Hallelujah, brothers & sisters!
Dunno what brought Ruby the Corgi under the weather last night, but this morning she seems to be miraculously healed!
Yes. She’s scarfed down the usual dose of 1/3 can of dawg food. She’s patrolled the backyard — twice, come to think of it. Now she’s standing out there waiting for a burglar to chase off.
😀 Funny little beast.
At any rate, today she’s acting like her old, healthy self, so I assume whatever ailed her must have been something she ate or some very fast-passing bug.
Whenever the human feels like getting off its duff, we’ll go out and patrol the neighborhood. LOL! The locals must be so glad they have a 30-pound protector looking out after them.
It’s a neighborhood that has much changed over the past few years, yet remains weirdly the same. Our dearest neighbor, locally known as The Ole Guy, disappeared with his wife some time back. He had told me he thought he was going to have to lock her up in an old folks’ home. And I’ll tellya: that guy would never imprison her in a place like that and then walk off, leaving her alone. If he put her in an old-folkerie, you can be sure he put himself there, too.
Meanwhile, SDXB has moved to Sun City, where he took up with New Girlfriend. He seems happy enough, though the last I heard old age has caught up with him and he’s been pretty sick.
I’d be sick, too, if I tried to live in Sun City. My parents proudly retired and moved to Sun City when I went off to college. They thought it was just the business. I thought it was abhorrent.
Seriously: you couldn’t pay me to live there: a ghetto for old folks.
But they thought it was The Bidness. His brother, Ed, and Ed’s harridan of a wife moved there. And my parents’ best friends from Saudi Arabia — Ruth and Hollis — joined them. My mother must have been thrilled to see Ruth move in. The in-laws: not so much, though.
But for me, the place had one major trait working against it: a kind of toxic sameness. All the houses looked alike. All the yards looked alike. All the people looked alike.
The people: old, middle-class, and white. Once a black couple dasted to move in there. They literally were hounded out by the locals.
Hereabouts: I haven’t seen an African-American type move in to these parts. Well, no: one bachelor bought a house a block or two away. But he moved on. Hounded? I doubt it: probably found it costs a lot more to live here than one would expect.
Property taxes are surprisingly high in these parts — probably, I suspect, because the houses are over-valued. Truth to tell, these same models occupy a fair amount of Sun City, which was largely built out by the same developer. A few are a little bigger than SC shacks — mine has four bedrooms, which you surely wouldn’t find out there. And the yards have six-foot walls, with city-owned alleys running behind them. (No alleys in S.C.) But otherwise, the two developments are much the same.
Except…we have kids!
How can one live without the sound of kids carrying on outside?
Seriously: I love the racket of kids playing. Sun City — devoid of anyone under the age of 50 — was silent as a tomb. Well…except for the damn fighter jets blasting over from Luke Air Force Base. That was a racket.