know if she was similarly scared when she was a young thing

* Don’t know if she’d ever been attacked, and so might have suffered the aftereffects.

* Yes, I do know there are a lot of sh!theads out there, but not so  much as to require you to cower in terror behind locked doors and windows, with a pistol in hand.

And as for the local creeps, crooks, and nut cases?

* Dudes! Make. My. Day!