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Beautiful Kid Afternoon

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Oh, my! Dear Reader, I do wish you could be here to watch the goings-on here in the ‘Hood.

Actually, the performers are gathering to go in for dinner now…the hour coming on to 4:00 p.m. But up til now: all this cool, sunny afternoon we’ve had kids and teenagers cavorting up and down our little neighborhood lane… So much fun! So adorable!

Hope they’ll come back out after dinnertime.

The kids and the teenagers (and their parents) are what makes the ’Hood a lovely place to  live. Why, you wonder as you watch the goings-on, would anyone ever want to live in a mausoleum like Sun City?

😀    :-0   😀

Well. My parents did. Particularly my father.

He didn’t seem to care for children at all. He actually disliked the sound of kids playing. From what I could tell, my mother had to bamboozle him into letting her bear the pregnancy that produced me. And I was — quite deliberately –the only child they had.

He must have been disappointed when they spawned a girl. He didn’t seem to mind Boy Scout types. But girls didn’t much interest him.

That notwithstanding: He did his duty in supporting me and providing a safe home. Sent me through four years of college. So…I guess I can only be mystified at what made those two tick.

Meanwhile, here in the ‘Hood we do have kids. A lovely, funny, rowdy passel of them.

😀

Where I Came From

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Well…ultimately, I came from Western Europe. My predecessors were Anglo-French with a dose of Native American.

But where, if you were to ask me, did my family (and I) come from?

I was born in Southern California and raised in Saudi Arabia, while my closest relatives lived in Northern California, Texas, and Upstate New York. So…hmmm…  I suppose you could say I came from wherever I happened to be standing at any given moment. 😀

My mother was Anglo-French. My father was Choctaw Indian with a dose of Gringo. So…where did I come from?  Ohhh….round and round and about. 

It’s a little hard to say, then, “where I came from.” Basically, I’d say we came from wherever in the United States a given predecessor happened to be standing at a given time.

That, I suppose, is the American way.

Icky Sticky Day!

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What a nasty Arizona summer day!

So humid that it’s overcast. And hotter than a three-dollar cookstove, as my father used to say: at 4:15 in the afternoon of a summer day on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Feels a whole lot like that, right now.

Just back from a brief perambulation of the ‘Hood. It was WAY too hot for that stunt! Whatever possessed me to go out strolling around in that swamp?

Gosh, how do I miss San Francisco?  Let me count the ways….

Wait! I can’t count that high!

Well, thank goodness for Amazon! They carry the type of crunchy brown sugar I like. Like it or not, you may be sure that I do NOT feel up for trudging through this heat and humidity to buy it at the grocery store.

Ordering it online, of course, means I have to wait for it. But that’s unlikely to kill me. The stuff is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Somehow I guess I can survive that long! 😀

Seriously: this is one of the ickiest days I’ve seen here. Back porch thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of an overcast day. Not all that hot, for Arizona — far from it! But sticky and gray and gummy. Just ugly weather.

Not fond of Arizona, really. If Ian the Great didn’t live here, you couldn’t drag me across the state line…  For sure, I’d be…where…?

* The San Francisco Bay area
….or
* Western Colorado
…..or
* Parts of Nevada
…..or
* Mars…

Anyplace but here, really.

Honestly! I thought my parents had lost their collective marbles when they moved to Sun City and dumped me into school at the University of Arizona.

Forgodsake, I was set to go to UC Berkeley! I assumed that was where I would go to undergraduate school and possibly grad school.

But oooohhhhh no. It was off to, forgodsake, Tucson for their little darlin’.

Okay, they weren’t educated or sophisticated people. To my father, a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. He surely would have understood the quality of a degree from Harvard or one of the elite women’s schools. But otherwise: there wasn’t much difference. Not in his mind.

Certainly not enough difference to pay a ton of money to get a degree from a decent public university.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up with not one, not two, but three degrees from Arizona universities. Because I myself, lacking close family with degrees from private schools — Cal Berkeley was our highest mark — I had no idea what the gradations between degrees from public schools might have been. If I’d known, of course, I’d have insisted on going to a California undergraduate school. Or to a private college. But…well…I hadn’t a clue. No more than my parents did.

A Miracle! It Works!!

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Puttering around the backyard just now, I idly attempted to turn on the kaput gas barbecue. And…

A MIRACLE! The thing came on!!

It was dead as a doornail when last reported on here.

My guess is that my excellent son probably came around and quietly fixed it, without pestering me.

Whatever the explanation, it’s working now. Or at least, it was five minutes ago.

Thank the heavens! I do most of my cooking on that grill…not fond of cleaning up the kitchen after meals and projects.

So: come dinnertime we shall see. An attempt to grill a slab of fish or piece of steak will tell the rest of the story.

The question now is who busted it and why. I’ll have to ask the cleaning crew what they got into, and hope they’re at least moderately honest in replying. But really….there isn’t anyone else who would have had access to it. So one of them must have dorked it up.

Next Step Along the Way?

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Gawdlmighty, what Looney Toons around this place!  It’s beginning to look more and more like I’m going to have to move into one of those horrible holding pens for old folks. I’m not going to be able to live in this house or take care of the property without having someone HERE, with me, to deal with the unending slew of stupid little crises.

Now the barbecue is on the fritz, apparently as a result of some bird-brained cleaning lady’s ministrations. Naturally, today is Sunday, so I can’t get anyone out here to work on that.

And if that weren’t enough, something on the roof — presumably one of the whirling vents — is going BANG BANG BANG BANG…. 

Don’t want to ask my son about that, because I really don’t want him climbing around the roof.

Ohhhh Gawd!

I’m afraid it’s time.

Time to move into the old-folkerie. 

What a horror. 

Few things do I abominate more than institutional living. Just HATED living in the dorms at the university. And that is NOT how I want to spend the last few months or (God forbid!) years of my life. Frankly, before things reached this point I hoped I would die — of a natural passing; don’t panic, I’m not talking suicide here.

Jeez. I just CANNOT BELIEVE one of those nitwit women wrecked my barbecue. What the f*ck is the MATTER with people?

Day from Hell Continues….

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WOW! I wish Funny’s readers could have been here a few minutes ago, to see the awe-inspiring little storm that just blew through.

And when we say “blew,” we mean “like a freakin’ tornado!” Great blasts of wind plus buckets of rain.

Well…it seems to have passed: rain has stopped, wind has dropped back to normal breeze level. But gosh! What a thing to see!

Luckily, Ruby and her human were not out strolling around the ‘Hood as this thing blew up. If we’d arrived on the other side of the park, we wouldn’t have had a chance of getting home before a good drenching. And….boyoboy, am I glad I wasn’t out driving in it!

Trees and shrubbery are still swaying in some residual wind, but the liveliest part of the storm seems to have passed.

***

Well, this puts the eefus on any scheme to stroll to one of the local grocery stores and restock the shelves. I ain’t goin’ out in that!!

Nonetheless, we still have plenty of supplies. We certainly can last well into tomorrow, and probably much longer than that.

Freshets like this one usually clear up within a few hours, here in (un)lovely Arizona. So by this evening or (preferably!) tomorrow, I should be able to stroll to the corner shopping center. Ohhh well! 😀