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SHOCKED, I tell you. Shocked! 

😀

This noon, I thought…gee, I’d like a bottle of beer to go with the orzo I’m planning to fix for a mid-day meal. Beer, or maybe a glass of wine.

Ohhhhhkayyyy….

Welp…I knew I was out of wine, and I feel uninclined to buy more just now. But…beer?

Yeah: beer:

There’s none left in the fridge.

DANG!

So…I figure I’ll walk down to the Albertson;’s and buy a six-pack.

Well.

In the first place, just now it’s HOTTER THAN THE HUBS OF HADES out there: A hundred degrees in the darkest shade of the north-facing back porch.

Caligula, my dear son, has my car imprisoned at his house. So to acquire this delicacy, I have to walk half an hour or forty minutes, back and forth, beneath Arizona’s finest noonday sun.

Hm.

So much for that idea.

I figure I’ll brew up some sun tea under the afternoon sun (add tea bags to a pitcher of water, cover, and set it out in the blasting heat for three or four hours). Meanwhile, I’ll be reduced to drinking (ecch!) water {shudder!!} or making hot tea and pouring it over ice for lunch.

Ech, though. Yech! is what I say to that.

So, yes! Let’s walk down to the nearby Albertson’s and buy a box of beer.

Uhm…shoofing on-line…

Just now, Albertson’s wants twenty-three bucks for 18 cans of Coors.

Got that?

Yeah: Almost $1.30 for a can of superbly mediocre beer. And you get to haul it home through the heat all by your dainty little self.

Hooooleeeee shee-ut!!!

****

Welp! One thing’s fer sher: I ain’t a-spending that kinda money on cheap beer!

Next time I’m in Costco, I’ll pick up a lifetime supply of whatever plonk they have on offer that’s not too indecent. Until then, we’ll be making do with water! If Costco’s plonk doesn’t rise to my elevated standards, we’ll be having iced tea with dinner after this.

Meanwhile — indeed, maybe henceforth, going forward — I don’t feel I should be expected to accept a bottle of plonk to go with my mid-day meal. Or my evening meal, either.

Pisseth me off! I really do resent not being able to have a modest swiggle of wine or beer with dinner. But y’know what?  Getting ripped off for the privilege pisseth me off even more!

I surely will miss my daily slurp of wine or beer with a nice meal. But y’know what? I resent getting ripped off even more than I’ll miss swiggling.

And so, dear booze manufacturers and sellers: BYE!!

 

 

{chortle!} Here we are, back home from the morning Doggy Walk, right along about 7:30 a.m. A little hot & muggy, but not too bad this morning

Yesterday: it was a swamp out there.

Still no sign of Pool Dude. Dayum! I do hope he’s not back in the slam.

I’ll try to call him on and off during they day. If he doesn’t answer…well then, time to find a new Pool Dude.

Darn it! He’s a sweetie, so I hate to lose him, Most of those guys, as it develops, are ex-convicts. Turns out that pool maintenance is one of the careers for which our wise gummint fathers train convicts. So if you hire a pool dude, chances are you’re hiring a record with him.

And chances are he won’t last long in the job.

***** Ooops! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! *****

WTF?????? It ain’t Monday. Forcrissake, it’s SUNDAY!!!!

Jeez. Who knew?

LOL! apparently Pool Dude knew! 😀

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

Strolling around the rather pretty ‘Hood: houses built in the 50s to the 70s take on a “historic” look in these parts. So I was reminded of our beloved 1923 house in the historic Encanto neighborhood, a home and a neighborhood I miss to this day.

Gosh, I loved that beautiful old place.

Dear Ex-Husband moved us out of there, to a large degree by telling me we would take our son out of the brain-banging expensive private school where he was going (public schools in Encanto are out of the question) and putting him in one of the perfectly acceptable public schools in North Central.

Turns out he had NO INTENTION of doing so!

And that little deception was one of several factors that led to the end of the marriage.

Truth to tell, even though I loved our gorgeous home and our beautiful historic neighborhood, I didn’t feel safe in Encanto. But frankly i don’t think there are many places where women feel safe. One of our most memorable Encanto adventures occurred when our German shepherd awoke in the middle of the night and EXPLODED into a rage. Roaring like a banshee, she shot up the hallway, where she chased a poor, hapless prowler out of the house.

Then we have the fact tat, bein’ white trash myself, I did NOT fit into tony North Central. One of the bitch neighbors there actually said to me, in casual conversation, that they thought it was such a shame we moved in there, because our presence ruined the neighborhood.

No kidding!!

At least in Encanto, the neighbors were polite to the White Trash.

Oh well. Hereabouts, the question of the day (or of the decade?) is whether I’m going to be able to stay here in my beloved little palace, or whether I’ll be forced to move into one of those dreadful old-folkeries. My son is already yammering about locking me up in one of them, an institution called the Beatitudes.

Ugh! How would I prefer to be dead? Let me count the ways.

I might manage to persuade him to lock me up in the jail of my father’s choice, a single-story spread here in North Central, called Orangewood.

It’s actually not a bad place. My father moved there after my mother died. He was spectacularly miserable there…but not because of the institution itself. What made him miserable was marrying a bi*ch named Helen, who really was…ahem…well…a hag of the first water.

If he hadn’t married Helen, he probably would have been OK there…even very fine. But he’d been married to my mother for something over 30 years. So in his mind “normal” people lived in marital bliss. For a man to live alone without a female helpmeet apparently struck him as abnormal, possibly even bizarre.

Unfortunately, what was “bizarre” was Helen. And their relationship was truly grim, at least from his point of view. He refused our suggestion that he divorce the bi*ch, moaning She’ll get all my money!!! 

The horror of it, eh!

Unfortunately, the horror was being married to Helen, who was one of the meanest human beings I’ve ever met.  He was so miserable with that hag that he used to…oh, get this! If it weren’t so grim, it would be hilarious:

He would tell her he was taking the car to be worked on at the Ford dealership. No kidding!

Then he would go outside to the parking lot, climb into the car, and sit there reading all day long!

After he realized that was a bit transparent, he would drive the car up to one of the city’s many canals, park near a hiking trail, and do the same: just sit there and read all day long!

Ohhh well.

Speaking of “all day long,” I need to quit the endless scribbling and head on over to the Sprouts.  Outta here!

Wherever you are, you can’t get there from here…eh? Altogether too often, working with  computer is like that. Argha! For unknown reasons, WordPress decided to hang Funny about Money. Why? UNKNOWN. Dorked around with it, and presto-changeo! Up it comes. Why? UNKNOWN.

Darn it. I guess I’m too sick and tired of this li’l game to continue.

Tomorrow, folks!! <3

 

Jeez, these damn computers just leave you confounded.

Funny appeared to be off-line. Not visible in Firefox’s alleged FaM web page. ARRRG! Another computer hassle.

But?????  Now I get online, click in the address line, and damned if the thing doesn’t come right up. Whaaaa?

Ohhhhh well.

Where were we?

Screwèd, screwèd, & gescrewèd . That’s where. I GIVE UP!!!!!!!

I’d druther not do….

Auuughhhh!

Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, throwing herself around like a low-flying rocket. Forgodsake, it’s after 5:00 p.m.!!! Does the woman EVER come to a stop????

Seriously: she showed up sometime after 4 p.m., all primed to take on the Funny Farm.

This would be fine if she’d showed up sometime after, ohhh…say 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. But at the end of the day? Not. So. Much.

This afternoon M’hijito dragged me to the Mayo Clinic, NOT my favorite place to spend half the goddamn day. Pestered and pestered and pestered some more by doctors and nurses and medical assistants, on and on and on. All I wanna do when I get home is sit down. Then fix some dinner and sit down some more to eat it.

But ohhhhhh no! Here’s our honored (extraordinarily honored!) cleaning lady, banging around and banging around. She showed up a few minutes after I got home. It’s now after 5:30 p.m., and she’s still banging around.

Lordie!  Where DOES that woman get her energy???  

She’s cleaning a bathroom now…having changed the sheets and hauled the vacuum around and…on and freakin’ on. 

Arrgha. 

Okay, so the dishes are in the dishwasher, which is clanking along. The house is more or less picked up (my part of the job). My fingers hurt where the nails are peeling off their quicks. The rags are collecting in the clothes washer, preparatory to an hour’s worth of running through that contraption.

Forgot to turn the hose on into the pool. Run outside and crank up the spigot. Not too badly evaporated…that’s something, I reckon.

This must be the third house Luz has cleaned today. At $80 per shack, that’s TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY DOLLARS A DAY!

Criminey. I never made that kinda money with a Ph.D. and gawd only knows how many years of university & community college teaching experience.

Hm. If she cleans three houses a day, five days a week, that’s…. MIGAWD! That’s $1200 a week!  $4800 a month.

Jayzuz!

Now of course, I didn’t leave the campus at 6 or 7 p.m. after a full day’s work…uhhhhh….waitwait! Yes, I surely did. Often I left at 10 p.m. And then when I got home I had a pile of nitwitted student papers to read.

Hm. 

Truth to tell, when La Maya and I were working out there, we considered — slightly more than halfway seriously — starting a cleaning service. And y’know…we might have had something. We would have earned the same amount we made teaching, only in many fewer hours. And we never would have had to read a bird-brained or plagiarized stoont paper.

On the ‘tother hand…. It does have to be said that I truly, deeply, passionately HATE cleaning house. And you can be sure I would’ve hated cleaning up other people’s filth even more than I hate cleaning up after myself.

Yea verily: when I say there are 87 berzillion things I’d druther do than clean house…I ain’t kidding!

But…hmmmm….. I don’t suppose teaching idiot composition courses is one o’ those things….

When you move to Sun City?  Well…yeah. Life goes on: that’s what happens.

😀

SDXB (Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend, for you newcomers) moved out there, where he took up with the excellent NG (New Girlfriend), a truly nifty lady. And y’know…the truth is, for him Life Has Gone On in full, lovely glory. Talk with him and you can tell:  This is a happy  man. 

He sounds content, pretty much full of life, active…stuff is going on and he’s going on with it. NG is a neat lady: very smart, very practical, very polished.

She did bang up against one of the Hazards of Old Age: hip surgery.

Argh!!!

But she’s coping. Not just coping, but coping magnificently: back on her feet, hobbling around, soon to be bouncing around. Like SDXB, she’s moderately athletic, and it’s pretty clear that before long she’ll be back to hiking and bicycling and whatnot.

My parents dragged me to Sun City when they decided to retire to Arizona while I was still in high school. That became my last K-12 year, and so I did finish out the 11th grade in California. They contrived to get me admitted to the University of Arizona at the end of my junior year in high school — which was kind of a relief, because I was bored stupid in that California school. In Tucson, I quickly melded into the National Honor Society and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the UofA.

*** Ohhh M GEEE***

Absolutely positively THE cutest, most charming young Black fella just showed up at the door! He’s peddling window accouterments. You’ve never met a more adorable gent in your life!

😀

Seriously: One of the most ingratiating characters I’ve met in years.

And the truth is, he’s got a shot at making some sales. My house has new windows (plus I’m pretty much pitch-proof, being the old cynic that I am). But these houses were built in the early 70s, and the original windows and sliding doors were pretty much…well…junk. Single-paned, flimsy, and more spectacularly NOT weather-proofed than you can imagine. If he visits enough homeowners here, especially if he goes into the slightly older tract on the north end, he’s gonna make some sales.

So I had to wish him luck — couldn’t resist — because he was such a charmer.

😀 😀 😀

Lordie. How can you NOT love young people?

Most of them, anyway.

***

LOL! So what DOES happen when you do or don’t move to Sun City?

Well. First off, in Sun City you get moved into a cheaply built cinderblock house. Insulation? We don’t need no steenking insulation!

And the truth is, when the tract was first built out, most of the residents didn’t. Because…very few of the new natives opted to stay in Arizona over the summer.  Most of them came from the Midwest: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota…and waypoints. They would go “home” during the summers, staying either with friends & relatives or in places that they’d kept for the purpose.

That wasn’t my parents’ style. O’course, to begin with, they had no “home”: my father was a Merchant Mariner, which translated to an endlessly peripatetic life. Except for the 10 ugly years we spent in Saudi Arabia, they really never came to light anywhere more than about two years. I was 12 when they came back to the States. Between the 7th grade and the 11th grade, we lived in four different apartments, two in San Francisco and two in Southern California.

Once they got settled in Sun City, they were…well, deep in the depths of contentment. My mother thought that place was just the best thing that ever happened. My father went back to sea for a year or two: not out of choice, but because a recession raped his retirement savings.

My mother, having succeeded in smoking herself to death, croaked over within a few years. Visceral cancer is a peculiarly ugly way to go: don’t smoke. If you already do, forgodsake QUIT IT.

She was the love of his life, no question of it. When she died, his heart was broken. He sold the sweet little house in Sun City and moved into an Old Folkerie. Probably would have been content enough if he’d left well enough alone..but…of course he couldn’t, any more than you or I could. Once he got re-settled in the old-folks’ prison, he married the redoubtable Helen: a hideous mistake. The rest of his life was spent on the cusp of utter misery.

Here in the wide-open spaces of North Central Phoenix: You get moved into a house that very well may have been built by the same developer who built out Sun City. 😀

That’s true of my shack.

The construction here is somewhat better: the house does have a little insulation, anyway. The yards have walls (no: they don’t in Sun City). About 80% to 90% of the houses have pools. And you’re within walking distance of several desirable-enough stores: a Sprouts, an Albertson’s, a Fry’s, a wine peddler, an El Rancho, a Basha’s, and on and on and on….

The truth is, my son’s having absconded with my car (he thinks he’s protecting me from myself…heeeee!) makes virtually no difference in my comfort and lifestyle. Well…no…what it does do is provide a good healthy dose of pleasant exercise: walking to those stores takes me through four very nice neighborhoods. 😀

And…yes…I’m afraid it’s true: I love it here. Despite the crime level (Sunnyslope, the district just to the north of us, is Crime Central), I don’t feel especially at risk (that’s why you have a dog, no?). The amenities are excellent. Buses and trains run up and down the main drags. If you like city life, it’s damn near a perfect place to live. Two major hospitals are within easy ambulance distance. The socioeconomics are solidly middle-class. Really: it couldn’t be better.