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Omigoodness! Just came in from a totally pointless, idle, and radically sentimental cruise of the Old Neighborhood.

It’s still there. It’s still called the Encanto neighborhood. It’s still beautiful. It’s still infested with the Young and the Upwardly Mobile, who seem to invest most of their money and their energy in fancifying and preserving the lovely old early 20th-century houses.

How I do miss it.

We left because I (ignorantly) imagined DXH (Dear Ex-Husband) would consent to put our son in the (excellent! top-of-the-line) Madison public schools if we moved north up Central Avenue into the Madison School District.

Wrong!

He refused to do so, and insisted on keeping the kid enrolled in the spectacularly expensive, annoyingly sosh’ private schools up there.

If I had known he would do that, I would never have lobbied to move up to North Central Phoenix. I hated the place and hated the snobs who infest it. Ultimately the stress from that move and my social exclusion from that fine exclusive company brought an end to the marriage.

Sorry. I’m just not lawyer’s wife material….  LOL! Born WT and always will be WT.

Ohhhh well.

Our old house is still there, looking much the same. Well maintained: whoever has it now must love it.

They did put a steel gate across the driveway: good move. Discourages the local bums and prospective burglars from entering the backyard via the west side of the house.

Wish we’d done that.

{sigh}

I did love the neighborhood. The reason we left was fear: the crime level was quite high. And we didn’t seem to be able to get away from it…

* The night Greta the Gershep caught a prowler in the living room, where he had just found me snoozing on the sofa (DXH had a deafening roar of a snore!). She chased the poor fella out the back door…I imagine he’s still running.

* The guy who tried to get in the side door as I was sitting in the adjacent room typing a seminar paper. I ran to the front door, threw it open, and screamed FIRE! FIRE!! FIRE!!! That brought out all the neighbors, excited to watch the house burn down, and scared the poor perp off down the alley.

* The sh!thead who tried to break in the front door as I stood there next to another German shepherd…whose presence didn’t even faintly faze the guy.

* The night my mother brought a pistol after I’d invited her to stay overnight. Yeah.

Well. No wonder, eh?

But still: it was such a pretty neighborhood, and the neighbors were such a delight, a constant delight.

We moved up to North Central: Snobsville North, as we might call it. I’m just too fragile a little blossom to survive hate, prejudice, meanness, and petty snobbery…the result being that the marriage didn’t survive them, either. How I came to hate that place!

And I guess the hate slopped over onto the marriage.

Encanto remains a beautiful neighborhood. And I found myself wishing we still lived there, were still married, were proceeding happily ever after.

Yeah. Right.

 

 

….i’ve ever seen!

Seriously (okay, not very)…this afternoon THE cutest young fella came up to me in the Safeway. A nifty-looking black gent, simply too, too handsome. He wanted to know which aftershave was most likely to appeal to his lady friend.

😀

How adorable can you get, eh?

{heh!} Yep: afraid i failed to explain to him that it was his incredible cuteness that would appeal… 😀 At random, recommended one or the ‘tother.

Let’s hope she appreciates him! <3

 

Another cozy warm afternoon in lovely Arizona.

All I wanted to do out there in the freakin’ backyard was pull the garden hose around to get water on the trees (whose automatic watering system has failed) and on the weed in the middle of the backyard (whose automatic sprinkler has failed) and on the roses in back (whose automatic sprinkler has failed).

Fail.

Fail.

Fail.

And fail.

Hotter than the hubs out there. No clouds in sight, but once again the air feels almost as humid as effin’ Saudi Arabia on the shore of the effin’ Persian Gulf.

Drag hose.

Drag hose.

Drag hose.

Drag hose.

Drag….

Sick and tired of DRAGGING. In the HEAT!

In front: can’t find sprinklers. Appears some worthy soul has stolen them. You can’t leave anything out front that’s not red-hot or nailed down. What is the MATTER with me that I don’t seem to be able remember that little factoid?

Senility, no doubt.

*****

5:00 p.m. give or take.

Some worthy has definitely stolen the sprinklers off the (walled!) front patio. So it appears, anyway. Another search led to no sign of the escapees. So I think it’s safe to assume they were purloined.

grrrrr! Too bad I can’t electrify the damn things.

So tomorrow I’ll have to schlep to the Depot or the hardware store and buy another couple of damn sprinklers.

I mean…jeez! It’s not like the things cost much! Dude! You can’t afford to buy your own damn sprinklers????

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to secure the things — to wire them in place, for example. So…it looks like if you don’t want your sprinklers stolen,  you have to disconnect them from the hose every time you finish watering and lock them inside garage.

Chilly afternoon: only 88 degrees at 5:40 in the afternoon. Brrr!!!!  We’re told the temp is supposed to go town to 70 tonight… YOW!  Get out the wool blankets!

😀

Somehow, I find that a little dubious. It certainly hasn’t been as allegedly “cool” as predicted today. Wunderground is predicting highs in the 70s throughout the upcoming week.

Yeah. Sure.

 

“…Leave us all enjoy it,” as the late Governor Jack Williams, that avatar of hickish literacy, used to crow on his morning radio show.

We have a chilly 80 degrees outside, with FORTY PERCENT HUMIDITY. Traipsing around the park with the dog was like spending 40 minutes in a sauna.

One good thing, though: not many other dog-walkers out there. That meant we got through the whole trip without a dog fight — neither real nor threatened. That was refreshing. I guess.

This — hot and soggy — is a typical day in Saudi Arabia. How my father (or any other Westerners) managed to survive TEN YEARS of physical, outdoor work in that Hellish climate escapes me.

Finally made it back to the house: the pooch very chipper, the human about to melt into the ground.

Meanwhile, during the entire trudge we were serenaded with an infernal RRROOOOOOOOAAAAAAARRRRRRRR from Luke Air Force Base. That place is a good 20 miles from here.

My mother, an inveterate John Bircher patriot, used to simper on about how that racket was “the sound of freedom” as she sat on her back porch in Sun City, listening to blasting jets over her morning coffee.

This is what keeps me from moving to the blankly middle-class realms of Fountain Hills, where the weather is cooler, you could walk to the Mayo Clinic, and you’re within ten minutes of Scottsdale’s infinitely superior shopping. Passenger jets from Sky Harbor take off in the morning, headed north over Fountain Hills, and land in the evening, headed south. People out there bellyache all the time that they can’t have their morning coffee over breakfast or their post-prandial wine after dinner — not on the back porches that they paid handsomely to buy.

Who would imagine that, as you’re shopping for a house, you need to look into the noise from commercial and military plane traffic?

ooohhhh well…

After 6 p.m., and the thermometer on the back porch — which has been in the shade all day — reads 95 degrees. That’s down considerably from the 100+ we’ve had all day.

Need to take the pooch for a walk…but I’m kinda afraid to do so. The pavement — especially the black asphalt on the roads — is likely to be so hot it will burn her little feet. I certainly couldn’t walk far on it without singing my soles So, dammit: I’m mightily undecided.

Waiting several hours won’t do much good: that asphalt stays hot into the middle of the night.

Shoulda taken her out as dawn cracked this morning…but was waayyy to lazy for that trick.

The low desert is lovely all winter, when Michigan and waypoints are under several feet of snow. But we pay for that during the summer.

My neighbor Marge rented an apartment in Prescott, a small town in the (relatively) high country. She’s taken to spending most of the summer there. Wunderground says it’s 78 up there now, slated to drop down to 59 (brrrr!!!!) tonight.

Well. That sounds loverly…but I don’t feel I can afford to rent quarters in some other burg to escape the Phoenix heat.

Well. I probably can. But I’m too cheap to do it. 😉

At any rate, the air conditioning has been pounding away all day. That kind of overwork worries the Proprietor: sooner or later the system will crap out, and then I’ll have to hire someone to fix it, to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. Or more.

In the meantime, while we wait for a repairdude to show up, it will get hotter than a damn oven inside the house.

LOL!

Take a look at THIS site: https://prabook.com/web/home.html

Here, I stumbled across a biography of a former colleague from Arizona State. It’s hilarious! He’s written the most spectacular encomium to himself. Makes it sound like he’s had a career on a par with a full professor at Harvard. The guy was adjunct faculty at Arizona State University’s provincial West campus, where he and I taught such august courses as “Writing for the Professions” — a.k.a. “Freshman Comp for Juniors and Seniors.” An underpaid and pointless waste of time.

Heh heh heh…I’ll have to dream up an ego trip for myself and post it at that site. 😀

Ever wonder why, years after the fact, you didn’t think of something that was obvious?

Something you missed because you blew off the circumstances without thinking about them? Well…lemme tellya…

My parents’ best friends — closest friends for most of their adult lives — went back to their home state, Texas, because my mother died. They’d come to (ghastly) Sun City to be near her, not near my father. And…when she died, they just plain abandoned him.

Then, speaking of that which is obvious, we have what killed her. Anyone who knew her and knew how much she smoked has to know what ailed her. Especially if that anyone knew anything about the symptoms of cancer.

Did she know?

Ohhh…on some level she must have.

She knew what cancer looked like: she nursed her own mother all along the road to mortality. But did she care? Seriously? Apparently not: she wasn’t about to do without one of the few small pleasures in her life just because it might kill her.

Well. I know what wine will do to me. But I continue to lap it up anyway. Wouldn’t have a dinner without it. On the other hand…I don’t do it 24/7…

****

She was the kind of right-winger who believed — sincerely — that if some pronouncement came out of the government, it was a lie whose purpose was to try to manipulate you. So, she studiedly ignored the steady stream of warnings about tobacco, and specifically about smoking the damn stuff.

Not surprisingly, then, the tobacco peddlers killed her — murdered, is the term I use for it. They knew what their product would do and they kept on selling it to people who were addicted to it. And by dint of money and influence, they contrived to keep the murderous stuff legal. It’s still legal…your kids may be killing themselves with it right now, as we speak.

Welp! I’ve gotta do with the wine (and the whiskey) what my mother should have done with the cigarettes. Maybe I can squeeze an extra few years out of my life… 😀