You know you’re gettin’ old when a passing remark on a website evokes a twinge of memory and sentimentality.
This morning I stumbled upon a mention of the late (now long late) San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Herb Caen.
Oh, my: he was wonderful. Could that guy write! More to the point, he could report. My mother loved his stuff. And we subscribed to Chronicle because of Caen. Otherwise we would have been getting the rival paper, the Examiner.
He passed in 1997, it sez here. {sob!} Herb! How could you leave us?
My, it was great fun living in San Francisco for those three years or so after we came back from Saudi Arabia. I was in junior high school — early teens. There was no such thing as drugs in public schools — at least not in middle-class schools. It was safe for a 13-year-old to walk and ride the public bus to campus.
LOL! Speaking of “memory”: 21st-century building materials don’t have much…
Just now, a crew is out in the yard digging up the entire irrigation system. The plastic piping installed when I moved in here has rotted out and much of it needs to be replaced.
This is something I’ve known for awhile…though my son thinks I’m being taken advantage of. So of course that led to a lovely dust-up.
It’s a very expensive job, and I’m having to transfer money from investments to cover the bill. This, as you can imagine, does little to make my day… But in the absence of reliable watering, the landscape plants and citrus trees are dying, so the job has gotta be done.
This is the sort of thing that makes moving to a high-rise apartment look good.
It would look a lot better if I didn’t have a dog…. To live in one of those places, I’d have to litter-train Ruby (yes, believe it or not, a dog can be taught to use a cat box) and also take her downstairs and outside several times a day. Neither of those are appealing prospects.
Then you have the lovely racket of apartment living. We used to live in a high-rise apartment in San Francisco. It actually was better built and better sound-proofed than modern-day structures…but still, when the upstairs neighbor wore high-heels, you could hear her march click-click-click-click-click across the parquet floors. And listening to the neighbors’ TV shows does NOT appeal to me… 😀
Yes. Where my father used to live in his dotage, you could hear the neighbors’ TV sets nattering on. Where he parked his car, it was always at risk of break-in and theft.
Ugh! That is not how I wanna live again.
Here, the car is secured inside a closed, locked garage. I have my very own pool with a tall fence that no one can peer over. I do not have to overhear anyone else’s choice of television shows.
On the other hand…I sure could do without having to hire someone to come in, dig up the irrigation system, and repair it. This is going to cost gerjillions of dollars, which offends my Tightness Tendencies.