Scarfety chomp munch munch scarf scarf chomp… Ruby’s way of greeting the morning. Arf! we say to that.
Lately back from the ayem tromp around the park. Apparently the Human tromped on an ant’s nest: Crazy-itchy spots on the feet.
Hey, stupid! Next time remember to wear a decent pair of shoes!
😀
Honestly! Humans aren’t very bright, are they?
It is a beautiful morning, though. High, thin overcast softens the brilliant sunlight and gives it a golden cast. Ruby as usual enamored herself of every passing human.
My gawd but people love corgis. The cuteness does it, apparently.
* * *
{sigh} We may be coming up on the last few morning walks around that park. M’hijito has been talking up the glories of prisons for the decrepit such as Orangewood, a dreadful motel that my father moved into after my mother died.
It’s not actually dreadful, objectively speaking. It’s just that..well…communal living is about as not my style as anything can get.
Truly. I despise living in close quarters with other people
- No, I do NOT want to listen to your choice of television shows.
- No, I do NOT want to hear your toilet flush.
- No, I do NOT want to overhear your conversations.
- No, I do NOT want to hear your microwave beeping.
- No, I do NOT want to listen to your favorite radio talk show.
- No, I do NOT want to smell whatever packaged gunk you’ve heated in your microwave.
- No, I do NOT want to listen to your dog yap.
- No, I do NOT want you to have to listen to my dog yap…
- No, no, no, no, and N-O-O-O-O-O!!!!!!!
Seriously: It’s getting harder and harder to see how I’m going to avoid being locked up in an institution for the elderly and the decrepit. And that is NOT the way I want to go out.
I hated, loathed and despised living in the university dorms. Just HATED it!!!!!
That was the way I began my adulthood. And now it’s beginning to look like that’s the way I’m going to end adulthood.
There simply MUST be a better way to pass through the tag end of your life. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is!
***
On the other hand, it does have to be said that these jails offer some serious benefits for the unattached elderly.
The staff at Orangewood were wonderful to my father. You couldn’t hope to find more caring, more skilled, and more knowledgeable prison guar…uhmmm…caretakers. I surely couldn’t have given him even a decent fraction of the attention and care that he got from them.
He doted on my mother — apparently loved her more than anyone or anything in his life — so she was cared for like a queen during the last weeks and months of her life. By the time he fell ill, though, I was running late on the deadline for my dissertation and could NOT interrupt that project to hang out at Orangewood and nurse him as he passed into the Next World. And it might be recalled that he had bestowed one beating too many on me as I was growing up, a circumstance that left me with no great desire to scotch the Ph.D. and stay at his house or at some institution to babysit him.
He had already decided to move to Orangewood — the only reason he wasn’t ensconced there when my mother’s smoking habit caught up with her was that she had flat refused to move out of her beloved Sun City house. She wasn’t in her funeral urn more than a few minutes before he was arranging to get out of Sun City and into the old-folkerie.
He liked that kind of thing, though. Institutional living would’ve made me crazy then and will make me crazy now, if I’m forced into it. How exactly to avoid it, though, kinda escapes me.