Coffee heat rising

Soggy Doggy Day…and a Sentimental Journey

by

7:45 a.m. Ninety degrees in the shade. 41% humidity.

I’m so parboiled I can’t think: don’t know why WordPress is letting me write in this post, since apparently I’m not actually logged in. Or something.

But lo! It let me out AND let me back in. Weird!

Just back from a truly unpleasant doggy-walk. The heat and the sogginess would be quite enough, without the fellow moron dog-walkers. Where does it say that stupidity is part of the job description of “human being”?

**************

Never did get around to posting this.

ohhhh well…

Now it’s a few days later. The weather has attenuated some. Actually pretty pleasant out there this morning: much drier than it was when this post started. Just finished wrestling with the pool, to little avail. Hope Pool Dude shows up shortly to get it set up properly.

Where were we?

**************

Ah yes: the junket with VC. My friend VC and I went over to a classic old Phoenix shopping mall (believe it or not, we were around when it was NEW!!). Roamed through a couple of tony upscale department stores; then roamed up and down the mall and peered at the tony individual stores. That was fun.

Who has the money to shop in those places? More to the point: these days who has the TIME to do so?

Our stroll brought back memories of my mother, who dearly loved to putter around a shopping center that contained a couple of big department stores and a slew of expensive little stores. In Long Beach (where I went to high school), we lived within walking distance of a sprawling mall. She was a bit too crippled up (from the malnutrition she suffered as a child) to walk from our apartment to that mall, so of course she would drive us there. Occasionally, though, I would walk over there by my li’l teenaged self and roam around the place.

One of the large department stores there — I believe it was a Broadway — had a classic department-store coffee shop/restaurant, up on the third floor. She dearly LOVED coffee shops! So, not surprisingly, we ate there fairly often…maybe once a month or so.

Yesterday, after I dropped VC off at her house — she lives in a historic downtown neighborhood — I drove back up to my parts through the Central Avenue corridor.

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve cruised around those parts! I used to live in the historic mid-town district. We had a beautiful old house west of Central Avenue and south of Thomas Road, one that I miss to this day. It was so pretty, and the neighbors were so nice!

Unfortunately, we moved out. I stupidly thought we would send our son, who was coming onto grade-school age, to the well respected public schools in the Madison District, up on North Central Avenue.

Yes. Central Snobsville…

Unbeknownst to me, my husband had NO INTENTION of sending our son to a public school, no matter how well rated it was. If I’d had any idea that he would flat-out refuse to put the kid in a Madison school, I would never, ever have lobbied to move out of that lovely house.

The mid-town Encanto area, though, really wasn’t very safe. We had several hair-raising incidents while we lived there, as did some of our neighbors. The most unnerving adventure, though, really was our fault: Having come home late from a Bar Association shindig, very tired and pretty drunk, we left the back door open so our German shepherd could go out and get herself back in, allowing us to go to bed without waiting for her to do Her Thing.

Mistake!

Shortly, DH started to snore: a roar like an 18-wheeler’s. I got up to sleep on the living-room sofa, since sleeping next to him in the bedroom was out of the question.

Sometime after I dozed off, we were awakened by an ENRAGED ROAR from Greta the German Shepherd. She exploded like a cannon, taking off from her snoozing site outside our bedroom door.

A local sh!thead, exploring for places to burgle, had hopped over the six-foot backyard fence and lo! Found that back door open!

YaHOO!

So he walked right in and made himself to home.

He got well inside the house before he woke up the German shepherd and she registered that whoever was in the kitchen was not DH and not me.

She ROARED after the poor son-of-a-bitch, getting between him and the door he came in. By the time DH woke up and came out to see WTF was going on, the chucklehead had found the side door. DH got there just in time to see him dart out the door and slam it in the dog’s face.

When I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen to see what was going on, DH said, sounding outraged and suspicious, “Who was that man?”

Welp. That was the beginning of the end. Who was that man, indeed.

This episode accelerated our desire to move uptown, and within a year we were outta there.

Mistake, IMHO. No place in the Valley is safe — as one of the cops who rescued me from the home invader in my present house remarked. You can not get away from it, no matter where you are. Hence: the proliferation of walled, gated “communities” hereabouts.

So, would I move back down there?

Hmmm….  Probably not.

Yes, I do love those beautiful old custom homes and the park and all. But… The crime and the transient issues are still there. And it’s noisy. Very noisy.

The lovely Encanto district is trisected by a one-way road leading downtown, a one-way road leading uptown, and Seventh Avenue, a main drag that runs from points WAY north to points WAY south. So the traffic is pretty much constant, and so is the noise.

Add to that two major hospitals: one up on Thomas road (north border) and one down on McDowell (south border). The one on McDowell is east of Central, so ambulances headed there rarely cut through Encanto. But the one on Thomas is right on the north border, and it’s HUGE. Ambulances and fire trucks race up and down those two one-way “neighborhood” streets all hours of the day and night, all the time. Plus shortly before we moved, the idiot city bought a private home on the street just north of us and about two lots to the west, and they turned it into a fire station!

Yes! Fire trucks and ambulances roaring back and forth, 24 hours a day! Not to mention the helicopters.

So…that, along with my hallucination about the school, was why we moved out.

To this day, I miss it. We no doubt would still be married if we’d stayed there, because I would never have become quite so discontent if we still lived in a beautiful house with beautiful neighbors.

Not that the house we bought up on North Central wasn’t beautiful enough. But the neighbors? Not so much.

North Central truly would be better named Snobsville. With one (count her: one) exception, our new neighbors were roaring snobs. And they knew a blue-collar girl when they saw her. They treated me like white trash…which, I guess, is not far off the mark. But my mother taught me to be polite to everyone, not only to the wealthy and the fancy. Those people around us were just horrid. Nouveau riche parvenus…

Cruising through the beloved old neighborhood, I thought maybe I should sell my house, here on the fringe of Sunnyslope, and move back into Encanto. We certainly have our share of crime and cop copter fly-overs and roaring ambulances. They seem to have moved the Fire Department out of that house around the corner from the old place, so that problem presumably is resolved.

But…truth to tell, those old houses entail even more work and more expense than this place. So that would be ill-advised, as moves go.

Really, the only practical moves at this point would be either to move into a high-rise on North Central or to a patio home in the Biltmore area. And neither of those appeals very much. I don’t want to live in a hive.

Besides, my son wants this house. He doesn’t understand about the longevity issue on my side of the family: women who had reasonably quiet lives lived into their 90s. With no medical care! They were Christian Scientists!

My mother died in her mid-60s…but she smoked herself to death.

Literally: the woman was never conscious without a cigarette in her hand — not even in the shower! So, no surprise, she died of a fine visceral cancer. That and the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Saudi Arabia picked her off relatively young.

****

For me, sometimes I do wonder…what next?

If there is a next, that is.

There may not be: it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion.

Truth to tell, I surely would not mind moving out of this neighborhood. The presence of the Romanian Landlord represents, IMHO, an ongoing threat, even though he’s presently quiescent and has been for quite some time. He’s closed the juvenile delinquent home across the street and turned it into a rental. Just now the tenants are quiet and the yard is well kept up. But…yeah: what next?

Just to the north of the hood, a dangerous slum spreads up to the foot of the North Mountains. To the west: banks of deteriorating apartments, running down as fast as they can run. To the east, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city.

It’s not the worst place in the city. But there are better places — at comparable prices.

This, That, & the Other

by

Hotter than the Hubs out there...and wetter than the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Seriously: it is SO hot and SO humid, you step out your (soggy) front door into a corner of Hell. Or…more likely, into a corner of Lovely Saudi Arabia.

Today and yesterday have been weirdly reminiscent of the balmy old days beside the Persian Gulf.

There, the air would get so wet that sometimes rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky. We’re not that bad…yet. And I sincerely hope we don’t get there.

Ugh! Gotta go to the store. Get stuff for me and the hound: stuff that can’t wait. Then another errand…while I’m running around, I prob’ly SHOULD run by the mid-town Best Buy and get another power cord for this li’l computer.

Because…AS YOU AND I BOTH KNOW….wherever you are, you can’t get there from here. Whatever room I happen to be in, when the power runs low on the MacBook, the power cord is on the other end of the house!

😀

Ogling real estate in Moon Valley, a sprawling Mittel-America tract where my friends La Bethulia and La Maya moved. Look at this shack, for example. It’s on the high side of houses out there: not the best available, but far from the tackiest. I’d say it’s comparable to my current hovel, in style and size and maintenance.

Guess if I wanted to run away from the Romanian Landlord, that would be a likely candidate. It’s not quite as large as my house…but truth to tell, my shack is one bedroom too much.

Relatively pretty, as tract houses go.

But…y’know…so is mine. And my house is closer to M’hijito’s, by some miles. And click through the photos to see that thing next door to it. That’s a weird lash-up, isn’t it? It looks, for all the world, like a commercial structure with an underground garage.

?????

Not likely, in a suburban middle-class tract. But…weird, isn’t it?

Dunno that I could live in Moon Valley: too much emotional baggage.

A dear friend of mine: her husband died out there. He had cancer, and he died excruciatingly. And…well…her behavior left something to be desired. So did mine, come to think of it. We should never have been socializing in the kitchen while he was dying in the bedroom.

Horrible.

After he passed, I never heard another thing from her. She sold the house in Moon Valley; moved to Scottsdale. Then, apparently as she herself sank into decrepitude, she moved back to the Midwest, where her adult kids lived. And that was the last I knew.

Moon Valley is a bland tract of bland, throw-’em-together stick-and-drywall huts. For my purpose, it’s kind of a sentimental journey, cruising the Web and eyeballing the overpriced ticky-tacky. But in fact, my house is far nicer: block construction, real walls that keep out the burglars.

Seriously: a good-sized man could break right in through a wall out there, simply by delivering a good-sized kick. When my friends moved into that house, I went out to help her paint and fancify the place. You would not have BELIEVED the ticky-tacky construction!

No kidding: you could break in with swift kick to an exterior wall. The walls, which were pretty much all stick-and-plaster, were so poorly insulated that as I stood on the tile floors painting the living-room (she had the whole house tiled before they moved in!), I could feel the HOT heat under my feet. You don’t even wanna know what their power bills must have been.

***

Here I am at the neighborhood doc’s office. Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting.

What I wanna do is ask him if he’ll refer me to the Alzheimer’s facility at Good Samaritan Hospital, in downtown Phoenix. That’s about a 10-minute drive from my house…as opposed to an hour’s trudge to get out to the Mayo.

Also, quite frankly, I want a second opinion. The Mayo is halfway to Payson from my house. Good Sam is straight down 7th Street: outside of rush hour, an easy shot. Soooo….we’re talkin’ two advantages here:

  • If the staff at Good Sam do indeed appear to be competent, then we have excellent doctors within easy reach; and
  • Good Sam is right on the route to my son’s house and to a dear friend’s house! Thereby producing an excuse for visiting. 😀

*****

Didn’t get far with that scheme. Oh well: I’ll have to keep at it.  A little peripheral neuropathy isn’t gonna kill me. Soon. And if my brain has turned to Swiss cheese, there ain’t much anyone can do about it.

 

 

 

Muggy Muggy Day

by

Ugh!  This was NOT the morning for a doggy-walk! By the time we got back — it’s only a mile around the park — my clothes were drenched in sweat. No exaggeration: just SOAKED.

Fortunately, the weather was hot enough and wet enough to keep the worst of the Dog-Loving Morons inside. We had to dodge only a few nose-to-nose encounters, and there was just one idiot out in the middle of the park with his pack of dogs off-lead, chasing around after the toys he was throwing for them. You know the type: that sign reading

DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH!

doesn’t apply to them.

This is the problem — my problem, evidently — with taking Ruby into her profoundly beloved park: People are fukkin’ STUPID.

And boy, am I tired of stupid….

So, say you with sterling common sense, why don’t you walk her someplace other than the park?

Well, I do.  But y’know, she SO DEARLY loves that park!  Because it has this green, grass stuff all over the ground! Ohhhhh that GRASS stuff!

Our yard is desert-landscaped — that means gravel in front and quarter-minus (finely ground gravel) in back. It’s hot, it’s hard on the feet, and it’s not something you want to roll around on or loaf around on. Most people here have desert landscaping, unless they have agricultural irrigation left over from the time when these tracts were citrus orchards. Tap water is prohibitively expensive.

Ruby has learned about the park and its grassy carpet, and that’s where she heads — like a rocket! — the instant we’re out the door.

Very cute and charming, except when it’s 110 in the shade….before the sun even comes up to make shade. No kidding: as we scribble, it’s not eight in the morning, but it’s already 84 degrees out there (feels like 87, sez Wunderground), with 31% humidity.

Welp…it’s 8:00 a.m. now, yea verily.  A friend is coming over this morning…so I’d better get moving around. Onward!

Heah Come de Storm…

by

Eeek! We’re looking at a serious storm a-rollin’ in, right this minute. Wunderground expects our lovely weather to chill down from the present 106 degrees to a crisp 86, with thunderstorms, a few of which may be “severe.”

Ya don’t say, Jose?

Jeeminee, you should see that sky!

Welp, as much as can be battened is battened down. The BBQ is secured (…i hope…). Pool level is about 1/2 inch low, so if we get some serious rain it shouldn’t overflow much of anything. Gerardo’s gents have kindly pruned the palm trees, so we ought not to get too much of that kinda debris in the drink. Ruby is in the house and perched on the bed, where she presumably will feel safe…or as safe as a dog feels in any wild-a$$ed storm.

It’s dead still out there right now…never a good sign right before the thunder starts to roll.

a-a-a-a-a-n-d… Here’s another good reason to live in Arizona, not in other sylvan vales of our great nation…

What Does Inflation Do to Your Savings Goals?

by

Every now and again, I think of my father and his goal to earn back the substantial fortune his mother had squandered that her father, the 19th-century buffalo hunter, had accumulated in the process of clearing the Plains of Indians and wild livestock.

She herself was an Indian woman: Choctaw. If you happened to know that and you looked at my father closely, you’d realize “yup! Injun lad.”

Not surprisingly, she had no inkling of what money was or how to manage it.

When she refused to accede to her husband’s demand that she abort the unplanned, late-in-life pregnancy that produced my father, said grandfather(again!)-to-be climbed on his horse and trotted off into the Texas boondocks, never to seen alive by her again.  Supposedly, he shot himself, but when you get into the facts of the story, it looks suspiciously like he was murdered by a guy who had been an inmate where he — the father — had been a prison guard.

WhatEVER…the whole drama essentially burned a brand into my father’s psyche. It produced an obsession:

He would earn back the entire sum that his mother had squandered: $100,000.

Today, that wouldn’t seem excessively difficult.
Hell, I’m worth three times that…and what am I? A freakin’ teacher!

In those days, though, a hundred grand was a LOT of money. By 1962 (when he tried to retire), it would have been something in excess of $300,000.

Understand: my father dropped out and joined the Navy a year or two before he finished high school, out in the Texas boondocks. So his target actually represented much, much more money and MUCH more work than he understood. In today’s dollars, it would come to $3,131,660.

Can you imagine? For a guy who doesn’t even have a high-school diploma…

Well, he did it. By dint of canny investment and a lucky choice of investment counselors, when I went off to college in 1962, he had his 100 grand in the bank, and he retired from his job with a pocketful of dollars.

That didn’t last long.

Remember: this was a guy who did not understand the first thing about economics.

By the time I graduated with a BA, we had hit a recession and his vast fortune went down the tubes. He panicked, packed his bags, and went back to sea, leaving my mother in Sun City…a hole in the middle of the Sonoran Desert into which to dump elderly folks.

That which he did not understand — the mechanics of inflation and deflation — eventually came to pass, and by the time he died he did have a pile of dollars to leave to me, despite having moved into a rapacious old-folkerie.

All very nice…but the point to the story is that the workings of the larger economy have a much greater significance for the individual’s savings and retirement plan than most of us realize.

For one thing, you need to bear in mind that the absolute value of the dollar slips and slides over time. Sometimes, yes, over time the value goes up. But more likely, it will go down…and down…and down. By the time you’re ready to retire, a hundred grand will be worth….far from a hundred grand!

This implies, of course, that you need to inflate your savings goal by some extravagant factor if you are to arrive at a sum that can be expected to support you through your dotage. Take the amount you think you need to live in retirement and multiply it by about 3: that will probably be the minimum you’ll need to have on hand when you finally quit your job.

Because, y’know: inflation.

 

Wednesday

by

Seven-thirty in the morning: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch, humidity 44%.

Back from a mile-long walk with the Hound. Hotter than the hubs out there, and soggy. Ruby doesn’t seem to notice. She rockets along the whole route like she was shot out of a cannon.

The irrigation system is crapping out. Gotta try to track down the installer (if he’s still in business!) or find a new one. Probably will have to replace a fair amount of that fine plastic piping. Ugh! Not to say $$$!!!

At the park: not too many dogs to have to dodge around this morning, probably because the weather is constraining most of the strolling dog-lovers. That’s a relief: some of those folks are stupid beyond belief, when it comes to dogs.

I find it impossible to understand how you could conflate a dog with a  kid. Wake up, folks! It’s not your “fur-baby”! It’s a highly evolved wolf that has developed a co-dependent relationship with humans. It doesn’t want to “pw-a-a-ay” with your neighbor’s dog. It wants to EAT your neighbor’s dog.

LOL! Hafta say, at the time I moved into this house, I never would’ve thought that I would be here long enough to need to replace the irrigation system I paid heftily to install during my first weeks of residency. Rebuilding it does NOT sound like a great idea. But…if I’m going to stay here (am I???), the watering system has gotta work.

Personally, I’d like to move into a high-rise on North Central, thereby mooting the whole yard and watering-system issue. However, my son WANTS this house. and accordingly he wants me to stay here until I’m carted off to the nursing home. At that point he’ll sell his place and move in here. Sooo…one could regard the proposed new plumbing as a gift to him.

Besides which: despite the proximity to Crime Central, I do like this house and this neighborhood. LOVE having the pool to topple into on a hot day. Love the trees and the shade. Love the yard that lets me have a dog of just about any size.

***

7:30 p.m.

And here we are, twelve hours later! Another day…not a single ‘nother dollar.

Weather progress: it’s a hundred degrees in the backyard just now, under a light film of high clouds. Nine percent chance of precip.

In Arizona, that’s what we call “humid.” 😀

No, I did NOT get my dainty little self enough off the dime to call the irrigation dude, or even to try to track him down. This laziness thing is becoming…uhm…a thing.

It’s too damn hot to do an evening doggy-walk — the pavement would burn Ruby’s feet. So we loaf.

Loafing is our specialty. Ruby is stretched out on her doggy-blanket atop the bed. The human is stretched out on her human-bedding atop the bed. We rule!