<snark!> Wunderground tells us our humidity is a mere 22%. Shoot! You can’t even swim in that!
Hot. Wet. Gray. Boring.
Waiting for my son to pick me up and take me to see a new-to-me doc, one whose practice is way to Hell and Gone out near Sun City.
Stupidly, eagerly…I picked this guy off the Internet because he has good reviews and he’s NOT way to Hell and Gone halfway to Payson.
The august Mayo Clinic is just that: on the road to Payson, a good hour’s drive from the Funny Farm.
Afraid the guy’s office is just about that far in the other direction, so this is gonna be a futile trip.
…
I sit here un-enjoying this balmy day and think…how miserable my mother must have been, living by the sea in Saudi Arabia. It was like this about 80% of the time: hot and humid.
It’s also not surprising that my mother, a girl from Upstate New York, would not survive 10 years on the shore of the Persian Gulf. The accursed place was hot and humid: most of the time just like today’s gray and sticky weather in this place and in this time.
Yeah. Ten years in Saudi Arabia killed her. Shortly before we were to come home for good, an idiot neighbor invited us over for a farewell dinner.
Understand: the company trained employees to sanitize all the produce they ate. Fresh vegetables were to be soaked in Clorox before you washed and ate them.
But there, as here, morons held forth: the type who imagines that if an authority says something, it must be manipulative and false.
So this stupid woman, our neighbor and the wife of a guy who worked on the docks with my father, had us over. I — then an 11-year-old — was dorking around in the kitchen with her and her son while she was preparing the meal. Several times, she sliced off a piece of cabbage and handed it to me as a snack…without sanitizing it.
I must have been strong as a little horse, because I never got sick from it. But…my mother sure as hell did.
She almost died. She spent weeks in the company hospital as they dosed her with whatever poisons they had to try to beat back amoebic dysentery. More weeks in bed after we got back to the States. And really: she never was right again. She died of a gastric cancer shortly after my father retired and betook them to Sun City.
Ugh.
Anyway. Doctors are not my favorite people. No fault of their own, you understand: I just don’t like being reminded, vividly, of the gawdawful occasions when we needed to make use of their skills.
***
hmmmm…. 10:30 and my son’s not here. Could he have forgotten?
awwww…what a shame!
Do I have the wrong day?
* * * * * *
oh!!!! Yaaayyyyy! YES , I DO!!!!!!
Today is Tuesday. Our appointment with New Quack isn’t until tomorrow: Wednesday!!!!
Joy joy joy! Dance to spring!
Well. Dance to mid-summer, anyhow.
*** *** ***
So! NOW what?????
What I’d like now is a fresh bottle of wine. We’re about out of booze here at the Funny Farm. But on the other hand…if M’hijito spots any such prize, he will have a sh!t-f!t that won’t quit. He imagines he’s heaving me onto the wagon.
{chortle!}
At any rate, to replenish the supply, I’d have to march through the humidity to the Sprouts…or down to the Albertson’s. And you wanna know what I DON’T want to do?
Yeah…tromp around Phoenix on a humid, hot day.
All the stores around here have announced that they’re taking to delivering groceries to your house. Nice, eh?
Except…I haven’t set that up with any of our fine emporia yet. To do so would require me to walk over to Main Drag West and up to Main Drag North, visit three or four stores, and dork around with making them understand where to bring the loot.
And good luck with that, eh?…
Seriously, I am enthusiastic about trying this new service…and, I sincerely hope, using it regularly. I do hate grocery shopping, that’s for sure.
But first off, I’m too lazy to get my butt over to the stores and dork with this stuff.
And second off (third off, fourth off, fifth off, and so on…), most Americans haven’t a clue about the nature and uses of fresh produce. Which is to say, they couldn’t pick out a decent head of lettuce if their life depended on it.
So, I expect that once I do get this system up and running here, the results will be less than sylvan.
Hmmmm…. Another frenzy of sirens echoing across the lands. Must be another wrecky-poo down on Main Drag South…no, sounds like the ambulance is on its way northward on M.D. West.
Ambulance driver. Now there’s a job I don’t envy anyone. What a hair-raising experience that must be…day after day after day…