A Day Later…A Dollar Shorter
And now it’s 7:20 of a hot, muggy Friday morning. Just NASTY out there!
Ruby and I are back from this morning’s doggywalk, having dodged…well…not TOO many (for a change) “fur-babies” and their non compos mentis humans. Only two dogs were running around (illegally!) off-lead — we managed to stay out of their way. But OH!!! It’s SO HOT out there!
Well, I hafta admit, it’s not as miserable here as it was in Arabia at this time of year. Along about now, rain could coalesce out of a clear blue sky — that’s how humid it was. And every morning water would drip off the eaves as though it had rained…which it had not. But I will say…this morning it was soooo soggy and sooo hot out there that I was dripping wet before we got back to the house.
Sometimes, honestly….I would just like to move away from Arizona.
But where would I go?
Can’t afford the Bay Area, which I regard as “home.” So that’s out.
Loathe Southern California: it’s worse than here, not because of the weather but because of the bat-brained natives.
Not fluent enough in Spanish to move to Mexico.
Canada: tooooo bloody cold.
New Mexico: don’t know anybody there…too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. And effete.
I dunno…frankly, Arizona is at once the best and the worst of all possible worlds. Sometimes I wish I could have brained my father for dragging us here (it’s only 30 years too late for that! 😀 ) My mother loved it though, so Sun City was a nice way to wind up her life. He didn’t seem to mind the weather, but between Texas, Saudi Arabia, and the high seas, he didn’t know much of anything that was any better.
That poor man! After 30 years of hard, HARD work, penny-pinching every minute along the way, he finally managed to retire. Moved them to their dream home in Sun City, figuring to live out their lives in peace and quiet, parked contentedly in front of the TV.
And…yeah… Within a few years, she’d killed herself. Puffed herself to death with her tobacco addiction.
Seriously: the woman was almost never without a goddamn cigarette in her hand. She would smoke while we were eating. Smoke and smoke and smoke in front of the TV. Smoke at restaurants. Smoke cleaning house. Smoke while she was cooking. Smoke while she was driving. Smoke in the bathtub. Smoke in the shower. Smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke…all the way to the grave.
I can’t even imagine how he was able to sell that house in Sun City: it stank so much of cigarette smoke! Presumably whoever bought it must have been rabid smokers, too. Or else not very bright. What. A. Stench!
Sometimes I wonder if she deliberately killed herself. By the end of the 1950s, it was widely known that tobacco smoking would give you cancer. Having watched her mother die hideously from a reproductive cancer, she lived in terror of the disease. But…apparently that didn’t scare any common sense into her head, not where the effing cigarettes were concerned. Really: she wasn’t stupid. Quite to the contrary. The only thing you can think is that she knew what she was doing and she did it on purpose.
My father smoked…but he sure didn’t smoke like that!
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Cop helicopter circling overhead interrupted that grim little reverie. Grim to grim, eh?
He just took off to the west. Presumably either the perps escaped or the cops on the ground caught them. LOL! Why we always keep our doors and windows locked, here in lovely uptown Phoenix. What a place!
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And, for the life of me, I canNOT make WordPress do what I want it to do. So this post is going online weirdly formatted. Sorry about that.