Coffee heat rising

Moving Crabbily On…

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As we scribble, come 6:00 in the evening it’s freakin’ hot outside. Yeah: 98 degrees in the shade of the back porch, according to our thermometer. About right: Wunderground says it’s 99 degrees out there, “feels like 102.”

😀  Is THAT all?

***

A small fiasco is under way, one that will require the attention of my amiable lawyers. So: tomorrow it’s over to their office, wherein to have a chat. Just what I need to blow away half my day.

***

Meanwhile, the poor little dawg is about fried. Now that she’s had a few bites to eat and had a chance to flop on the kitchen tiles, she seems a little better. And as we scribble, she has retired to her favorite spot on the cool tiles under the toilet…

Dayum!  I hope she’ll be OK.

Give her half-an-hour or so, and then retrieve her from the toilet cave. Put her on the bed. And let’s see how she does.

Hope she recovers fully. I’m not sure where the nearest animal hospital is…which doesn’t matter, because Caligula has kiped my car, so I can’t get her to an emergency vet, anyway. If that’s necessary, though, I hope one of the neighbors will drive us.

Really….I probably ought to chat with the WonderAccountants (they live across the street) and ASK — in advance!! — if they will please help me get Ruby to an emergency vet should that ever be necessary. Maybe beg the same (in-advance!) favor from some of the other neighbors.

***

This mother/son squabble and automobile rip-off flap has gotten SO stupid that I’m thinking I probably need to sell the house and move to some other venue: one where I can buy and use another car to get myself to key destinations.

Where to go, where to go??  Well…Sun City probably.

Yuch!

My parents decamped to Sun City. They LOVED it…because that sort of stodgy atmosphere and whitey-white exclusivity was right up their alley.

Personally, I prefer a more liberal atmosphere and a more diverse set of neighbors. Plus (really!) I do love the sound of children playing outside. In Sun City, instead you get the melody of jet warplanes blasting out of nearby Luke Air Force Base. Loverly….

***

Oohhh gawd! Now Ruby has taken to choking frantically every time she laps a few sips of water!

KEEEripes! WHAT is causing that?

Well, she gets over it quickly. Now it’s stopped…

Tomorrow morning I’ll call the vet. Maybe I can put up one of the neighbors to driving us over there. Otherwise, it’ll be a half-hour hike, each way, though gawdawful heat. Carrying the sick dog in my arms…

What next, Lord?

Rasty-Nasty Redux

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Ahh! COLD TEA!!!  What a relief!

Just back in the house after a peculiarly unpleasant doggy-walk. At eight in the morning, it is SO HOT and SO HUMID out there that it feels like a day in Rasty-Nasty, the horrible American compound where my parents and I spent nine years on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

What a gawdawful experience that was! I can remember days when it would be so humid that rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky.

Oh, well. At least we don’t have any Arabs standing around hating on us here. That’s something. I guess.

Where would I go, if I could get away from this sylvan spot?

Well…

The San Francisco Bay Area for sure, if I could afford it. My mother’s family lived in Berkeley, which at the time was a lovely suburb of the City, up in the East Bay hills…just as pretty as could be.

But of course, I can’t afford it.

Where else?

Some parts of Colorado have their appeal. Problem is, it gets too cold in the winter there.

New Mexico, maybe…but I suspect the summers there are about as balmy as they are here…

All of which is about as irrelevant as irrelevant can get. Because… As long as my son is here, this is where I’m gonna be.

Hotter than the Hubs…

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Surely Hades was never this hot and soggy! 😀

Ruby is guzzling water (again!), panting, choking, gasping for breath. The human is hurting, hurting, and hurting some more: this peripheral neuropathy is no joke.

But at least we got our morning perambulation…  And ohhh my! Lest you ever feel sorry for yourself, all you have to do to perk up is to look around at other people.

This morning we passed a crew of laborers working on the renovation of a large house in Lower Richistan. Yeah: in the heat. In the humidity. Dear lord! What a job!  Hard physical work in absolutely ghastly weather.

At times like this, (un)Lovely Phoenix reminds me of Ras Tanura, the American outpost where we spent ten years next to the Persian Gulf while my father worked for Aramco. Just about the most gawdawful place to live on the planet! Hot, wet, miserable…and hostile to Americans.

My mother’s health was ruined out there — she came down with amoebic dysentery — and I was sick all the time.

Most of my “sick” was play-acting, a strategy to keep me out of the damned school and away from the horrid little brats who inhabited it. If you were “different” in any way (I was a girl who wanted not to grow up wearing ribbons and frills but to work as an astrophysicist), you were tormented, tormented, and tormented some more. So I was constantly trying to persuade my mother that I was too sick to go to school. About half the time, she fell for it.

And well she might have, since she was sick at least half the time; probably more.

Ohhh gawd! There goes the dawg again: choke choke choke CHOKE GAAAG!  Got to get her to a vet…but how to do that without a car beats me.

My son, despite having made off with my car (he thinks I’m too old to be driving!), cannot take time away from his job to schlep me to stores and the dog to veterinary hospitals. So exactly what I’m supposed to do here, isolated in (un)lovely North Phoenix, escapes me. Even though a doctor has said there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be driving, Dear Son is determined to keep me out from behind a steering wheel.

This, I assume, results from what he’s seen in his job as an insurance adjustor. You can bet he’s shuffled his way through some horrific car wrecks. And yes: it’s undoubtedly true that elder drivers with slower reflexes and weaker vision are more vulnerable to accidents than are the Young and the Alert.  Surely, though, there ought to be some way to test you to see whether you’re safe to be driving. My own doctor says there’s no reason I shouldn’t be driving…but the kid ain’t listening to him.

At any rate: the result is that I’m stuck here in the house and can’t even take my poor sick little dog to a vet.

Not.
A.
Happy.
Camper.
!!!!

And the Day Staggers On…

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Yeah: it’s still pretty “Rasty Nasty“out there under the cheery blast…uhm, glow of an Arizona afternoon sun.

The little dog seems significantly better this afternoon: the horking and coughing have about faded away. I think — hope — there’ll be no need to drag her through the unholy heat to have a vet look at her.

Exercise-traipsing around the ‘Hood just now, I was reminded of how much my mother loved Arizona…how grateful she was to my father for installing them in sizzling, sky-roaring, anachronistic Sun City. Oh, my…she did love it!

At this moment: Horribly hot for an exercise traipse. This is weather that makes me wish I were back in San Francisco. Even in Long Beach, that capital of the bourgeois.

Personally, I’m none too fond of Arizona. But I ain’t movin’ on…no way, no how. For one simple reason: my excellent son is here. And where he is: that’s where I’m gonna be.

If he were to decamp to, say, Colorado (where I believe he would rather be), I’d follow him. To Canada or Mexico? Not so much. But almost certainly anyplace in the U.S.

***

Heh!  I sure have lived in a lot of places on this planet! Let’s add them up…

  • Long Beach, California
  • San Francisco, California
  • Richmond, California
  • Alameda, California
  • Berkeley, California
  • Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
  • Beirut, Lebanon
  • London, England
  • Tucson, Arizona
  • Phoenix, Arizona
  • Sun City, Arizona

LOL! I’ve probably lost track of some of them! 😀

Now, yea verily: Arizona isn’t my favorite venue. Particularly not the gawdawful Phoenix area and its environs. The sole reason I’m here is that my son is here. And…as long as he stays here, I’ll stay here. If he were to move on? Chances are, I’d follow him. At the very least, I’d move out of the (un)lovely Valley of the Sun.

But more likely, wherever he goes, I’ll go.

A Rasty-Nasty Day

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Rasty Nasty…so glad to be gone!

Today’s weather is what my father used to call “rasty-nasty,” after Ras Tanura, the dreadful ARAMCO company town where we lived for nine years, perched on the shore of the Persian Gulf. It was a hot, soggy, miserable place.

Today’s ugly morning is hot and soggy, for sure. The sky dark gray with overcast, rain varying from drizzling to pouring.

Directing matters toward Hell, Ruby has  something wrong with her sinuses…or something. She keeps gasping and wheezing…hork  hork hork hork! Damned if I can tell what the matter is.

So I need to get her to a vet, but without a car, I can’t imagine how to do that through this unholy weather. I’d have to pick her up and carry her eight or ten blocks…and migawd!! Just now I’m so sick I can barely carry her around the house!

A guy across the street drives for Uber…but somehow I doubt he’ll agree to carry a sick dog in his cab.

Yesterday’s junket to the Mayo Clinic was just gawdawful! What I need today is to sit down, hassle-free, and be quiet all day. Doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen, though. Afraid to ask my son for a lift…yesterday he and I were at each other’s throats. Plus…he has — of all things — a job! He can’t be knocking off half the day to schlep me and my dog to a vet.

In related sylvan fields, I need to find a decent doctor who does NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic, halfway to Bisbee. Dealing with a doctor — especially when you’re a woman, Gawd help you! — is dreadful enough, without piling on a 45-minute drive each way. 

And “find a decent doctor” is no small task these days. Our wonderful old docs from the law-practice days are long retired, after having repaired to the Mayo some years ago (dragging us with them). And of late the quacks I’ve met there have ranged in competence from bird-brained to spectacularly arrogant; half the time when you describe your issue, they’re not paying the slightest bit of attention. Their minds are made up, and they don’t care be distracted by any damned facts, thank you.

Lawyers tend to know which doctors have been sued and which haven’t. That’s why you should seek a recommend from a lawyer, whenever you’re in the market for a new doctor.

Now that my lawyer hubby and I have been divorced for some years, I no longer know a lawyer to ask. Most of our friends are now retired…I haven’t seen a practicing lawyer in for-freaking-ever.

***

Blech!!! It’s getting still uglier out there! How it’s possible, I do not know…but the sky has turned even darker than it was.

I give up! Back to bed with me and the hound!

Escaped from the Mayo

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Okay..well…I guess I’m not quite ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. That notwithstanding, a visit to the Mayo Hospital does little to persuade me of that. LORDIE, how I hate hospitals, and how I hate that one in particular!

By the time we left that sylvan realm, my angry son and I were speaking to each other more or less politely. Sorta. So there’s some hope that we’ll get back to normal in a day or three.

Miserable experience, though.

***

How much longer do I have in this sylvan vale, really? 

Well…that’s no easier to tell for me than it is to tell for anyone else. My guess is, if I don’t get any sicker than I am (which isn’t very), we’re looking at five to ten years. But if I follow in the family Tradition of Extreme Longevity, it could be another twenty to twenty-five years.

Twenty-five: no, I would not expect. But twenty: that wouldn’t be very surprising. Women in my family have lived to advanced old age…and without medical care, because they were Christian Scientists.

Sometimes I think that the very reason they lived into their dotage was that they stayed away from doctors and hospitals.

Today’s experience at the Mayo was enough to cause you to hear the sylvan call of the Other World, that’s for damn sure. All afternoon with a needle stuck in my arm, miserable hurting scared annoyed pissed in the dark as to what was really happening… How CAN i count the ways….?

Well, I never want to go back there, that’s for sure. But since the Mayo is the best medical facility in the Valley — very possibly in the whole state — this surely was not my last adventure in those parts.

Ugh. Maybe I should convert to Christian Science…

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