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Hot(!) dang, but yes indeed: it’s HOT here in the loafing room!

😀 Didja know you could work up a sweat by typing? 😀  Neither did I!!

Wunderground claims it’s only 98 degrees out there. Bullsh!t…

Hmmmmm…   Apparently it’s not that far off, though. In the shade of the back porch, my thermometer reads…ayup! Ninety-eight! Who’d’ve thunk it? Humidity: only 7 percent. Just not that hot.

So…I dunno why it feels like it’s hotter than the Hubs: indoors as well as outdoors.

Three and a half more months of sizzling weather! June, July, and August. September is hot here, too, but the nights begin to cool off along about then.

For sure: if my son weren’t here, I would be back in the Bay Area, whence my mother’s family came. Right now it’s allegedly 65º in the City. Looks like the high this week will come on Monday: 76 degrees. Ohhhkayyy…. 

Ohhh well. At least the Human and the Dawg are not up on the Rim, at our erstwhile Ranch. The place is burning down. Wickenburg, a town northwest of the Valley on the way to California, has had evacuations and SWAT teams and all sorts of drama. This is where our ranch was — well, a few miles outside of Wickenburg. I do miss the ranch, that’s for sure… But boy! Am I glad we’re not there now!

***

Starting to feel a bit better, from whatever ailed me. Must have been some kind of virus: a mild flu? WhatEVER: I’ve sure felt crummy over the past few days.

The spider bite unwound overnight, mercifully. This morning it’s pretty well gone! No pain…doesn’t even itch. That, I would call atypical…but I ain’t fightin’ it!

***

Stupid stuff going on here…stupid enough to stupefy Funny.

For reasons I can’t imagine, my financial advisor decided that he would rescue me from myself by hiring a cleaning lady and siccing her on me.

?????????

He never did seem to get the picture that I have a cleaning lady: a first-rate one. So this woman is supposed to show up here next week…and…I guess I don’t know what to do about that. If my present employee shows up when this woman is batting around, you can be sure my lady will quit on the spot.

And I don’t want to lose her. She does a first-rate job on every part of the house, and I don’t NEED another cleaning lady!!  Not at all.

I guess I should get off my duff and call off financial dude. But complicating matters, my son got into the middle of this transaction. And I’m afraid if I cancel New Cleaning Lady, that will annoy Dear Son enough to cause a conflict.

And just now…well…conflict is not what I’m up for.

Too hot for that, y’know…

 

This fire is burning just up the road from our beloved ranch, located up the hill from the town of Wickenburg. Terrifying!

It looks like it’s still a distance from where our house and barns were located. But…wayyyy too close for comfort.

{sigh} So…I guess I’m glad we sold out and fled to the Valley. But darn it! I still do miss that place…and the ranch house and the barns…and the horses and the cattle…and the river and the trees…and… {sob!}

It’s so beautiful up there! And the weather is soooo much nicer than we get in the Valley…even a hot day is nothing like 110 degrees.

But…I guess whenever I pine for that good old place, I really do need to remind myself that it has some drawbacks. Like…raging brush fires!

My good son, thinking he was pulling a fast one on me, has instead done me an ENORMOUS favor. A favor so huge it’s almost hard to comprehend. 

In an effort to bop me about the head and shoulders, he slipped into my garage and STOLE my car.

Did I call the cops?

No.

Well. Maybe I should have. But no, I ain’t about to sic the gendarmes on my kid.

So it’s been parked in his garage for lo! these many weeks. And my garage has been miraculously, pristinely empty for lo! the same many weeks.

And y’know what?

I don’t miss the damn thing!

Matter of fact…hang onto your communal hats,, dear readers…matter of fact, I’ve discovered that I’m glad to be rid of it. 

• No kidding. Because…no everything! 
  • No expensive gasoline refills
  • No nuisancey trips to the garage for regular maintenance
  • No surprise expensive repairs
  • No concern that someone will steal it

Turns out we have an Uber driver living right across the street…one of half-a-dozen such worthies who inhabit the ‘Hood.  If I need to go someplace that I can’t reach on foot, or where I have to haul stuff around, that Uber driver is FRONT AND CENTER.

And an occasional cab ride with a neighbor costs a fraction of what it costs to store, maintain, and fuel a gasoline-run vehicle.

Huh. You’d think, after having lived in London for awhile (where few if any residents actually owned a car), I’d have known that. Known it a long time ago! But oooohhh no!

It’s a cultural thing, I guess.

Another cultural thing — one that has sprung up in the past five or ten years — is that the  ‘Hood is awash in small businesses that cater to one’s daily, weekly, and monthly needs.

• Three major grocery stores (one of them a beloved Sprouts)
• A hair salon
• A veterinarian
• A nail salon
• A computer store
• Another computer store!
• A dentist…

It goes on and on and on…. Literally, there’s almost NO service or product that I can’t access — easily — on foot from my house. All of these and then some are within a few steps of the Funny Farm!

Why on earth did I never notice this???  

And why has it never registered with me: the piles of money I could have been saving over the years, simply by patronizing the businesses within walking distance or by hiring a cab to take me to more distant places?

Y’know, the same circumstance held forth when my mother and I lived in San Francisco, during the few years between the time my father went back to sea (he was an oil tanker captain) and the time he finally made his escape into retirement. He bought himself a fancy-dan Chrysler: quite a nice car. But because he was floating around on a ship most of the time, he never drove it.

Neither did my mother. I think she lived in fear of damaging it, which would have brought the heavens down upon her head. But more to the present point: we didn’t need that car in San Francisco. The city had more than ample public transit…and that’s what we used to get around. I rode a bus to school. The grocery store was within easy walking distance. My mother and I rode a streetcar to visit her relatives in Berkeley. If push came to shove, we might occasionally hire a taxi…rarely.

Well…. Nowadays, Phoenix is much like San Francisco was, in that you don’t need a car to get around here! Especially not with a fleet of Uber cabs in the offing.

And therein lies the crux of our present son-inspired discovery: I don’t need a car to get around here!  That thing taking up space in my garage was really just a hole in the concrete into which to pour money.

***

Well, we now have a cave on the south side of the house. My son parks his chariot in there when he comes to visit. And he’s more than welcome to it.

It has occurred to me to repurpose it as an art studio. But…do I wanna do that? Really? Something else to take care of???  

My inclination is to leave it as it is: an empty hole for His Lordship to use at his convenience. It will get his vehicle in out of the sun, come summertime: a highly desirable circumstance. Otherwise, it can just sit there. Empty.

And costing nothing!

So I call Cox Communications and ask what the outrageous gouge for $115 is for, since I never make long-distance calls and hardly even make local calls. The moron who answers says, in effect, that’s just the regular price.

No, it’s not. I’ve never had a $115 gouge for ordinary local phone service.

Sheeeee-ut.  Now I’ll have to ask the Owner of the Male Voice — i.e., my son — to call those clowns and ask WTF that’s about.

Jayzuz! Never a dull moment.

It’s the weirdness of it that’s scary. Like…in the minutes since I posted the last weird FaM entry, the wind — which had been blowing briskly — has stopped dead.

No, that’s not an exaggeration. We’re talkin’ STOPPED. DEAD.  Not a breath of air stirring. Whaaaa??????

No kidding: just a few moments it was whirling around. Now: nothing.

Why?

How? 

And if it has meaning,, what does it mean?

So here’s the Human: loafing in its easy chair, swilling coffee, and munching chocolate. And there’s the Dawg: squirreling around with something on the floor.

Human takes a swiggle of coffee and a closer look, and…and…

HOOOLEEE maquerel! That something is a SCORPION. 

Incredibly, it hasn’t yet launched its defenses against the Dawg.

IS there REALLY never a dull goddam moment?
And why th’Hell NOT????

Human leaps up, chases the dog off, grabs an old jar and a piece of stiff paper.

Into the glassware with the little guy, lidded in with the paper slab.

What an amazing and wonderful creature!  Looks like something that came straight from some Age Before the Dinosaurs.

So we carry the little guy through the garage and out the door, way into the front yard. Down by the street, as far from the Shack as possible. Gently, carefully let him out into the gravel beneath one of the trees.

Now, if you were God, what on earth (or in Heaven) would persuade you to create such a strange little beast?

Kinda mystifies me: I could never imagine how to put such an animal together.

Presumably, that’s why I’m not God, eh? 😉