Coffee heat rising

Hotter than the Hubs!

Seriously: hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. At 7:20 in the morning, the shaded(!) back-porch thermometer reads 85 degrees…but you couldn’t prove that by me. Ask me, and I’ll guess 95 to 100.

* Wet.
* Overcast.
* And hot.

A humid day like this is NOT a typical Arizona number. Generally, “it’s a dry heat,” as the locals like to say.

Ruby and I: just back from dragging the human around the park. Sweltered!

This morning M’hijito is dragging me to the dentist, lhudly scream Goddam. A crown fell off a back molar. So won’t THAT be fun!

Frankly, I don’t think it needs any repair work…because when you look closely at it you see it probably never needed a crown to begin with. I suspect a lot of these li’l procedures are actually procedures on your pocketbook.

That is almost certainly the case here. You can see, absent the crown, that the tooth was never cracked and probably never broken, more than at the level of a small chip. If it were up to me, I’d go on about my business and leave it alone.

But when you get old, things are not up to you. The next generation takes over and pushes you around like you were an eight-year-old.

😀  Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. In some aspects, I probably do operate about on the level of an eight-year-old. After a certain number of decades, you lose patience with all the hassles, all the bullshit, all the unnecessary expenses, all the gouges and just let it go. And frankly: I’m long past that point.

LOL! One benefit of living at McCormick Ranch would be that it would be too far from my son’s house for him to justify traipsing across the city to accompany me to every little event and crisis. And you may be sure that if I were out there today, I would not be trudging to the dentist this morning. 😀

I’m IN!

Geez, FaM’s website let me in!  I lost the log-in data and for awhile thought…well…that’s the end of scribbling blog posts! 

Whether I can get in again remains to be seen. Didn’t think the code I entered would work, so…I didn’t write it down.

Hoping that today will not be another Day from Hell. It’s overcast and muggy…gotta get up RIGHT NOW and take the dog for a walk, if we’re gonna get out today at all.

The hellish illness has eaten away at my nerves and at my son’s nerves to the point where we’re barely speaking. I don’t know what to do about it — never have been good with people, even under the best of circumstances. And what we have here appears to be about the worst of circumstances. Sooo…with social skills that rank among the bottom third, I’m kinda…fu*ked, frankly.

At any rate: awaaayyyyy!  Hope I can get back in…but if not: it was nice knowin’ ya!

To Move…or Not to Move

The other day I enjoyed some time socializing with a business acquaintance/friend, Ken, and his very pleasant wife. They live in a planned housing development called McCormick Ranch, out in ritzy-titzy Scottsdale:  They have a nice little condo with a sweet patio verging on greenswards that make splendid hiking space.

Their apartment’s not very big — but for two retired folks, why would it need to be big? It  has a nice kitchen the size and style of mine. A handsome living-room that looks out onto a pleasant, walled-in patio, perfect for loafing of an afternoon. Or morning. Or evening. Two bland but highly serviceable upstairs bedrooms/bathrooms. Handy two-car garage.

Man! I looked at that shack and thought HOT DAYUM!  This is the place!! 

Seriously: the main reason it struck me as “the place”is that it’s right up the road from the Mayo. My son and I were slated to visit that garden spot the following day…and a “visit” to our doc’ at the Mayo entails driving driving driving…through horrid, cut-throat traffic characterized by lunatics who never should have been allowed near a steering wheel.

The Mayo is damn near an hour’s drive from our part of town. To get there from Ken’s place would take about ten minutes. Max.

Hmmmm…

O’course, that very characteristic is what makes it UNdesirable for my son and, ultimately, for me.

Those sweet li’l condos are halfway across the globe from Dear Ex-Husband’s place — meaning my son would have to drive until his car runs out of gas to see either one of us…regardless of which part of town he was aiming at. I sure don’t want to put him in a position like that. Nor do I want to have to schlep that far to get from my place to his.

So… I guess for the moment I’m stuck here in Crime Central.

***

{sigh}

Yeah. The Funny Farm is an easy target for the…uhm…locals. On the other hand, the pore li’l locals make pretty easy targets for me…especially when they set off the burglar alarm called Ruby the Corgi.

So really: I can’t very well use the Crime Situation as an excuse to drop everything and move to Scottsdale. If my son weren’t here, I’d sure think about it seriously. But he IS here, and that creates its own set of circumstances.

 

Weird Little Experience…

Now, HOW on earth did I know?????  

Wonder-Cleaning Lady just emailed to say she wouldn’t be able to come shovel out the Funny Farm this week. And that’s fine…she has — you know — a life, if you can imagine.

But the weird thing is…yesterday evening and then again this morning I thought, clear as day, “Luz is not gonna show up this week”!

There was no reason to imagine that. She had said nothing. And yet somehow I knew she was not gonna come over today.

Isn’t that strange?

***

Oh, well. She does such a superb job that even after two weeks, the place is relatively clean. I’ll sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms. Since I keep the kitchen pretty clean all the time, she shouldn’t have too much extra hassle when she does resurface.

Ruby-Doo will miss her, but I won’t miss the roar of the vacuum and the bustle of the dusting, sweeping, bathroom-scrubbing, bed-changing…and whatnot.

😀

woo-WOO-woooo

G-D Phone Solicitors!

They got a late start this morning: it’s already 8:14!

One ringy-dingy two ringy-dingies three ringy-dingies…and here’s the start of the sales pitch.

The targeted victim emits a high-pitched stream of obscenities, followed by BITCH! STAY OFF MY PHONE!!!!!!!

She’s probably in jail. Phone soliciting is a prison industry, so a fair number of the crooks who jangle you up every day start out as criminals.

**DO NOT be polite to them! It’s not polite to jangle you up  in your home and pester you with nuisance calls. So you have no obligation or reason to be sweetie-sweet to them. Tell them to take a flying f**k at the moon — and do so at high volume.

Blasting a police whistle into the phone is an effective way to communicate your displeasure, too. Try it…they won’t like it.

Lazy Hazy Crazy Day of Summer…

LOL! Twenty after 9:oo in the morning — Sunday  — and the Human & the Hound are back from our daily perambulation of the neighborhood park.

It’s a nice, grassy spread, surrounded by rows of upper-middle-class homes. Very pretty, nice and quiet: Dawg Hevvin!

Today, though, is hot, stuffy, and overcast.

To perfect that scenario, somehow my son arranged a flickin’appointment with the flickin’ Mayo Clinic…for TODAY. Yeah. Sunday. 

Why escapes me. Just now, nothing is ailing me (except a sore hip, no doubt acquired by sleeping cattywampus).

Whatever the reason for this scheduled visit, I sure as hell could do without it. I’ve come to truly hate traipsing to the Mayo, clear across the north Valley, halfway to freakin’ Payson. It’s almost an hour’s drive out there, through homicidal traffic (you ain’t seen a homicidal driver till you’ve seen a Phoenix driver!). So…half the day is gonna be blown away for…what?

Far as I can tell: for nothing.

Besides the drive, of late another thing that has concerned me has been apparent misdiagnoses. The last few oh gawd! oh dear! diagnoses that have emanated from there turned out to have altogether different causes than the Mayodocs claimed.  Given some tests, the Mayodocs’ frantic claims turned out to be…wrong…wrong…and dead wrong.

So…I get less and less comfortable with these journeys to the East Side of Eden. And increasingly wary about diagnoses that may or may not be right.