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What was I saying about it never staying hot & muggy in Arizona long enough to make you crazy?

Uh oh! Here come the white coats!

Apparently my marbles had slipped out my ears when I wrote that squib… It is so hot and so gooey out there that it indeed does feel just like Saudi Arabia. I can’t remember the weather here ever being this bad. And it’s only July: normally a hot and dry period. Yes, hot, but because of the dessication, not usually all that uncomfortable. Just now, at 8:25 in the morning, it’s overcast and 98 out there, with 20 percent humidity.

Twenty percent of the air is water? Eeek!  😀

Silliness aside, it really does look strangely grim out there.

***

Waiting for M’hijito to come pick me up. We’re off to the Mayo today, where I expect to be adjudged mentally incompetent, in the not a joke department.

Yes. My son has decided I’m non compos mentis, and he’s been dragging me out there for all sorts of pointless, fruitless, time-wasting meetings.

A day ago, I found myself sitting beside a doctor and being catechized on how to use an appointment calendar.

No joke! They give their brain-dead clients a stupid little calendar with dates, lines to enter reminders, and little squares to check off things you’ve somehow, miraculously remembered to do. This woman sat me down and guided me through every step of how to enter an appointment, and how to find an appointment, and how to check it off the list. Seriously. I had sit through a half-hour catechism on how to use a calendar.

I have a calendar in my office that keeps track of all appointments and to-do’s. A whiteboard on my office door that lists the current day’s to-do’s. And another whiteboard in the kitchen that lists things like workmen to call and grocery/household items to buy at the store. Extra reminders for the most urgent tasks appear on a pad on the refrigerator. Sorry: but I don’t think I need a fourth to-do list.

Explaining to her that I do not carry a purse in which to lug her marvelous notebook and that I am not about to start carrying a purse did not make so much as a tiny dent in the woman’s determination.

Jayzus! What a bore, and what a waste of time.

Today we go to a weekly time-wasting group where we sit there for an hour listening to brain-withered oldsters natter on about how they forgot where they put their shoes!

No joke. That is exactly what we heard in the last meeting.

What makes this even more annoying is that the Mayo is almost an hour’s drive from here. So the round trip blows away well over 90 minutes on the road…almost two hours wasted for the privilege of wasting an hour on the Mayo’s campus.

I’m finding this very frustrating.

Okay. okay….. Yes, I did finally get through first edits of the client’s book manuscript — the project I was trying to focus on whilst being forced to sit through three hours of whinging by marble-short old folks at the Mayo Clinic.

Sent that off to him last night. But…hmmmm…. Yeah: BUT… If he goes through with his plan to self-publish the thing, IMHO he needs to hire a graphic designer. I can edit copy, but a page designer, i are not!

And the truth is, it’s a very interesting book. I think he should run it past a few mainline and academic publishers before he tries to self-publish it. Yea verily…  I may ask my editor at Columbia if they’d take a look at the thing.

Well…let’s see how he responds to the pile of edits I just dumped over his head, pore fella. If he copes, then I’ll suggest we write a proposal and fling it at a few book publishers.

***

Hotter than the Hubs of Hades here today — as it has been for the past two or three weeks. Today it’s more humid and sticky than I can ever remember in Arizona.

The pooch and I shot out the door as dawn cracked, hoping to grab a doggy-walk before the park got too crowded (it being Saturday, all the dog-walkers are out in force) and then get back before it got too hot.

FAIL!

Holeee doggerel, it feels like Saudi Arabia out there.  Hot as Hell, and so wet you can hardly inhale the heavy air.

Okay, okay: I will say, it’s not as hot as Rasty Nasty. Noooo, not even as hot as you could expect it to get here as the day wears on. But the thick air made it feel mighty uncomfortable out there.

My favorite neighbor bought herself a place in Prescott as a summer escape. And I must say: that idea looks better and better to me.

Don’t know whether she bought a house, or whether it’s an apartment. To my mind, the Big Drawback is that I don’t wanna have to take care of another piece of property. One house, two yards, and one pool are quite enough, thankee. Even an apartment still has to be kept clean and safely maintained. Ugh: more work, more $$$.

And y’know…it snows in Prescott. I really don’t like driving on icy roads. And given a choice between freezing in the winter and melting in the summer, I think I’ll take the annual melt-down.

Hey. Rasty Nasty used to get so humid during the summer that when you woke up in the morning, you’d see water dripping off the eaves as though it had just rained. Nope: no clouds.

In fact, one day it did get so humid there that, as I was playing in the front yard, rain started to pour down on me out of a clear blue sky.

What a horrible place….

One thing you can say about Arizona: even though it can get miserable, it never STAYS miserable long enough for you to learn to hate the place. Most evenings — probably 90% of them — cool down to a more-than-tolerable temp.

Jeez. Ninety degrees in the shade, overcast, and raining.

Well. Sprinkling: more like threatening rain.

But the overall effect is Hotter’n The Hubs of Hades.

This is the way Arabia was most of the summer. Here, we only get a few days of it. There, we got three months of it.

How my father and his colleagues were able to work outdoors down on those docks escapes me. What a HORRIBLE way to make a living!

He subjected himself to it because he figured that between the more-than-decent pay and the fact that ARAMCO covered the cost of housing and transportation, he’d be able to retire about 10 years early.

And he did. Unfortunately, not bein’ the most sophisticated guy on the planet, he didn’t understand about inflation. So after he had “retired” (so he thought) and moved to Sun City, he had to go back to work. Ugh!

At least he was shipping out of Long Beach, not piloting tankers around Ras Tanura’s sauna-like harbor.

We didn’t have real air-conditioning out there. The company provided a kind of makeshift evaporative cooling: They pumped cold water through underground pipes that traversed the camp and came up into each home, where a whole-house blower would blast air over the relatively cool pipes and then into the house. This would work well if you were close to where the water came in to the housing tract. We, however, were not. 😀

Wouldncha know, eh?

My mother, who grew up in upstate New York and then later in Berkeley, California, suffered vocally in the heat. Me, I knew nothing any different, so most of the time it didn’t bother me.

But there on the shore of the Persian Gulf, the air was SOOO HUMID that it could rain out of a clear blue sky. You’d wake up in the morning — especially in the summers — to see water dripping off the eaves as though it had rained during the night. No…it had not rained.

We have no fake rain here this morning…but still. The air is thick.

Took Ruby for her morning perambulation around the park. What a zoo that place is when everybody and their little brother are out there tromping around — most of them walking dogs. It really is a nuisance to have to make your way around a dog every ten yards. I swear.

Often literally swear. The idiots who simper “ohhhh don’t worry! They just want to plaaaayyyy” are the ones that drive me craziest. That was a favorite line when they would bounce up to the German shepherd. Nooo, dear Moron. My dog doesn’t want to playyy with your dog. She wants to rip your dog’s throat out. 

Anyhow, this place is alarmingly like Ras Tanura this morning — weather-wise. Wunderground predicts a high of 106 today. Humidity is 54%. Chance of rain: 12%.

Garden spot…

The morning clock has not hit 6:30. The hound and I have just returned from circumnavigating the park, dodging this dog and that idiot through 92-degree heat enhanced by 33% humidity. Hotter than the Hubs of Hades.

That, mercifully, kept some of the park’s Dog Parade traffic down. So I didn’t have to drag Ruby out of any fights. That’s something, anyway.

WHY are people soooo stupid about their dogs? If I have to hear “ohhh, they just wanna pwaaayyyy” one more time, I’m gonna set my dog loose on their effin’ fur-baby.

It’s not your kid, stupid! It’s a DOG! A highly evolved wolf. It doesn’t wanna pway. It wants to kill. Idiot!

It’s so hot and wet out there, it almost feels like lovely Saudi Arabia, down by the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Ahhhh yes. Where the humidity would be dripping off the eaves like rain when you got up in the morning. Where rain could start falling out of a clear blue sky. Lovely.

Usually I try to get out of the house by 5;30, before the dog parade gets into full swing. But we missed it by ten or fifteen minutes — plus in this heat the dog-lovers probably are leaving their homes a little early, too, trying to get out before the serious warmth comes up. The park wasn’t yet completely overrun, but still we had to keep to the sidewalk to avoid confrontation.

Bunch of soccer players were out there practicing. It’s always a hoot to watch those guys. How they can charge around the way they do in this heat: that escapes me.

Better get up and jump in the pool to cool off. And so…urk! Awaaayyyy!

Three forty-five in the afternoon and it’s 115 degrees in the shade of the back porch.

A friend of mine heard from her son, who’s serving time in the state prison for diddling a chippie (yes…that unkind description DOES fit) who was three days under the age of consent when her mother walked in on them. (Apparently bringing a naïve and horny kid home while Mom was out had become something of a hobby for the young lady — she had a fake ID and used it for hanging out in bars). Mom, who had in the recent past told her little Boopsie to quit doing that, called the cops and the young man — a college freshman — arrested…for child molesting!

Yeah.

Along about noon today, he told his mom, over the phone, that the temp inside his cell was 114. Apparently inmates’ relatives have been on the horn with the warden, who says there’s not a thing he can do about it.

Oh well…  Here at the Funny Farm, we have the hose running on the bedding plants…and see that the backyard hose is turning to mush. Its surface is…squishy. Squishy and sticky.

Apparently it’s shot. I should go up to the HD and order another hose. But…my GAWD i don’t wanna go driving around in this heat to get another damn hose.

At Amazon reviews of this type of hose are wildly mixed. This does nothing to enthuse me about ordering another one.

ogawdogawdogawd….

Adding to my friend’s angst over her (wildly unjustly!) imprisoned son, when we got back to her place this afternoon, she couldn’t find her little pet dog!

Ohhhhhhhforgodsake.

We searched and we called and we hollered and we called and we searched and…just as we were giving up, the pooch surfaced.

Talk about your Days from Hell. My poor pal!

You understand…115 in the shade isn’t THAT hot here. It’s surely not out of the ordinary for a July afternoon. Except for those big towering white clouds building up to the north and the east. Yep: we got humidity on top of the spectacular heat.

And that indeed DOES make for a miserable afternoon.

{Chortle!} I was gonna title this post “Memories of the Ridiculous and the Weird.” 😀

Idly daydreaming, I happened to cast what remains of my mind back to the time when my mother and I moved from San Francisco (where I went to junior high school) to Long Beach, California (where a change of jobs meant a change of seaports for my father).

My goodness. What a weird time.

When we got back from Arabia, I was in the sixth grade — and literally years ahead of my new San Francisco classmates, who themselves were in a pretty tony, pretty high-octane school.

At Ras Tanura’s American school, there were only about 15 kids in my grade — give or take a couple. Stuck on the shore of the Persian Gulf, we didn’t have a lot to distract us from our studies, and even if we did…the studies were pretty darned basic.

After my mother persuaded my father to let her and me go home (the excuse being that I was too sickly to stay out there any longer in Hell By The Seaside) (sickly: yes, that was pure, handsomely engineered bullshit), we settled in San Francisco, within walking distance of a California State University campus. This university prided itself on its college of education, and in connection with that august institution, it ran a K-6 school in Parkmerced, the apartment development where we settled.

What incredible luck!

The school was well in advance of most American public schools — at least, of those in California — and not only did I have the head start of spending six years in the high-test grade school in Ras Tanura, I also got several years of private, one-on-one tutoring on the theory that I was too sickly (heh!) to continue going to class with the little beasts that inhabited the company school.

By the time we got back to the States, I was far ahead of my contemporaries in the Parkmerced school (who were far ahead of their own stateside contemporaries), so I happily loafed my way through the last vestiges of grade school and then bounded into a more-than-half-way-decent San Francisco junior high school.

It was there that I got it into my pea-brained little head that I must grow up to be an astronomer.

* Nevvermind that girls did not go into science in the 1950s.

* Nevvermind that math was not my thing.

* Nevvermind that language and writing absolutely, obviously, spectacularly were my thing.

No one cared, because girls didn’t need any of those things to cook Jell-O, raise kids, and sew shirts. So I proceeded toward my destiny.

Nevertheless, I did insist in taking what was then called “five solids”: five courses with actual substance, rather than a combination of things like dance, P.E., sewing, cooking, and whatnot with the non-negotiable required courses in math, foreign languages, and English.

*****

After a couple years, my father changes jobs, and now he’s sailing out of Southern California. My mother and I move to Long Beach (don’t ask!) so as to be closer to where he came in to home port.

Turns out the public schools in San Francisco were superior to those in Long Beach by HUGE orders of magnitude.

Suddenly, I hit the National Honor Society without bestirring my little brain. My grades were in the stratosphere. AND…and I was fluent in French, the language I’d chosen as part of my high-school requirements.

Fluent, that is, compared to the teacher in the new high school.

No kidding. The poor woman was trying to teach French, but she didn’t speak French!

heeeeeee!

Before long, she figured out that I did…and before long after that, she had me teaching the class!

No kidding. At the age of about 14, I’m teaching sophomore-level French to my astonishingly ignorant little contemporaries in a Southern California high school!

Ahhh, the state of American education.
What a place!

This went on for two or three years, until my father had a brilliant idea: he could use my cleverness (and six years of REAL basic education in Saudi Arabia) to get himself out of his hated job and into retirement in low-rent Arizona, where he figured he and my mother could afford to live even if he retired early.

So they break out the typewriter and shoot off a letter to the University of Arizona (no, they didn’t know where that was, other than that it was in the state where their coveted destination of Sun City existed), suggesting that the UofA should accept their brilliant child a year before she finished high school.

To their astonishment, forthwith came a reply: Why shore! Send her right along!

Sheee-ut!

Sooo, it was off to Tucson, wherein resided the University of Arizona…without ever having dipped a toe in a calculus class or in whatever California taught in fourth-year high-school math and science classes or in a final year of French or…godlmighty.

Next forthwith: a Phi Beta Kappa key. (eyeroll) Ohhhh well. WhatEVER.

Meanwhile, my mother’s lifetime best friend, a lumbering 300-pound woman named Anna (no kidding: Anna’s real weight was unknown because no scale would measure that high) resided in Long Beach, overseeing the rearing of her semi-delinquent grand-daughter. This — the overseeing — because her own daughter, Ingrid, was not at all up to raising kids.

Ingrid was…well…stupid. Yes: that’s the only word for her. I think, in retrospect, she was probably mentally retarded, to coin an offensive old-fashioned term. She was, however you want to put it, non compos mentis.

Her daughter grew up batsh!t crazy, probably because Ingrid had no clue how to bring up a child. Why? I cannot imagine…other than that poor Ing was none too bright.

Her daughter — Roberta — was quite bright, though. Bright and mightily deprived of the advantages that somehow I contrived to get. So…as she surfed into adolescence, she ran amok!

You can imagine the opportunities for smug gloating this predicament afforded my mother. 😀 Gawd help us.

***

Anna: she was no mere ordinary woman. She was a wonderful woman.

A trapped woman. As working-class women were, in that generation.

What possessed America to waste SO much human potential?