Coffee heat rising

Wow! Another Narrow Escape

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Doesn’t this look like charming Downtown Phoenix?  (Well: yeah, it sure does!)

Couple years ago, I very nearly bought a handsome li’l condo just about in the middle of this garden spot.

As usual, I was craving to get away from the Tony Situation. One of the possibilities was to go all the way downtown and buy a place smack in the middle of everything. The development I found — which was, yes, right at this place, offered a brand-new condo just up the street from the Episcopal Cathedral, where I surely could have joined the choir. I wouldn’t even have had to drive to rehearsals…well…assuming I didn’t mind putting my life and my virginity on the line to walk back and forth to the church at night. 😉

Man! Some things are worse than a houseful of juvenile delinquents across the street!

***

LOL! Narrowly escaped heat exhaustion this afternoon, too. Ruby and I just got back from a late afternoon doggy-walk. Not very far: only about a mile.

But dayum! Thought I was gonna collapse before we got back here. It’s humid enough just now to make the crisp 87-degree afternoon a lot more uncomfortable than expected. The dawg was huffing and puffing and I was drenched by the time we got home.

Adding to the afternoon’s small annoyances… Ruby has a black thing on her upper lip that looks like a mole. Or something. That’s what the vet says it is: nothing to worry about. But to me it looks ominously like a melanoma.

So now I’ve got to drag her to ANOTHER vet, something I would eminently prefer not to do. But…it keeps getting bigger, and it scares the bejayzus out of me. Tomorrow’s Saturday…we’ll see which of the many money-grabbers I can reach tomorrow.

NOT a nice person…

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Nope. Nooo, I’m surely not a nice lady. Not if you judge by this afternoon’s antic.

Need to go to the credit union. Actually, this visit is overdue, and I really, really need to schlep way to Hell and gone across the west side to the CU’s office;

bang around bang around bang around bang around, collect all the junk to take over there, pile it in the car, lock up the dawg, back out of the garage, back out back out ba…waitaminit…

Whozzat guy?

Yeah. Some guy is out in front. He’s not a neighbor that I recognize. That doesn’t mean he’s not a neighbor. Only that I haven’t seen him before.

He walks eastward from the westerly corner toward our easterly end of the block. Turns around, walks back westerly again. He goes up to the front door of a house in that direction. But he doesn’t do anything: doesn’t knock on the door, doesn’t ring the doorbell, doesn’t pull out a key and stick it a lock. Huh uh.

He just stands there for a minute, then turns around and continues to walk up in our direction.

In the department of huh uh!, I don’t want this guy to see me pull out of the garage and cruise off down the road.

But DAMMIT, do I ever need to get to that credit union! Cruise toward the intersection with Conduit of Blight.

Think…nope.

nope nope nope… 

Pull a U-ie, come on back to the Funny Farm. He makes a half-hearted sally toward another front door, then, as I cruise back to my house and back into my driveway, turns around and heads in the direction that he came from.

Park in the garage. Close the door. Stalk inside and pour half a glass of wine. Take up a position in the front courtyard, with the Killer Corgi at hand. Think ohhhh sheee-ut how paranoid CAN a city-dweller get? 

Ruby barks at the kids in Tony’s institution.

The kids across the other street take up a game of basketball-tossing, always a delight.

Ruby ambles indoors.

Tom — Mr. WonderAccountant — comes home and parks his truck in his driveway, across the street.

My wine-glass is still half-full.

Should I ask Mr. WA to keep an eye on the Funny Farm whilst I make a run on the credit union?

How can I count the ways…not?

It’s a gorgeous afternoon.

I decide to avail myself of a beautiful day and a grand kid with a basketball and a fierce little dog and — especially — a glass of wine and a few slices of fancy cheese.

Why does this make me feel like a sh!t?

Well…

Because… Zat guy is a black man. Yea verily, a handsome black man. Yea verily, a radically middle-class-looking black man. But nay verily, not a gent of any color or ethnic persuasion that I’ve seen anywhere near that neighbor’s house.

Yep. He’s prob’ly harmless.

Ayup;. He’s probably a brother-in-law of one of the residents.

But…{sigh} Nope: I absolutely positively do NOT want this guy to see me drive off down the street leaving the garage empty. Nope.

Arrrrrghhhhh!

Would I have felt that way if he were white or Latino?

Possibly not. Surely not if he were white: I would have recognized him as not a neighbor. If he were Latino: I would have regarded him as possibly a neighbor but I don’t think so because I happen to enjoy Latinos and Latino culture and so I would have come to know him, at least to some degree, by now.

Friday: SO MUCH stuff I needed to get done while banging around this afternoon. Dayum!

At least half of it won’t get done. The other half — computer PITAs — can get done tomorrow, on top of a cruise toward the other side of town.

Next Monday: today’s PITA will remain to be addressed.

Life in the 21st century….

Tracking Down the Ancestral Myths…

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My mother’s mother was a glamour girl named Olive Getten. She apparently, to hear my mother tell it, was quite the flapper.

My mother claimed that she — my mother — was the illegitimately conceived offspring of Olive and a fella named DeLong, an a-scant offspring of a prominent turn-of-the-century family in upstate New York. Though the couple married, once my mother was born and given a proper family name, they divorced. My grandmother allegedly returned to California (or Illinois, or wherever her tribe was living at the time) and my mother’s custody was adjudicated to her father’s parents. In other words, my mother was raised on a farm in upstate New York by her paternal grandparents.

The more you learn about these people, the more jaw-droppers come your way:

Most striking: apparently my mother really believed Olive died in the mid to late 1920s, but that was not true. Olive evidently was still living in the 1970s, when my own son was born.

My mother believed she saw Olive die: that she passed in the Berkeley home of the maternal family and was carted out of the house into a hearse and driven off down the road.

This, apparently, was some kind of a trick. Very clearly, she did NOT die…she left many a footprint in the years that followed.

Olive may have married Jack Sansome, scion of a prominent San Francisco family. If that was the case, she spent at least part of her life as a very wealthy woman.

Somehow they hid this from my mother, OR my mother made it her business to deny it. HOWEVER, in other parts we learn my mother married Sansome: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/85936198/john-colin-sansom

It’s not impossible that the Gettens themselves may have been fairly wealthy. In the 1920s, that part of the Berkeley foothills may have been pretty swell. According to my mother, the house on Hopkins was a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff, if not an actual FLW design.

If this involved sub-plot has any truth to it, then how much did my mother know?

Did the Getten bunch lie to her? If so, did they do so in cahoots with Olive?

Why?

Or did they evict Olive from their family and their lives, telling her she would be dead to them henceforth?

If so, how did they put her up to the fake cancer death? That would have been a very elaborate performance, apparently designed to trick my mother and possibly some others.

Sansom lived until the late 1970s, and incredibly, he’s listed as my mother’s spouse, married in 1931. This would have been shortly after Olive’s purported demise. Is it even remotely possible that he married her daughter soon after she died? Why??????

Is it more possible that the data appearing online is wrong, confused? Uh…well…yeah…

Here we find an interesting entry in the ever-unreliable website known as Ancestors.com:

https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KWV3-T2S/olive-catherine-getten-1891-1979

Apparently Olive lived until 1979…if you believe Ancestors.com. My mother claimed to have seen her carted off from her deathbed, placed in a hearse, and driven away down the road…when my mother was in her teens.

My mother was born in 1911. So she would have been, say, 15 years old in 1926. Olive would have been in her mid-30s.

Soooooo….how was Olive still haunting us in 1979?

GAAAAHHHH! STOP THE WORLD!!!

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😀 Ever have one of those STOP THE WORLD! days? 

One of those whatever can go wrong WILL go wrong days?

LOL! As you may have surmised by now, we’re having one o’ them thar days here at the Funny Farm.

Whatever I touch goes T-W-A-A-A-A-N-G-G-G!! or gets lost within 30 seconds. In-fukkin-credible!

I’ve spent half the morning searching for stuff or yakking on the phone to CSI’s trying to untangle the latest screw-up.

Latest fiasco: I LOST MY AMEX CARD!

Yes. Lost it.

Here in the house.

No. I haven’t been out of the house with it since the last time I had it in my hand, which was about 45 minutes ago while I was on the phone with an AMEX rep.

Dammit!!!!

all…

i…

wanted

to

do

this morning

was pay off the goddamn balance owing on that card.

After calling AMEX and ascertaining the current bottom line, the next task was to jump in the car, drive to the CU, and be sure the correct amount is transferred from checking to American Express; then be sure I have the correct figure for the remaining balance.

How hard IS this?

Find out the outrageous figure — several thousand dollars. Don’t ask!

Seek out the card case, wherein resides the AMEX card. The very card case that I just had in my hand.

And…it’s gone.

HUH???

Search for it.

Search for it.  Search for it. Search for it.

Search the car for it. (the car??????)

Search the bedroom for it.

Search the office for it.

Search the office closet for it.

Search every purse in the house for it.

Search the family room for it,.

Search the bathroom for it. (the bathroom?????)

Search the kitchen for it.

Search the office again.

Search the car again.

Search the family room again.

Search the kitchen again.

Search every  single purse again.

Goddamit, I can not find it!!!!!!!

Eventually I did find my checkbook. But I can’t find the secret code to get into the damnable online bank account. So I have no idea how much is in the checking account. No idea what has been autopaid. No idea how much is owed to AMEX.

All I know is…I’m losing my mind.

Finally did find the American Express card…tossed on the dining room table. Where else, eh? Doesn’t EVERYONE store their AMEX card on the dinner table?

Meanwhile, the scandalized Mac informs me there have been no backups for 772 days (there’s a reason for that…, the damned thing), I have only 17.567 GB of storage and I’m supposed to do something called “optimizing storage,” a term that might as well be in Martian, and that as we scribble the goddamn thing is running out of juice and will shut down in a couple of minutes.

How sick am I of life in the 21st Century?

Let me count the episodes of nausea….

One “NOW WHAT” after another…

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Dawn cracks. Ruby is delighted: she dearly loves the break of day. Human is less thrilled. Ohhh well.

We stumble outside, Ruby to patrol the yard and pee on everything, the human to…uhm…stand around. And…

LO! A set of wet tracks has been laid down on the Kool-Deck…like someone or something climbed out of the drink. Impossible to tell whether the tracks are human or animal…

Did Pool Dude show up before the crack of dawn and maybe fell into the water?  Seems like Ruby would have alerted to that. Pool Dude is her hero…paws-down the very finest hero in the history of human-canine contact. If he’d been out there, she would have been hot to shoot out there and love him up.

Besides, if he’d fallen in the drink he would have made a lot of noise, enough to set off Ruby like a four-legged burglar alarm.

Hmmm…

Tony’s Home for Juvenile Delinquents has been a little more restive than normal. Maybe one of the pistols over there snuck out and frolicked around the neighborhood last night. But…why would they climb through the thorny vines over the alley wall to do…effectively nothing?

Tony himself has targeted the pool in the past. Indeed, that’s how we ended up in court with him, where he scared my lawyers so much they urged me not to come back to the house. And that was the immediate reason that SDXB sold his house and moved to Sun City. He who swaggers first runs first, hm?

Maybe I’d better put up a camera or two out there. If the delinquent charges of the Delinquent-Master have decided to launch a new campaign, it would be good to have a video of them. Right?

But…I Want It NOW…

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Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not whenever I can find it (if I can) on the local market.

NOW.

It’s spectacularly convenient to be able to order up this little thingy and that little doo-dad and have it delivered right to your door. Yes. That much must be admitted. That much must be admired.

But the other day, I wanted one silly little, minor little, once always-available-about-everywhere little thing, and I wanted it now. Today. Ideally, within the hour.

It was the sort of thing you used to be able to find in a type of store called a “dime store,” such as a TG&Y: chain stores that sold inexpensive handy-dandy gadgetry that people use around the house and the car and the yard.

No more! Far as I can tell, dime stores no longer exist.

I drove from pillar to post searching…

  • Albertson’s does not carry it.
  • Safeway does not carry it.
  • Target does not carry it.
  • Bed Bath & Beyond no longer exists.
  • Walmart does not carry it.
  • Lowe’s does not carry it.
  • AJ’s does not carry it…

On and on and gas-guzzlingly on. NO ONE carries it.

What is “it”?

It’s this: an old-fashioned purse-sized, pocket-sized spiral-bound notepad.

Apparently they still make them. Although of late retailers will not let you copy an image and paste it into your effing blog post….

You just can’t find them. At least not in brick-and-mortar retail stores. I searched all over the effing city, and nobody had these things.

Upshot: It’s not that you can order it from Amazon. It’s that you HAVE TO order it from Amazon. And if you need it now? Well, screw you, m’dear.

Ugh! I am sooo unstuck in time! My God, sometimes I feel like I live not in a different era but on a different planet from the one I grew up on.

And while we have many, many blandishments that are wonderful and amazing…well… Are they?

We have these awesome phones we can carry around! Whoop-de-doo!

  • Now anyone who takes a whim to do so can pester us on the phone as we drive around or hike or bicycle ride or sit in a meeting or…whatEVER.
  • Now advertisers can track us around the city and harass us at will.
  • Now if our car craps out and we don’t have one of these gadgets with us — or, Gawd forfend if it’s not charged up — we are in deep, deep trouble.
  • Now if we’re on the lam from the cops, the authorities can track us down, intercept us, and bust us…

Hmmmmm…. THIS is a good thing?

We have delivery services that bring everything from a cheap notebook to a filet mignon to our doorstep. But what if we want to shop for it in person? What if want to see what we’re getting before we plop down our credit card?

What if, f’r hevvinsake, we want it NOW?

Ugh. What a brave new world!