Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Delivery? HOT diggety!

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Eight o’clock in the morning and already hotter than the Hubs of Hades outside. Without a car, I need to get going RIGHT NOW to hit the Sprouts, the Albertson’s or the Fry’s to buy the groceries I need.

But…but…I also want breakfast. More than I want to go grocery shopping. By far…

The coffee is steeping. What passes for breakfast is ready to come out of the microwave. So…noooooo. Nope: not traipsing to a grocery store at crack of dawn.

And…LO!!!  Here’s a REAL good excuse not to do any traipsing at any time.

Albertson’s, Safeway, and Sprouts will deliver groceries!

Who knew??? 

Now that I know…we’ll be trying that out.

I’m dubious, though. My diet tends to be heavy on fresh produce. And in my experience, Americans know amazingly little about selecting and preparing fresh fruits and vegetables. So whatever those stores deliver is likely to be catch-as-catch-can.

But it’s worth a try.

Imagine! Never having to trudge to the store again!!!  

Woweee!

If one or more of those fine establishments can manage to deliver decent produce, I actually might not need a car. My son could be right!

Even if their staff can’t select decent produce, an Uber guy lives right across the street. He can deliver me over there, maybe for an extra fee help me gather the groceries, and haul the stuff back here. I mean…WOW!

Talk about the lap of luxury, eh?

An alternative might be to pay the Cleaning Lady Par Excellence to drive me to the store. That would work better, because then I could select my own groceries. But it would add to her workload and probably not ingratiate her. Not one…little…bit… 😮

Y’know… When we lived in England, we didn’t own a car. 

In London, a car wasn’t necessary. An unholy number of locals had them and trudged around in them…but…even more rode the Underground or the surface-street busses or…hang onto your hat..walked. 

What if…what if you thought like a Londoner? and behaved like one?

  • You wouldn’t own a car, partly because you couldn’t afford it and partly because you wouldn’t need one.
  • You would ride the busses and trains to and from work.
  • You would stop by a lovely little grocery store on the way home from the transit station; there, you would buy the makings for dinner, plus a bottle of wine.
  • You would eat like royalty, because virtually all of the food you bought would be sterling FRESH.

Well…o’course, we have no Underground. But we DO have the new fancy-dan streetcars, Hot diggety!

And we DO have Uber. The whole damn city is infested with Uber drivers. Hot diggett dawg!

Hmmmmm….. Intriguing!

The only time this would be impractical would be right now: in the dead of summer. Hiking around in 110-degree heat is not the best of all possible strategies.

However, the stores in question open as dawn cracks and stay open until well after dark. You could either start out at six or seven in the morning, or simply ride Ubers during the summer and shift to healthier (and cheaper!) walking when the weather cools.

Huh.

Today, I think, I’ll try the Albertson’s or the Sprouts delivery services. Let’s see how they do.

If they can select decent produce (and I’ll betcha Sprouts can)…well…

If they can, mirabilis! I’ll have groceries delivered here. Once in a blue moon I’ll visit the stores, explore their current offerings, and adjust my delivery lists accordingly.

First, though…I believe I’ll go back to bed for a nap. Was sleepy when I woke up at dawn’s first crack, and now am zombified.

Hotter than a three-dollar cookstove…

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…as my father used to say about the lovely weather in the garden spot that was Saudi Arabia.

As we scribble, the back-porch thermometer claims the temperature is 108 in the shade.

Yeah. That’s degrees Fahrenheit.

Ye gawds! It makes Arabia look balmy.

But…but…seriously: it’s 12:30 in the afternoon. Earlier in the day — shortly after the local grocers and farmacias opened, our li’l thermometer was already registering 102.

And yes, that does make Arabia look pretty balmy.

Fortunately, we have actual air-conditioning, rather than the gummy swamp-cooling that Aramco installed in its residents’ homes in Ras Tanura. Even then, it’s damn hot and sticky in here.

Nevertheless, the brain continues to run on overdrive. 

All sorts of original, clever, and…uhm..weird ideas are drifting through my overheated little mind. And in particular, the most significant ones have to do with my son’s adventurous liberation of my car.

Yes.

The garage remains empty.

And y’know what?

I’m finding I just…don’t…give…a…damn. 

This neighborhood is overrun with guys who wanna get rich quick driving for Uber. A nearly brand-new train runs down Main Drag West, one that would drop me off six safe and quiet residential blocks from my son’s house, if I chose to ride it. And the city busses cruise right past the intersection of the nearest feeder street and Central Avenue, which would take me to the front door of the beloved AJ’s market. Or let me off a block from the kid’s house.

Personally, I’d choose Uber if I knew they would show up reliably.

That doesn’t appear to be the case…but…but…yeah. I haven’t tested any such thesis. I will, in the future…probably the slightly cooler future. But if I do find they show up when they say they will, then…well…

Wanna buy a nice used Toyota Venza?

Yeah. Y’know what I think about this caper? That kid did me a huge favor. He’s helping me to get rid of a tank that needs to be serviced (expensively) every six months, that needs to have $3.00/gallon gas pumped into it every time you turn around, that takes up space in a garage that could be used for any number of better purposes, that pollutes the air, that….

Uhm…and how am I gonna get the dog to the vet, in an emergency?

Uber.

Or the kid. He still has his car. If Ruby has to be rushed to a veterinarian, he can come up here and collect her.

Or on foot. A 24-hour veterinary hospital is right down the road: about six or eight blocks, on foot. She weighs all of 25 pounds: I can easily pick her up and carry her there.

Meanwhile, check out these contraptions! I happen to have one of these. As we scribble, it’s now all tricked out with cardboard panels, the easier to haul stuff without dropping anything.

Here in the ‘Hood, we’ve got not one, not two, but three major supermarkets within walking distance: a Fry’s, a Sprouts, and an Albertson’s. I can do most or all of my grocery shopping on foot, without ever leaving the neighborhood. And right across the street dwells an Uber driver. Matter of fact, we’re told the ‘Hood is over-run with Uber drivers.

Heh! I haven’t tested that hypothesis. But it wouldn’t take a mob of wannabe cab drivers to provide plenty of transportation to the nearby shopping. 

Summertime, And the Livin’ Is…

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…the livin’ is sauna-like!

😀

You should be here to enjoy a fine, humid 102-degree day… Uhm…well, no…maybe you shouldn’t.

Seriously: it’s like a steam-bath outdoors just now. Hotter than the proverbial hubs, and SOGGY.

It puts the eefus on my plan to walk over to the nearby Sprouts and raid their fruit and veggie bins. I may hire the Uber guy across the street to schlep me over there…but…hmmmm…..  

Don’t think so. The hound and I have plenty of food. The fridge is more than adequately stocked. We surely can wait a day or two.

Besides, what I’m MOST interested in is learning about the new(ish) delivery services of late offered by most of the major grocery stores around here. By way of experiment, I may call the Albertson’s and order up some chow.

Main drawback to that scheme: Americans are not fresh-food folk. Most of us eat packaged or frozen chow. As a result, we have NO CLUE what a decent zucchini squash or head of lettuce or ripe peach is supposed to look like. And since I eat mostly fresh foods (I know how to cook! Isn’t that weird?!?), I’m reluctant to pay to have someone shop for me.

Hmmmm… Uber…Uber…Uber…  I’m beyond fascinated with the whole Uber phenomenon. It reminds me, richly, of our ten-year experience in Saudi Arabia, where Saudi drivers ran a fleet of taxis. They would come right up to your back gate (front yards were bounded by sidewalks and hedges), whisk you down to the commissary, then drive you home and help you haul your bags of groceries into the house.

Not that I would expect an American driver to help haul grocery purchases. But the experience would be similar in many other ways. If it could happen. 😀

And all these years I’ve been paying…for WHAT?

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Thanks to my son’s recent sh!tfit, I’ve made a huge discovery:

For lo! these many years, I’ve been paying through the schnozola for that damn car sitting out there in the garage, little guessing that in truth, I can get wherever I want to go in lovely uptown Phoenix for less than it costs to own a car… No, make that For one HELLUVA lot less than it costs to own a car!

Owning a car ain’t cheap, here in the Big City. Especially if you’re a person who does not know how to service your own car: change its oil, charge its battery, rotate its tires, whatnot whatnot and whatnot.

What if…yeah, what if? 

You rent a car only when you need it? Take it back to the rental agency when you’re done with it, and they change the oil and fill the gas tank and see that the windshield wipers work and test and fill the tires and…on and freakin’ ON. They pay for the licensing. They pay for the annual inspection…

Hmmmmmm…. What HAVE we been missing in this picture?

A lot. A whole lot, my friends. And the Kid’s recent revenge maneuver — kiping my car and locking it into his garage — has suddenly made those missing details blindingly clear.

Suddenly, if I want to go someplace right this minute, all I’ve got to do is tell the Uber driver who lives across the street that I need a ride. If he can’t take me where I need to go, he sure can make a ride materialize.

Huh. Think o’ that. Imagine not having to pony up a chunk of dough to have the car serviced. Or to register it with the state. Or to run it through the car wash. Or whatEVER.

I knew that kid was brilliant, but this is ridiculous!

😀

Seriously: What he’s done points in a VERY interesting direction.

What if you stopped driving your car and rode the bus or streetcar instead? Would that not leave you plenty of spare change to afford a taxicab for occasions when you need to be someplace reliably at a specific time? Like…PLENTY of spare change!

Yea verily: how much money have we wasted, you & I, on buying, owning, and running cars? 

How much more does a tank of gas cost than an Uber ride across the city, from (say) the ASU campus in Glendale, Arizona, to the main university campus in Tempe?

And…can a city kid get by without owning a car?

***

My mother and I lived in San Francisco for two or three years after we came back from Arabia. She rented us a place in an apartment development called Parkmerced.

My father would never have been without a car — it was one of the things the man lived for. But he went to sea: was regularly gone for weeks at a time. And…hmmmm…WHERE was his vaunted Chrysler?

Yeah. On the sixth floor of Parkmerced’s underground garage, that’s where.

About the only things we used that car for were to drive to the docks to pick up my father when his ship was in, and to drive across the Bay Bridge to visit my mother’s family in Berkeley or Sausalito.

So…I think this history brings up the same question that M’hijito has raised:

  • DO you really need a car when you live in an urban setting?

And that question poses a whole slew of other interesting queries…

  • Could you not do just as well riding in Uber cabs or on busses and trains?
  • Do you really need to ride any conveyance when you’re going to a store three or four blocks from your front door? Why?
  • Over the course of, say, a month, how much does it cost to walk to a store or ride a bus, compared to maintaining a car during the same period?
  • How much are you paying in taxes to keep that rolling tin can in your garage?
  • And how much in insurance bills?
  • And in gasoline?

Maybe, just maybe, the kid has got something. Eh?

Back at the Hubs…

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Quarter to eight in the morning. Hot. Sticky. Yucky out there.

The balmy weather blocks all but the balmiest of dog owners from circumnavigating the park, so Ruby the Corgi and I had the place almost to ourselves.

Traipsed down Main Drag Central. Eastward across Fancy-Dan Street South. Back north along Palm Row…passed the lady who HATES me because I asked her to please quit shoving junk-food “treats” in Ruby’s mouth.

Some people just flat refuse to believe you. Ever notice that?

Gosh, but humans are stupid. As animals go, that is.

The house once occupied by the young guy who got in trouble with the law and bankrupted his parents with legal bills (he still ended up in the slam) is vacant. Those poor folks lost their shirts!

Apparently a speculator bought the house. The pool is all torn up and it looks like the same is true of the interior. But then whoever got the place abandoned it. So it just sits there. Hideously.

The neighbors must just love it.

Eastward, eastward…that street reminds me of the exceptionally tony Palmcroft district, one of the Fanciest-Dan neighborhoods of Phoenix.

We used to live in a lesser neighborhood just to the east of Palmcroft — I could walk over with the dawgs to that park and its surrounding Richistan, and did. Still very nice. Still highly unaffordable for the likes of moi, today.

We moved out of our beautiful historic house there just in the nick of time. About six months after we escaped, the city bought a house right behind ours and turned the damn thing into a FIRE STATION!

Yeah! WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEE-UUUU…all hours of the day and night.

Couldn’t believe it…y’know, there were plenty of commercial slots on the surrounding main drags where the city could have parked that thing. And the huge regional hospital with a gigantic parking lot that could have accommodated a fire station. And a defunct shopping mall with its own huge parking lot: perfect for a fire station. But ohhhhhhh no! The city has to stick the thing next door to or across the street from NINE residential lots!

Natcherly.

Honestly, I really think the City Fathers deliberately work at downgrading the quality of living in the beautiful old central neighborhoods. My guess is, the developers who build out the surrounding suburban tracts fund election campaigns for their stooges, to get them on the City Council and into county government. Once there, these sleazeballs work actively to trash centrally located neighborhoods, so they can be converted to commercial properties and generate $$$ for their sponsors and emptied of less-profitable private households.

I love my present neighborhood, though. And would like to stay here until I die.

Exactly how to pull that off kinda escapes me. 

My son wants to consign me to a high-rise old-folkerie called The Beatitudes. Ugh!!! Just the thought of it makes my skin crawl.

I hate, loathe, and despise institutional living. 

* No, I do not want to listen to your effing TV blatting away all day and half the night.

* No, I do not want to eat disgusting foodoid dumped out of cans and boxes into steam tables.

* No, I do not want to have to pretend to be nice to you as I hover, disgruntled, over a plate of disgusting foodoid.

* No, I do not even faintly care about your Ailment of the Day.

* Yes, your bird-brained politics make me want to bite you.

One thing is for sure: I wouldn’t last long in a place like that. I would die of depression, if nothing else.

Speaking of the Joys of Old Age, my son is dragging me out to the damned Mayo Clinic again this afternoon. Why, I do not recall. Just now, whatever Blessing of Age was afflicting me seems to have gone away. And frankly, I don’t even remember what I might have been whining about that would have led him to make an appointment.

Ugh!

What Happened to Her?

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Yknow… Sometimes in idle moments I wonder what happened to my mother to make her SO SCARED.

Something must have happened. You wouldn’t be that terrorized of ordinary daily living unless something had happened to you.

When DXH and I lived downtown, we had a beautiful old classic rich person’s house in the historic part of the city. It really WAS beautiful. And the people who had it before us added on to it, creating a little mansion with a huge living room, huge dining room, large breakfast room, vast kitchen, large laundry room, separate TV room, and four bedrooms.

The house was first-rate. The neighborhood left something to be desired, though. Like…basic safety. The place swarmed with scammers, rapists, and burglars.

DXH traveled off and on for his job and his civic volunteerism. When he would leave town, my mother would get all upset.

No kidding: she would be nigh unto frantic when he absented himself.

She lived, with my father, in Sun City, a mausoleum-like retirement tract that stood a 30- or 40-minute drive from our house, through unpleasant traffic.

But whenever DXH would leave town, she would volunteer to drive into the city and stay with me while he was gone. What on earth she thought she was going to do if the dread burglar/mad rapist actually did enter the house escapes me. But there she was.

What she thought she would do is shoot the ba*tard. She would always show up with a nice little revolver, which she would set on a TV table next to the fold-out bed where she slept. This would give me the willies — she did not have formal self-defense training, and I don’t even know if she had formal training in the use of a pistol. But my father did: he was a licensed firearms instructor. So…I expect she knew how to pull the trigger.

The question, o’course, was whether she knew when to pull the trigger.

And when not…

Most of all, though, what worried me was that she was so scared. 

Now, in those days, women were scared. I was, too, when left alone in a house that any passing sh!thead could easily enter. And occasionally did enter…  But…but…why was she SO damn scared she thought she needed a deadly weapon at her side, even when a large dog was sitting there guarding her?

Yes. “Scared” was why we owned a German shepherd…

I figured something must have happened to her. You surely couldn’t imagine yourself into a state of fear so elevated. She must have had something real to cause that terror.

If so, she never told me what it was. (Thank goodness: if she had, I would have been just as terrorized.)

One of the reasons my parents retired to Sun City was that people believed those stodgy realms were safer than safe. What could happen? Who would want to rape a wrinkled, gray old bat? Who would waste their time burgling the home of some wretch trying to live on Social Security?

Well. Stuff happened all the time. Overall, the public imagined that Sun Citizens were fairly affluent. They weren’t, but compared to someone living on welfare in South Phoenix, they appeared to be. So burglaries did happen. Stick-ups did happen. And the occasional bizarre rape did happen.

So the truth was, our house and neighborhood were at no more risk — or not much more — than their little retirement dream house out in the far western suburbs. But I didn’t know anyone else who felt called upon to keep a revolver at the side of their bed.

Here, where Ruby and I live now, is…safety-wise? About the same. Certainly no safer than anywhere else. Certainly not as safe as a place in a gated community or a high-rise with a security guard posted in the lobby.

But hereabouts I don’t feel at anything like the risk we sensed downtown. We have deadbolts on every outside-facing door and on every security screen door. Alarms on every window. And a dog that barks like a banshee. You couldn’t get in here without giving me plenty of warning to get out a different door or to lock myself and the dawg behind a solid-core interior door and call the cops.

{sigh}

But really: what a place we live in, eh? The Land of the Free and the Home of the Terrorized.

When I was a kid, my mother was wary…but we didn’t live inside a barricaded fortress. What do you suppose has changed? And how?