Back porch thermometer says it’s only 111° in the shade out there. Hm…and Wunderground, that fount of officialdom, says…? Yeah: 111 degrees!!!
Blech! How could we do without it? Let us count the 87 gerjillion ways…
Why, again, do I stay here????
Oh, yeah: because my Honored Son is here.
Man!!! If he weren’t, you may be sure I’d be back in Northern California, whence I emanated lo! these many decades ago.
My parents dragged me to Arizona after my father retired from the Merchant Marine. They’d discovered Sun City, which they thought was just about THE most marvelous thing they’d ever heard of. So they bought a little house there (all the shacks out there are “little”), dumped me at the University of Arizona (say good-bye to UC Berkeley, dear…) and decamped to a cute little house directly under the flight path of the jet planes from Luke Air Force Base.
Garden spot.
Well. They thought it was, anyway. They were delighted with it.
😀 I was delighted to get away from it.
Anyway, the University of Arizona was OK, I guess. But Tucson sure as Hell wasn’t Berkeley. On the other hand, one could easily land a Phi Beta Kappa key while snoozing through one’s classes….
From the UofA I roamed back up to the Phoenix area and alit at Arizona State University, a monument to mediocrity, where before long I captured a Ph.D. Didn’t do much to launch a great career…..but at least it led me into a job that was better than answering the phones at the law firm that was supporting me.
These are the kinds of experiences that have led me to regard Arizona as the Land of Mediocrity. Only thing that’s NOT mediocre here, far’s I can see, is the heat. That, and the mediocrity itself. We do have first-rate mediocrity. 😀