Coffee heat rising

Stop the World…

by

i wanna get off!!!!!

This damn place — lovely uptown Phoenix — gets crazier and crazier with each passing day. Accumulated passing days have given us insane cross-streets and neighborhood roads: lunatic drivers, roads that go nowhere, a construction zone at every turn…what a horrible place!

Wait, wait… Whew! A miracle just happened: WordPress let me in to Funny about Money, a maneuver it’s been rejecting all morning.

I could not remember the secret codes…or much of anything else. Apparently the computer’s memory has not yet been consumed by senility: at length, it remembered SOMETHING and let me into FaM’s site.

So this morning I determined to buy a silly dood-dad that I’ve been coveting for some time. So it was off to the gigantic {supermarket} up on Dunlap Road.

They didn’t have it.

Ohhhkayyyyy….

Around the corner to the hardware store:

Noooo…not a chance in Hell.,

Ohhhhhkayyyyy,,,,

Across Main Drag Central, over to the westside shopping area, into another hardware store.

Nope.,

Into another supermarket.

Har har hardy-har har!

Over to the Safeway.

Not a chance in Hell.

Up to the Albertson’s. It may not be Hell, but it doesn’t have a chance of carrying the doo-dad, either.

Driving around & around. Ugh!

Truth to tell, I love to drive. But I am SO-O-O-O SICK of driving in L.A. East!!!!! Gawdlmighty, I hate the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Just a nasty, frustrating, crazy-making place to drive a car.

Driving around gets crazier with each day. People behave like they’re high on meth, wherever they go. Who knows? Maybe in my senilitude, I do the same thing. All I know is…GET OUTTA MY WAY, YA CRAZY FOOLS!

Seriously: that’s how it feels to drive here.

The more Phoenix resembles the L.A. area, the more I hate it.

Seriously: if my son didn’t live here, I would be sooooooooo long gone!

Where would I go?

Hm….

Here in Arizona?

* Sedona
* the Oro Valley area outside of Tucson
* Fountain Hills, an overpriced suburb of Scottsdale
* Prescott (probably not: too cold in the winter)

Uhmmmm…that’s about it.

In California:

* San Francisco
* Certain parts of San Diego
* Carmel/Monterey, if I had all the money in the world

In Nevada?

*Phbbhphttt!

In New Mexico?

* Santa Fe: again, if I had all the money in the world

****

Welp! Since “All the money in the world” doesn’t apply here. it looks like I’m stuck. And the more I live in Central Arizona, the less I like it.

****

Advice to the unwary: think one helluva lot more carefully than I did about where you’d like to spend your dotage!

Whatever You Want…

by

…You can’t have it. Right?

It’s not even 7:30 in the morning, and this has already been One of Those Days.

Plumber is supposed to show up at 8:00…Dawg and I roll out at 6:30 or so. Feed dog. Get dressed.

Have you ever tried to deny a dog a doggy-walk?

No? Don’t even think it!

Out the door at 6:45, knowing that n-o-o-o-o-o, we will not be trekking around the park. But at least we can get …

Ahhh, the morning serenade! Reverberating merrily from Conduit of Blight Blvd: HOOOOOOONK! HONK HOOOOOOONK! HONK HONK! Some idiot must have cut off another semi-truck. Or maybe the train.

What a place!

…yesh…we can get back here before the Plumber’s appointed hour.

Dawg is highly annoyed to have her usual morning safari cut short. We approach the house. Coming from the other direction is some woman with a dog that, before our very eyes, has launched into a fight with another woman’s dog.

Fortunately, our front porch is surrounded by a walled courtyard.

Dodge in and slam the gate shut, escaping the wandering knight.

Hungry. Cranky. Not in the mood for a plumber or for anyone else.

Can’t find the coffee.

Ah! Here’s the reason! We’re almost out. Now I’ll have to traipse to AJ’s (Fancy-Dan Grocery Store) to pick up another package of overpriced coffee beans.

Reflect, as I’m boiling water and grinding coffee, that I really got ripped off the other evening, at the restaurant where VC and I went. It’s a sushi place up on North Central, in the AJ’s sh0pping center. Yes, I ordered a plate of sushi. Got some six pieces. And a beer.

They charged me thirty bucks!

Holeee shee-ut!

The ridiculousness of that hadn’t registered with me until this morning. No wonder SDXB, an accomplished tightwad, doesn’t like to go out to eat!

Well, we had a nice time. But come ON! We could’ve had a nice time at a Burger King.

Marge, my favorite neighbor, has a son who decided to start a restaurant. Apparently that’s a particularly difficult line of business in which to succeed. She abandoned her retirement to go help him run the place, so basically the whole family was hard at it. Located in a Safeway shopping center that itself was in an upscale part of town, it occupied a space where it should have seen a lot of traffic. Despite those advantages and plenty of hard work, the place still went  belly-up. No wonder restaurants have to charge so much!

That’s even though most Americans are very much into eating out. Just about any restaurant you pass is crowded during mealtime hours. But I’m more & more with SDXB: why go out to eat when you can cook as well or better yourself? Yeah: the cost is having to wash the dishes…but that’s better than thirty dollah.

one ringy-dingy…

two ringy-dingies…

Grab phone: Plumber.

Won’t be here till noon.
Translation: sometime this afternoon…

LOL! And…is there a reason I shouldn’t have expected that?

To the caller’s surprise (you can tell she’s braced for outrage), I remark that the world will not end if Our Hero doesn’t show up at the appointed minute: tell him to take his time. Astonished relief echoes down through the telephone wires.

{Yes: we still have wires here in the ‘Hood: they’re underground, but they’re wires.)

***

Overcast, hot, and humid. And aren’t you glad you don’t live in Florida?

Gaaaah! We’re better than Florida!

No doubt of it!

Eeek!

Haven’t been there but have done that.

When I was a kid, we lived in Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Our houses — the settlement was an oil camp built by ARAMCO — were sturdy enough little cement-block numbers, very comparable to the one I’m living in right now.

One summer, a storm like Florida’s came through. My mother was in a panic. My father (who, thank the Gawds of the Sea, was not at his job down at the docks just then) was manfully calm. I was fascinated.

“Get away from those windows!!!”

“Uhm…and…why?”

Unclear whether an actual tornado came through. You couldn’t see anything through the commotion, and of course out in the middle of nowhere we had nothing that resembled a weather service.

Our house — we were about a block and a quarter from the beach — stood up just fine. We didn’t even get a leak.

Others? Not so much….

My pal Ennis’s house lost its roof. Literally, the storm lifted the roof off the house and threw it on the ground.

He didn’t seem especially fazed, in the aftermath. But then, like me he may just have been too young to understand the potential.

Plus his parents didn’t have to wrestle with repairs: all our homes were company houses, so the company came in and fixed everything.

What a place!

Ras Tanura’s “hot and humid” would make Florida’s look balmy. It was so humid there that I have actually seen — more than once! — rain start to fall out of a clear blue sky.

Right now Wunderground is predicting 145-mph winds in parts of Florida. A hundred and forty-five miles per hour!

How can we count the ways we’re glad we don’t live there? Makes 115 in the shade look good…

So Glad Not to Be There

by

On any ordinary day, to tell the truth, I’m mighty glad I no longer live in Saudi Arabia…or really, anywhere in the Middle East. But these days: holy mackerel!

[oooookayyyy… WordPress won’t let me add a link. So, here it is, for the copy-and-pasting: https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/czrm4k1e7d0o  Best described as egad!]

It was a horrible place to live, even for a little kid who didn’t know or understand what was going on around her. You think Americans can hate? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Where those bombs are blasting away? That’s where we used to stay during my father’s biannual two-week vacations!

The American men (married women couldn’t work for the company) signed on for two-year contracts. Between each contract, you got a month off, and in the middle of the contract, you got a couple weeks off.

During those “short leaves,” as they were called, we would go to Beirut, or to Bahrein, an island off the shore of the Persian Gulf not far from where the American camps stood.

It’s horribly sad to think of a bunch of a$$holes blowing up Beirut. Despite the poverty and the hatred for Americans, it actually was quite a beautiful city. I recall this one beach we used to visit — not far from where we would stay. It wasn’t sand, exactly: it was made of tiny, smoothly eroded glass-like pebbles. Stones of many colors. Small enough and fine enough that you could walk around on them bare-footed. And so very, very pretty.

Yeah. So…let’s drop a bomb in it, right?

I see Aramco has spiffed up the Ras Tanura beach, turned it to a sorta entertainment venue. That’s too bad: it was quite beautiful enough, back in the day, and did not need to be junked up with any man-made accoutrements.

You have to be quite the adventurer — or, as my father was, extraordinarily anxious to max out your earning power — to sign on for two years in that place.  We were there for ten endless years. These photos make it look a lot less bare-bones than it was when we lived here. But still:

  • It was hotter than the hubs of Hades.
  • Humid as a steam-bath
  • Women were not allowed to take any decent jobs: you could be a K-8 teacher, a nurse, or a secretary. That was about it.
  • You had to soak every piece of produce in Clorox water, lest the stuff give you a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.
  • The school went through the eighth grade. After that you were sent to Beirut, to Switzerland, or back to the U.S. for high school. And no, your parents didn’t come with you.
  • At the time, the only air-conditioning was what we call “swamp cooling” today. Damp and pretty much ineffectual.
  • There were two church meetings: Protestant and Catholic. If you were into religion and one of those would suffice for you, you’d go to one of those. Not very many folks did.
  • Americans were roundly hated. That’s OK, I reckon: the feeling was mutual.
  • You couldn’t have a dog: rabies.
  • Even if you could, jackals came into the camp at night and would rip your dog, if it was caught, from limb to limb.

My mother did catch amoebic dysentery, as a matter of fact. In our LAST WEEK in that garden spot, we were invited to the home of one of my father’s coworkers. He was a guy my father openly disdained as a moron…without a doubt that attitude had become widely known. The guy’s idiot (malign???) wife served  us a salad with greens that she hadn’t soaked in Clorox, then the only effective way to sanitize produce. Before we were ready to head to Dhahran and jump on a plan back to the states, my mother came down with the parasite.

She very nearly died from it. Had to be shipped back to the U.S on an emergency flight. There she spent weeks in a hospital, being treated with the fierce and poisonous drugs they had at the time. The stuff made her desperately sick…which must have been gratifying for MacA’s bi*ch wife.

{Seriously: I am quite certain the woman knew what she was doing. She deliberately served us unsanitized produce in an effort to make us sick. And it worked!}

Eventually, my mother recovered. Got on a plane; flew back to Rasty Nasty, picked me up, and took me off to New York.

Never have I ever been so happy to leave a place. Seriously….

Lost Times, Lost Friends, Lost Family…

by

Phoenix…ugh! The place gets more and more like L.A. as the days pass!

I was reminded of this, fairly vividly, when I drove through a tract just to the south of the ‘Hood, probably built out in the late 1950s or the 1960s. The houses there remind me so much of my mother’s best friend, Anna. The Long Beach, California, neighborhood where Anna lived could have been built by same developer — the houses practically clone Anna’s little place.

It was a nice little place. Her husband, Capt. Fred Ellison, was a sea captain just like my father, and he made a pretty good living, for a blue-collar guy.

And their house was nice enough: a sweet little place in a blah, faceless Southern California tract. Every shack looked the same as the next one, really. If you didn’t know Anna’s address and didn’t know where you were going, you’d never find her place.

The two men were coming on to the end of their careers, along about 1960 or ’62. They both planned to retire soon.

Capt. Ellison was on the last inbound leg of his last sea voyage. We were all looking forward to the great retirement and all the fun the friends would have and maybe talking Anna and Capt. Ellison into moving to Sun City, where my parents had already decided to retreat.

And damned if he didn’t drop dead on the ship’s deck.

No exaggeration: he had a heart attack and literally fell down dead. As the ship was heading in to harbor.

Well, the Ellisons’ house in Long Beach, a pleasant little place, was paid for. Their only child, a daughter who had some mental problems that seemed to entail a shortage of IQ points, was married and had two kids. And she had an appropriately mindless job on a factory assembly line, also in Long Beach. The son-in-law was a decent man who had reached the apogee of his career in a similar job.

That, of course, was the end of any inchoate schemes to inveigle Anna into moving to Arizona.

So there was something kind of heart-rending about driving through a neighborhood that looked so much like the one where Anna and Fred had lived. Absurdly, I wondered if my parents would have moved into town if Anna and Fred had bought a place over here, in that tract.

They might have. But probably not. My father, who was not fond of kids, thought Sun City was the greatest innovation since gin & tonic. The child-free appeal of Sun City, for him, was just huge. One rather doubts that Anna and Fred, who had grandchildren, would have thought the same way.

Also, Anna was massively overweight: so much that a good-quality bathroom scale could not measure how much she weighed. The ensuing health problems would have made it difficult for them to move. Plus their daughter, who was not overly endowed in the compos mentis department, was happily ensconced in that assembly-line job and a stable marriage. And Anna’s grand-daughter, who seemed to have developed a normal contingent of IQ points, was in high school and no doubt needed her grandmother to keep her more or less on track.

So…it’s reasonable to doubt that Anna and Fred could ever have been talked into coming over here, even after Fred retired.

Too bad. They’ve been missed over the years.

The Salton Sea Boondoggle

by

About the time we came back from Saudi Arabia for (thank gawd!) our last long leave, my father celebrated by purchasing the Car of His Dreams: a Chrysler sedan. He bought it in New York. He and my mother drove it across the country to San Francisco, where he took up a first-mate’s job on an oil tanker and we lived for a couple of years in a tony apartment complex called Parkmerced. Then he got another, better-paying job, shipping out of Long Beach, California.  So my mother and I packed up all our worldly goods, sent everything south, and moved into a (crummy!) apartment in Southern California.

Of course, we took the new Chrysler with us.

My father was so proud of that car. It was a Rolls Royce for the working classes. At least, so it was in his mind.

Meanwhile, my father being quite the cheapskate, my mother took it into her head to create her own little career: selling real estate. She had become friendly with a real estate saleswoman who was quite the scam artist. This woman persuaded my mother to get a real estate license and throw in with her, selling houses at the Salton Sea.

Salton Sea, then imagined to be a developer’s bonanza, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.  And my mother got swept right up in it. Fortunately, she didn’t buy any property down there, so my father didn’t lose his hard-earned shirt through her real-estate exploit. But….

Among other things, one aspect of my mother’s project involved driving from L.A. through Palm Springs and down to the half-baked development at Salton Sea. And that involved driving through a broad, sandy desert, where the wind blew fiercely.

Fiercely enough to sandblast the finish off that swell new car, right down to the metal.

My father must have just been horrified when he came home from the ship and saw the paint scoured off his beautiful new car.

And for what?

For naught. Salton Sea, as it developed, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.

***

She had no clue. Neither, unfortunately, did he. But one senses that if he’d had a shore job, if he hadn’t been off at sea for week after week and month after month, he would have sussed out the rip-off before she got caught up in it..

I was just a kid in high school. I therefore had an excuse (of sorts) to have no clue. Instinct suggested that all was not perfect there, but there was no way in Hell (where we were dwelling…) that I could have figured out that it was a huge, ridiculous scam. Even if I could have, my parents paid no attention to me. I MIGHT have alerted my father…but probably not. As far as he was concerned, I was just a weird little kid — and worse, a weird female kid.

So they got sucked into the Salton Sea boondoggle. How much they lost — above and beyond the damage to a brand-new Chrysler — I do not know. They didn’t share their financial matters with a weird little kid.

Mercifully, she didn’t buy any property down there. I’m pretty sure that was only because my father wouldn’t have allowed it. He clung to every penny more fiercely than Scrooge McDuck hung onto his dollars.

Luckily for me..

The Insane Fidgeting of Tempus…

by

Tempus fidgets, as my mother used to say. (Yah: very funny. Chortle!)

Yesterday evening I was thinking about my college boyfriend — let’s just call him P. — whom my parents hated, loathed, and detested.

Why they so reviled the man was something I could never figure out. To this day, it’s just a guess…but revile is the word. The detested him at a professional level.

My guess is that it was because he was from an Eastern European background, and they were bigots at a professional level.

You understand: he was NOT European. He was born and raised in Chicago, as were most of his nearest relatives. But in my parents’ minds…well…once a Bosnian, always a Bosnian???

My parents demanded that I break up a two-year relationship with P., one that had become serious enough that he and I assumed we would marry after we finished at the University of Arizona. When my mother made it clear that I would have to choose between them and him,…well…there really wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t about to abandon my parents, who had hauled me all over the world, provided a sterling upbringing, and sent me, on their dime, through four years of college.

A few other details frosted that cake, though. I think the one that cinched my decision came when his best buddy took up with a barfly, frolicking merrily in the sack with her…while his wife was too pregnant to accommodate him.

Seriously: the guy’s wife is eight or nine months along, and there he is, screwing this chippy. And P thought that was cool, just hunky and dory…after all, his wife couldn’t or wouldn’t let him have any. What’s a man s’pposed to do?

Right?

All my mother’s vociferous objections to P had little effect on my taste for him. I was madly in love, after all. Right?

But when, that night as we lingered in bed together, he remarked that “A guy has gotta have it,” excusing his friend’s faithless lust, I thought…ah hah! If you think that’s OK for your pal, you’ll figure it’s OK for you.”

Right?

Uh huh… Well, right or not, out he went. I flang him out: sent him off weeping into the night.

That that was the last I saw of him.

From what I can tell, he went back to the Midwest, got a master’s degree in those parts — in Education, the easiest of all possible programs — and then dove into a series of bureaucratic jobs. Turns out that for some time during my last stint as an Arizona State University bureaucrat, he was working in the ASU president’s office!

I had no idea. Didn’t find out about it until I was long gone from the Great Desert University, as was he. If ever I encountered him on the campus, I didn’t recognize him.

Which, I suppose, is just as well.