Ninety-eight degrees in the deep shade of the back porch, according to the thermometer out there. Wunderground says it’s 97, with a predicted high of 103. Ohhhhkay….whatEVER: just now it’s hotter than the proverbial Hubs of Hades. Google puts the humidity at 12 percent.
Hm. Well. Yeah. I could prob’ly believe that. It is, yes, hot enough to melt your hair out there. Yep.
Ruby and I: just back from circumambulating the ‘Hood, having left the house for that venture rather tooooo late in the morning. It’s supposed to reach 113 today, if you buy the local newscasts. So much for Wunderground, eh? 😀
As nothing compared to lovely Saudi Arabia, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. There, the air got so wet that you could be loitering outside and find yourself standing in pouring rain that fell out of a clear blue sky. That’s right: no clouds. It was just so damn humid that rain would coalesce out of the air around you.
Yech! I do find myself wishing I didn’t have to stay here. Given my choice, I’d move right straight back to the San Francisco Bay Area: either to Berkeley, where my aunt, great-grandmother, and cousins lived, or to Sausalito, where my very brilliant uncle and his equally intellectual wife lived.
No, I don’t hate Phoenix. But it surely wouldn’t be my first choice of places to live. Alas, though, I couldn’t even begin to afford the “first choice”: Berkeley, of course.
My parents dragged me here when they took it into their pea brains to retire to Sun City.
They loved it.
You couldn’t pay me to live there: I thought it was just revolting, with its extreme right-wing politics and its atmosphere of hate and those damn jets roaring out of Luke AFB starting at six in the morning.
But whatEVER. Once they got me here, I was pretty much stuck: four years at university; then a job; and thence marriage to an established Phoenix lawyer.
Could I have left?
Probably. Wouldn’t have been easy, though: with a husband and a kid here and a career started and my parents parked out in the boondocks. No…didn’t want to take that on then, and reckon I don’t wanna take it on now.
Even with my parents gone and the husband out the door: My son is established here. I happen to think he’s The Best, and so I have exactly zero craving to move away from him.
No, I don’t like Phoenix and would not choose to live here. But with Dear Son engaged in a career and set in a nice house, I ain’t leavin’…
***
One the things that makes the Valley of the We-D0-Mean Sun damn near unlivable, to my taste, is the unholy summer heat. Back in the Dark Ages, when Gringos first set out to live here, we didn’t have air conditioning. So people who chose to work in the Phoenix area, for whatever reason, kept summer homes up on the state’s central plateau, locally called the Rim. “Cool” might not be the term you’d choose for the June/July/August temperatures there, but it was a helluva lot more tolerable than the sizzling heat in the lower-altitude Valley of the Sun.
Horrible place.
Yeah: if my son moved to someplace I could afford, I’d be out the door in an instant. But he has a good job, and I rather doubt that he’d take off into the urban boondocks somewhere else.
Heh! If he ever does, though, it’s outta here for the Old Bat!
😀
Ohhhhh CRIMINEY! Save me, Lord!
Here’s the Wonder-Cleaning Lady at the front door! Now she’s started to charge around the house, flinging stuff and moving stuff and dusting stuff and cleaning stuff and changing sheets and washing things and MY GAWD HOW ON EARTH DOES THE WOMAN DO IT???????
No kidding. This amazing lady cleans several houses the size of mine (and larger) in one day.
I would drop dead on the floor if I tried to do that. Seriously: just cleaning my own house is as much as I can cope with in one day.
O’course, one reason for that is that I deeply, passionately HATE house-cleaning. Which is the single reason I do pay this marvelous lady some stupefying amount of (well-earned!) cash to come in here and bang around and thrash around and scrub around half the day.
How she stands it: mystifies me. The only explanation is that she’s a woman of steel.
At any rate: she just came from the neighbor’s place. My having spaced the fact that this was a Cleaning-Lady Day, the ambition to loaf atop the bed all afternoon just went straight down the drain. Darn it!
***
Look!!!!
A MIRACLE!!!!!
Just found a book of current checks!
WhoEVER would’ve thunk it? Thought I was out of checks, and have been sitting here wondering how on earth to pay WonderCleaning Lady without begging her to drive me to the credit union.
Now all I’ve gotta do is persuade my son or the neighborhood Uber driver to schlep me to the credit union to get more checks before this new pile runs out. 😀
$$$$$