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Good Gawd! It’s only 105 out there, but it sure feels more like about 110 to 112. Probably because the humidity, sez Wunderground, is 24%.

Meanwhile, inside the shack with the air-conditioning pounding away, the thermometer next to the bed where the dawg and I are loafing reads 84 degrees. Balmy. The AC is laboring to drag the thermostat down to 80.

My power bill is gonna be astronomical…

Incredibly, the pool remains crystal-clear — some kind of miracle in this fine, algae-friendly heat. Thing is, I haven’t seen Pool Dude in the past two weeks.

No way in Hell that water could stay that clean all by its fine self. That says that PD is showing up when I’m not here, since Ruby goes BATSHIT with Corgi Joy whenever she realizes he’s here. So either he’s sneaking in during the night — very, v-e-e-r-r-y quietly, or somehow he’s arriving when I’m out. The latter is unlikely, since these days, between the heat and the plague, I don’t go out much. But then, the former is pretty unlikely, too.

At any rate, I just tested the water. It’s very high on chlorine. That suggests Our Hero has been at work.

The floater is full of tabs, and I haven’t put any in there. In this kind of heat, chlorine tabs dissolve quickly, so even though he’s dropping five or six tabs in there, they wouldn’t be THAT plump if he hadn’t shown up yesterday to refill the thing.

Welp, we can’t complain too much about Arizona’s summer heat and…absent monsoons. Good Lord! A million people back East without power. Power lines trapping the natives. Airports shut down. Tornado in Tennessee.

It’s supposed to warm up a bit next week…115 or so, come mid-week. Chance of the traditional late-summer monsoon rains: about nil.

When we say “hotter than the hubs of Hades,” we ain’t kidding. It’s 9:00 at night, and the thermometer on the back porch — in the shade all day, nestled among the leaves of an overgrown ficus plant — reads 110 degrees.

Yeah. That’s right: ONE HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES.

In the shade. All day.

The Wunderground site, my favorite weather predictor, is hung. But the last I looked, it seemed to be saying we could expect three-digit heat all night. The Accuweather site is more optimistic, predicting a balmy 89 degrees as a low, with 103 as the present temp, at 9:00 p.m.

People are dropping dead left and right. Here’s some poor fellow who fell over dead in the parking lot where I leave my car when I walk in the desert mountain park just to the north of the ‘Hood. I actually could walk to that place, but I’m too lazy.

Walking around the neighborhood suffices, especially when it’s 110 degrees out there. And…well, 110 degrees itself suffices to kill you.

This pretty young woman did herself in last Friday, walking on trails I go on several times a week during the winter.

And {ahem!} zero times a week during the summer.

Ruby and I did get out to perambulate the higher reaches of Upper Richistan, along about 5:30 this morning. Can’t leave much later than that: a two-mile stroll would occupy an hour, and that would get us back here around 6:30, way too late for comfort.

At this time of night — pushing 10 p.m. now — the pavement is still way too hot for Ruby to walk on. Early in the morning, the streets are still warm, but safe enough for us to walk around, at least for an hour or so.

Right now, I reckon, about all we can do is go to bed!

“Hot” in more ways than one.

This afternoon as I was idly cruising a neighborhood here looking for someplace to move away from the Romanian Landlord’s antics, what should appear to the south but a HUGE plume of  black smoke. It rose hundreds of feet into the air.

You could see it was a distance off: down by the riverbottom, probably, or at least in the industrial area of South Phoenix. So one hoped…not an apartment building full of poor folks.

Yea verily: it was in some kind of industrial yard. Apparently started as a grass fire and then spread to a warehouse. A half-dozen people were displaced from their mobile homes…unclear whether those vehicles were damaged, or whether people were evacuated for caution’s sake. Depending on what source you access, three or four firefighters ended up in the hospital (more photos!) with smoke inhalation….not too awful, considering that the city had 100 of them on the scene.

Meanwhile, the rest of the city is still cooking. Looks like we reached 111° this afternoon. Balmy!

As in “you have to be balmy to live here…”

 

Sleep. All I want is sleep.

Whatever that is, it’s in short supply. For sure!

Pool Dude is supposed to turn up about now. Ruby, who’s in love with him, has been standing guard at the windows, watching…watching…watching…  No sign of the guy.

Given the way things have been tooling along — “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” — this tardiness has several possible explanations…

* His truck is on the fritz
* Some other customer has a gigantic headache in their pool, slowing him down
* He’s been arrested and carted (back?) to the slam
* He’s sick or injured

It’s pretty clear that Pool Dude is an ex-con. A couple things he’s said indicated…shall we say, wisdom born of experience. And one of my friends has a son who (unjustly, IMHO) ran afoul of a (ridiculous!) law and spent several years at the prison in Florence. There’s a kind of style one develops that’s not hard to recognize. Plus of course, once you’ve enjoyed the state’s hospitality, it’s damn near impossible to get a decent job; so, you end up trying to build a business out of incidental, catch-as-catch-can work. That would be tree trimming…yardwork…pool cleaning…  Yeah.

If that’s the case with Pool Dude, it offers one potential explanation for his absence (if absence it is; not lateness): he may be back in the slam. {sigh}

Heh. In theory, you might make a pretty good living at pool cleaning. I pay him $80 a month for the basic routine clean-up & maintenance. He comes once every two weeks; that would yield $960/year per pool. Let’s say he does four pools a day, which could reasonably be as many as he could handle, when you add in the driving time. Working one day a week for four clients would give him $3840/year. Say he actually does this as a full-time business and so works five days a week: $3840 x 5 = $19,200/year.

That’s not very much, given that he supplies the chemicals — which ain’t cheap! — and has to deal with fuel and maintenance for his truck. Subtract those costs, and you get seriously not very much.

Hmmmm….  Well, I’ll give him til 10:00 a.m.  If he hasn’t shown up by then and he still isn’t answering the phone, I’ll drive over to Leslie’s and ask for a referral to one of their customers. Also put out a query on the neighborhood Facebook page.

The guy has been doing an incredible job.

a-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-d….

True to today’s Pattern of Frustration, OF COURSE… I go to look up  how much I’ve been paying him and see normally I pay him $110 a month. (Where did I get $80????? Ain’t senility grand? ) But the last time I gave him a check, it was for $40.

Huh??????  Why?

Jayzus! If I shorted him that much, no wonder he hasn’t shown up today!

Oh gawd what a mess!!!!!!!!!

The credit union’s website won’t let me into my online account. Apparently the password I have in my records is wrong. So I can’t get in to see whether I actually paid him a third of what was owed, or or whether I entered an error in my checkbook register.

Now I’ll have to wait till the credit union opens — 10 a.m. Schlep across town to get ahold of a live human being. Explain the predicament. Find out if I really DID pay him a measly forty bucks.

If so, I’ll have to grovel like mad. But if I did pay him his usual $110, then I’ll have to demand to know where the hell he is.

If he’s quit because I shorted him obscenely, then I’ll have to find a new pool dude.

Ohhhhh gawdlmighty! Just what I needed to make my day!

******

Hallelujah! It’s a miracle! For a change the mistake I made was in Sanity’s favor, not Satan’s.

Stan the Pool Dude on the phone: yes, I did pay him $110, not cleaning-lady wages. In fact, the $40 probably was for Luz, not for Stan.

Maybe the CU will tell me who that check was written to. If not…no huge hurry. I won’t have to fly over there like a rocket and arrive at their door the instant they open. That’s something. I guess.

Heh!

It’s only 8:00 in the morning. Whaddaya suppose is gonna happen NEXT?

Did you know a corgi can go on point? And will, enthusiastically!

It’s the weirdest silly thing you ever saw: A tiny, furry, little pointy-eared dog standing on point outside the shrubbery that Ratty just ran into. She also knows when Ratty is residing in the marjoram bed and occasionally will go on point without a chase.

In fact, the corgi apparently was bred specifically as a ratter: to harry the incidental wildlife that would take up residence on sailing ships.

She will not enter the shrubbery, though she probably would if I encouraged it. When Ratty decides to make a run for it, she chases the little gal like a rocket across the yard and into the cat’s claw vines.

It’s not clear that Ratty’s first instinct is to run or to hide. Roof rats are spectacular climbers. They will go right straight up a vertical wall at a dead run, without even slowing down. And that would be why the attic needs to be sealed thoroughly, or why poison baits should be scattered around the attic.

I’m not at all comfortable putting out poison, because…well, frankly, I’m afraid if Ruby finds a Ratty corpse and decides to chew on it, that will be the end of Ruby. Guess I’d druther have Ratty in the shrubbery than have no Ruby around the house.

One wonders, though…  Why do we think birds and chipmunks and squirrels are so cute around the backyard, but have such a phobia about roof rats? I mean…the critters really are just another species of wildlife. If they’re not chewing on the electric wiring (hey! seal up that attic, f’r hevvinsake), who cares if they’re ambling around the back yard, stealing birdseed and eating the cat food?

Heh…I failed to post yesterday’s fine entry. So that just went online. This one will, too, in a few minutes…assuming I don’t faint and fall on the floor first.

{boyoboy, how d’ye like that alliteration! Shoulda been a poet!}

It’s 7 in the morning. Ninety degrees in the shade of the back porch overhang. Ruby and I just got back from the morning doggywalk, an hour-long stroll through the outer reaches of Hell.

It would like to rain out there, evidently. The clouds are low enough…but they’re wayyyy too thin. If we get rain today, it won’t be till late afternoon. When it’s even hotter than it is now. Wunderground sez that’s 96 degrees — at seven in the morning!! — and predicts a high of 114.

Forest fires along State Route 87, the road to Payson — whereinat KJG and Mr. Fireman repaired for their retirement. Their kids are down here, so it’s possible that they’ve come down from the mountain and are staying with them. I hope.

Meanwhile, the town of Sunflower has been evacuated — the residents moved to a center out in Fountain Hills.

This morning when I let Ruby out for her first frolic around the back yard, what should I find but a RAT, caught in the trap I’d left unbaited on the back porch.

Since, unlike my son, I can’t bring myself to drown the poor little thang, I hiked him down the alley and tossed him out near a fine pile of debris. Now, as my son is given to saying angrily, he’s someone else’s problem.

b-a-a-a-a-a-a-d human!

Gerardo just called to inform me that he and his crew are on the way over here to fix a leaking pipe.

?????????

Thought they’d already done that! They dug up the ground on the east side and repaired the leaking pipe under there.

But…well…it looks like there’s some other leak out there. So let’s see if they can figure out what it is and fix it.

Meanwhile, I’ve had no breakfast and the cleaning lady will be here this morning and the last thing I need is Gerardo banging around all morning.

Let’s put this post on “hold” for a couple hours… Maybe I can at least bolt down a piece of toast before the guys show up. Ugh!

*****

Ehhh…just barely.

You have not seen a human being work until you’ve watched a Mexican trabajador work. My GOD, that man is just astonishing.

He dug and wrestled and wrestled and dug and dug and wrestled…all this digging and wrestling was going on in soggy, sticky mud. He found a stretch of busted pipe, which by dint of sheer strength he replaced.

Looks like the system is working now, at least in back. But as he pointed out, it’s old. Satan and Proserpine put in the system when they were here and doing their Happy Handyman thing. Gerardo pointed out that I’ve been in this house a good 10 or 15 years, meaning the system is older than that.

He thinks the whole system is gonna have to be replaced. And THAT is gonna be an expensive proposition.

Speaking of expensive propositions, AMEX called late last week to harass me. They claimed last month’s bill hadn’t been paid. I said it certainly had. They said it certainly hadn’t.

And NATCHERLY the credit union’s system wouldn’t let me into my account!!!!

So, goddammit, now I’ve got to get dressed and traipse across the city to the CU — in 115-degree heat — to try to find out WTF happened there.

I pay the American Express bills electronically. And assuredly I DID pay that statement — or at least tried to.

When the system blocked me from my account while I had the AMEX representative on the phone, it made me look like a shifty fool. So needless to say, I’m a bit peeved by this bit of bullshit.

After this, I’ll pay those bills with paper checks.