Coffee heat rising

Stylishly Stupid

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Thinking about the teachers we had in Ras Tanura’s grade school, not with much pleasure where most of them were concerned.

The first-grade teacher, Miss Woods, was excellent — by the grace of God. We had no kindergarten, so at least this woman started me out on the right foot.

The second-grade teacher was a witch. Stupid as a post…if only posts could be not mean.

The third-grade teacher, Miss Gaskill, also was excellent. Between Woods and Gaskill, I learned to read exceptionally well and sorta kinda figured out arithmetic (which I dearly hated).

The fourth-grade teacher was so stupid as to make a post look smart. Ignorant? She defined ignorance. And was proud of it.

Fifth grade brought me to a “world traveler”: one of those women who out of boredom and curiosity convert their teaching credentials into a ticket to jobs overseas. Stupid, she probably wasn’t; but she was mean, at least to weird little girls who didn’t conform to her definition of American girlhood. I loathed the woman. Managed to get out of her class (thanks to the machinations of my mother and her best friend, a nurse in the camp clinic, who contrived to persuade my father I was so sickly I needed to be sent home to the States).

So, mercifully, I escaped the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School and arrived in the U.S. halfway through the sixth grade, having been out of classes for the better part of a year — supposedly too “sick” to attend.

In San Francisco, where we came to light, I was so far ahead of grade that the teacher hardly knew what to do with me. I quickly moved on to junior high school, also well ahead of grade (I had been tutored at home for the better part of a year). And oh, my! I was so, sooooo happy to get on the other side of the globe from Saudi Arabia!

And out of the Saudified Americans’ lock-step schools.

Just because your kid isn’t doing well in grade school may not mean something’s wrong with the kid. The problem may be with the school itself, or with the kid’s charming little classmates. Don’t assume anything…

Random ruminations…

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Chilly, windy day: morning breezes have blown away most of the cloud cover. In an hour, I have to be at the physical therapist’s, meaning I have to leave in 45 minutes. Nothing from my son as to whether he’s picking me up or when. But this poses no problem for the appointment, because the spavined shoulder is healing MUCH faster than I imagined possible, and I certainly can drive my car the couple of miles to get to the PT’s office/clinic/gym/whatever-you-call-it.

I can think of about a thousand things I’d rather do than spend another hour going hup-hup-up, flapping my arms around. WHAT a bore! However….gotta admit that just one session seems to have made a huge difference. The joint hardly hurts at all, and I can move the arm in just about any direction without a startling stab of pain.

Meanwhile, there’s a Safeway catty-corner across the street from the PT’s joint. Some groceries are in order…so whenever I get free from the “therapy” or whatever it is, I can dodge over there and refill the fridge. That’s assuming my son doesn’t show up to haul me over there.

If he does, he’ll need to get back to work ASAP: this business of his taking 90 minutes or two hours off to ferry me around in the middle of the afternoon is NOT satisfactory.

*****
Wasting way too much time reminiscing
about old times and daydreaming about childhood friends.

Few of those were in evidence, back in the Bad Old Days of Saudi Arabian exile. I was a weird little kid: instead of craving to grow up to be a pretty little wife and mommy, instead of spending my endless hours pretending to cook meals on a play stove, I craved to become an astrophysicist.

No kidding. That’s what I wanted, back in the days when girls could  barely get into a public college, to say nothing of majoring in science. HAR HAR!  I had no idea I would not be allowed to pursue a career in astronomy or physics…I imagined I would grow up, escape the horrid confines of Saudi Arabia, get in to Cal Berkeley (where other members of my family went…members of the male persuasion, by and large), and major in astronomy.

Heeeeee!
Dream on, girlie!

Anyway, because I was too stupid to keep my mouth shut about this line of thought, my little colleagues in school saw me as a hilarious butt of teasing and tormenting. By the sixth grade, I hated school so violently I would dream up just about any excuse to stay home. Consequently, my mother thought of me as sickly…she fell for every tale I’d tell her.

One of her best friends out there, though, was a nurse. This woman was no fool.

Somehow she figured out what was going on, and she recognized that I was just…flat…MISERABLE living in that horrid place. What she did — one of the biggest favors anyone ever did for me during my entire lifetime — was to tell my mother that I needed to come back to the United States and be enrolled in a decent school here. She convinced my mother that the two of them needed to dream up a tale to faze past my father, something that would persuade him to send my mother and me back to the U.S. well before it was time for him to retire and come back to the States.

Don’t know what they did or how they did it, but…they DID do it. I’d already been taken out of the nasty grade school, thereby escaping the second-stupidist  primary-school teacher of my life (the stupidest one surfaced in the fourth grade). Now instead of having me tutored privately, my mother managed to get my father to send us home to San Francisco.

There, she enrolled me (by luck and by God, as far as I can tell) in a wonderful school that was part of San Francisco State University’s College of Education.

  • The teachers did not treat me like sh!t.
  • Indeed, most of the teachers appeared to have inherited their fair share of IQ points.
  • The kids did not know I was the weird little kid. They treated me like one of their own.
  • Because I had nothing to do in Arabia but study and read, I was far, far, far ahead of my grade level. The sixth-grade teacher they dropped me on must have been astonished.
  • And I even made a couple of actual friends, if you can imagine.

****

Back from the Magical Mystical Physical Therapist!

That guy really is good at what he does. As in amazingly good. After an hour of hopping around at that place, the arm hardly hurts at all, and it moves almost as well as it did before I busted it. He listened to what I said MayoDoc said and issued some advice about what to ask and who else to talk with.

At any rate, I gathered we can expect the complete healing process to take about six weeks.

From there it was over to AJs, where as usual I failed to buy all the things we need. Tomorrow I’ll have to traipse back down there.

But…f’r sure…NOT today!

 

A Miracle!!!!

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! WordPress let me into the Funny about Money site!

Who’d’ve thunk it? Especially given that this is a Whatever Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong day. Ugh!

After slamming around and bamming around and hurting like Hell and trying to figure out how to talk my son into driving me to stores (since he insists he doesn’t want me to drive) and realizing that ain’t a-gonna work and crashing the computer and re-crashing the computer and spavining the sore shoulder even more with the damn laundry and…gawdlmighty…here I am with the computer unplugged and for reasons incomprehensible the extension cord not reaching to where it usually goes (did Wonder-Cleaning-Lady move the cords? WHY?????).

Bang around and slam around and bang around some more. Figure out what W-C-L did to suit her taste in extension cords. Undo that tidy mess and reconstitute my own untidy mess.

Think maybe I can slither down to the Sprouts on the corner, where His Lordliness is unlikely to catch me, and get most of the things I need. If they don’t carry toilet paper (for unholy and unknowable reasons, the Funny Farm’s supply of TP is bare!), then I can sneak across the road to the Albertson’s, put my life on the line dodging panhandlers, and pick up the paper goods there. Whee. What fun.

So whenever the dryer buzzes again and the stuff in there is (painfully!) unloaded, it’s off to the store. Ohhhhhh goodie…I can hardly wait.

Y’know, I rather hate grocery shopping under the best of circumstances. But here in this state of Invalidism, the last goddamn thing I wanna do is take on the traffic, dodge the bums, find something (anything) that resembles a decent roll of TP in the Land of Politically Correct groceries, dodge some more bums to slither back to the car, trudge back up to the ‘Hood through annoying traffic and around stoners stumbling into the roadway,… AAAARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH!

***

Grrrr grrrr grrrrrrr….. This is just ducky. See that pile of cheap apartments? You can walk there from my son’s house. It’s right around the corner from his place.

Translation: Neither of our neighborhoods is safe. This whole damn city is L.A. Redux, a hole in the desert into which to house trash.

And mayhem has become pretty much SOP: business as usual for lovely North Central Phoenix.

This morning the neighbors here in the ‘Hood awakened at dawn to a serenade of gunshots. Nobody on the neighborhood Facebook page is fessing up, but apparently either a couple of sh!theads had at each other as they cruised the public streets, or one of the householders took off after yet another home invader.

{sigh} What a garden spot!

If my son were not living in the central district — by way of being close to both his father and to me — I would be soooooo GONE from this place. Really, it’s very dangerous. Centrally located and convenient: just dandy. But it’s also centrally located and convenient for every sh!thead in the Valley.

Truth to tell, the only Maricopa County districts I would choose to live in are Cave Creek/Carefree and Fountain Hills. Either is a good hour’s drive from here, through homicidal traffic. And that factoid makes Sedona and waypoints outside of Tucson look good. For that matter, Santa Fe looks mighty good by comparison, too.

But meanwhile…the centrally located districts where we live are OUTTA SIGHT when it comes to prices: as we see when surfing the million-dollar range for rather ordinary, aging upper-middle-class shacks. It really is L.A. redux. How are they getting people to pay these insane prices?

M’jito is now working 100% out of his home. This saves his employer vast quantities of money on office space — meaning the good ole’ days are unlikely to return. Meaning, further, that going forward, most white-collar folk may be working from homes, meaning…they can live anywhere they choose. And so…WHY would anyone choose to live here, when one could live in…

* Sedona
* Prescott
* The suburbs of Tucson
* Fountain Hills
* Flagstaff
*Anywhere but here?????????

Man! If I were a young person and in that fine position, you may be sure I would NOT be camped in mid-town Phoenix. Even if you wanted to hang out in this general area to be close to relatives, there are many better places to set down.

In fact, I would be trying to persuade the honored parents to move out of the central districts, since neither of them has a commute to worry about anymore. Get them to move where you want to live, and follow them there.

***

Egad! One of the neighbors has posted, on the local Facebook page, that their dog spooked, ran off, got hit by a car, kept running, and is now lost.

Ruby and I are on our way out, to search for the wayward pooch. Hope it has survived and is still in the ‘Hood somewhere.

Outta here!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

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Seven in the frikkin’ morning. Gotta be outta here in less than an hour, on the road through wicked rush-hour traffic, headed for the dentist. Big lump on a gum. Cancer???? The way things have been going, I sure won’t be surprised.

So, soooooo tired! I’ve been up since two a.m.: never did get back to sleep.  All I wanna do is crawl back in bed and be miserable in peace. Instead, I’ve gotta put my life on the line to traipse to the dentist.

Gotta marshal some strength to fight back. I’m totally under siege here, between the busted arm and my son’s concern.

I forget things. This is not surprising, at the age of 78. But M’jito is all worried: he thinks I’m getting senile. From what I can tell, as you round on your 80th year, you forget stuff…and that is normal. It’s easy enough to compensate with a notebook and a spreadsheet.

***

Ohhhh…kayyyy…  Now I’m dressed…after a (non) fashion. The busted arm: still in a sling, still hurts. Almost all my shirts are pullovers — and o’course I can’t get one of those over my head, not in this condition. I have some three shirts that button up the front. And they’re not exactly gorgeous with a Velcro strap slung over my shoulder. In another 10 minutes, it’s off to the dentist to find out (I hope) what the lump on my gum is. It popped up a few days ago. From what I can tell in the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest, it’s unlikely to be cancer. Just hope it can be left to go away (or not) on its own. I’ve had enough with the slicing and dicing!

*******

And speaking of senility…

I get all the way over to 16th and Maryland — through cut-throat rush-hour traffic — go to turn in to the garden office complex’s parking lot…and…and…and I can’t find it!!!!!

WTF!?!?!????

It’s my regular dentist’s place…why isn’t it here?

Drove all around over there and STILL couldn’t find it!

Schlepped home through the hideous rush-hour traffic. On the way I stopped at the orthodontist’s…any chance that I mistook, in my senility, the place where I was supposed to go?

Nope.

So I missed an important appointment, put my life on the line to do it by venturing out in Lovely Phoenix’s homicidal rush-hour traffic, got myself all worked up, missed taking Ruby for her beloved doggy-walk..all for NOTHING.

*****

Something is to be said about living in a given city for several decades: You get very skilled at navigating rush-hour traffic.

One comes to know all the most-traveled and least-traveled routes. All the impossible traffic signals to avoid. And the most discreet parking lots to cut through to avoid a traffic jam…without attracting acop’s attention (it’s agin’ the law to do that).

***

10 a.m.

Yep. Just ten o’clock and it’s already  been an awful morning.

I should take the little dog for a walk. Really, despite the personal awfulness, it’s a beautiful morning. The rain has cooled things down. The before-work dog walkers have done their duty and cleared off the sidewalks.

So yeah…this is the time.

On the other hand…will venturing out just make things worse for the Walking Wounded? Maybe I should think twice.

On the other other hand…I’m in no shape to think at all..much less to do it twice.

Busted, Disgusted, and….

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…and at least clean now!

Managed to get in the shower all by myself this afternoon…AND washed my hair. It’s a miracle!

I can’t believe it’s been SIXTEEN DAYS since I did this to myself! Feels like it happened just a day or two ago. 😮

But… Well, but it is beginning to feel noticeably better. Far from functional, but a fair amount less painful.With any luck, in another two or three weeks I can get out of the accursed sling.

{chortle!}  Take another look at this thing:

Is that or is that not the business? I never have gotten around to schlepping to PetSmart and waypoints in search of one for sale locally. Though I can drive one-handed, it doesn’t seem well-advised. So if I’m going to get any such thing, it’ll have to come from Amazon.

Ruby the Corgi is too small to get on the Queen’s bed by herself. I’m too crippled to lift her up, and apparently will be for several more weeks. So the poor miserable beast has been spending the nights on the floor, in her favorite nest under the toilet, or on a big ole’ doggy-cushion next to my bed. And Hevvin only knows how long it’ll be before I can lift her up on the throne again.

The thing looks like it’ll take up an awful lot of space — and won’t Wonder Cleaning-Lady be pleased to find THAT contraption lurking in her way! 😀

ooohhh well…

***

 

 

 

 

…a-a-a-n-d… The lingering aftermath

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Believe it or not, the Wounded Dragon-Lady is actually up moving around!

Believe it or not, the old bat is stumbling around the cave and even over the badlands of the backyard. It’s a spectacularly beautiful morning, and here we are loafing away the balmy morning on the lovely little side porch in the shade of the huge trees on the west side if the Funny Farm.

Come to think of it, though, hold the metaphorical phone….

**** Much later ****

Another not-very metaphorical Day from Hell. Pain followed by frustration followed by pain followed by…so on to infinity. Felt better for a couple hours this morning, but it didn’t last.

Things could be worse, though. One could still be dwelling in Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the Persian Gulf. The Middle East: what a horror show.

My son just showed up. Wandered off to the living room to unwind from a day of work. Me, I’m too sick to get out of bed. or to be anything like decent company.

****

Mijito’ showing up after work is awfully nice. I’m in no shape to entertain him, being sick as a dawg just now. Think the aspirin I’ve been gulping for the shoulder pain is not agreeing.

*****

Sunday

But now another night and half a day have passed. This a.m the pain was much diminished — why, I do not know.

And just now? Crippled again!

Ugh!! Goin’ back to bed…