Coffee heat rising

Time to Move to the Old Folks’ Home?

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Stay? or flee?

Do Ruby and I want to sell up, pack up, and move? Shift our base of operations to an institution for the elderly, where staff babysit you 24/7? Or…well…stay here, keep dodging the burglars and the sh!t-heads, keep managing crews of yard guys, housecleaners, pool dudes, repairmen…on and on and endlessly on?

One advantage of living in an old-folkerie: someone else rides herd on the hired help.

Here, I do have a cleaning lady who does an excellent job. Most of them don’t: they appear not to know how to clean house, at least not to middle-class American standards. So the presence of Wonder Cleaning-Lady is a huge privilege…and very possibly a rarity.

You shouldn’t have to ride herd on a worker doing a job that your mommy taught you to do when you were nine years old. In Wonder Cleaning-Lady’s case, I don’t have to…but too dam many of them don’t even seem to know how to use a dustrag.

Move into one of those old folks’ warehouses, and (in theory, anyway) you have an employee riding the herd.

Whaddaya bet, though, that you still end up with imperfect cleaning, dust still sitting on the bookcase shelves, dust still hiding behind the sofa, grease still sitting on the stove burners…on and on and on…  Y’know…if I have to deal with that, I’d rather deal with it in my own home,  not in some unholy institution.

But…Jeez!!

This morning Ruby and I repaired to the neighborhood park for our morning perambulation. And there was some guy out there, yelling suggestive obscenities at us. Yeah: at an 80-year-old bat!!! 

You can’t get away from the bastards!

Wait…isn’t that what the cop said after the Great Home Invasion Adventure?  😀

Seriously: you CAN’T get away from them.

If I’m going to stay here and if I imagine Ruby and I are going to continue our walking routine, maybe I ought to get us a pistol. One that’s small enough to fit inside a pocket.

On the other hand, I don’t want to shoot some jerk just because he asks me if I wanna f*ck. That wouldn’t be nice, would it?

😉

We’re IN! Not to say FED UP….

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SURPRISE!!!!!  Our honored computer let me into our blog site! It’s a miracle! 

Gray, muggy day. Reminds me vaguely of life in Berkeley, where my relatives dwelt. Only considerably warmer than the East Bay, which was usually pretty nippy.

Dog and Human traipsed around the park, by the light of a dawn best described as “dim.”

Grrrr! Afraid I’m going to have to stop taking Ruby to the park — her paws-down favorite venue! — because of the a$$holes that habituate the place. This morning we had some jerk hollering obscenities at me — AN 80-YEAR-OLD WOMAN! — as we strolled across one end of the park.

Swear ta gawd!!!  What IS the matter with people?

Looks like we’ve got three choices:

* Stay out of the park, now and evermore.
* Get someone, preferably a large and male someone, to walk with us.
* Adopt a German shepherd to accompany us.

None of those appeal:

* Ruby’s little doggy heart will be broken if she can’t ever go into the park again.
* I don’t know any bodyguard-shaped men any more, and even if I did, nothing about little old(!!!) me would motivate such a fellow to traipse around the park with me, flexing his biceps.
* And I’m past the time of my life when I can handle a 90-pound protection dog.

So…it’s pretty annoying. Frustrating, as a matter of fact.

Yow! TAKE COVER!

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EEK, is what we say to all this. Eeeek!

:-D, not to say 😮

Seriously, quite the little freshet is blowing in from the north. Soon, we could reasonably guess, it will be roaring in from the north.

Here’s what SDXB and New Girlfriend observed yesterday, out in their Sun City digs. He said the wind blasted shingles off roofs and roared around…yipes! 

Gathered that they’re both OK, though he didn’t say whether he’d gone over to NG’s house to examine the roof. I do hope she stayed at his house (or vice-versa), so neither one of them would be alone in this insane weather. One way or the other, check the incredible prices for roof repair and re-installing!

So…. I do sincerely hope my honored son, the Insurance Dude, has laid on enough coverage for each of our shacks. This is freakin’ scary stuff!

Never a Dull Moment

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Every time you turn around, here’s some new shenanigan or headache to contend with. It’s getting old…very old…

This morning, in comes an email from a co-religionist down at the church. She and I used to work the front desk in the office, among other things. Soo…I go to answer this message and find it’s FAKE. It’s a spamming, scamming message sent under her name and email address.

Jeez. Don’t you know the mere act of opening that message has now invited that scammer to exploit and hassle me.

Goodie! I can hardly wait.

Just one more thing to pile atop the Handcart to Hell. 

  • My son is ill and pretty much on the outs.
  • I ain’t what you’d call “well,” either.
  • The pool appears to need some (expensive!) work
  • The park is infested with coyotes, so I can’t take Ruby the Corgi over there safely. That park is her favorite doggy-walk venue.
  • The peripheral neuropathy I’ve been enjoying, as it develops, can be a sign of a very serious ailment.
  • And on…and on…and on…

Part of the trouble here is that I’m now sick enough myself that I can’t handle all the stupid little ditz of daily life. And as you my recognize, most of this stuff is the ditz of daily life. One fukkin’ thing after another!

Garbage of that ilk, of course, flows in a steady stream. There’s never any end to it.

But gosh! I’m tired of it!!

Check Your Homeowner’s Coverage!

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Hey! Take a look at your homowner’s insurance  policy and be sure it covers ALL the contingencies. You could be surprised…and that’s a surprise you won’t enjoy if suddenly you need coverage that ain’t there.

Just a few weeks ago, one of the desert’s occasional spectacularly violent windstorms blasted through Sun City, a seemingly endless suburb on the west side of Phoenix. The storm blew off roofs to the left of us and roofs to the right of us…and caused a fair amount of flooding. This happens every now and again out there — maybe once every three or four years, big-time.

SDXB, who lives out in Sun City nowadays, reports that a bunch of his neighbors discovered their trashed roofs were NOT covered by their homeowner’s.

Wow!  You don’t even wanna know what it costs to reroof a two- or three-bedroom house. So…

As annoying as it is, and as much as it does feel like you’re paying for air…DON’T neglect paying for your homeowner’s insurance…and making sure it actually does cover everything that could happen. Including a flying roof…

Home, (Not So…) Sweet Home

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Ugh!  This is where my parents and I used to live, on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Hard to describe how richly we were hated by the locals, who considered Americans to be emissaries of Satan. So, SOOO glad not be there anymore.

My father was paid some ludicrous amount of money to shepherd tankers and freighters out of the Ras Tanura harbor. He was an ocean-going pilot of some prominence, and when he hired on out there, he figured to earn enough to finance a spectacularly early retirement.

Didn’t quite work out that way. I was a weird little kid who couldn’t get along with my normal, very sosh’ classmates. Imagine: a girl child in the 1950s who wanted to grow up to be, of all things, an astronomer! 

😀
not to say
🙁

So the kids hated me and tormented me every day from the fourth grade on, day in and day out of awful misery.

My mother realized how horrible life had become for me out there, and she managed to maneuver my father into retiring from ARAMCO and coming back to the U.S., whither he shipped out of California for Standard Oil.

Whew! She saved my sanity with that. 

Didn’t do his career a whole lot of good, though…

So I was in the 6th grade when we landed back in San Francisco. Couple years later, he got a higher-paying job with Union Oil shipping out of Southern California, and that allowed him to retire permanently much earlier than planned.

Thence, it was off to Arizona, where he had discovered the phenomenon known as Sun City. They shoehorned me into the University of Arizona a year early (skipping my senior year in high school), bought a house in that dreary old folks’ suburb, shooed me off to Tucson, and lived happily ever after.

Well… Until my mother’s incessant goddam smoking habit caught up with her. After it had made me sick (and sick…and sicker) for several years, it gave her cancer and killed her.

My father was soon glommed by one of the predatory women in the old-folkerie to which he had recourse after my mother died. She maneuvered him into marrying her — one of the biggest mistakes of his life — and he lived miserably ever after with her, in that dreary retirement home in uptown Phoenix.

Hafta give him this: he was a far stronger human being than his daughter was or is. I would have picked up a pistol and blown out my brains if I’d been stuck with that lady in that hideously depressing prison for old folks. She was mean, meaner, and even meaner, and she openly hated me because my husband and I were traitorous LIBuhrals. (She was a right-wing crazy; my hubby was on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union, if you can imagine anything so Communistic!). I soon learned to detest her, and so I stayed away from my father most of the time.

Grand way to wrap up a life of amazingly hard work, eh?

Poor man! His life should have been better than that…especially the last few years of it.

He spent those last few years in misery, because he refused to divorce the Dragon Lady. This, despite urging to do so from me and from my husband, one of the most prominent lawyers in the American Southwest. “She’ll get all my money!” wailed he. Forgodsake, Daddy: some things are more important than money. 

Well. He thought not, having toiled throughout his adult life to collect that retirement fund. So he stayed married to the witch, on and interminably on. He predeceased her, which meant the last few years of his much-coveted retirement were passed in glum, tedious depression.

Ugh! What that said to me is no matter how much you covet married bliss, NEVER remarry in old age!