Uncategorized

WEEEEEE-ooooooo WEEEEEE-ooooooo WEEEEEE-ooooooo WEEEEEE-ooooooo WEEEEEE-ooooooo WEEEEEE-ooooooo WEEEEEE-ooooooo WEEEEEE-ooooooo…. All the way up Conduit of Blight. Something’s going on, and it’s bigger than a local ambulance ride. Must be a major wrecky-poo over there.

You take your chances whenever you get in a car on a Phoenix road. Actually, you put your life on the line. The place is one huge Carnival of Car Wrecks.

Truly: I do hate driving here! One thing you could say about San Francisco: you could get from Point A to Point B on the busses and trains, reasonably fast and fairly safely. That made riding the public transit easier and safer than driving.

Here, it’ll take you half your lifetime to get from your house to the local grocery store without driving your own car. So unless you’ve got nothin’ else to do than traipse around on foot, you’re far better off to drive than to ride the local public conveyances.

Overall, as the Phoenix metro area Californicates more and more, it grows more and more lurid and dangerous. We have this, for example. And, from Our Heroes, this.

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

And now we have — YES! — a fine system crash!

FaM goes down, down, downy-down-down and won’t come back online.

We’re up for the nonce, but the page doesn’t look right. But…darned if I can put my finger (or my keyboard) on whatever the heck is wrong.

*******

hmmmmm….  And interestingly Firefox is not gonna let me save this draft.

A strategy,
A strategy…
My queendom for a strategy…

Okay, let’s see if we can crash out of Firefox, shut down, reboot, and recover.

This may or may not work. So…see ya later! Maybe….

By damn, I’m getting so senile I don’t recall where I was and what I was doing ten  minutes ago!

Well: the mystery (such as it was) is solved. Ten minutes ago I was charging round the house searching for my keys. I’d put them “away,” which — as you no doubt know from your own experience — pretty much guarantees that you’ll never see the damn things again.

Searched and searched and searched and searched. Then searched again. In their normal residence, inside the sofa table by the front door? No. Of course not.

In the basket that holds all the dog-walking detritus? Nope.

Somewhere in the kitchen? No, no, no, and no again.

In my office? Nay verily.

In the office door’s deadbolt lock? Of course not.

In the car? Naturally not.

In a bathroom? Nay verily, indeed.

Under the bed? Why would one imagine so?

Similarly, under the easy chair in the family room, in the middle bathroom, on the nighstand, somewhere in the mess that is my office desk? HAH, we say to that: HAH!!

Finally found them, in the drawer for the table next to the front door…where I’d already looked three times. Where they belong. Must have looked right at them. Over and over and over again…

***

Drove all around Moon Valley yesterday, peering at Reel Estate.

It’s quiet and tidy and staidly middle-class. But… But… Well: no.

The place hasn’t prospered the way one would have expected. Despite its handsome suburban desert venue, it’s really not a very pretty area. My neighborhood is far more attractive, as is all of North Central, all the way down to the aging McDowell Road. The fancy AJ’s gourmet grocer has closed, as have almost all the smaller shops installed when Moon Valley went in.

Given a choice, I’d take North Central over Moon Valley, any day. Palmcroft: far superior. Or East Camelback. Or Encanto Park…

Why, I wonder?

My guess is simply that the drive from Moon Valley into the North Central and downtown areas is more difficult than it appears. Only one main drag takes you into the Central Avenue office districts, and it’s only three lanes, southbound. You’d grind the enamel right off your teeth if that was the way you had to go to work. And no doubt every morning you’d ask yourself, if that was the route to your office, why the heck you didn’t just buy a place in the North Central district, which would take you half as long to get to work.

LOL! Yep: this here is “one of those days.” You know: the kind where nothing goes right and everything you touch goes SPRRROOOOIIIINGGGG!

If I touch it, it breaks. If I do nothing, some idiot shows up at the front door trying to peddle stuff.

Looks like the irrigation system has gone on the fritz. Plants are dying — and as spring melds into summer, will be dying faster and faster. Dialed the phone number on the system’s control box and…uh oh! A machine answered, and whatever mumbo-jumbo it emitted seemed to indicate that I had seriously NOT reached a yard-care company.

So now I’ve gotta track down someone to do that.

Later.

On a smaller but pestier level: Something’s wrong with my fingernails. Infection?? Injury??? Neurosis run amok????  Dayum.

So now I’ll have to traipse to the dermatologist, halfway across the damn Valley. But…first I have to go down to my son’s house and retrieve my car.

Through a baroque series of little fiascos, he ended up with my car in his garage. His house is too far away for me to walk there {well…I could, but a) it’s getting too warm for long outdoor junkets and b) I don’t wanna}…so now I don’t have a car.

For the moment, this is No Big Deal: two large supermarkets lurk within easy walking distance, and that doesn’t count the beloved Sprouts across the hectic road. So neither the dawg nor I will run out of any serious necessaries — not in the near run, anyway. But Phoenix is a very large city, and for most errands and appointments, you do need a car.

Dear Son has — of all the bizarre things — a job. Can you imagine? Remember those?

So he’s stuck in the salt mine from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Meaning I won’t be able to get my car back unless I walk down to his house or take a cab. Yes, we do have bus service…but it’s erratic, and between that and the drug-addled transients, one would prefer some other way to get around.

Prefer so much that it’s actually worth waiting till 5 or 6 o’clock to retrieve my car.

{chortle!} Remember back in the Day when you didn’t need a car to navigate from day to day? Remember when we had busses? Streetcars? Even (of all things!) taxicabs?

Ahhh, the good ole’ days, eh?

I can remember when it was safe for a 12- or 14-year-old girl to get on a city bus (NOT a dedicated school bus) to ride through two neighborhoods and a commercial district to get to campus. Today…hmmm…. I very much doubt I’d let my kid do that, here in the lovely 21st Century.

O’course…that was in San Francisco, a whole ‘nother planet from Phoenix.

****

WOOT! There was my son, just now, on the phone announcing that his late-morning meeting got canceled and, incredibly enough, he’s bringing the car up here!

It’s a miracle! 😀

Seriously: I planned to walk down to his place or maybe take a bus, so he didn’t have to leave his desk.

Hmmmm…. Maybe he’ll let me take him to lunch. Let us see…

So we’re back from our favorite around-the-corner grocery stores (Sprouts, Albertson’s…and waypoints. We’ve tossed away a few bucks in those sanctified quarters.

The ‘Que is fired up.

A fistful of frozen French fries defrost merrily atop the grill.

A glorious lamb chop awaits its visit to the same grill top.

Half a glass of cheap red wine awaits on the backyard tabletop.

The little dog loafs.

The human loafs.

Excellent loafing time!

….And so, we have lunch/dinner/whatever it is. Probably need a new term for the mid-day chow frenzy.

It ain’t exactly lunch (no sandwich! no fancy salad!). It ain’t exactly dinner (nary a thing that elaborate!). But it is deeeelishus.

Wish you were here!

Seriously:

On the grill, we have handsome li’l steak. While we’re at it, we also have a fistful of pretty fresh asparagus, soaked in olive oil and lemon juice. And don’t forget the tasty French fries, merrily defrosting and browning atop the grill along side the spectacular slab of meat.

Wish you were here!

Bored, are ya? C’mon over!

Dusk is settling in. Beautiful evening, a soft breeze rustling the palm fronds. Ruby has gorged her little self on canned dog food. I’m busy gorging myself on red wine.

Just about had it.

La Maya on the phone: Describing the latest un-fukkin-believable outrage from the Great Desert University.

Ugh! How can I describe my joy at no longer working there!!!

No kidding. You spend 87 gerjillion years getting a Ph.D. to qualify yourself for an academic job. That’s when you realize the last thing anyone in anything passing for a right mind would do is hire on to an academic job.

It was with something very close to seriousness that she and I used to discuss the possibility of creating and running a house-cleaning service. And frankly, if I were out there at the Great Desert University today, the discussion would not be “close” to serious. It would be freakin’ dead serious.

Ohhhh well. Thank gawd I’m now retired from that place. Soon she will be, too. Maybe she and I and her partner and our dogs can retire to Ecuador!