Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Huffa puffa…WOW

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Hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there. It’s only 11:15 in the morning, but the thermometer on the back porch reads 100 degrees. Objectively speaking, that ain’t very hot…for Arizona, we mean. But it’s a little humid out. So the heat…or whatever it is…strikes one as a shade (heh!) on the uncomfortable side.

But FUN!!!! I do love walking around the ‘Hood, which is…well, just one great hangout. No question of it.

On the way home from the U.S. Postal Services official mailbox — whither I’d gone to drop a can’t-wait-on-it piece of mail — I passed a couple attending to their BRAND-NEW, GORGEOUS, HUGE, FIRE-ENGINE RED MINIVAN. Parked in their driveway…to die for.

Seriously, I think the only reason they weren’t in the cooler reaches of Payson or Flagstaff or parked beside a Pacific Coast beach is that they had just bought the thing.

When I stopped to admire it, the woman owner who was tidying the thing up said they’d bought it for their road trips — soon to be a regular feature of retirement — and because it had a nice, safe place for their little dog.

You can be sure that if it were mine, it and I and the dawg would be ON THE ROAD, right this minute. 😀

Many years of grand fun to you, folks! <3

***

No grand fun here, just this minute. Well…unless grand pain is the same as grand fun… 😀

Seriously, the hip seems to be dislocated. At some points, you can almost feel that the femur doesn’t fit quite right into the hip socket. At other, the joint works smoothly and with very little pain.

I was gonna drive out to the far west side to try to snab a new doctor. But my son having snabbed my car put the eefus on that. Not far from here, we can rent cars…but…on reflection…how much DO we want to walk through 100-degree heat on a hip that hurts every time you move it? Hmmmmmm…..

So: called the proposed new quack and canceled that appointment. Not an easy trick: the guy apparently is too cheap to hire a receptionist/phone-answering lady, and I had a bitch of a time reaching a machine that would take a “won’t be there” message. I hope he doesn’t try to charge me for the missed meeting.

‘Cause he ain’t about to get paid for it…

*****

And now Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, pushing dirt and dog hair around the tiled floors. What a fun way to make your living, eh?

Idle conversation about our predecessors. Hers, of course: largely Native American mixed with Spaniard types. Seemed unclear to her what tribes might have made up the native set…but if her people came from fairly deep in Mexico (as they probably did), you can be sure they weren’t Chocktaws and Chickasaws.

My father, as far as we can tell, was largely Chocktaw. Apparently his mother was a member of the tribe who married a gringo buffalo hunter. We know his family came out of the deep South, though they had landed in Texas by the time he was born.

What was my mother? The surprise gift of a spate of naughty adventuring on the part of her mother and…some guy. Raised by her paternal grandmother and, later, by my maternal great-grandmother, my mother was amazingly staid. One would never know the maternal line of the family was composed largely of March hares who subscribed to a crackpot religion called Christian Science. 😀

A lot of strangeness lurked in that branch of the family…but none of it had to do with being Native American.

The Evolution of Car-Freedom

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Another (un)lovely day in Phoenix. Leave us all FLEE it…

LOL! That’s a take-off on the daily pitch of a guy who, back in the Day, was probably Phoenix’s all-time greatest morning talk-show host.

He’s long gone now. But anyone who’s  been in the Valley for a lifetime or so remembers his daily greeting:

It’s a beautiful day in Arizona…
Leave us all enjoy it!

Yeah. Arizonans were that illiterate, back in the day. 😀 He was much beloved, though…and frankly, much missed.

Truth to tell, it’s hotter than a by-gawd out there just now.

“A beautiful day,” it ain’t.

So far, quite to the contrary.

Oh…really, though…. Look at it through the right lens, and it’s funnier than a crutch.

****

My son has decided that I should get off the sauce. My terrifying drinking habits have led him to believe I’m a lush!  And he wants me to swear off.

What are those terrifying habits?

-> Swilling down a couple of glasses of wine with the large meal of the day. “Dinner,” most Americans would call it, except that I partake of this pile of chow at noon, when most of us are eating what we would call “Lunch.”

This latter feast, as you no doubt know if you live on this half of the globe, is taken at mid-day and is usually a light meal.

Okay. Being a little weird (and having grown up in an entirely different country…), I stoke up the barbecue along about noon and sizzle myself a portion of meat (steak, lamb, pork chop, fish filet, or the like), a starch (potato, pasta, beans, whatnot), and a green or yellow vegetable (broccoli, asparagus, green beans, carrots, corn, etc.). This makes a large meal: large enough to soak up whatever wine I decide to lap down with it.

A few hours later, at what most FaM readers would call “dinner time,” I have a much smaller, lighter meal, usually without benefit of booze.

Well.

Observing me chow down on what I call “the big meal of the day” (i.e., lunch in your jargon), and seeing me swill down a glass of wine with it, Wonder Cleaning-Lady concluded that I am a lush.

Yes. She decided that because I was drinking an alcoholic beverage at mid-day — along about noon — I must be a drunk. 

{Understand: a “glass” of wine in my house is a wine glass…one of those bubbles atop a stem. Filled to the top, it holds about a third of what a standard US-style glass holds…and it’s never filled to the top.)

To make things worse…ooooohhhh gawd! Get this:

She was here on a day after I’d been awake the better part of an insomniac night.

I’d had almost no sleep the night before she showed up here. And all the time she was banging and roaring around the house, what I most craved was just to go back to bed. 

Not an option, of course.

So…stupidly…ooooh HOW stupidly!… I put my noon meal on the table. Sat down to eat it, accompanied by the usual partial glass of red wine. And feeling soooooooooo tired that I pushed the plate aside, laid my head in my arms on the table, and promptly FELL ASLEEP.

No kidding.

So what does she do?

She whips out her little camera (we all carry a camera with us, everyplace we go, right?) and snaps photos of me with my head in my arms on the table, a half-full glass of red wine sitting there next to my noggin.. 

These, she soon displays to my son, telling him that I was so drunk I fell asleep at the dinner table while she was here.

Yes. I did fall asleep.
No. I did not pass out in a drunken stupor.

But o’course, he couldn’t tell that from a snapshot. And nothing I could say would persuade him of what really happened.

So now the Kid is on High Alert at all times. He thinks I’m a drunk, and he thinks I’m pirating wine to swizzle at every opportunity.

I know: it would be funny if it weren’t so damn stupid!

Funny or stupid — or even serious, if you prefer — it has created a shopping-bag full of trouble for me.

At this point, I can’t persuade M’hijito that I’m not a lush and that I do not loaf around the house all day swilling booze.

So convinced is he that he raided my kitchen and stole the two bottles of sinful wine it contained: a bottle of red and a bottle of white. He also made off with my car, because he imagines I cruise around the city three sheets to the wind!

Hm.

I really SHOULD fire the cleaning lady, shouldn’t I? The woman has created a gigantic kettle full of trouble for me. How to get out of that kettle escapes me at the moment.

But that poses its own little headaches:

* Good cleaning ladies are notoriously hard to come by. And you may be real sure I don’t want to clean this four-bedroom palace myself.

* If I can her, will that not just damn me by my own actions? It will look like I’m firing her because she knows I guzzle down the vast kegs of wine at noon that she reported to my son.

* And yeah: I do hate cleaning house! So much so that I’m inclined to let this stupid flap go, just to hang onto the woman.

The latter is itself probably pretty stupid, eh? 

I mean, after all: If she’s going to squeal on me to my son because I dared to swill a glass of wine with lunch, what other trouble will she make for me? 

* People in a given trade tend to know each other. So let’s say I do can her and hire a new cleaning lady: next thing we know New CL will also think I’m a lush, having been told so by the present incumbent.

****

{sigh} I’m brought back to my periodically recurring thought: that I should sell this house and move out of Phoenix.

Just. 

Get. 

Away.

From.

Here.

But y’know…I don’t wanna!

* I love my house.
* I like my neighbors.
* Even the Romanian Landlord and I are acting like friends of late.
* The house is paid for.
* I could walk to my son’s house from here.
* I don’t wanna move away! 

So here we are: I’m living in a lovely house with a huge, EMPTY garage. My son has absconded with my car. I’m not about to get into a fight with him over that damn thing.

And we have an army of Uber drivers in this neighborhood…

We have a busy and efficient light-rail system running right up the west side of the ‘Hood…

The neighbors and I are getting along fine of late…

It’s (relatively!) safe here…

And, gilding all those lilies, just about all of the grocery stores and household marketers are within reasonable walking distance.

So no: I don’t wanna move away from here!!!!

And I ain’t a-gonna. 

Which Way to Jump? If Jump at All…

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So this morning I’m idly thinking of walking down to the Beatitudes (since my son has kiped my car) and looking into how much it would cost to move into that old-folkerie.

A lot, I can tellya.

After my mother died, my father moved into one of those places. It cost just about everything he had — and he had a lot, for a workin’-class boy.

All the proceeds from the sale of their home in Sun City plus most of his retirement savings went to buy him into that place.

For me, that would be like paying someone else to get outta my way so I could commit suicide. But having gone to sea since he was 17 years old, he was used to institutional living. If anything, he preferred it to living on his own.

Most of the old-folkeries around here — “life-care communities,” eh? — range in quality from good to very nice, indeed. My problem with them is simply that I loathe communal living. 

No, folks. I do NOT WANT to live elbow-to-elbow with an army of other old farts. Nor do I want to be required to take at least one meal a day in a dreadful mess hall. Or to have to listen to some half-deaf soul’s TV set blaring away at all hours of the day and night.

That pretty much puts the eefus on moving into one of those places.

But I have to allow: it’s highly questionable whether I’ll be able to stay here in my home — hired help or no — until the last gasp. Or even anywhere near the last gasp.

Because Old Folks are something less than second-class citizens in American society, the only way you’re going to keep a grip on how and where you will live is to make those decisions before you need them and then to get yourself settled in acceptable accommodations before you need them. And since I’ve pretty well arrived at croak-over age, that means I need to make said decisions now and get things set up for them now. 

So…what can one do? A few possibilities do present themselves:

* Hire someone — the cleaning lady, maybe? — to come in daily:

  • Check on you
  • Take you shopping if need be
  • Gas up the car
  • Bring the groceries home and help put them away
  • Prepare at least one balanced meal in your kitchen; serve it or store it in the fridge for you
  • Clean up the kitchen
  • Clean the bathrooms as necessary
  • Water the outdoor potted plants
  • Check that the pool is working properly; note any problems observed and report them to Pool Dude
  • Negotiate with Pool Dude to be sure he knows what (if anything) needs to be fixed
  • Walk the dog
  • Drive you to appointments
  • Ride herd on Lawn Dude. Be sure he knows what needs to be done this week, and that he does it.

Yeah…sure. What fun, eh?

And what d’you suppose it costs to hire someone to cover all the details of your daily life, every day? 

* Another possibility: Put up your adult kid to ride herd on the hired help. Also put him up to doing some of the noxious household chores.

Won’t he just love that!  And realistically: Our grown offspring have their own very full, very hectic lives to manage. They can’t be spending hours taking care of our affairs.

Arrrrghhh! So I’m awfully afraid I’m not gonna be able to evade having to go into one of those old-folkeries…simply because I won’t be able to afford to hire someone to cover all those chores, nor, as I get older, will I be able to ride herd on them. Once I reach that point…well…realistically, I’ll no longer be able to stay in my home.

On the other hand:  I must say that hiring people to come in regularly and do the scutwork of homeownership is working exceptionally well. Just now, anyway.

I never have to lift a finger to keep that damn swimming pool running, for example. And it’s always sparkling clean and running perfectly. Useta be: I had to work on that thing every. single. day.

Not since I slipped on the kitchen tiles and busted myself up have I had to clean the 1800 square feet of tile flooring in this house. Or scrub the kitchen. Or scour the bathtub. Hiring someone to do that has worked exceptionally well.

While that fine someone is here, she also dusts the furniture and cleans the bathrooms.

The cost of hiring these folks comes nowhere near what it would cost to live in an old-folkerie like Orangewood or the Beatitudes.

And…well…I still get to live in my place. 

Deliver me the chow!

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Okay, here we are in the 21st century, whither Yours Truly just arrived. 

As we scribble, it is hotter than the hubs of Hades here in lovely uptown Phoenix. I need to go to a grocery store: the only chow with which our shelves are well stocked just now is…yeah…dog food!

The human needs meat. It needs veggies. It needs fruit. It needs pasta. And it craves a glass of wine.

For some time, I’ve known that the local Sprouts will deliver. So, I gather, will Albertson’s. But I haven’t taken advantage of these alleged services, because…well…let’s be frank: Learning something new feels like more trouble than it’s worth these days.

My charming son has absconded with my car. Apparently he thinks that 80 is too old to be navigating the homicidal streets of Phoenix with much hope of survival. Ohhhhkayyyy…. Wanna know something? HE CAN HAVE THE THING! Because the real horror — which he seems to have overlooked — is that I don’t need that car to get around. 

Y’know… We have Uber. We have a wonderful shiny new lightrail that whizzes right up Main Drag West. We even still have old-fashioned boring busses. Dreary little hickish Phoenix has turned into a big city…and lo! These days we have big-city amenities.

Dudes and dudettes! We don’t need no steenking car!  :-D

Nevertheless, as we scribble, the outdoor thermometer reads 109 degrees in the shade of the (north-facing!) back porch. And y’know what I am NOT gonna do?

I am NOT gonna walk the two or three blocks to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s. NOT A FREAKIN’ CHANCE!  Nay verily: I’m gonna call Sprouts and order the meat and the veggies and the bottle of wine I crave.

Let’s see how they do! 😀

Americans are not good with fresh produce: they don’t know what good fruits and veggies look like. So…we shall see if Sprouts’ staff can overcome that cultural challenge. But if they can…I may never go into a grocery store again! 

😀  😀  😀  😀

Seriously: I do hate grocery shopping. If store staff can get their act together well enough to select decent produce, this ole’ lady will cheerfully hire them to do so.

The main problem will be scraping together enough cash to tip these folks — no, I do NOT carry cash with me. I put everything on charge or debit cards. And no, I do do NOT want to traipse across the city to the credit union to extract cash dollars from my bank account.

But there’s gotta be a way around that. We’ll figure out what it is. Maybe they’ll let me add a tip to the bill.

Heh!  Y’know, when we stayed in London, we didn’t own a vehicle. ‘Twasn’t necessary: busses and cabs would take you wherever you pleased in the city. If we wanted to take a weekend sight-seeing junket into the countryside, we’d rent a car.

Between  you’n’me, I don’t see why we couldn’t do the same here. What with Uber, why do you need to grace your garage with a hole in the ground into which to pour cash?? 

The Sprouts, the Fry’s, and the Albertson’s are no further from my house than were any of the stores in London — in fact, they may be closer. London had trains: we have trains. London had busses: we have busses. London had taxicabs: we have taxicabs. So…uhmmmm….

Yeah: at the risk of repeating oneself: why do you need to grace your garage with a hole in the ground into which to pour cash??

{Cackle!} Why do you need a damn garage at all????

Sauna City!

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It is hotter than a two-dollar cookstove outside — as my father used to say. Feels like Ras Tanura out there. That’s Aramco’s crummy little company town, perched on the shore of the Persian Gulf, about 40 miles out of Dhahran.

Horrible place. Horrible horrible place!

Damn glad I don’t live there anymore.  But sometimes I do wonder if there’s much difference…at least, at some times of year.

This is one of those seasons: hot, still, and wet. Just walked in the house from the morning doggy-walk, drenched in sweat.

Oh well: a morning like this is short on doggy-walkers. That means fewer encounters, fewer near-fights (or full-on fights), fewer morons to ask to puh-leeeze keep their dogs back. That’s something I guess.

Something else: today is NOT a day when my son is dragging me out to the damn Mayo Clinic. Thank goodness! 

What a waste of time: An hour’s drive through nasty traffic. They put me in these stupid workshop meetings where a dozen old buzzards sit around and bitch about how they can’t remember things. Is any advice offered on how you might keep track of things that you used to be able to manage?

Nooooooo. It’s just whine whine whine wine….I can’t remember where I put my shoes…. Not one person in the room — fellow whiner or medical/psychological professional — says “Well, then: get in the habit of always putting your shoes in the same place!”

Duhhhhhh!

My patience with that clap-trap is, shall we say, long gone.

Well, anywho…that frees up the day for my favorite activity: loafing. Ruby and the human are are now well-walked, and so we can loaf without guilt.

LOL! Sentimental-journeying through websites picturing Ras Tanura, the horrid company town where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Claustrophobic. Hot. Small-town mentality. Horrible place.

Mercifully, my father retired from Aramco when I was at the end of the 6th grade. My mother and I came back to the states six months ahead of him and settled in San Francisco…just in time for the big earthquake at the end of the 1950s.

My mother was absolutely terrorized by earthquakes. To capitalize on that, they stupidly rented a high-rise apartment — a very nice one — in a tony development called Parkmerced. He had gone back to sea, and so was floating around the ocean on a tanker most of the time.

Yeah: in a real earthquake, that swell Parkmerced building would sway back and forth! “How to terrorize your wife even more,” eh?

We hadn’t been there long when, during a school day, a major quake struck. I was in school — sixth grade. The teachers paraded us all out onto the playground, where flying debris and collapsing ceilings were unlikely to kill us.

Meanwhile, my mother totally freaked out. So much so, that she lost consciousness of her experience that day. Her first memory of it is finding herself in the middle of a street in front of our building, running around in circles! My father had gone back to sea at the time, so he wasn’t there to calm her down.

Ahhh, the good ole’ days, hm?

So…despite the gawdawful heat and the bat-brained right-wing politics, Arizona has a lot to recommend it. High on the list: no earthquakes. 

😀

I stay here because there really isn’t anyplace that I know of that’s any better. But primarily because my son is here. He stays here because his dad is here. And because he grew up here. And because he has a decent job here.

Actually, I can think of a number of better places. If M’hijito weren’t in Phoenix, where would I go?

* Berkeley, California
* San Diego, California
* San Francisco, California
* Paris (yeah: the one in France)
* Santa Fe, New Mexico
* Seattle, Washington
* Mexico City

I dunno. There really aren’t all that many places in the world that are much better than where I am. What would be the point of moving?

Except, maybe, to get away from the summer heat. Then you get…what? Winter cold?

Welp…the dog is walked. The human is hungry. Better get off my duff and fix some breakfast. Outta here!

And…you thought “hotter than the hubs” was hot?

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Hah! we say to that…

{chortle!}  7:19 a.m.: Just back from the morning Dawg Walk.

It seems hotter than the Hubs of Hades. But in fact…it’s not. In fact, it’s only 90 degrees out on the patio.

That seeming, I expect, is occasioned by the fact that it’s a bit damp out there. The air is hazy: not overcast, but…kinda fuzzy-looking.

Ruby and I circumnavigated the neighborhood, from the upper reaches of Richistan to the humbler, Sun City-style bungalows that characterize our parts. Indeed, my house was built by the same developer who brought us that sylvan ghetto for old folks. And once you know that, you can see the resemblance. Kinda.

WhatEVER. Even though it’s not hot outside by Arizona standards, it’s mighty cozy by ordinary human standards. Yes: Hubs of Hades.

And what have we here? A wind seems to be coming up. Rain in the offing maybe, later today?  Innaresting.

Thinking, whilst hiking, about how I”m going to contrive to stay in my house until the last cat is hanged. My son wants to consign me to the Beatitudes, a prison for olde folkes.

I just HATE institutional living — hated living in the dorms, and know very well that being locked up in an old-folkerie will quickly drive me to suicide.

Which ain’t the way I wanna go out…

Recently I learned that Wonder Cleaning Lady used to take care of old bats in their homes. Whether she stayed with them overnight, I do not know…but with all the gadgets we have these days, it wouldn’t be hard to equip oneself with a call button to summon your caretaker or the EMTs. If said caretaker surfaced around 7 or 8 a.m. and stayed until after dinner, you’d be OK.

By and large.

And given what it costs to stay in one of those horrible places, you’d probably come out ahead financially.

A-a-n-n-d interestingly, I seem to be getting by just fine without a car! Dear son, who kiped mine and locked it in his garage, has driven me to a few places that I need to go, and has made it clear he has no intention of returning the chariot. But….

But…I don’t need it! 

The guy across the street is an Uber driver! He can schlep me just about anyplace I need to go. And if I can’t snab him, I can…hold onto your hat! This is radical stuff!…just call a taxi.

Yes. Phoenix still has taxi cabs. If you can imagine.

It’s interesting to think….  That you could get by without a car in a major city, I mean. Back when my mother and I lived in San Francisco, we mostly did without the car. My father’s car, that is: most of the time it was locked up in an underground garage, while he went to sea. She and I took the bus, the streetcar, or a cab. And we got around just fine.

The presence of Uber’s amateur cab drivers would hugely enhance that. With those guys on stand-by all the time…really…you wouldn’t need to own a car.

Truth to tell, though…once the weather cools a bit, I probably won’t have much use for the Uber dudes, anyway.

The Funny Farm is within walking distance of three fine shopping centers. Taken together, they house…

> an Albertson’s (giant supermarket)
> a Walgreen’s
> a computer store (new gear and repairs!)
> a Fry’s (supermarket!)
> a Sprouts (hippy-dippy supermarket!)
> an El Rancho (another supermarket!)
> a music store
> a beauty parlor
> a liquor store
> a doctor’s office
> a couple of clothing stores
…and several others that offhand I don’t recall.

Soooo…I lucked out when I bought this house here at the top end of North Central.

What it means is that I can reach any of those stores in a ten-minute walk. And with the roller-cart that I tricked out, I can carry a freaking ton of goods from place to place to home.

And what THAT means is: no need for a car!

Seriously: if I need a car, all I have to do is go rent one.

And…if Luz is representative, I can rent a caretaker, too! 😀