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I’d druther not do….

Auuughhhh!

Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, throwing herself around like a low-flying rocket. Forgodsake, it’s after 5:00 p.m.!!! Does the woman EVER come to a stop????

Seriously: she showed up sometime after 4 p.m., all primed to take on the Funny Farm.

This would be fine if she’d showed up sometime after, ohhh…say 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. But at the end of the day? Not. So. Much.

This afternoon M’hijito dragged me to the Mayo Clinic, NOT my favorite place to spend half the goddamn day. Pestered and pestered and pestered some more by doctors and nurses and medical assistants, on and on and on. All I wanna do when I get home is sit down. Then fix some dinner and sit down some more to eat it.

But ohhhhhh no! Here’s our honored (extraordinarily honored!) cleaning lady, banging around and banging around. She showed up a few minutes after I got home. It’s now after 5:30 p.m., and she’s still banging around.

Lordie!  Where DOES that woman get her energy???  

She’s cleaning a bathroom now…having changed the sheets and hauled the vacuum around and…on and freakin’ on. 

Arrgha. 

Okay, so the dishes are in the dishwasher, which is clanking along. The house is more or less picked up (my part of the job). My fingers hurt where the nails are peeling off their quicks. The rags are collecting in the clothes washer, preparatory to an hour’s worth of running through that contraption.

Forgot to turn the hose on into the pool. Run outside and crank up the spigot. Not too badly evaporated…that’s something, I reckon.

This must be the third house Luz has cleaned today. At $80 per shack, that’s TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY DOLLARS A DAY!

Criminey. I never made that kinda money with a Ph.D. and gawd only knows how many years of university & community college teaching experience.

Hm. If she cleans three houses a day, five days a week, that’s…. MIGAWD! That’s $1200 a week!  $4800 a month.

Jayzuz!

Now of course, I didn’t leave the campus at 6 or 7 p.m. after a full day’s work…uhhhhh….waitwait! Yes, I surely did. Often I left at 10 p.m. And then when I got home I had a pile of nitwitted student papers to read.

Hm. 

Truth to tell, when La Maya and I were working out there, we considered — slightly more than halfway seriously — starting a cleaning service. And y’know…we might have had something. We would have earned the same amount we made teaching, only in many fewer hours. And we never would have had to read a bird-brained or plagiarized stoont paper.

On the ‘tother hand…. It does have to be said that I truly, deeply, passionately HATE cleaning house. And you can be sure I would’ve hated cleaning up other people’s filth even more than I hate cleaning up after myself.

Yea verily: when I say there are 87 berzillion things I’d druther do than clean house…I ain’t kidding!

But…hmmmm….. I don’t suppose teaching idiot composition courses is one o’ those things….

When you move to Sun City?  Well…yeah. Life goes on: that’s what happens.

😀

SDXB (Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend, for you newcomers) moved out there, where he took up with the excellent NG (New Girlfriend), a truly nifty lady. And y’know…the truth is, for him Life Has Gone On in full, lovely glory. Talk with him and you can tell:  This is a happy  man. 

He sounds content, pretty much full of life, active…stuff is going on and he’s going on with it. NG is a neat lady: very smart, very practical, very polished.

She did bang up against one of the Hazards of Old Age: hip surgery.

Argh!!!

But she’s coping. Not just coping, but coping magnificently: back on her feet, hobbling around, soon to be bouncing around. Like SDXB, she’s moderately athletic, and it’s pretty clear that before long she’ll be back to hiking and bicycling and whatnot.

My parents dragged me to Sun City when they decided to retire to Arizona while I was still in high school. That became my last K-12 year, and so I did finish out the 11th grade in California. They contrived to get me admitted to the University of Arizona at the end of my junior year in high school — which was kind of a relief, because I was bored stupid in that California school. In Tucson, I quickly melded into the National Honor Society and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the UofA.

*** Ohhh M GEEE***

Absolutely positively THE cutest, most charming young Black fella just showed up at the door! He’s peddling window accouterments. You’ve never met a more adorable gent in your life!

😀

Seriously: One of the most ingratiating characters I’ve met in years.

And the truth is, he’s got a shot at making some sales. My house has new windows (plus I’m pretty much pitch-proof, being the old cynic that I am). But these houses were built in the early 70s, and the original windows and sliding doors were pretty much…well…junk. Single-paned, flimsy, and more spectacularly NOT weather-proofed than you can imagine. If he visits enough homeowners here, especially if he goes into the slightly older tract on the north end, he’s gonna make some sales.

So I had to wish him luck — couldn’t resist — because he was such a charmer.

😀 😀 😀

Lordie. How can you NOT love young people?

Most of them, anyway.

***

LOL! So what DOES happen when you do or don’t move to Sun City?

Well. First off, in Sun City you get moved into a cheaply built cinderblock house. Insulation? We don’t need no steenking insulation!

And the truth is, when the tract was first built out, most of the residents didn’t. Because…very few of the new natives opted to stay in Arizona over the summer.  Most of them came from the Midwest: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota…and waypoints. They would go “home” during the summers, staying either with friends & relatives or in places that they’d kept for the purpose.

That wasn’t my parents’ style. O’course, to begin with, they had no “home”: my father was a Merchant Mariner, which translated to an endlessly peripatetic life. Except for the 10 ugly years we spent in Saudi Arabia, they really never came to light anywhere more than about two years. I was 12 when they came back to the States. Between the 7th grade and the 11th grade, we lived in four different apartments, two in San Francisco and two in Southern California.

Once they got settled in Sun City, they were…well, deep in the depths of contentment. My mother thought that place was just the best thing that ever happened. My father went back to sea for a year or two: not out of choice, but because a recession raped his retirement savings.

My mother, having succeeded in smoking herself to death, croaked over within a few years. Visceral cancer is a peculiarly ugly way to go: don’t smoke. If you already do, forgodsake QUIT IT.

She was the love of his life, no question of it. When she died, his heart was broken. He sold the sweet little house in Sun City and moved into an Old Folkerie. Probably would have been content enough if he’d left well enough alone..but…of course he couldn’t, any more than you or I could. Once he got re-settled in the old-folks’ prison, he married the redoubtable Helen: a hideous mistake. The rest of his life was spent on the cusp of utter misery.

Here in the wide-open spaces of North Central Phoenix: You get moved into a house that very well may have been built by the same developer who built out Sun City. 😀

That’s true of my shack.

The construction here is somewhat better: the house does have a little insulation, anyway. The yards have walls (no: they don’t in Sun City). About 80% to 90% of the houses have pools. And you’re within walking distance of several desirable-enough stores: a Sprouts, an Albertson’s, a Fry’s, a wine peddler, an El Rancho, a Basha’s, and on and on and on….

The truth is, my son’s having absconded with my car (he thinks he’s protecting me from myself…heeeee!) makes virtually no difference in my comfort and lifestyle. Well…no…what it does do is provide a good healthy dose of pleasant exercise: walking to those stores takes me through four very nice neighborhoods. 😀

And…yes…I’m afraid it’s true: I love it here. Despite the crime level (Sunnyslope, the district just to the north of us, is Crime Central), I don’t feel especially at risk (that’s why you have a dog, no?). The amenities are excellent. Buses and trains run up and down the main drags. If you like city life, it’s damn near a perfect place to live. Two major hospitals are within easy ambulance distance. The socioeconomics are solidly middle-class. Really: it couldn’t be better.

 

For a few minutes there, Firefox wouldn’t let me in to Funny, correct password or no correct password.

ohhhh well… Here we are, and the system seems to be working O.K. hmmmm…. For the nonce, anyway.

Onward: A new post is in the works as we gaze upon the site….

Lumbering toward lunchtime:

* A lovely little piece of steak sits on the grill, doused with turmeric
* A fistful of handsome asparagus also awaits it fate
* Yay! A ripe tomato!!! Sliced and ready to eat
* Pistachios to snack, on the side

My righteous son seems to have purloined all the wine, so all that remains to swill down with this feast is some coffee left over from breakfast, served over ice.

Not bad, for a person who refuses to trudge to the grocery store through the heat..

😀

What a strange, almost icky day. High, thin clouds filter the sunlight into a kind of blurry haze. Still hotter than the hubs, though. And humid.

A mockingbird maestro holds forth in the lemon tree: a fantastic symphony of tweets and trills and whistles…bird music.

Wunderground tells us to expect a low of 75 tonight, after a high today of 98. Chance of rain: 0% to 1%. Lovely…what a garden spot.

 

Switzerland! Ohhhh the terror..

https://www.travelandleisure.com/switzerland-issued-surprising-us-travel-advisory-11740117?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us