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…as my father used to say. Things were

…colder than a bigawd
…hotter than a bigawd
…faster than a bigawd
…slower than a bigawd
…bigger than a bigawd

…and so on to infinity.

LOL! His language had a lot of dialectal characteristics. So I never knew whether one of his characteristic turns of phrase was something out of the Deep South, something from West Texas, some kind of translation from Choctaw, or…just an idiosyncrasy of his own.

Whatever…evidently there were quite a few quasi-divine figures, wherever he came from 😀

His mother’s people were Choctaw Indians, a group that migrated westward out of the Deep South as fortunes were to be made annihilating herds of buffalo in the central plains.

Interestingly, he had bright blue eyes, a characteristic I always imagined was inherited from his gringo father. But…come to find out: Choctaw people could be blue-eyed, too!  Who knew, eh?

At any rate…he indulged any number of entertaining dialectal turns of phrase. The opposite of colder than a bigawd, for example, would have been hotter than a two-dollar cookstove.

Just now, as we scribble, it’s colder than billy-be-damned out in the backyard. Not much warmer in here, either.

LOL!

The hour grows late. The human wears out.. And so… a-w-a-a-y!

Okay. This evening tore it: I ain’t a-goin’ back to our Sprouts, no way no how!

How many times do you have to be hustled over your plastic grocery bag to get sick of it?

How many times do you have to be panhandled in the parking lot to get sick of it?

How many times do you have to tell the cashier NO, you’re not paying for a plastic bag, before they’re allowed to be free?

Gaaaahhh!

Out the door, headed for the parking lot….there to be intercepted by a female panhandler. She ain’t takin’ “no” for an answer. I have to charge and push my way around her to get to my car. Manage to dodge into it, start the engine, and drive away from her, irked.

Yeah.

The plastic grocery bag: NO, I am not paying for a plastic bag. Therefore, NO, my groceries don’t get bagged. Therefore, packing the groceries out of the shopping cart into the back of my car delays my escape from the hustling panhandler.

True: we do not live in the greatest of neighborhoods. And true: the Sprouts parking lot is crawling with nuisances. (Not so much, the Albertson’s lot across the road: not since they hired an armed security guard to stand out there and watch the comings and goings.)

Should I know better than to shop at that Sprouts?

Yes.

But… It’s a drive to the next closest Sprouts; it’s coming onto dusk; I don’t wanna drive across the city in the dark to buy a few minor items. Yes, I could buy the stuff at AJ’s, just down the road or the Albertson’s across the street: for about three times what Sprouts charges.

Yet… {sigh} I’m afraid that after this I’ll be burning gas to shop at the Walmart on Dunlap, at the Sprouts on 20th Street, at the AJ’s on Camelback. Enough, after all, is enough.

…Than a neighbor’s kid?

😀

The young lesbians catty-corner across the street are outside with friends, along with a couple of absurdly adorable small children. EGAD, but I love other people’s kids!

Migawd, kids are wonderful!  But they’re particularly wonderful when you don’t have to put them to bed. Or haul them out of bed in the morning and drag them off to school.

LOL! This is why I absolutely positively would NOT want to live in Sun City, not ever again. True: I don’t want to work like a horse, ever again, taking care of the offspring. But I do get a hoot out of kids…especially the ones that belong to the neighbors.

One of the reasons my parents chose to retire to Sun City in fact was that my father hated the sound of children playing. He liked to take an afternoon nap (because he regularly worked a swing shift)…and few things annoyed him more than being kept awake by kids hollering.

And it wasn’t just that he disliked kiddie noise. He really, truly didn’t like kids. It’s kind of surprising that my mother was able to persuade him to have even one brat. But she insisted I was dearly, desperately desired.

Apparently that was so…yea verily, she had a series of miscarriages before I popped out. But after that, she seems never to have tried again.

Hmmmm…..

She was severely malnourished as a child growing up in New England. As  an adult, she had skeletal deformities that resulted from poor nutrition and lack of sunlight. So my guess is that she in fact did have a difficult time carrying a pregnancy to term.

I wonder to what extent (if any) her malnourishment as a child affected my development as a child and/or even my own pregnancy. Apparently a wide variety of effects occur, and many last for a lifetime. {sigh} Makes me feel horribly sad to think that my mother suffered the consequences of malnutrition because her grandparents lived on a dirt farm and couldn’t afford the amount or types of food needed for a kid to grow into a healthy adult.

At any rate… Other people’s kids, eh?

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

So there we are, Ruby the Corgi and I, strolling around the park, when we hear WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO melodramatically wailing from Conduit of Blight Blvd. Now what?

The choices are richly manifold:

• Apartment building on fire
• Single-family home on fire
• Business on fire
• Major car crash on one of the three-lane slabs running north and south
• Even more major car crash in an intersection
• Car cuts in front of light-rail train, gets crushed
• Moron walks out in front of light-rail train, gets smushed
• Bus crashes into light-rail
• Bus crashes into some other vehicle
• Mugger or some such criminal gets caught in the act; cops are called

Blech! So many other potentialities, one hasn’t the patience to list them.

Speaking of potentialities, my calendar says M’hjito is supposed to come over for dinner tonight. Dunno whether that’s the case, though: we haven’t talked about it today. And I dare not call him now, at quarter after four, while he’ll be mired in telephone hassles related to his job. Guess I should wait until after 5:00 to inquire.

Hope he is planning on it, though…’cause I’ve got piles of gorgeous things to feed him, marvels for his choosing: giant shrimp and fresh salmon steaks and on and on. If he has other ideas, though…well…all the more prawns for me, eh?

*****

Nope! Bowed out. he did.

Okay. I got shrimps. And shrimps. And shrimps! Mwa ha ha!

*****

Just made a little discovery: tinnitus — ringing in the ears — can be caused by alcohol.

Do I have tinnitus? Is the Pope (etc.)?  The ears ring and whistle and whistle and ring and ring and whistle and whistle and ring and ring and whistle and whistle and ring and ring and whistle and whistle and ring and …. Ad infinitum, not to say ad nauseum.

Well…uhm…ahem! I drink wine every day! I have one to two glasses of wine every day. Sometimes more than that, depending on what I’m eating and who I’m with.

So, as of this minute: we’re back on the wagon again….

It’ll be interesting to see if tee-totaling works.

Okay, okay! {grrrrrrr!} I take back this morning’s grousing about the lost lawn chair cushions, a crab-fest to which, mercifully enough, Funny’s readers were not exposed. Just a few minutes ago I found the “stolen” cushions in a back bedroom’s closet, where I’d tossed them to get them in out of the elements. And where, o’course, I’d find them easily, right?

/eyeroll/

Gorgeous, gorgeous afternoon! Sunny. Cool, but not quite cold. Even fairly quiet. It’s a miracle.

***

One of the joys of Old Age is that you forget things. Helle’s Belles, I’d forget my name if I didn’t see it just about every day. And this morning I forgot where the Helle I stashed the outdoor cushions.

Oh well. They’re found, and now I’m parked on one of them.

***

On the way home from this morning’s escapades, I once again took it into my feeble little head that maybe, just MAYBE, I’d like to move to some other neighborhood…

• Further away from the crime-ridden Sunnyslope district
• Further away from the accursed light-rail
• Closer to the beloved AJ’s grocery store, or
• Closer to the community college that will hire me if I wave my eyelashes in their direction
• A bit (tho’ not much) closer to M’Hijito’s house
• Closer to a dear friend’s house
• A very(!) short ambulance ride to not one but two first-rate hospitals
• And so on, damn near ad infinitum….

Soooo… It was out the door and into the Dog Chariot, therein to cruise lovely North Central Phoenix in search of open houses. And y’know what?

I did not see ONE HOUSE that was any better than this house. Most of them didn’t even come up to the level of this place, in terms of design, construction, and location.

What that’s tellin’ ya is that to get to a comparable or better house & neighborhood, I’d have to move to North Central or the Arcadia district. Neither of which I could even vaguely afford.

Sooooo…. It looks like either I’m stuck here for the duration, or I’m going to have to accept a sh!tload of undesirable compromises to move into a desirable centrally located neighborhood.

Guess which one is NOT gonna happen….