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The Human and the Dog should get off their respective duffs and trot around the neighborhood.

Really: there’s no excuse for evading it. Except…

except…

except…

Well…I don’t wanna!

Yeah. the Human is toooooo freakin’ lazy to get off her duff and stroll a mile or two around our (truly) garden spot.

It is a GORGEOUS morning, balmy with a light breeze, high patches of filmy cloud, no appreciable smog. Saturday rush-hour traffic is about over, so it’s quiet and lovely.

That notwithstanding: mostly what the human wants to do is crawl back in the sack and sleep for another hour or two. 😀 Talk about lazy!

If we wait much longer, it’ll be too hot for walking on concrete and asphalt.

But…but…do I care?

*********

This post crashed. Came back up a few minutes ago…just having crashed the current post I was working on.

WTF???????????

And speaking of “crashed,” a Toyota repairman is out there in the garage wrestling with the tank.

Speaking of “jobs we’re glad we don’t have…”

So far, this is been a pretty dreadful day.

If it can break, it breaks.

If it can bankrupt me, it runs up a gigantic bill.

 

Ugh!  The dog and I: just back from an hour+ perambulation of the neighborhood park. Serenaded every damn step of the way with ROAR ROAR ROAR  blasting out of Luke AFB’s jet planes.

When we lived in Sun City, my mother used to start each day sitting on her screen porch, sipping coffee and listening to the interminable ear-splitting blast from those F-15s, which would start the day at dawn and scream on for several hours.

“Ohhhhh,” she would simper, “it’s the sound of fweedom!”

Uhm…no, muther… That’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way.

Fortunately, it hasn’t arrived yet.

But don’t worry. It will. It will.

That air base is a good 20 miles away from the ‘Hood — or more. But the blast of the jet engines sounds like the damn things are in our backyard.

Anyway, that turned a clear, clean afternoon stroll into something kinda…grody. Noisy. Loud. Threatening. Scary if you have even a clue what those things are intended to do.

                                                       Horrible creature, the human animal…

Wow!

Really: there is only one word for the woman: WOW!

Luz, the Cleaning Lady from Heaven, just walked out the door…7:30 at night.

She has been here ALL AFTERNOON AND INTO THE EVENING. And no joke: not once has she sat down or even slowed down.

What an amazing person!

The house is beyond spotless. It’s after sunset, and the darn place is glowing in the dark.

Can’t even imagine how she does it. She must be dead exhausted by the time she gets home. Back at her house, she has a family to wrangle…wow! Let’s just hope they know how to fix dinner for her!!

Next week I must give her some kind of gift. But…what???

How about this: a $100 gift certificate for the best Mexican food restaurant in town?

{By and large, a good Mexican restaurant here is far and away superior to most other eateries in these parts…}

That would be enough to treat her whole family…and give her a mightily well earned break from banging around a kitchen.

Tomorrow let us trot around town to confirm where the best chow lines are. Then by the time she comes back for another day of ungodly labor, we’ll have something to show in appreciation.

WHAT a woman!!!!

Jeez. Can’t complain about the jet engine racket emanating from Luke Air Force Base this morning. Nope.

Over on the opposite side of the Valley, we have the vast commercial airport locally known as Sky Harbor. Passenger and cargo jets roar in and out of there pretty much nonstop. It’s 9 in the morning, and the eastside sky has been blasting away since before dawn.

ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR R-R-R-R-RO-O-O-O-O-A-A-A-R!!!!!!!!!!!

Yep: nonstop.

What a place!

***

If my son didn’t live here and if I could afford to move, where would I go?

Dunno: Mars, maybe?

Not many choices, really. As a species, humans are addicted to loud, constant noise. So I kinda doubt you could find anyplace on the globe — short of deepest Antarctica — where peace and quiet are staples.

Hmmm….  How d’you suppose the cave men generated the kind of racket native to humans? Sat around the campfire and howled, maybe?

What does a baying great ape sound like, anyway?

Oh! I know!!! Like this:

R-R-R-O-O-O-O-O-O-A-A-A-R-R!!!!!

😀

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.