Uncategorized

GOOD MORNING, AMERICA!

Ruby the Corgi greets a cold daybreak with a frantic attack of reverse sneezing. This is a dramatic, noisy episode of choking and gasping for air. Apparently it’s not life-threatening, but I’ll tellya: it’s terrifying for a human to watch and hear.

***

She seems to have calmed down now. That’s good.

I guess.

Was going to traipse to the grocer, now that the rush hour is more or less over (it’s quarter to ten a.m. just now). But…hmmmm….  Hesitate to leave her alone until it’s undeniably clear that this episode is over and done with.

awwwww she-ut! There she goes again.

Am I really going to have to tote her to a vet?

watching….waiting…

Thinking vividly — for reasons I cannot even begin to divine — about my college boyfriend (scroll down in that page). Oh, my! How my parents hated him! Never did fully understand why, other than to assume it was some kind of racist thing. He was white…what WAS their problem? Apparently eastern European doesn’t count as “white” in the minds of Texas nationalists.

Ugh! Humanity: what a critter!

**********

And speaking of critters, the Corgi has quit wheezing and gagging. Soooo…i guess it’s off to the grocery store with me! {sigh}

The Corgi and the Human dawdled a bit this morning. It’s already 9:20, and we only just walked in the door from the a.m. perambulation.

But what a GORGEOUS morning! Clear and cool, free of visible smog, most of the bird-brained dog-lovers already back in their homes.

The dog-lovers. /eyeroll/  They all assume your dog LOVES their dog, and they wanna drag their fur-baby over to yours to socialize.

Why are people so stupid, anyway?

We walked by the late Jerry Jacka’s house, up on the north end of the ‘Hood. Jerry was, among other things, a professional photographer of significant stature. I met him while I was working for Arizona Highways, which filled its pages with his spectacular scenic photos. What a lovely man he was: the definition of talent and grace.

Jerry and his wife, Lois, owned a berzillion acres of ranch land halfway between here and Prescott, acre after rolling acre stretching west from the I-17. What a place!

They also had a pretty house in our neighborhood, just south of Dunlap: now a noisy main drag, but then a quiet two-lane country road passing through acre after acre of citrus orchards. The house is still there. But they, alas, are long gone.

So is the quiet rural character of their neighborhood. Now it’s on the northern border of North Central, beneath the flight path of helicopters ferrying patients to a huge hospital a couple miles away. Noisy! Hectic! Crowded! Crime-ridden…

LOL! You can bet that if I owned a few hundred acres out in the boondocks, you’d never see me in this place! 😀

My, how I do miss the Arizona Highways crew! It was so much fun to work there: so much talent came in through the doors. Not just the photographers and the artists and the writers: the editorial staff was outstanding, too.

Ohhh well. They’re gone, most of them. I’m probably one of the few members of that staff who are still living.

Life is short, my friends. Enjoy it while you can!

Gosh, am I glad we don’t live in Southern California anymore. Looks like the whole damn place is burning down.

My father, a Merchant Marine officer, used to ship out of Long Beach. That’s where I was born, before we moved to Saudi Arabia.

Twelve years later, we came back to the States. He took a job with Standard Oil. Settled in San Francisco: a variety of Nirvana. Unfortunately, though, he decided he could make more money working for Union Oil, shipping out of grody Southern California, than shipping out of ritzy-tizy Northern California.

{sigh}

That’s how we ended up back in Long Beach: chez pitz.

Couple years ago, friends La Maya and La Bethulia bought a cool trailer home down the Coast, practically on the ocean and surrounded by forest. They haven’t said that they’ve been moved out — they do, after all, retain a place in the Valley. But…just now you couldn’t pay me to stay there! In California, I mean. Those fires can move with the speed of a rocketing baby. You get out of the way now, or you may not be able to get out of the way.

At any rate: mighty grateful just this moment not to be in California. The wind is WHALING in out of the west…that’s after it’s crossed hundreds of miles of barren desert and a forested mountain range. You don’t even wanna know what it must be like in the southern California as we scribble.

Lessee what Wunderground sez here:  Phoenix temp: 63. Feels like: 60. Wind: 19 miles an hour.

hmmm…. I’d be surprised if the wind speed were only 19 mph just now. But I don’t have a windsock out back. So: dunno. The thermometer says it’s 55 degrees out there: almost 10 degrees lower than the Weather Service claims.

{sigh} Welp, I’d better get off my duff and venture out into the stormlet. The Queen of the Universe is running low on dog food, so the Human needs to traipse down to the local gourmet grocery store and buy up a stock of canned doggy-gourmet food.

Ugh! How can I count the ways….? Well, the rush hour is over, anyway, so I can turn left out of our neighborhood to go in the direction of the Royal Grocer’s. During the rush hour, you can’t do that and so have to go north in order to go south. (Yeah: That’s right turn/left turn/right turn; left into the parking lot.) At least that wind isn’t carrying flames. Just now.

Our honored civic leaders are engaged in another gambit to degrade the quality of living in our part of town.

One of their favorite projects is the lightrail, a boondoggle that multiplies the cost of public transit, limits it to specific routes (unlike a bus route, a train must stick to the expensively installed train tracks), and hauls derelicts and criminals up to the end of the line and drops them off at the top of our neighborhood.

It’s the stupidest thing you ever saw.

Compare it with a bus line:

* A bus does not need train tracks installed at taxpayer expense.

* Bus lines can go just about anywhere, rather than being confined to routes followed by train tracks.

* A bus line does not require overhead electric lines.

* One bus is a helluva lot cheaper than a passel of train cars.

* The end of the line for a bus service can be in the middle of a gigantic shopping center parking lot, dropping the bums off far from residents’ homes. (We have one of those, just on the other side of the freeway, which itself is about three blocks from the western edge of the ‘Hood.)

* Such a shopping center can house social services, reaching out to the drug-addicted and the brain-addled rather than dumping those unfortunates on a street somewhere. Or into the alleys behind our homes.

Why do such stupid people get into public office? Is “dumb as a post” a requisite quality for those who would be civic leaders?

***

We have a nice park in the middle of our neighborhood. Kids played there, teams played baseball and volleyball, people walked their pets there.

Not so much anymore.

I won’t go in there at all unless a lot of people are around. You just never know what the loafing bums are gonna do.

Well…yeah: you DO know they’re gonna hit you up for a hand-out. And when you refuse, then what are they gonna do?

Ruby the Corgi is too small to be any protection. So…we have no choice but to stay out of the park that my taxes pay for.

Pisseth me off.

If my son were not here in lovely uptown Phoenix, I would move away.

Where?

Probably Fountain Hills, a suburb of Scottsdale. Upscale, clean, relatively free of bums and crime.

Failing that: a suburb of Tucson called Oro Valley.

Both of these are relatively free of transients; relatively low in crime. Both have neighborhoods that aren’t impossibly more pricey than my neighborhood.

Friends have retired to a little ranching town/tourist trap on the Mogollon Rim called Payson. It’s a pleasant enough place, though not to my taste: I don’t care much for small-town living. For me, neighborly nosiness is not entertaining…and I do like having access to at least one or two major department stores and a first-rate gourmet grocer. And, we might add, to the kind of doctors and medical facilities that are attracted to affluent cities.

Ohhh well...time to walk the dog; then get back to work. Ugh!

LOL! That was one of my father’s common habitual sayings, come a chilly day: “It’s colder than a by-gawd out there!”

I always imagined he meant “bigod” and wondered how a Norman family name came to signify something extreme. But…hey…oh well.

Truth to tell, this morning it’s really not that cold out on the back porch. But the high overcast is keeping the sun covered, and so…I think it seems colder than it is.

Swiggling coffee that’s gone cold… I suppose one could bestir oneself to stumble across the room and zap a mugful of the stuff in the microwave, eh?

OMG
and
Arf Arf Arfety Arf!

Here’s Pool Dude, deeply beloved of Ruby the Corgi!

I do NOT know how she knows what day of the week it is and that a given day is Pool Dude’s appointed visiting day. But by gawd, she does. On no other day of the week does she sit by the window, watching and waiting for the guy.

That little dog is so in love with Pool Dude. Why, I have no idea: he seems like an ordinary enough kind of a fella. But…???  Something about the man just delights this dog no end. And when he does show up…omigawd, the frenzy of Dawg Joy!

Oh, well. This uproar bestirs me to get off my duff, stumble into the kitchen, and reheat my mugful of coffee, long gone cold.

And that little journey reminds me that I need to get even further off my duff and make a grocery-store run.

…And… How do I not wanna? Let me count the proverbial ways…