Urban life

Every Christmas, the neighborhood gung-ho group — who are great, no question of it, and a real asset to the ‘Hood — flogs a busy communal display of luminarias. These are traditional Mexican Christmas decorations made with paper bags and candles. You pour a layer of sand into the bottom of a paper lunch bag; then insert a short candle into the sand. Line the driveway or sidewalk or porch wall with these light them, and voilà! Christmas cheer.

To say nothing of voilà! Fire hazard.

Being a crabby old lady, I do NOT want these things set up along my courtyard wall or driveway. Because yes, I do think they’re potential fire hazards, especially if a wind comes up — as winds are wont to do at this time of year.

In the past, enthusiastic neighbors have brought the things around and set them up along sidewalks and driveways, free of charge. This is very fun and cool…but it kinda puts us humbugs behind the eight-ball. If you don’t light the things, you out yourself as a Scrooge. 😀

This year, bless’em, they’ve decided residents should buy the things, and so they’ve set up a stand in the park where we can go pick them up and pay for them. And that is definitely Service Above and Beyond: it’s colder than billy-be-dammed out there, and threatening to rain.

Some Christmas season, add I to that. Grump!

Adding further: SDXB called an hour or two ago. Canceled our planned excursion, saying he’s come down with what he thinks is a cold. One can only hope that’s all it is! He sounded just awful…but whenever he gets a respiratory infection, he sounds like he’s pounding at death’s door.

He says he taken both the flu and the covid vaccines — and had three shots of covid. So…we’re looking at two possibilities: either whatever he has is neither of those bugs, or the vaccine he got for one or the other of them failed.

WhatEVER. Cold, flu, or vaccine-resistant covid, I don’t want it…so am grateful for his decision to stay home. Though sorry he’s sick…and hope he gets over it soon.

Meanwhile, in the Department of High-Risk Activities, I dropped out of choir soon after the plague began, choral singing indeed ranking among the highest-risk things you can do in time of contagion. This poses a problem of the First Water: I have nothing else to occupy my time and challenge what passes for my mind!

Tried volunteering for something else down at the Cult HQ. Ended up helping to staff the front desk and answer the phones one afternoon a week. All very nice, no doubt — sorta gives you a chance to meet the clergy and staff. Except they ARE busy and don’t have time to stand around socializing. So you sit there for four hours with not one damn thing to do!!!!! The phone, which is bizarrely complicated, may ring once during that time: nowhere near enough to allow you to learn how to operate it.

After the umpty-umpteenth week of brain-banging boredom, I quit.

Interestingly, the church’s accountant also quit at about the same time. She moved over to a church in the East Valley where our former pastor moved.

uh-HUH…

What is she tryin’ to say to me?

Tried rejoining the choir, but that was a lost cause. Because…I have no formal training in music. When it comes to voice, the best I can do is sing along (actually, I’m fairly good at that). BUT our new choir director (accountant was not the first to flee…) has a taste for music that is wonderfully sophisticated and so complex there’s truly no way I can learn it in the brief time the group has to introduce itself to a piece and practice it a few times. So: out that door.

The church has now completed its addition to the school — already one of the toniest schools in the state. This thing is a good three or four storeys high, as big as the high school I attended in Southern California…which had three thousand students.

UH–huh.

It looks suspiciously to me like our venerable, high-society church for lawyers, doctors, and society matrons is planning to go into direct competition with the Catholic schools just down the street: St. Francis (K-8); Brophy (boy’s high school); and Xavier (girl’s high school).  If that’s the case, the church will become basically an adjunct to the school operation. Which is all very nice, no doubt, but….??????

I could follow our perspicacious accountant out to the east side. But…how CAN I count the ways I don’t want to commute halfway to Payson a minimum of twice a week, once at night?

The local Episcopals have what they call a cathedral, smack in the middle of downtown. This is not an area where I would like to walk around at night, I must say. But….neither do I relish the prospect of melting away into a puddle of dead IQ points, which is where MayoDoc fears I’m headed. To survive, I’m going to have to find something to keep the brain functioning.

Which is worse: brained in a parking lot, or brainless in a nursing home?

Think I’ll try the parking lot, thank you.

Planned to go down there this morning, but I was simply too lazy to get up off my duff and fling myself around. Next week.

Meanwhile…what if they won’t let me onto their choir? Which, at this point in the season, they very justifiably may not?

We have two alternatives:

One is to take a course at Phoenix College, a nearby JC, in choral singing. Dunno what the status is now, but that school did have an excellent music and drama program, and one of our choir members/leaders taught there. Wonder-Accountant took a semester of choral singing there, and she was impressed.

Another is to go out to the Episcopal church on East Lincoln and try to weasel my way in there. Whaddaya bet some of our old choir members are already there, hm? It is halfway to Scottsdale, and truly I would rather not drive around this Godforsaken town that much. But hey…any port in a plague, eh?

A benefit to the second scheme is that one of the best Sprouts stores in the Valley resides approximately on the route between here and there. A high-test Safeway is just up the road from that place. So in theory, I could get most of my grocery shopping done on the way home on Sundays. That would be good. I guess.

WhatEVER. One way or the other, I’ve gotta find a way to get off my duff, plague or no plague. As the finest professor I ever met, Byrd Granger, used to say…

You must engage life!

So the dawg is fed and I’m just about to throw on some clothes and take her for the morning doggy walk. It’s around 6:30.

Right. Sure.

Ruby is chowing down; I’m looking for a pair af marginally presentable jeans. And…ohhhh yeah:

R-R-R-O-O-O-O-A-R-R-R-R….

Cop copter flyover.

Round and round and round he goes. He’s looking for someone, and that someone is within a few blocks of the Funny Farm. The police dispatch website says nothing about it.

Based on past experience, the someone will be…

• an ordinary burglar (not likely: they’ve been up there almost 40 minutes…they wouldn’t waste that much fuel on a workaday prowler);
• a wanted criminal on the run from some other neighborhood;
• somebody who actually did break in to a house here and raped or otherwise engaged the resident;
• a bum who picked a fight with a homeowner trying to evict him from a garage or a backyard; or
• a criminal, probably of the violent type, on the run from the cops, who chased him here after some other incident.

WhatEVER: it put the eefus on the Morning Doggywalk.

Fortunately, the weather has cooled dramatically. So, we can afford to wait an hour before setting out to defile the neighbors’ lawns.

😉

Yesterday the neighborhood association had its annual Giant Shindig in the Park, so we weren’t able to go over there during that. And now I”m not so sure about taking her into the park anyway, at least for the nonce. We’re enjoying a parvo plague. This fine and often fatal disease can be picked up off the ground. And Ruby, like any dawg, loves nothing more than sniffing every stink she comes across. Especially if it’s associated with a pile of feces.

Ruby has had her parvo shots, of course. However, I don’t get her shot up every year, because…a study showed that most of the routine vaccines last up to a decade. The researchers shot up a passel of dogs and watched them to see how long the initial rounds of shots worked. The vaccines were still protective nine years after the study began. At that point, the researchers ran out of funding and so dropped the study.

Thus we don’t know for sure how long the shots last, but apparently it covers the dog for as long as most dogs live. And also thus: I’m less than thrilled about taking her to our park, which everybody and their little brother uses as a de facto dog park. Not only are their little furbabies running around off-lead (some of them looking for a fight), but lead or no lead, any dog that’s been exposed to parvo is dropping viral particles everywhere it goes.

***

Hmmmm…. And this may have something to do with this morning’s Copter Flyover:

…the intersection of [Conduit of Blight and Main Drag South] is closed in all directions this morning and will not open until much later in the day. Please seek alternate routes. #PHXTraffic

Probably some idiot drove or walked out in front of the train.

Y’know…I love my neighborhood and all the wonderful young people who are moving here with their kids. I like being centrally located. I love the greenery and the park and the fancy houses in the Richistans and the cute little tract houses in my parts. But I sweartogawd, sometimes I think what AM i doing here?

My son is adamant that I should not move out of this house. But the truth is, there are safer districts, and they’re not all in the Sun Cities.

Fountain Hills is the most attractive of these. Problem is, it’s about as far away from everyone I know and everything I do as the Moon is. It’s halfway to Payson! Close to the Mayo Clinic…but otherwise, I know no one out there and have no great desire to get to know anyone. Sun City is quiet, if you enjoy the silence of the tomb. And mile on mile on mile of houses that look so much alike you can’t tell the difference between them.

Most areas in north Phoenix and Scottsdale do have fewer bums…we get inundated because we live at the end of the lightrail line. The bums and the indigent mentally ill climb on the damned train, ride it up here to the end of the line, get out, and fan out into the neighborhood. Of course we always had some crime before that thing was built. But we didn’t have a bum in every yard, and we didn’t have to be extra-cautious about taking the trash out in the alley (I have two sets of padlocks on the back gates!), and we didn’t have to walk around spaced-out bums sleeping off their latest fix in the park. These are largely functions of the idiotic lightrail project and the insertion of several drug clinics in the immediate vicinity of the neighborhood. So in theory one could escape some of the crime and ickiness simply by moving to a different district.

One of the magnets that calls the transients in: the FIVE drug treatment centers within easy walking distance of the lightrail stops at Main Drag South and at Gangbanger’s Way. One of them is right down the street from a grade school!

Drug abuse is pretty much endemic here. And it spans all social classes. So unless you live in a gated community such as the Biltmore or the Phoenix Country Club, you are going to have drug addicts wandering your neighborhood streets and sleeping in your yard.

Welp, Ruby is lobbying for a doggy-walk. I haven’t had anything to eat and am starved. And so, awawayyyy….to breakfast and then to brave the day’s outdoor adventure.

And tonight? HALLOWE’EN! Armies of cute little kids trucked into the ‘Hood from lower-income districts, here to collect the loot. We always sit in the WonderAccountants’ driveway to hand out candy…so that will be fun.