Coffee heat rising

Good Morning, America!

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Midnight: Weird noise outside.

What?  Pool equipment run amok? Air conditioner on the fritz? Juvenile delinquents frolicking?

Stumble outside. Cop copter is circling over the intersection of a neighborhood lane and Conduit of Blight Blvd. He flies up this way, then doubles back. Ugh.

Why DO I live in Crime Central, anyway?

Climb back into bed.

Dog wants out. Wouldn’tcha know it?

Lift dog out of bed. Follow her to the backyard.

* Cop copter is already gone. That’s somethin’, anyway.
* Wait for the dog to do her thing. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
* Neighbor’s AC is making the weird noise. Sounds like an expensive fix.
* Motion-sensitive backyard light is losing motion sensitivity. Does it just need a new lightbulb, or is that another expensive fix?

“Come ON, dawg!!”

*Scrabble scrabble scrabble scrabble…. Dog digs up quarter-minus.

Stumble back in the house. Lift dog back onto the bed.

{sigh}

Dog’s stomach is growling dramatically. Why did I imagine I wuz gonna get back to sleep?

Fed her…when? Around 6 p.m.

Helle’s belles. That was seven hours ago!

Do I really have to get up at 1:00 in the morning and feed the dog? And then let her out into the crime-infested night again?

Arrrrghhhh!

Flaming Horror in the Pacific

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No doubt you’ve been following the scenes of disaster from Maui… How could you miss them? They’re all over the news.

And there but for the Grace of God…and a handy divorce court…go I.

DXH loved to travel. Every vacation, nothing would do but what we had to jump on a plane and fly someplace.

Personally, I was less of an enthusiast, having spent my entire childhood and early teens traipsing around the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. But whatEVER.

We had discovered Maui before my son was born, around the time we made our first trip to the Hawaiian Islands. We stayed in a high-rise condo on the beach, where condo owners (from what I could tell) rented out their apartments to tourists. It was gorgeous. And a lot of fun.

So a few years later…he wants to go back. At this point, our son is about three or four years old. And I’m none too enthused about spending two weeks in a hotel with an energetic kidlet.

Solution: we took my step-niece along to babysit! By that time, my widowed father had remarried, producing a fine stepsister (a Superior Court judge) for me, and she had a teen-aged daughter, very sweet, smart, and responsible.

It appears that our hangout is right where all those fires are raging, or very close too it. We roamed all over Lahaina. If we were there again now (and yea verily, it is August, the month most Phoenicians try to leave town!), we would be in the middle of all that.

Far worse, though, would be to live there. Hundreds and maybe thousands of people apparently have lost their homes and their livelihoods. Even those who have escaped that kind of loss are living through a horror show.

Well, it can only be hoped that somehow this disaster will be brought under control. It certainly is a terrible thing to contemplate, to say nothing of having to live through it.

Now What?

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LOL! Speaking of the Hubs of Hades, the local denizens are as weird as anyone you would expect to reside in the Miltonic Underworld. 😀

This afternoon I’m puttering around in the house, not doing anything consequential, and what do I hear but KEEEEEE-RASH!! Coming from the street to the east of the Funny Farm. Car wreck, it sounds like. Right in front of Tony’s Rest Home for Juvenile Delinquents.

Now what, indeed?

See that the dog is safely contained. Find some shoes. Trot out front to  peruse whatever new excitement has occurred. And find…

nothing

Nope. Nary a dented car. Not even a smashed mailbox stanchion.

nothing

No idea, still, what THAT was about. If one of the brats had bashed a parked car, a fender surely would have been crushed. If they’d run into a mailbox, that would make quite a twisted little display.

The brats are in the habit of SLAMming the front door. Apparently it sticks — Tony being the clever handyman that he is, you’d think he’d shave it down so it would fit smoothly. But who knows? Maybe they’ve trained the inmates to slam the door as a signal to tell the overseers that they’re going outside.

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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Good Gawd! It’s only 105 out there, but it sure feels more like about 110 to 112. Probably because the humidity, sez Wunderground, is 24%.

Meanwhile, inside the shack with the air-conditioning pounding away, the thermometer next to the bed where the dawg and I are loafing reads 84 degrees. Balmy. The AC is laboring to drag the thermostat down to 80.

My power bill is gonna be astronomical…

Incredibly, the pool remains crystal-clear — some kind of miracle in this fine, algae-friendly heat. Thing is, I haven’t seen Pool Dude in the past two weeks.

No way in Hell that water could stay that clean all by its fine self. That says that PD is showing up when I’m not here, since Ruby goes BATSHIT with Corgi Joy whenever she realizes he’s here. So either he’s sneaking in during the night — very, v-e-e-r-r-y quietly, or somehow he’s arriving when I’m out. The latter is unlikely, since these days, between the heat and the plague, I don’t go out much. But then, the former is pretty unlikely, too.

At any rate, I just tested the water. It’s very high on chlorine. That suggests Our Hero has been at work.

The floater is full of tabs, and I haven’t put any in there. In this kind of heat, chlorine tabs dissolve quickly, so even though he’s dropping five or six tabs in there, they wouldn’t be THAT plump if he hadn’t shown up yesterday to refill the thing.

Welp, we can’t complain too much about Arizona’s summer heat and…absent monsoons. Good Lord! A million people back East without power. Power lines trapping the natives. Airports shut down. Tornado in Tennessee.

It’s supposed to warm up a bit next week…115 or so, come mid-week. Chance of the traditional late-summer monsoon rains: about nil.

Pool Dude: MIA

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hmmmmm…. It’s 9 o’clock in the morning…

Got the right day?

Yep: it is Monday.

Pool dude is usually here and gone long  before this. If he’s been around, I sure haven’t seen him.

And if he had been around while I was here, Ruby would have alerted me. She is hopelessly in love with the man. Not only does she fly into a frenzy of joy when she sees him, but…she knows what day of the week it is.  And in the Canine Calendar, today is definitely Pool Dude Day.

How on earth that’s possible, I cannot imagine. But on Monday mornings, she’s standing by the glass sliding doors watching. And watching. And watching…waiting for the mysteriously beloved Pool Dude.

Most optimistic hope is that he had car trouble, or that some major hassle arose at an earlier customer’s place. But…I tried to call him earlier this week to ask about a question that arose, and got no answer. Left word on his machine: no call-back.

I take these developments as bad signs. Though he’s been reliable all these many weeks that he’s been working for me, at one point in the course of a conversation he did make some remarks that revealed he has a prison record.

That in itself is not enough to put me off. In fact, it explains why he’s trying to make a living in rather low-skill self-employment, since he seems to be a smart and self-sufficient kinda guy.

But the problem is, if he got busted for something — anything, no matter how minor — that will make big, BIG trouble for him. He may be in jail or under some kind of house arrest.

If that’s the case, pretty clearly it’s the end of his pool maintenance business.

And that makes his problem my problem…  Because he’s been doing an awe-inspiring job on the damn pool! The water is crystal clear and the system is running beautifully. That thing has never looked better or been cleaner, not since I’ve lived here.

The remains of three pool tabs were in the chlorine floater. So…well…in this heat, you wouldn’t THINK they’d last a whole week. But that would mean he must have shown up on some other day. I haven’t seen him…but anything’s possible.

I tried to phone him a few days ago: no answer. Left word on his voicemail: no return call.

Not. A. Good. Sign.

Welp. If Pool Dude has flaked out on us — and since nothing lasts forever, that’s surely a possibility — I’ll have to find a new guy ASAP. In this heat, that water can turn green overnight.

So, drat!  The pool is running fine right now, and should continue so for a week or ten days. But I don’t seem to have the required skill to keep it running clear and shiny.

While I’m traipsing around the city, then, I guess I’ll need to go by the Leslie’s Pool store in Sunnyslop — the best branch of that outfit I’ve found so far — and ask if they can recommend any customers who are in the pool maintenance business.

However…I fear Leslie’s itself does that, which means they’re not going to refer the competition to me. So THAT means I’ll have to put out yet another notice on the neighborhood Facebook page, begging for leads.

****

O Gawd! the guy at the credit union couldn’t get me into my bank account. He told me to go home and call thus-and-such an annoying number.

It’s 108 in the shade, with thunderheads building up to the north.

How can I COUNT the ways I don’t feel like getting on the phone to the CU’s representative?

Wait…how can I count the ways I ain’t a-gunna do it?

Stopped at the Sprouts next to the campus on the way home. Snabbed a package of lamb chops, a package of beef steak thingies. Fresh asparagus. Box of fresh bright-green spinach w/ which to make a salad. Fresh corn on the cob. Fresh bottle of cheap wine.

SCREW COMMERCE! By damn. I’m a-gunna eat myself stupid and then fall face-first into the sack.

The heat and the humidity defy belief. This feels like the shore of the endlessly effing Persian Gulf…which is another way to say you feel like you’re swimming through the air.

The last time I can remember this kind of heat, they shut down Sky Harbor because the jet airplanes couldn’t get enough lift from the hot air to take off safely. Or at all.

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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When we say “hotter than the hubs of Hades,” we ain’t kidding. It’s 9:00 at night, and the thermometer on the back porch — in the shade all day, nestled among the leaves of an overgrown ficus plant — reads 110 degrees.

Yeah. That’s right: ONE HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES.

In the shade. All day.

The Wunderground site, my favorite weather predictor, is hung. But the last I looked, it seemed to be saying we could expect three-digit heat all night. The Accuweather site is more optimistic, predicting a balmy 89 degrees as a low, with 103 as the present temp, at 9:00 p.m.

People are dropping dead left and right. Here’s some poor fellow who fell over dead in the parking lot where I leave my car when I walk in the desert mountain park just to the north of the ‘Hood. I actually could walk to that place, but I’m too lazy.

Walking around the neighborhood suffices, especially when it’s 110 degrees out there. And…well, 110 degrees itself suffices to kill you.

This pretty young woman did herself in last Friday, walking on trails I go on several times a week during the winter.

And {ahem!} zero times a week during the summer.

Ruby and I did get out to perambulate the higher reaches of Upper Richistan, along about 5:30 this morning. Can’t leave much later than that: a two-mile stroll would occupy an hour, and that would get us back here around 6:30, way too late for comfort.

At this time of night — pushing 10 p.m. now — the pavement is still way too hot for Ruby to walk on. Early in the morning, the streets are still warm, but safe enough for us to walk around, at least for an hour or so.

Right now, I reckon, about all we can do is go to bed!