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Urban life

Why I stopped carrying a purse…

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A couple years ago, I decided to stop carrying a purse around. Why? Well, because in my part of town, it just flat isn’t safe. Any time you walk across the parking lots of our neighborhood grocery stores, you run the risk of mugging.

The way to minimize that risk: carry a wallet with your credit cards and nuisance store “member” cards in a pocket. Leave the purse at home, in a closet.

Interestingly, this works in a variety of positive ways, one of which is to cut panhandling exponentially. When a bum thinks I’m not carrying cash, he doesn’t barge up and demand that I share it with him.

But…then there is Tempe, even more richly infested with bums and panhandlers than the ’Hood, here at the end of the accursed lightrail line. (The lightrail is affectionately known in these parts as “the bum express.”)

Today I went out to that garden spot, that lovely little college town (you have to live in Arizona to sense the full irony in that characterization), to meet my friend and business partner for a late lunch at our favorite overpriced restaurant. Had to park about a block up the road, there being no spaces anywhere near the front of said restaurant.

Afterward, we drifted out to the front sidewalk and stood chatting for a few minutes. A bum wandered up and hovered nearby, studying a parking meter as if it held some clue to the meaning of life, the universe, and all that. Tina’s car was right in front of the place; shortly she jumped into her vehicle and drove off. I now had to walk a ways to get to my car.

Because of the quasi-infected surgical wound on my leg, I haven’t been able to wear my jeans, which are about the only women’s clothes you can buy that reliably contain pockets. So I’d brought a small purse with a long strap, which I’d slung over my shoulder.

The bum looks up and gazes at me quizzically, his eyes a startling blue. If he were washed and sober, he’d be a handsome man. But he is…well, neither washed nor sober.

I avoid his glance (Rule of Womanhood No. 213: Never make eye contact) and start walking up the block toward my car.

Naturally, he follows me. I’m walking fast, and he’s keeping pace with me, just a few steps behind.

I walk past my car — not a chance am I going to stop long enough for him to get any closer. As I march along, I slip the purse strap over my head so the bag hangs crosswise across my chest. And I search for a building that I can get into.

ASU and the city of Tempe have littered this stretch of the lovely downtown with pointless museums, all of which are locked tight. I keep hiking all the way down to Mill Avenue, where at last I come to a sandwich shop that’s open. I dart in the door and find — thank God — four burly men, two behind the counter and two standing in line to order food. They look a little startled when they see me come flying in.

Fortunately, the shop is fronted with ceiling-to-floor windows. I can see the vagrant walk on past and continue north on Mill. After waiting for a minute or two, I slip back out the door and hike back down the sidewalk to my car.

What did I think was going to happen? Well…take your pick:

  • Nothing.
  • The guy would ask me for a handout.
  • The guy would grab my purse and yank it off my body.

“Nothing” would be nice, but experience suggests it was the least likely of the three possibilities.

Frankly, I suspect if I’d had my credit cards stashed invisibly in the pocket of a pair of jeans, that guy would never have followed me.

This is something you learn from living in the central city. In the old house, one old lady was walking from her car into a nearby grocery store when a purse-snatcher threw her to the ground to grab her bag, thereby breaking her hip. Here in the ‘hood, another shithead shot one of my neighbors when he mistakenly thought she was resisting an attempt to steal her purse.

And that, folks, is why I do not carry a purse. Not unless I’m forced to it.

Crazy Driver Season

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The theory that one in every ten drivers on the Arizona road is a moron may need revision. Possibly closer to the truth: one in every five. My gawd, were they out in force yesterday!

Several gas stations in Our Beloved City have run out of gasoline. In half-baked Play-Nooz stories, we’re told it’s because fuel supply lines “may” have been disrupted by the weather in the Midwest, another way of saying “we dunno.” Personally, I suspect our country’s present mis-leadership, but that’s another story. Whatever the cause, gas prices have risen by about 30 cents a gallon. Today I have to drive my agèd friends to Costco, but would rather not ask them to sit in the car through the Costco’s long lines and then sit some more while I pump gas. Tomorrow I have to schlep to Paradise Valley Mall and then turn around and traipse way to Hell and gone out to Sun City.

The car had about a third of a tank of fuel, which under normal circumstances would last another week or ten days.

However…if Costco runs out of gas, too…if Costco and QT run out of gas…hmmm….  So, I decided to make a single trip yesterday, just to Costco to fill up the tank.

Sounds easy, eh? And it would be, if we were talking about any normal place.

On the way down, I pass one of the usual road-blocks, on the other side of the street. Every route in the city is dug up. Wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here. Seeing the line of stalled cars stretching westward from 7th Avenue on Bethany, I realize I can’t get home that way. So decide to go up 15th Avenue, a slower route but usually unclogged.

Two morons get in front of me on the way to the Costco, but they’re pretty harmless. Just the usual “don’t know where I’m going” and “texting on the phone” set.

Get filled up, head out, and turn left onto lovely 15th Avenue without incident.

Fifteenth, a major feeder street that runs from Gangbanger’s Way, mostly through neighborhoods, all the way down to the State Capitol area, has been adorned with traffic-harassing nuisances in the form of stupid roundabouts and speed humps. Most people ignore these: in time you learn that you really don’t have to slow down for them. The other day I saw a guy shoot down that road at about 50 mph, navigating the nuisance circles and bumps without a hitch. Most people drive about 35 with no problem.

But…yes. Or rather no. Naturally, I got a Moron of the First Water in front of me.

First hint was that the Moron slowed wayyyyyyy down as soon as it got north of Bethany Home. Then when the Moron came to a speed circle, it STOPPED.

Yes. This idiot slows so far down as to stop before entering the roundabout nuisance and then C-R-R-R-A-A-A-A-W-L-S around it, barely idling foward. About one mile per hour, I’d guess.

No, that is not an exaggeration. The chucklehead is barely moving.

Moron speeds back up to about 30, then as soon as a speed bump pops up, DOES IT AGAIN. This idiot actually STOPS and then, barely moving, C-L-I-I-I-I-I-M-B-S over the thing. Then speeds up to almost 25 mph.

This is why I don’t carry a gun in the car. I’d have blown out the clown’s tires.

Seriously: it’s NO WONDER people shoot at these fools.

We finally get to Maryland, the next east-west road, where the Moron inches into the intersection on the green. I squeeze around him, veer right, leaning on the horn as I leave the nitwit behind. This adds an extra mile to my drive: a half-mile over to 7th Avenue and another half-mile back through the ’Hood.

I think people do this kind of thing on purpose. It’s a game for some folks. And really: it’s a miracle more of them don’t get shot.

Life in Outer Dystopia

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So yesterday (is it today already?) I spent OVER FIVE HOURS traipsing miserably from pillar to post, accomplishing…what?

No WAY can you get there from here…

The MacBook, upon which I depend for almost all things computerese, croaked over. So, Apple having closed its store within reasonable driving distance of my house, I had to drive way to Hell and Gone to a tony shopping center called Scottsdale Quarter: 14.5 miles. Add to that the 3+ miles in the other direction, over to the north side of the Metrocenter ghost mall, and you get about 30 miles round trip through the city’s wacksh!t traffic, in which approximately one in every ten drivers is crazy as a loon or dumb as a post.

Before heading east for Scottsdale, I had to drop by the FedEx store at Metrocenter — on the far side of the I-17 — by way of sending a paper(!) manuscript back to a client. This annoyance, because the lines at the post office are so long you’ll stand there for 20 or 30 minutes to get a package weighed, buy stamps, and drop it in the outgoing mail. You actually save time by driving out of your way to go to a store that will sell you the postage. This junket, then, took me six miles out of my way.

Wherever you’re going in the dystopic Valley of the Sun, you can’t get there from here. During this endless junket, I ran into eight roadblocks. If the drive weren’t long enough, it stretches toward eternity while you grind your way through traffic jam after traffic jam. The roads, thanks to all these afterthought asphalt-digging programs and lowest-bidder asphalt-laying, are potholed and ridged every inch of the way. To any drive you choose to make — near or far — you have to add about 10 minutes to your projected driving time, because somewhere along the way you will come to a stop and sit. And sit. And sit.

This time I had enough sense not to park my car in Scottsdale Quarter’s underground labyrinth. Instead left the car across the street in Kierland Commons’ parking lot.

Scottsdale Quarter — to say nothing of the glass box that is the Apple store there, with its ear-splitting ambient noise echoing off the glass and metal walls — is not a pleasant place to spend your time. It is crowded, and not crowded with nice people: the inhabitants by and large are snobbish parvenus, rude and obnoxious. Even outside, the noise level is headache-inducing. Lest any of the customers be disturbed by a moment of introspection, SQ’s designers have kindly lined the sidewalks with fake rocks from which blare a peculiarly annoying type of faceless Muzak. Everywhere you turn, the racket is brain-banging.

Finally, though, I reach the Apple store. And yeah: naturally, they had done exactly what I told them NOT to do: erased the operating system and updated it with the latest and greatest. And by the way deleted the connection to DropBox, which they refuse to deal with because they want you to store your data to iCloud, not to their competition.

My resident Word program will not run on an OS later than Sierra. I went around and around and around with the tech explaining this to him, and explaining that because I am a crazy old lady I do not want my clients’ work in Microsoft’s Cloud, nor am I going to pay Microsoft an expensive subscription for the privilege of having to work in their Cloud. So, when I showed up there after a second nightmarish drive and found they had done exactly what I had asked them not to do, I threw one of my more colorful shitfits, a phenomenon that I am capable of generating with élan.

They agreed to restore the system, but…but…did I have a backup? Of course, they thought I did not. But luckily, I hadn’t taken the external drive that contained the most recent Macbook back-up out of my car, and so yes, it was sitting in the parking lot across the street, in the Kierland Commons shopping center.

Retrieving it required me to walk a quarter mile and cross Scottsdale Road, a huge and hectic thoroughfare, at signals that do not stay green long enough for a rabbit to get from one side to the other at a dead run. But to their amazement I traipsed out, snabbed the thing from the car, and resurfaced in their glass box bearing a two-day-old back up.

So supposedly they have now recovered my system. Tomorrow I have to traipse out there again and pick it up. And you may be sure — because it never fails — that the thing will be totally, utterly, irretrievably fucked up. And you may be sure I will have to spend at least an hour, possibly much longer, trying to get reconnected to DropBox, a chore that is likely to be a horror show of the first water.

Because I still have an antique iMac running, a device I use as a TV substitute, Time Machine has made current backups of all my data. And I can reach DropBox from the iMac. But I don’t do my work on the iMac: my old bones ache so much that it hurts to sit in an office chair in front of a desk for hour on hour. Or, come to think of it, for minute on minute. I have the MacBook so that I can sit in a chair that doesn’t cripple me while I perform the endless work I do for my clients.

Okay, so there’s that.

Meanwhile, when I fell face-first on the concrete pavement the other night, I scratched my expensive pair of glasses. So…oh goodie! Now I get to buy a new lens.

I had gone to Costco a few days ago to pick up a copy of the new prescription I had made there last November. Meanwhile, the fancy optometry shop that dispensed these fancy glasses was priced out of the AJ’s shopping center where it resided for many years and has moved around the corner on Camelback, where you have to navigate around the damned train tracks and where a restaurant reserves most of the parking spaces with posted threats to tow your car if you leave it there.

So I decided to go to the expensive store La Maya frequents for her glasses, which lies tangentially on my homeward-bound way.

Drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and dodge construction and dodge homicidal drivers and jerk left across freeway-sized thoroughfares and finally arrive at this glasses place. Get into the cramped parking lot, find several empty parking spaces in front, park, jump out, prance up to the front door…which is LOCKED. They’re closed. On Monday, at midday.

So I and drive and drive and drive and drive some more and dodge construction and dodge homicidal drivers some more and jerk left across freeway-sized thoroughfares some more and finally arrive at the new venue of my old glasses place. Trot in, show the scratched lens and the prescription to the guy, and ask if they’ll replace the lenses.

Sure, says he. That’ll be $395.

Got that? Three hundred and ninety-five dollars for a pair of plastic lenses. No, that doesn’t include the frames.

Holy sh!t, said I. So it’s back to Costco!

By then I was too tired to make the 11-mile return trip to Costco to order up a pair of dowdy glasses from their optometry department. But I will have to stop there on the way home, tomorrow, from what I expect will be an upsetting trip to pick up the MacBook, which we are told is ready to go.

Right.

Imagine. $395 for a pair of fuckin’ plastic lenses, and they don’t even have to write the prescription.

I may stop by Sassy Glasses — La Maya’s favorite joint — to see if they’ll make the lenses for something within reason. The frames were wildly expensive and they’re my favorite glasses of all time. I really, really don’t want to have to throw them away. But obviously I can’t afford four hundred bucks to replace the lenses. Costco does not make lenses for this kind of specialty glasses, and so if Sassy Glasses can’t do the job for a reasonable price, then it’s back to the ugly old, clunky old plastic glasses from Costco.

Life in beautiful uptown Phoenix. Life in Dystopia.

Golden Shepherd? German Retriever?

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This dog here…

Charley

…is not a golden retriever. Or even an English retriever, the proper name for a “white golden retriever.” He’s a German shepherd tricked out to look like an English retriever.

HOLY mackerel, what an adventure last night.

M’hiijto has gone off to southern Colorado to visit his ancient grandmother, leaving Charley the Alleged Retriever with me and Ruby the Corgi for a few days and nights.

About a half an hour or 45 minutes after our little tribe had shut off the lights and gone to bed last night, somebody came up to the house and apparently tried to get in. Charley was in his accustomed nest at the front end of the hall, where he can see the front door in case his Human shows up (hope springs eternal in the canine breast). All of a sudden, that dog EXPLODED. I mean, Ger-shep explosion: high insane rage explosion. He started out loud and angry, got more and more emphatic and then rose to GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THAT BED, GRAB YOUR DAMN GUN AND GET OUT HERE!

Holy shit.

Welp, I grabbed the phone, not a pistol, and flew up the hall, pursued by Ruby, who was barking LIKE HE SAID! LIKE HE SAID!

Charley was just insane, trying to get out the door, trying to get through the window, roaring like a freaking lion.

They hadn’t set off the motion sensitive lights, but they’d called for backup. Someone drove up in front of the house; they jumped in the vehicle and it shot off down the street.

So I guess Charley scared them off.

Gooood dog, Charley!

Life in the Big City: Moron Edition

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You think I exaggerate when I whine that my life is over-run with morons? Consider last night’s adventure, not an uncommon one in these parts…

Many of the neighborhood lanes here in the ’hood have no sidewalks. That’s because when the tracts were built, the area was out in the country.

People wanted to feel they were living in semi-rural suburbs, and (more to the point) it was cheaper for developers to neglect building sidewalks. Nowadays, though, we live in the big city, not in some sleepy suburb of a sleepy small town. Alas, many of our honored citizens just cannot grasp that as fact.

So…last night I’m headed down to the church. As usual, I putter along the ’hood’s smaller lanes by way of avoiding the back-wrenching speed bumps our City Parents have installed, since I’m already in plenty of pain and would rather not be treated to more of it to get to a main drag.

It’s after dark. I turn off the sub-feeder street that runs along the east side of the park onto a pretty road that gives its name to Lower Richistan, so as to get to Main Drag East. Just as I make the turn I see this whitish thing floating in the air some yards in front of me. Whaaa????

It’s a big old dog’s off-white rear end.

I know this dog: he’s a Great Dane mix, very mellow. But it takes a second to figure out what the pale patch looming through the dark is.

Fortunately I stop the car while I ponder this through. Mr. Dane is accompanying his human, who is dressed completely, head-to-toe, in black or navy-blue. The human is INVISIBLE in the dark. Not only that, but s/he’s pushing a black stroller, which is similarly invisible.

The only way I spot them is that a car passes on Main Drag East, a block ahead, and its headlights backlight them.

A-N-N-N-N-N-D this genius is walking right up the MIDDLE of the right-hand lane of the road. If he hadn’t had that dog with him, I would’ve hit him and his baby.

I almost stopped to let him know he was invisible and suggest that maybe he might want to at least get out of the middle of the road. But then thought ya can’t fix stupid and went on my way.

The walker had on a pair of sneakers with tiny reflective patches on the heels, but they were so small as to be unnoticeable. This is NOT a safe thing to rely on whilst stumbling around in the dark.

Dunno about you, but I can remember being told in grade school — more than once — to always wear light-colored clothing when walking around outside after dark. An adult who’s old enough to spawn a child shouldn’t have to be told this. Wouldncha think?

The Frost Is on the Palm Tree…

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…and on the neighbors’ roofs. The Human, consequently, is suffering a spate of severe indolence, much to the disgust of the Dog, a creature of crisper climates. Soon, though, the loafing primate will be forced to get up and trot around the ’Hood with the canid. Then it’s off to the Walmart to pick up some household necessities.

It was 36 degrees out there when the Dog and the Human rolled out of the sack this morning. Just now — along about two and a half hours later — the back porch thermometer claims the ambient temp has warmed to a cozy 41 degrees. Ruby just trotted in, bearing a prize mummified orange, which (unless I get off my duff and steal it from her) she will soon chew up into messy crumbs. There she goes…off to her nest in the back bathroom.

Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner is hung up on the new moron-protection equipment at the bottom of the pool. People with not very good sense will swim to the bottom of a pool’s deep end with their long hair floating sexily loose in the water and…surprise! Their hair gets stuck in the main drain (which has very powerful suction), they panic and can’t get loose, and they drown. So to protect such bright folk from themselves, we all get to be inconvenienced: the mandated non-hair-catching drain covers, which were not required by law the last time that pool was replastered, stick up off the floor and trap Harvey, so that he just sits there while the pump runs for eight hours at a time.

Pool Dude says I need to replace Harvey (who was replaced just a year or so ago…and whose life expectancy is a good eight years or more) with a model that has wheels. Right. That’ll be $380, which I don’t happen to have laying around. So…I dunno what to do about that. Maybe just take Harvey out and manually vacuum the pool every week or two. What a PITA.

I may ask Pool Dude if his company can come up with a better price than Leslie’s can. They are, after all, a local outfit, and one of course would rather buy local, all other things being equal. But…not now. Probably not until after the end of the summer, unless I win the lottery.

As soon as the rush hour traffic abates, the dog and I must set out for the daily mile-long circuit around the hood…though I must say, I’d like to take this dog somewhere else for a change of scenery. That would require getting in the car, though, something I find increasingly aversive as the days and months go by.

Yesterday I drove out to Tempe to meet The Kid at our favorite fancy restaurant. She’s now engaged in a new master’s program, with an eye to changing careers altogether. She wants to become a psychological therapist, a calling that (IMHO) she would be very good at.

It only took about 20 or 25 minutes to get out there. But it took over an hour to get home.

Normally one would figure the rush hour begins at 3:00 p.m. here. So at 2:25, westward bound on the 202, it did not register with me that I’d best get off the freeway at 32nd Street rather than driving all the way through to the northbound 51. That was dumb. Yards past the 32nd Street offramp, the traffic started to back up. People as usual were jerking and darting around and cutting each other off…I mean, really, estúpido, what good DOES it do you to be one car-length further on down the road than you already were? So in my inimitable manner I did a bit of my own highly skilled jerking around and cut off the guy who had just cut me off to get into the lane to go north on 24th.

Damn, I’m good! Outa my way, ya crazy fools!

I shoulda been a stock-car driver. Did you know one of my freshman-year roommates raced stock cars? Yeah. Back in the day: she was one of the only female race-car drivers in the country. Nineteen and aught-sixty-two…

The offramp is moving slowly, but it is moving. We cruise past several hundred cars (no exaggeration) becalmed in four side-by-side stopped lanes and we slide off onto 24th Street. From there it is a long drive on the surface streets to the north side of North Central.

I decide to take a favorite short-cut, darting west onto Missouri. Unfortunately, so many people now know about this route that one no longer does much darting on it…unless one is cutting off another of one’s fellow homicidal drivers, of course. Traffic is moving, but at a leisurely pace. Naturally, I forget about the damn school: see a school bus way on down the road. Thank the gods and goddesses, it turns off into a neighborhood. One annoyance out of the way, anyhow.

The favorite restaurant was disappointing: for the second time in a row. The last time, I thought it was a fluke — really, this is one of the best places to eat in the entire Valley. But now it looks like the operative term is was, not is.

Usually the hired help is primo: today the server was well-meaning, for sure…but…well…okay, let’s say it: stump-dumb. He didn’t know a lot about the restaurant business, apparently, and he certainly knew almost nothing about the level of cuisine usually served up there.

But that was probably OK, because the level was decidedly not at its high-water mark. Feeling less than ravenous, I ordered an hors-d’oeuvre  platter of Greek-ish delicacies priced about the same as an entrée, and a cup of fancified tomato soup. The soup had a kind of chemically taste (supposedly “smoked” tomatoes: I suppose the smoke was applied from a bottle). The hummus was overspiced (possibly that’s why it was misspelled on the menu? not really hummus but hummus-like: hummous…). The falafel balls were overcooked, dry, and came with too little tahini to moisten them — just a few smears spread on the plate. The Kid’s salad was…well, a salad: what else can one say?

The wine? I’ve had better from Walmart’s liquor shelf, and got the whole bottle for the six bucks we each paid for a glass of the day’s “special.”

The only part of the meal that was outstanding was the dessert. A berry shortcakey concoction, it was excellent. As for the rest of it: taken together, dessert included, it was decidedly not worth the $43 and change we each paid.

So. I’m thinking the next time I go there, I’m gonna order a cup of coffee and the dessert of the day. Period. I’m sure not dropping another $43 on another meal like what we had yesterday.

Well, the sun is half-way to the yardarm, the frost has melted off the neighbor’s shingles, and so…away!