Coffee heat rising

Soggy Doggy Day II

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Ick! It is SOOO HUMID out there at 7 in the morning that by the time the pooch and I got home from a leisurely mile’s stroll through the ‘Hood, I literally had to peel my jeans off my legs!

NASTY weather, hideously reminiscent of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…only without the beautiful beaches on the Persian Gulf. Just desert, repetitious middle-class tract housing, and swampy heat.

At the crack of dawn.

Garden spot, this….

Actually, it is a garden spot! 😀  Irrigated lots sporting bright green lawns; big ol’ 1950s ranch houses; huge and ancient shade trees; citrus trees abounding.

As we perambulated through the lower reaches of Upper Richistan, we passed a young dad pushing a pair of twins in a double stroller. Dad: white. Kids: brown. Cutest li’l thangs you ever saw in your life…and evidently adopted.

A couple of families over there have taken in youngsters from duskier races. A house on the main road into U.R. is home to two teenaged boys of the African-American persuasion; all the adults in the house are whitey-white. The young fellas like to practice basketball in the front yard, which is grand fun to watch.

As the sun has climbed into the sky, humidity is a balmy 30%. Clouds and haze lurk overhead. The AC labors mightily, groaning to keep the indoors moderately livable.

Loafing, I daydream about the Old Neighborhood, where DXH and I lived for well upwards of a decade after we were married. Loved that place!

It was so beautiful. Here’s the old house. It was so beautiful — even more so inside than outside. Built in 1929. Zillow claims it’s worth something over $1.2 million.

Yeah. Well…whatEVER.

It is a LARGE place, in a famed historic neighborhood, smack in the middle of the city. If you worked downtown, your commute would essentially be nil. Same if you taught at Phoenix College or worked in any of the gerzillion office buildings up & down Central Avenue.

I loved that house. Didn’t want to move. But…

We moved because we didn’t feel safe. The transients and the crime level in those parts will take your breath away. After a couple of hair-raising incidents — German shepherd notwithstanding — we moved to get away from the bums and the crime.

{sigh} I miss it, and I miss our classy neighbors.

But I don’t miss feeling scared half to death at night. Don’t miss the guy who broke in one night, chased off by said German shepherd. Don’t miss the guy who tried to break in, another night, but couldn’t get past the deadbolt. Don’t miss the bum who took up residence in D-XH’s car one night…he flew into a rage when D-XH had the nerve to climb in, start the engine, and begin to pull out of the driveway, headed to work.

No. Encanto is a beautiful historic district. But if you have any common sense, you don’t wanna live there.

Morning in Lovely Arizona…

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A Day Later…A Dollar Shorter

And now it’s 7:20 of a hot, muggy Friday morning. Just NASTY out there!

Ruby and I are back from this morning’s doggywalk, having dodged…well…not TOO many (for a change) “fur-babies” and their non compos mentis humans. Only two dogs were running around (illegally!) off-lead — we managed to stay out of their way. But OH!!! It’s SO HOT out there!

Well, I hafta admit, it’s not as miserable here as it was in Arabia at this time of year. Along about now, rain could coalesce out of a clear blue sky — that’s how humid it was. And every morning water would drip off the eaves as though it had rained…which it had not. But I will say…this morning it was soooo soggy and sooo hot out there that I was dripping wet before we got back to the house.

Sometimes, honestly….I would just like to move away from Arizona.

But where would I go?

Can’t afford the Bay Area, which I regard as “home.” So that’s out.
Loathe Southern California: it’s worse than here, not because of the weather but because of the bat-brained natives.

Not fluent enough in Spanish to move to Mexico.

Canada: tooooo bloody cold.

New Mexico: don’t know anybody there…too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. And effete.

I dunno…frankly, Arizona is at once the best and the worst of all possible worlds. Sometimes I wish I could have brained my father for dragging us here (it’s only 30 years too late for that!  😀 ) My mother loved it though, so Sun City was a nice way to wind up her life. He didn’t seem to mind the weather, but between Texas, Saudi Arabia, and the high seas, he didn’t know much of anything that was any better.

That poor man! After 30 years of hard, HARD work, penny-pinching every minute along the way, he finally managed to retire. Moved them to their dream home in Sun City, figuring to live out their lives in peace and quiet, parked contentedly in front of the TV.

And…yeah…  Within a few years, she’d killed herself. Puffed herself to death with her tobacco addiction.

Seriously: the woman was almost never without a goddamn cigarette in her hand. She would smoke while we were eating. Smoke and smoke and smoke in front of the TV. Smoke at restaurants. Smoke cleaning house. Smoke while she was cooking. Smoke while she was driving. Smoke in the bathtub. Smoke in the shower. Smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke…all the way to the grave.

I can’t even imagine how he was able to sell that house in Sun City: it stank so much of cigarette smoke! Presumably whoever bought it must have been rabid smokers, too. Or else not very bright. What. A. Stench!

Sometimes I wonder if she deliberately killed herself. By the end of the 1950s, it was widely known that tobacco smoking would give you cancer. Having watched her mother die hideously from a reproductive cancer, she lived in terror of the disease. But…apparently that didn’t scare any common sense into her head, not where the effing cigarettes were concerned. Really: she wasn’t stupid. Quite to the contrary. The only thing you can think is that she knew what she was doing and she did it on purpose.

My father smoked…but he sure didn’t smoke like that!

****

Cop helicopter circling overhead interrupted that grim little reverie. Grim to grim, eh?

He just took off to the west. Presumably either the perps escaped or the cops on the ground caught them. LOL! Why we always keep our doors and windows locked, here in lovely uptown Phoenix. What a place!

****
And, for the life of me, I canNOT make WordPress do what I want it to do. So this post is going online weirdly formatted. Sorry about that.

SURGE of Panic

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😀  Gosh, what could be better than starting your day with an adrenaline rush?

As dawn cracks, it’s off to the grocery stores and waypoints. Right?

R-i-i-g-h-t….

Get dressed.

Get the dog settled.

Load the car with iced water.

Find the shopping list.

Get the…

uh…

get the...

get the…KEYS!

uhhnhhhh…

Keys…NnnnnOo.

No, no, and no.

Jayzus. And that, my friends, was the high point of the day. Which tellsya something about how boring it is to live in a place where daytime temps exceed 100 degrees.

😀

The keys, the keys…where were they?

Stashed in the office deadbolt…where I always put them.  I must have looked right at them three times? Why didn’t I see them?

ohhhhh forgodSAKE! Wyrdpress has screwed up the formatting on this thing. Won’t let me fix it. Won’t fix it by saving to Word and copying back into WordPress.l Ohhhh SCREW IT!!!!!!!!!

Got other things to do than dork with computers. Posting…if the result is a mess, out it goes. If it’s more or less legible…good luck to ye, dear reader!

Outta here

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M’jito, ever wiser than his de-marbled muther, advised me to delete the most recent post, the one about today’s Adventures in Medical Science.

NATCHERLY, WordPress won’t let me just kill it.

ohhhhhh nooooo…that would be easy, eh?

So: let’s delete the content and replace it with blather: Herewith.

Stop the world…i wanna get off!

NOW it hits me???

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Ever have anything dawn on you, or strike you with an unnoticed significance, years after the event? Betcha most of us do. But…I’ll bet this one takes the cake.

My mother died of self-inflicted cancer — she smoked herself to death — when I was pregnant with my son. Said son is now around 40 years old.

That means she died about four decades ago.

At the time, my parents lived in Sun City, Arizona — a revolutionary dwelling arrangement for the still-kickin’ elderly and retired. Their dearest friends from their ten-year sojourn in Saudi Arabia had joined them there shortly after they found the place. Ruth and Hollis, this couple were named.

Ruth and my mother were like sisters. The four of them — the two women and the two men — formed a tightly knit unit, almost as close as a family. When my parents retired to Sun City, Arizona, Ruth and Hollis soon followed, buying a house in the same tract a couple miles from my parents’ place.

Over time, my mother smoked herself to death.

After it was discovered and announced that tobacco smoking was linked to a number of cancers, my mother went meh! and continued to puff away. WTF? It was coming from Big Brother, after all, and his evil Gummint Agents who desired nothing more than to control our lives. Right?

Yeah. Right.

She smoked constantly. No joke: She never spent a conscious moment without a fu*king cigarette in hand. First thing she did before she lifted her head from the pillow in the morning was light a cigarette. Last thing she did before she turned out the light at night was light a cigarette. Hell, she even smoked in the shower! She smoked every goddamn one of her cancer sticks down to the filter. Or, if it had no filter, until it was about to burn her fingers.

Not surprisingly, she did indeed develop a nasty cancer, and it did indeed kill her.

***

Some years before then, Ruth and Hollis had moved to Sun City, where they passed much of their time in my parents’ company.

My father struggled to care for my mother through her hideous last months, weeks, and days. And when she died…

…when he most needed a friend…

…those two moved away.

Ruth remarked to me that the horror of my mother’s ugly death was more than they could cope with.

Uh huh.

And how was my father — their alleged dear friend — supposed to deal with the horror?

Let me tell you what I think about that:

A thousand curses upon them

Damn them, damn them, and damn them again.

He needed their friendship.

He needed their support.

They didn’t have to do anything other than BE there, out in ugly Sun City, to be his friends, to say they cared, to assure him that (maybe) life would go on. Yes, even without Julie.

But they yanked that out from under him.

Ruth told me they couldn’t stand to watch my mother die.

For the LOVE of  God, how the fu*k did they think my father felt, watching my mother — the most profound love of his life — die in horrific, terminal agony?

The cruelty of their abandonment, the meanness of their behavior, has only recently struck me…come back to smack me upside the head.

Damn them!

I never knew what happened to them, after they left Sun City and fled back to Texas. Sincerely, I do hope they each suffered horribly. But…rather doubt it. If they were smart enough to stay out of an HMO (my parents had no clue!), maybe they got decent medical care in their last days. But…who knows?

A thousand curses on them, and may those curses ring down through Eternity.

Another Balmy Arizona Summer Day…

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I.e., you have to be balmy to keep on living here!!!  Just now it’s 106 in the shade of the back porch, 20% humidity. Clouds built up to the north, tantalizing with a vague promise of rain…but as we scribble, they’re burning off.

Arizona…what a garden spot!

Man, I’ll take San Francisco fog over burning heat, any day.

Speaking of the which: spent half the afternoon doing battle with the pool. The current Pool Dude seems to have f*cked things up royally.

Had to buy a big heavy bucket of chlorine tablets (none remained out there at the pool or in the pool shed). Dosed the drink with that stuff.

Next: decide whether to backwash…decided it’s toooo damn hot to wrestle with that task. Get the vacuum system to work properly: see that it’s picking up most of the debris. Think gotta clean out that filter NOW. Decide it’ll hafta wait.

ohhhhh gawd, tell me I don’t have to track down and hire a new Pool Dude.

See, the problem with these guys is a substantial proportion of them are jailbirds. If they’re on probation and they get into trouble — apparently that includes so much as a traffic ticket! — they end up back in the slam. This, as you can imagine, does not help to keep the algae outta the pool.

😀

Maybe what I should do is install some cages in the backyard where the Authorities could store the Pool Dudes. Then I’d always have one of the critters around to contend with the drink. And maybe I could even get the state to pay me for putting up the resident convicts….

Arrrrggghhhhh! What a place we live in!

Teeth hurt. Don’t know whether it’s from aggravated clenching or whether there’s an infection or some other such nightmarish pending dental bill. We shall see over the next few days, no doubt.

If I were a grown-up, I’d stumble out to the kitchen and bolt down an aspirin or an ibuprofen.

But I’m not a grown-up. Consequently, I’m bolting down a glass of wine. Oddly, that does nothing for the sore tooth.

Ohhh well. It sure tastes better than ibuprofen, though!

😀  😀

Driving around this afternoon eyeballing real estate.

Yknow, my mother was a real estate agent. Like me, she felt some strange magnetic attraction to Reel Estate. What it is, I do not know. But the whole business fascinates me.

I used to write about real estate for Phoenix Ragazine and for the weekly Phoenix Business Journal. Sometimes I think I should try to wriggle back onto a local publication’s staff — actually for awhile I wrote for a national real estate trade rag, but the truth is, I find the local market a lot more fun.

Yesterday I stopped by an open house and met a lovely young Realtor. Ohhh how ambition blooms forever… Well, I wish her well and hope she gets rich…or at least finds a nice rich man to support her. 😉 Real estate is one of those endeavors that looks like it should make you rich, but that at best maybe won’t make you poor.

***

Dog’s conkered out. I should conker out, too…dawgs having better sense than humans…