Coffee heat rising

Life in Hell…

The day

Ahhh, another lovely August day in Phoenix: 104°, 29% humidity. WHAT a garden spot!

And folks: we got guys out there workin’ like horses in that unholy, soggy heat.

We start the day with a New Yard Dude, a fella I snabbed whilst strolling through Upper Richistan. For slightly more than twice what the beloved but perennially absent Gerardo charges, he agreed to shovel out the seriously neglected front and back yards. Thank you, dear man!!

He does a superb job, not a mere excellent job. The place is transformed!!

  • The weeds are gone.
  • The rampant tree branches are trimmed back.
  • The quarter-minus is raked and smoothed and niftied up.
  • The back-breaking heavy gravel in front is de-weeded and raked smooth.
  • The dog is in love.

Of all those, the last is the simplest, because the dog is in love with everyone.

The amount of soul-crushing work this gent did defied belief.

And then, God help him and all of us, he jumped in his truck to go off to another job!!!

He did miss the weeds in the alley (Upper Richistan doesn’t have alleys, so he probably doesn’t know that alley weeds are the homeowner’s responsibility). But that comes under the heading of No Big Deal: I have a gallon of concentrated Round-Up. Haven’t used it because I haven’t wanted to contaminate my few sprinkling or spraying devices with the stuff. But WTF? Tomorrow ayem I’ll take one of the sprinkling buckets, mix up some Round-Up, and drizzle it on the alley weeds.

One problem solved.

Next the phones/Internet/WTF.

A Cox guy shows up shortly after dawn cracks.

Along about the time New Yard Dude shows up, another Cox guy shows up.

They puzzle and figure and wrestle and wrestle and puzzle and figure and puzzle and figure and wrestle and finally, for reasons that no normal human can conceive, announce that the problem is SOLVED.

Uhhmmmm….

Ohhhkayy…heard that wind blow before.

We experiment with the phones a bit. Looks like probably…possibly…maybe they’re right. I dunno. I can’t tell. What I do know is that if the damn system works while the Marvelous Cox Dudes are here, it no doubt won’t work after they walk out the door.

Ohhh well and WTH. That just means these cuties will have to be invited back in the house. Wot a shame!

In the meantime, I’ve acquired another wireless doorbell to replace the one inactivated by the latest Sh!thead Attack. This, I must unpack, set up, and install at the front door and at the front gate.

Yes.

Unpack.

Have you noticed how spectacularly almost everything is overpackaged?

Took half my lifetime to slice and wrench it out of its ridiculous plasticized wrapping. Finally got it out. Read the instructions.

They want you to install these little flat battery things somewhere. But…but…WHERE is less than perfectly obvious.

After some unholy amount of time (so it felt) trying to figure out what the fuck they were talking about, I finally came to a guess that worked.

Now we have two of these things that have to be installed at the front door and the front gate, and a bingy-bonger box that has to find a home inside the house.

Wrestle wrestle wrestle Rassle rassle rassle Wrestle wrestle wrestle…finally…YES!!!!!! IT WORKS.

Yes. Now after three days of thrashing around, we have here a doorbell that rings when you push its button.

In other realms:

Half of a pair of dear friends passed away a few days ago. Not unexpected, but still…sad. Planned to return to choir this fall, now that the worst of the plague is dying down. But sadly, it looks like the very first thing we’ll be doing is singing at his service!

Heaven help us all. Especially him.

His wife moved them into the Beatitudes specifically so they could get care for a much aging man (he was 94), and because they had a lunatic next-door neighbor who truly was a threat. Never once did she say to him or to anyone else “I’m moving us there specifically to get care for you,” but now we see that must have been the case. Her daughter tells me she’s moving to California to live with the kids.

Where this leaves the beloved Connie the Long-Haul Truck Driver escapes me. Presumably her brother will have to overrule his exceptionally hostile wife to take over the kindnesses their father bestowed. Or else…heaven help us.

As we scribble, a cloud passes over the  mid-day sun, and the room’s light grows dimmer and dimmer…

4 thoughts on “Life in Hell…”

  1. Very glad to hear you’re going back to choir. When my quilt group picked back up again, it made such a difference to me.

    As for your 29% humidity,I can only dream. Here in southern Louisiana, it’s almost always over 85-90 from May till mid October. I grew up here with no ac till end of high school. But now at 78 it is positively unbearable. We live for late October. From then till May the weather is between good and heavenly.

    • Welp, between the time I wrote that and just this minute, I changed my mind. {sob!}

      Choral singing, which entails deep breathing and extravagant exhaling, is about the most dangerous thing you can do in time of contagion. You have someone standing behind you huffing (and spitting, however finely) on the back of your neck, and people on both sides of you exhaling deep germy breaths.

      It really is, alas, a bad idea. Especially when you’re unusually susceptible to respiratory infections, as I happen to be. When I was a baby in an ICU with one such disease, a doctor told my mother I wouldn’t live until morning. He apparently was wrong…but the point is, I don’t wanna do that again.

  2. I don’t understand why someone would steal your doorbell. Can it be re-used? Can it be sold? Was he just being an @sshole? As mom used to say, “I’m bumfuzzled!”

    • I have NO idea, either. They clearly had spotted it and knew it was there, because they came up to the house from the east side of the gate and the doorbell was on the west side and so not visible from the pickup’s front seat. I reckon they’d seen it while they were doing yard work or something and decided nothing would do but what they must have a doorbell button of their very own,. 😀

      People are crazy, eh?

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