Coffee heat rising

How DO they compete?

Yea, verily: HOW do local stores compete with Amazon?

Just found myself running low on coffee grounds, something I’d ordinarily buy at AJ’s Overpriced Fancy-Dan Grocery Store.

But… but…

* My car has been purloined. No way I can get it back from the kid. And I can’t get to AJ’s without a car, or a 45 minute round trip by bus and hike.

* Until I can rent or buy another car — or threaten the kid with a lawyer (mine croaked over a few weeks ago…) — I’ll either have to take a bus to AJ’s or hire the neighbor’s Uber cab.

* It’s hotter than the hubs of Hades out there, and so you may be sure I’m in no mood to hike six blocks to a bus stop and stand in the 110-degree heat for 30 or 40 minutes waiting for a bus to show up; then repeat in reverse.

* This jacks up the price of a pound of coffee, to the tune of whatever the taxi driver across the street is charging for a ride to AJ’s and back.

Solution? It’s spelled A-M-A-Z-O-N

Mercifully, Amazon does sell fresh (supposedly) coffee beans. So whenever I get into gear, the first chore of the morning will be to order a bag of coffee from there. And here’s my favorite brand…only a little overpriced. Probably about the same as AJ’s charges.

So there’s the question: How do stores like AJ’s and Sprouts compete with Amazon?

Seriously: at some point it’s worth spending an extra buck or two to have stuff delivered to your front door. And the hotter it is outside, the closer that point gets.

July 4, 2025: 7:30 a.m.

Accuweather:  Humidity 50% at 7:37 a.m., wind 3 mph Predicts a high of 103. Yeah…it’s gotta be that already!

Shindig in the park: July 4. Place is overrun with kids and dogs and grown-ups. Shenanigans under way.  IMHO, w-a-a-y-y too hot to be shuffling around out there!

It’s great fun to see all the little kids racing around in the park. All the parents chasing around after them. That place is gonna be mobbed at 8:00 a.m. Ruby and I got our morning doggy-walk done just in the nick of time.

It is sooooo hot and humid over there just now. Feels like lovely Saudi Arabia. At least that happens only a few days a year in Arizona. On the shore of the Persian Gulf, this kind of suffocating weather occupies a good third of the year.

Despite the mile-plus hike, I’ve hurt my hip bad enough that mild exercise doesn’t help. Yea verily: hurts like Hell!

Some years ago, a MayoDoc said I would one day need to have surgery on that thing. Looks like the day has about arrived.

Which raises the obvious question: HOW am I going to manage a four-bedroom house, a third of an acre, a pool, and an active little dog when I’m laid up with a bum hip?

No idea how that’s going to work out. Ruby, I guess, will have to stay at M’jito’s place. She hates that. Sits by the door the whole time she’s there, staring and waiting for her human to come back, open it, walk inside, and rescue her.

Meanwhile, my son — the Emperor of the Universe — has decided I’m too decrepit to be driving safely. (In that, he may very well be right…). So he has purloined the Dog Chariot and intends to sell it for me.

Ducky.

So, I’ll be thrown back on Uber drivers, or on surreptiously renting a car from the lot up the road. This, as you might imagine, will not be a good thing…seven ways from Sunday!

Argha.

Well, I can walk to a Sprouts and two large supermarkets — though I intend to investigate their skills at delivery.

Problem is, Americans by and large tend not to know how to select fresh produce. And fresh produce makes up the major portion of my diet. So…if I can’t get to a store to pick out my own food, I’m gonna have a major headache. But there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it.

Right now I can’t walk much of anywhere. I seem to have sprained a hip. This morning’s stroll around the park about crippled me!

Seriously: I don’t even know if I can make it into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee.

…Let’s try it…

Ooooohhh f’rcryin’ out loud!

It STOPPED! The pain suddenly, completely QUIT.

Why? No clue.

But it’s gone. 

Too weird.

Is this whole day gonna be bizarre???

A Plan!

So…here I am, stuck in the house with no car in the garage and 112-degree heat outside. I need groceries. But ain’t about to get them in this weather.

Ooohkayyy…. So what AM I gunna do?

Welp, truth to tell, of late I’ve come up with a New Plan.

The basis of this Plan is to limit the number of times a week that I need to go to a grocery store or a pharmacy. With a set number of junkets for any given period, I should be able to arrange with a local driver to pick me up on specific days at a specific time. Say, Tuesdays at 10 a.m. for a trip to Sprouts. Wednesdays at 2 p.m. for a trip to Albertson’s.

And so on.

Not very much so on, I hope.

That way, I would know what I can buy, where, and when. And also have a pretty fair idea of how much it’s going to cost. If the trips are arranged with Uber (or some such), then I would always know when I’m gonna head to a store and always know approximately when I’m gonna get back.

If we discover that the local car-for-hire drivers are reliable (yeah…big “if”), so that they show up about when they say they will, it would be very easy to keep the pantry stocked. And I wouldn’t have to trudge through the heat, dodging panhandlers and sh!theads, to get to the store. Let’s say, at 10:00 on Monday morning, the Uber driver who lives across the street will pick me up and take me to the local grocer. He’ll wait till I’ve loaded up the groceries, and then he’ll bring me and the loot back home. Voilà! Chore done!

With any luck: chore done in ONE trip per week!

How awesome would that be, eh?

Soggy Doggy Day…and a Sentimental Journey

7:45 a.m. Ninety degrees in the shade. 41% humidity.

I’m so parboiled I can’t think: don’t know why WordPress is letting me write in this post, since apparently I’m not actually logged in. Or something.

But lo! It let me out AND let me back in. Weird!

Just back from a truly unpleasant doggy-walk. The heat and the sogginess would be quite enough, without the fellow moron dog-walkers. Where does it say that stupidity is part of the job description of “human being”?

**************

Never did get around to posting this.

ohhhh well…

Now it’s a few days later. The weather has attenuated some. Actually pretty pleasant out there this morning: much drier than it was when this post started. Just finished wrestling with the pool, to little avail. Hope Pool Dude shows up shortly to get it set up properly.

Where were we?

**************

Ah yes: the junket with VC. My friend VC and I went over to a classic old Phoenix shopping mall (believe it or not, we were around when it was NEW!!). Roamed through a couple of tony upscale department stores; then roamed up and down the mall and peered at the tony individual stores. That was fun.

Who has the money to shop in those places? More to the point: these days who has the TIME to do so?

Our stroll brought back memories of my mother, who dearly loved to putter around a shopping center that contained a couple of big department stores and a slew of expensive little stores. In Long Beach (where I went to high school), we lived within walking distance of a sprawling mall. She was a bit too crippled up (from the malnutrition she suffered as a child) to walk from our apartment to that mall, so of course she would drive us there. Occasionally, though, I would walk over there by my li’l teenaged self and roam around the place.

One of the large department stores there — I believe it was a Broadway — had a classic department-store coffee shop/restaurant, up on the third floor. She dearly LOVED coffee shops! So, not surprisingly, we ate there fairly often…maybe once a month or so.

Yesterday, after I dropped VC off at her house — she lives in a historic downtown neighborhood — I drove back up to my parts through the Central Avenue corridor.

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve cruised around those parts! I used to live in the historic mid-town district. We had a beautiful old house west of Central Avenue and south of Thomas Road, one that I miss to this day. It was so pretty, and the neighbors were so nice!

Unfortunately, we moved out. I stupidly thought we would send our son, who was coming onto grade-school age, to the well respected public schools in the Madison District, up on North Central Avenue.

Yes. Central Snobsville…

Unbeknownst to me, my husband had NO INTENTION of sending our son to a public school, no matter how well rated it was. If I’d had any idea that he would flat-out refuse to put the kid in a Madison school, I would never, ever have lobbied to move out of that lovely house.

The mid-town Encanto area, though, really wasn’t very safe. We had several hair-raising incidents while we lived there, as did some of our neighbors. The most unnerving adventure, though, really was our fault: Having come home late from a Bar Association shindig, very tired and pretty drunk, we left the back door open so our German shepherd could go out and get herself back in, allowing us to go to bed without waiting for her to do Her Thing.

Mistake!

Shortly, DH started to snore: a roar like an 18-wheeler’s. I got up to sleep on the living-room sofa, since sleeping next to him in the bedroom was out of the question.

Sometime after I dozed off, we were awakened by an ENRAGED ROAR from Greta the German Shepherd. She exploded like a cannon, taking off from her snoozing site outside our bedroom door.

A local sh!thead, exploring for places to burgle, had hopped over the six-foot backyard fence and lo! Found that back door open!

YaHOO!

So he walked right in and made himself to home.

He got well inside the house before he woke up the German shepherd and she registered that whoever was in the kitchen was not DH and not me.

She ROARED after the poor son-of-a-bitch, getting between him and the door he came in. By the time DH woke up and came out to see WTF was going on, the chucklehead had found the side door. DH got there just in time to see him dart out the door and slam it in the dog’s face.

When I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen to see what was going on, DH said, sounding outraged and suspicious, “Who was that man?”

Welp. That was the beginning of the end. Who was that man, indeed.

This episode accelerated our desire to move uptown, and within a year we were outta there.

Mistake, IMHO. No place in the Valley is safe — as one of the cops who rescued me from the home invader in my present house remarked. You can not get away from it, no matter where you are. Hence: the proliferation of walled, gated “communities” hereabouts.

So, would I move back down there?

Hmmm….  Probably not.

Yes, I do love those beautiful old custom homes and the park and all. But… The crime and the transient issues are still there. And it’s noisy. Very noisy.

The lovely Encanto district is trisected by a one-way road leading downtown, a one-way road leading uptown, and Seventh Avenue, a main drag that runs from points WAY north to points WAY south. So the traffic is pretty much constant, and so is the noise.

Add to that two major hospitals: one up on Thomas road (north border) and one down on McDowell (south border). The one on McDowell is east of Central, so ambulances headed there rarely cut through Encanto. But the one on Thomas is right on the north border, and it’s HUGE. Ambulances and fire trucks race up and down those two one-way “neighborhood” streets all hours of the day and night, all the time. Plus shortly before we moved, the idiot city bought a private home on the street just north of us and about two lots to the west, and they turned it into a fire station!

Yes! Fire trucks and ambulances roaring back and forth, 24 hours a day! Not to mention the helicopters.

So…that, along with my hallucination about the school, was why we moved out.

To this day, I miss it. We no doubt would still be married if we’d stayed there, because I would never have become quite so discontent if we still lived in a beautiful house with beautiful neighbors.

Not that the house we bought up on North Central wasn’t beautiful enough. But the neighbors? Not so much.

North Central truly would be better named Snobsville. With one (count her: one) exception, our new neighbors were roaring snobs. And they knew a blue-collar girl when they saw her. They treated me like white trash…which, I guess, is not far off the mark. But my mother taught me to be polite to everyone, not only to the wealthy and the fancy. Those people around us were just horrid. Nouveau riche parvenus…

Cruising through the beloved old neighborhood, I thought maybe I should sell my house, here on the fringe of Sunnyslope, and move back into Encanto. We certainly have our share of crime and cop copter fly-overs and roaring ambulances. They seem to have moved the Fire Department out of that house around the corner from the old place, so that problem presumably is resolved.

But…truth to tell, those old houses entail even more work and more expense than this place. So that would be ill-advised, as moves go.

Really, the only practical moves at this point would be either to move into a high-rise on North Central or to a patio home in the Biltmore area. And neither of those appeals very much. I don’t want to live in a hive.

Besides, my son wants this house. He doesn’t understand about the longevity issue on my side of the family: women who had reasonably quiet lives lived into their 90s. With no medical care! They were Christian Scientists!

My mother died in her mid-60s…but she smoked herself to death.

Literally: the woman was never conscious without a cigarette in her hand — not even in the shower! So, no surprise, she died of a fine visceral cancer. That and the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Saudi Arabia picked her off relatively young.

****

For me, sometimes I do wonder…what next?

If there is a next, that is.

There may not be: it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion.

Truth to tell, I surely would not mind moving out of this neighborhood. The presence of the Romanian Landlord represents, IMHO, an ongoing threat, even though he’s presently quiescent and has been for quite some time. He’s closed the juvenile delinquent home across the street and turned it into a rental. Just now the tenants are quiet and the yard is well kept up. But…yeah: what next?

Just to the north of the hood, a dangerous slum spreads up to the foot of the North Mountains. To the west: banks of deteriorating apartments, running down as fast as they can run. To the east, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city.

It’s not the worst place in the city. But there are better places — at comparable prices.

But…I Want It NOW…

Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not whenever I can find it (if I can) on the local market.

NOW.

It’s spectacularly convenient to be able to order up this little thingy and that little doo-dad and have it delivered right to your door. Yes. That much must be admitted. That much must be admired.

But the other day, I wanted one silly little, minor little, once always-available-about-everywhere little thing, and I wanted it now. Today. Ideally, within the hour.

It was the sort of thing you used to be able to find in a type of store called a “dime store,” such as a TG&Y: chain stores that sold inexpensive handy-dandy gadgetry that people use around the house and the car and the yard.

No more! Far as I can tell, dime stores no longer exist.

I drove from pillar to post searching…

  • Albertson’s does not carry it.
  • Safeway does not carry it.
  • Target does not carry it.
  • Bed Bath & Beyond no longer exists.
  • Walmart does not carry it.
  • Lowe’s does not carry it.
  • AJ’s does not carry it…

On and on and gas-guzzlingly on. NO ONE carries it.

What is “it”?

It’s this: an old-fashioned purse-sized, pocket-sized spiral-bound notepad.

Apparently they still make them. Although of late retailers will not let you copy an image and paste it into your effing blog post….

You just can’t find them. At least not in brick-and-mortar retail stores. I searched all over the effing city, and nobody had these things.

Upshot: It’s not that you can order it from Amazon. It’s that you HAVE TO order it from Amazon. And if you need it now? Well, screw you, m’dear.

Ugh! I am sooo unstuck in time! My God, sometimes I feel like I live not in a different era but on a different planet from the one I grew up on.

And while we have many, many blandishments that are wonderful and amazing…well… Are they?

We have these awesome phones we can carry around! Whoop-de-doo!

  • Now anyone who takes a whim to do so can pester us on the phone as we drive around or hike or bicycle ride or sit in a meeting or…whatEVER.
  • Now advertisers can track us around the city and harass us at will.
  • Now if our car craps out and we don’t have one of these gadgets with us — or, Gawd forfend if it’s not charged up — we are in deep, deep trouble.
  • Now if we’re on the lam from the cops, the authorities can track us down, intercept us, and bust us…

Hmmmmm…. THIS is a good thing?

We have delivery services that bring everything from a cheap notebook to a filet mignon to our doorstep. But what if we want to shop for it in person? What if want to see what we’re getting before we plop down our credit card?

What if, f’r hevvinsake, we want it NOW?

Ugh. What a brave new world!

Surprise!!! NOT a Disaster!

Yes.

For a change, something went more or less right today. And when I say “a change,” I ain’t kidding: whatever I’ve touched and whatever has touched me has gone SPROOOOINNNNNGGGGGG!!!

Mostly this has had to do with money. AMEX claims it wasn’t paid; AMEX claims a payment bounced (bullsh!t to that!); WonderAccountant’s mind is boggled; Financial Dude has retired and gawd only knows WHAT is becoming of my investments…and on and on and brain-banging on.

This afternoon, after I’ve enjoyed a good two hours of wrestling with everything that could go wrong and did go wrong, the doorbell goes off: BING BONG!!!!

This causes the dog to go off:

ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF!!!!!!!!!

Leap up. Run to the living-room. Nobody there. Truck is pulling out from the curb. Oh hell, now what?

Oh!

Now what is the lampshade I ordered from Amazon!

My favorite living-room lamp is a big old brass number my mother bought in San Francisco, when we came back from Arabia. A handsome number indeed, it still retains its original silk lampshade (I think…unless she bought a new one after we moved to Arizona, while I was off at the university).

That shade started to fall apart, and I realized — alas — I would have to buy another one.

You understand…she bought the thing about in 1957 or ’58… And that lamp has stood on a table in her house or mine all those years since then. That would make the lamp and that lampshade 65 or 66 years old!

Can you imagine a retail product sold today lasting that long?

Hah! Fat chance, as we used to say back in the 1950s.

😀

So I break the shade out of the box, with considerable trepidation.

It does measure 14″ x 14″, just as the old one did…but somehow it looks slightly different. Looks a little smaller. But it’s not smaller. It does fit the lamp. And, mirabilis…

It looks OK.

Not quite the same as the original. But there’s a limit to how much you can ask, eh?

For inscrutable reasons, it looks rather smaller than the old shade. But…it’ll do. If you didn’t know about the old shade, you’d think this one looks just fine.

Amazon has jimmied the image so there’s no way in hell I can copy it for you. So you’ll just have to guess at how it looks. God forfend we should help them sell their products, eh? 😀

Here it is on Etsy, though…for 20 bucks less than I paid for it at Amazon. Memo to self: after this…check other websites before buying from Amazon!!!