Coffee heat rising

Whatever Can Go Wrong…

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DOES GO WRONG.

LOL! One of those days, that is…with a vengeance!

Well…maybe not that extreme. But certainly to an extent on the high side of ridiculous.

Last week I had the laptop worked on by an outfit called MacMedia, out in lovely Scottsdale’s tourist district. It’s almost a full hour’s drive out there, on a good day. One-way. But they’re worth it. These guys are brilliant, and whatever CAN be fixed, they WILL fix.

So yesterday, they summon me thither to come retrieve the spiffed up computer.

Traipse traipse traipse, traipse traipse traipse…  Get out there, collect the machine: thrilled. They’ve somehow contrived to block ALL the blitz of incoming spam and scam emails!

Have they  blocked my friends? Nooooo idea: presumably I’ll find out. But for the nonce, at least that mess is tidied up.

This morning, there was one more thing that needed to be attended to, and I wanted to look in to buying a new or refurbished laptop to have a back-up for when this one craps out. Which it will, sooner than later…of that you can be sure.

Traipse traipse traipse, traipse traipse traipse…

They said to get there about 9:15 to 9:30. Ducky: I’m a little early.

Wait wait wait, wait wait wait

9:30. No one around.

Stroll around Scottsdale’s agèd Fifth Avenue. About all that’s left by way of retail stores are hair salons and art galleries. Stroll stroll stroll…down to Indian School Road, one of the Valley’s unlovelier thoroughfares. Come upon an old, fenced-off motel: no doubt once a nice enough tourist trap, now a ruin. Wander through…looks like they’re getting ready to tear it down. Someday. Pretty clearly it’s been in this predicament for quite some time.

This was once a thriving, vibrant arts, restaurant, and fancy retail district. It’s a ghost town now.

Where have all the tourist traps gone,
Long time pa-a-ssin’…
Where have all the tourists gone,
Long time ago?

Roam back to the computer store. No sign of life.

Ohh, screw it!

Climb back in the car and head outta there.

Mission Unaccomplished!

Cruise back across the surface streets, passing at a distance the (highly!!!) upscale neighborhood where my best friend in graduate school lived, with her low-income-earning socially useful husband.

HOW did those two find that really rather cool and wonderful studio on a couple acres of land, adjunct to a large, real adobe richistani’s house with space for a vegetable garden, with a big swimming pool that no one but those two used and a view from the side of a very expensive mountain and a straight shot down 68th street into Tempe, right to the university?

Huh…  Why have I never thought of that question before?

Not very curious as a kid, was I?

Oh well.

Driving driving driving, westward ever westward. Through tracts of palace-sized custom houses, their weird post-modern architecture uglier than pussly in my opinion, driving driving driving….

Think about my friend’s life. Think about her kids’ lives. Think about her ex-husband’s life. Think about my life. Think about my kid’s life. Think about my ex-husband’s life…driving driving driving….

Arrive back at the Funny Farm. By now I’ve been on the road around two hours.

Reflect that I intended to stop by the Safeway and get a booster shot to cover the current variant of the plague. Haul the computer in. Let the dog out. Climb back in the car: drive to the Safeway.

Wait is a minimum of 20 minutes, I’m told.

Now, I really don’t want to stand around breathing other folks’ germs even five minutes, to say nothing of 20-plus minutes.

Stalk back across the parking lot, jump in the car, drive out. Dodge a FRANTIC fire truck charging into the lot…did someone pass out while receiving their Omicron shot?

Weasel away from that mess.

Drive up to the Walgreen’s in the gangland bordering the ‘Hood just to the north. Squeak around a couple of sketchy looking clusters in the parking-lot; dodge into the store.

“We don’t have any of the vaccine. Call us on Monday to see…”

Jayzus.

Drive down to the Albertson’s on Gangbanger’s Way.

“You have to make an appointment several days in advance to get a shot.”

Jayzus.

Drive home.

Put on my favorite around-the-house/reading glasses. One of the temple pieces is about to fall off.

Call the beloved traveling glasses repair-dude (you would not believe this amazing man…and he comes to your house!). He’s maxed. Please call next Monday to see if he can find time to come by someday next week.

Dig out the newer, more bourgeois Costco glasses with the progressive Rx. They’re OK…I’m just not fond of having to tilt my head at a neck-kinking angle to read copy. Oh well.

Call the computer store. They beg me to come back. Ohhkayyyy.

Defrost a piece of salmon; cook it and an ear of corn on the grill. Feed the dog some of it, thereby ingratiating myself for the next week. Eat lunch/dinner.

Are You Crazy to Have Kids Today?

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Time to move along? If I were younger and had kids, I’d sure be looking at that possibility a lot more closely. On the other hand…move to where? Seems like every part of the country is either off the deep end or teetering on the edge.

What a place we live in!

Southward bound to the AJ’s, my favorite overpriced gourmet-style grocery store, I was about to turn left off Main Drag East to move over onto Central Avenue, which takes you directly by the front of the beloved store. Idling in the left-turn lane, I looked down in the direction of where I would be east-bound and saw…TA DAAAAA! An army of cops, fire vehicles, ambulances, and whatnot, right down on Central.

HOLY shee-ut! Veer back into the southbound lanes and proceed southward, ever southward, to the first E/W main drag north of AJ’s. Manage to get into the store without incident.

So…chatting with the beloved checkout lady at the beloved AJ’s, I mention that if she’s going out to lunch, she should avoid going north on Central. And she said…a little wrecky-poo was as nothing! The other day the AJ’s crew was witness to a full-blown lockdown of Brophy, Xavier, and Central high schools, fine institutions of learning directly across Camelback Road from AJ’s.

FYI, Brophy and Xavier are elite private high schools run by the Jesuits, who have a lovely church and campus about a block south of AJ’s. Central is THE high school that middle-class parents who can’t afford private schools move into the North Central neighborhoods for: to get their kids in there. If you’re a minority member and live in South Phoenix, you also have a good shot (oops!) at getting your kid into Central. Campuses for the three schools are adjacent.

Apparently a nut-case kid at Central showed up at school with a gun (or not???), and a full-blown panic ensued. From what you can tell by the gnus stories, it appears that all three schools were locked down.

Just imagine. All those hundreds of kids having to go through a terrifying drama like that!

Y’know…. If I were a young person today, you could not pay me to have children.

But if I were of the religious persuasion that insisted I simply must go forth and procreate, then you could not pay me to put my kids in the public schools. Or…as we can see from this episode, in any goddamn school.

If I had kids today, truth to tell, I would home-school them.

Right. Try not to go berserk at the mere thought: it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

One semester I was teaching a class at ASU West — in the evening, as I recall — whose members were mostly adults. Somehow the subject of home-schooling came up — why, I don’t remember — and ohmigawd! You should have heard the conversation that ensued.

As you might expect, a number of classmates were folks who thought that only the crazed and the doctrinaire would even think of home-schooling.

Then the crazed and the doctrinaire spoke up. There were, purely by coincidence, A LOT of them. And…you never saw so many ears perk up in your life!

Not one of the home-schooling parents appeared to be crazy. Every one of them had rational reasons to have their children tutored through the first 12 years of America’s conventional education. All of the kids who had reached college age had succeeded in getting accepted by the colleges of their choice. Each set of parents had made financial sacrifices (i.e., one parent had to stay home from work) to pull off the home-schooling trick. Classmates had question after question after question after question after question. And the parents had answer after answer after answer.

It was THE single most interesting classroom discussion I’ve ever had the pleasure of leading or of participating in.

We spoke together long before the mass-shooting loony-toons our culture enjoys today. But even in the absence of that concern, when you heard these parents speak about the reasons for their decisions, about how they pulled it off, about how they found activities to help socialize their kids, and about the results, you came away thinking holeee shee-ut! why didn’t i think of that?

And you know… I have to say that today, if I had kids (which I probably wouldn’t, under the circumstances), I would seriously consider home-schooling.

What a place we live in! What a time we live in! What an unholy culture we live in!

 

Time to Move Along?

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Mogollon Rim from near Payson

HOLY mackerel! This place gets more and more crime-ridden and more and more violent with every day that passes!

Y’know…I can handle the mailbox thefts. And the burglars. And the cop helicopter flyovers every damn night. The abductions (for the purpose of rape) from the bus & train stops at Conduit of Blight and Feeder Street E.W. can be dealt with simply by never riding a bus or a lightrail train. The transient drug addicts: locks on the doors and windows, plus a large, loud dog. The panhandler harassment at the corner shopping centers: drive to some other district for grocery shopping and drugstore visits. The car break-ins and thefts: close the damn garage door…oh, but first, do park your car on the inside of said garage. The mail thefts: for a mere 400 bucks, install a Fort Knox of a mailbox. The burglars: keep a fine, fully loaded .45 on hand.

But I sweartogawd, every which way you turn, here’s more gratuitous, demented, and criminal violence. And it is too…damn…close to home.

I go by this corner every time I visit the Costco north of the university.

Ruby and I could walk to this dump, if it were safe to do so. As it is, I drive by there several times a week on the way to the freeway or to points west. That’s rather closer than I’d like to get.

This fancy charter school is in the Arcadia district, not far from where my late step-sister lived.

This episode took place in an informal B&B (why are those legal???) that popped up, also in the Arcadia district — an area where the ritzy and the titzy congregate to live in what they imagine will be peace.

A moment of nuttiness took place at a park just south of the university’s west campus…another garden spot that I pass in my car with some frequency.

Central High School is the best public high school in the city (which may be telling you something). My son went to a Jesuit high school directly next door to it — they occupy, in effect, practically the same campus. Sunnyslope belies this figure, though; it also has a reputation as one of the best-performing high schools in the country.

Yet… the violence and the vagrancy and the craziness go on and on and on and on, every damn day! And it seems to get more frantic as the weeks pass.

And y’know what?

I’m tired of living in the middle of a war zone. Once again I’m brought back to the feeling that as much as I love my home and my neighbors and my neighborhood, as much as I like being 8 minutes from the church and 10 minutes from my son’s house (he also lives in a war zone…), it’s past time to move along.

The violence, the crime, and the Loony Toons spread pretty homogeneously across the Valley. Of course, there’s more low-end craziness in garden spots like the apartments that flank the ‘Hood on the west side of Conduit of Blight Blvd and the dank slum directly to the north. But as that cop said after the Adventure of the Home Invasion: “It’s everywhere.”

[Yeah? Well…whaddaya bet some parts of Everywhere have less of it than our part does?]

So…if one were gonna move, where would one go?

Well, if I stayed in the Valley, the two choices would be Fountain Hills or the Cave Creek/Carefree area. I don’t consider the Sun Cities a choice: just not innarested in living in a ghetto for old tolks.

Both these venues are expensive. Fountain Hills has the added attribute of late-model cheesy construction: structures that were built to fall apart. The Funny Farm is probably in the last generation of solidly built affordable residential structures, and even it has a failing in the insulation department. Those houses out east are simply junk: Southern California-style built-to-fall-apart junk. Expensive junk.

Anything that is newer construction shares that fine attribute, and most of the stuff in Cave Creek and Carefree falls under the rubric of “newer.” Ticky-tacky is the name of the Development Game here in Arizona, price range notwithstanding.

That leaves as options some of the outlying towns, or Tucson.

  • Tucson, also plagued by gimme-a-buck developments, has two big draws: the best hospital/medical center in the state (something that looks Bigger the Older you get), and the vibrant cultural center that is the University of Arizona. A lot is going on in Tucson, the weather is far more pleasant than Phoenix’s, and with a fine mountain range behind the city, just about anyplace you can live is fairly scenic.
  • Prescott, a large small town/small city up the I-17 between Phoenix and Flagstaff, is a pleasant little burg. HOWEVER…it’s been discovered. From what I’m told, mobs of Baby Boomers and younger people are moving up there, turning it into yet another Southern California East. The weather’s a little cooler (though what you save in air-conditioning you’ll probably spend on heating); it has a supposedly excellent medical center (people who work there beg to differ, interestingly enough); and it’s a straight shot down the freeway to the urban marvels of Phoenix. I’m not at all sure it has enough more to offer, when compared to Fountain Hills, to make it worth a major move and a long drive into town.
  • Payson: Mr. and Mrs. Fireman moved up there, on the edge of the Mogollon Rim. They bought an extremely cool house in the forest, and, given Mr. Fireman’s outstanding handyman skills, have turned it into a to-die-for little palace. Problem with Payson? Rudimentary services and facilities. They had to drive their dog into Phoenix to be tended to by a veterinarian after the poor pooch was attacked by a neighbor’s dog. No Costco: only one Safeway, a store that I would call…well, pretty blah. No first-rate doctors or dentists — they drive into town for those services, too. Doctors? Doctors? We don’t need no steeeenking doctors!
  • Uh huh. Well…if you have to schlep all the way down the mountain — about a two-hour drive — for basic shopping and services, you’d be far better off to live in Fountain Hills.  Not only do they have a couple of supermarkets within the development, there’s a Costco down the road and all the upscale shopping of lovely Scottsdale just a few miles to the west. Plus you could walk to the Mayo Clinic from Fountain Hills!
  • Chandler: Nope. Ticky-tacky suburb Hell.
  • Florence: Nope. No better than Payson, but not as pretty.
  • Ahwatukee: Blech. If I’m gonna live in ticky-tacky mass construction, I’ll take Fountain Hills any day.
  • Tempe: Gawd help us!
  • Sun City/Youngtown: Horrible ghettos for old folks, garnished by cheaply built ticky-tacky.

Really, in a lot of ways, the ‘Hood IS the best of all possible worlds, at least for someone who’s not swimming in money. It’s an established neighborhood. Because the upscale section has irrigation, we have mature and very beautiful green landscaping. Even over here in the po’ folks quarters, the trees and shrubbery are mature, shady, and lovely. It’s close-in — shopping, schools, entertainment, doctors & hospitals, all right around the corner. We have a park in the middle of the neighborhood. We’re served by a decent public grade school and one of the nation’s top public high schools, plus an array of private and religious K-12 schools. Young upwardly mobile types have discovered it and are madly gentrifying, so there’s nowhere for property values to go but up. Plus: what could be better than young families with young kids playing around the neighborhood?

So…i dunno. It’s a toss-up. So it seems to me…

Times Have Been a-Changin’…

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Couple days ago, I had occasion to drive through the neighborhood around the old-folkerie where my father chose to live out the last years of his life.  It’s over on the easterly side of North Central Phoenix — actually, within (almost reasonable) walking distance of the big North Central house where DXH and I took up residence, just to show the world what we could afford.

Killing time drivin’ around the other morning was kinda fun, kinda sentimental. After running away from the church, being told we had no choir today (why??????), I filled the gas tank and then cruised up into some of the (relatively) old neighborhoods over in the area of my favorite QT station. Part of this area comprises the easterly section of a renowned slum known as Sunnyslope.

My! We’ve been told that the ‘Slope has gentrified…. They ain’t kiddin’!!

WHAT a difference. Houses and whole streets that used to be run-down dumps have been cleaned up and painted up and spiffed up…gosh! Some of those little houses — built as homes for working-class folk, downright tiny — are suddenly VERY cute.

A decade ago, you couldn’t have gotten me even to drive around in there — because it wasn’t safe. Now, if I were in the market for a centrally located house with “charm,” that would be one of the areas where I would look.

Meanwhile, in the center of this middle-classifying neighborhood, the old-folkerie where my father retreated after my mother died has been HUGELY revamped. “Gentrified” ain’t the word for it.

When my father was there, it was a sprawl of single-story garden apartments arranged around a dining/activity center/nursing home. Renamed — no longer “Orangewood” but the ever-so-snootier-sounding “Terraces” — it’s three stories, painted in the latest, most stylish eye-searing white and beige. It’s spread out vastly — probably three times the footprint of the old place. And it looks bloody expensive.

Apparently it is: I hear tell it costs even more than the Beatitudes, whose business model is based on bankrupting the inmates.

It used to be that the neighborhood where this fine institution resided was…well…shall we say trending toward shabby (not to emit the word “slummy).”  Now it’s all been cleaned up, spiffed up, painted up, even in some areas rebuilt! Who’d’ve ever thunk! I would call it an upper-middle-class neighborhood now.

Weird!

In other precincts for the agèd, my dear friend L. (of the J. & L. duo) passed on a few days ago. He and his wife J. had, you may recall, moved into a similar institute called the Beatitudes, over L.’s vehement objections. But L. was very elderly — 94 years old — and his health was failing fast. He’d fallen a couple of times, and J. found she couldn’t help him get back on his feet by herself…so was justifiably frightened of what might happen if she couldn’t find someone quickly to get him back upright. Additionally, they had a demented neighbor who took to making trouble for them. One of this character’s more recent antics was making like she was going to run him down in her car.

So even though L. did not want to go, it was clear that getting away from their pretty little patio home was the wisest move, and, given that, the nursing care offered by the Beatitudes was a godsend for J., if not for L.

On the other hand…speaking of getting away…

J. was right, and within a year or so, L. passed on. A-n-n-d…within a week of the burial service, her daughters packed up what remained of her worldly goods and drove them and her off to California, where they live near Sacramento.

GONE!

So much for the glories of the old-folkerie. As soon as the most pressing need was past, she was outa there.

That has to have been a very pricey maneuver. Shortly after they moved into the place, she told me it cost her everything she netted from the sale of their handsome North Central Avenue patio home to get them in there. Basically, she forked over a huge chunk of her net worth to obtain end-of-life care for L.

Think you could do better at the Terraces? After a bracing buy-in, you’ll pay a staggering monthly fee. For that you get a far better designed and roomier apartment than the cramped space J. & L. landed in. But…good luck to you if you run out of money before you run out of life.

Heaven help us.

Why should we have to impoverish ourselves, our spouses, and our children to pass from this world in peace?

AWAY in a Cloud of Smoke…

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So Charley the Golden Retriever is sleeping on the floor beside the front door, where he’s taken up his position waiting for the return of his human, M’jito.

Ohhh how that dog loves that man. (And, we might say, the man is pretty fond of his beloved dawg.) So whenever my dear son leaves town for any length of time, he brings Charley over here, and Charley pines by the front door waiting for the guy to get back. Good ole Charley!

Just now my son is off on what I can only regard as the strangest expedition of his life and of mine. And all I can say is that as the Bitch Former Wife and Bitch Former Daugher-in-Law, I sincerely thank all the Gods and Goddesses in the sky for exempting me from that trip.

My son’s paternal grandmother  — my ex-mother-in-law — withered away in a nursing home, blind and deaf at the end…and for  quite some time leading up to the end. Finally, after several years of this horror (you have to know how active and brilliant this woman was to appreciate the meaning of the term horror here), she died.

She was 106 years old when she finally passed through the veil. Poor soul!

Now…two years after her demise…her offspring decide to fling her ashes off the side of a canyon rim. It is, one must say, a gesture she would have loved. But…now?  Two years after the fact? A good 12 years after a just and merciful God would have allowed her to move on to the Next World?

It is, in a short string of buzzwords, hard to process.

***

Now it’s Saturday, another day and another night have passed. A new (and meaningful) event has occurred. I must process that first, and then write about it. And so…away, later to re-coalesce!

 

 

Fone Frolicks and Fluff…

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Took some time, but for the nonce — and suddenly — it looks like Cox has got the phone situation under control

Some vast snafu arose last week, so involved I couldn’t explain it here because I couldn’t understand it myself. Cox sent over a tech — one of the nicest men I’ve met in decades. He worked on the phone system for a couple of hours, and now, hallelujah! It seems to be doing what a landline phone is SUPPOSED to do.

Yeah…i know…but i keep the landline for some specific practical reasons.

One is that I know how to use it. Every cell phone seems to be different, and every one of them presents a new learning curve, highly decorated with annoyance and frustration. So, all told…

  • We have the cool iPhone my son gave me, which I have yet to figure out. So far I have managed to learn how to make a phone call and how to call up a map. but…geez…should I have to get a graduate degree in electronic engineering to make a phone call?
  • We have four or five extremely cheapo flip phones that can be carried in a pocket out by the pool, around the house, and when walking the dog. (No: an iPhone does NOT fit in the pockets of a pair of women’s jeans!)  These are not hooked up to any service. Because of the law that says all cell phones have to be able to dial 911 whether they’re connected or not, their purpose is exactly that: for dialing 911 in the next emergency.
  • We have the landline with five extensions, three of them situated within grabbing distance of the floor, for use if I fall and bust myself.

The problem with the landline of late has been an unending blitz of junk phone-soliciting calls. Of late — over the past few months — I’ve been getting 10 or 12 nuisance calls a day! EVERY day. This has about rendered the landline useless, risk of falls or no risk of falls.

The Cox guy cleaned up a bunch of glitches and set the modem so it works the way it’s supposed to. Good.

A-N-N-D… it appears that Cox has connected my land line number with its industrial-strength call blocker!

The CPR Call Blocker, a handy-dandy little gadget that you plug in-line with your phone & your land-line connection, works to some extent. But it seems to be maxed — of late it hasn’t been working worth a damn. I’ve been getting ten or twelve nuisance calls a day! All day, from early morning to 9 or 10 at night. I don’t know whether it’s maxed, or whether the bastards have now got a way to circumvent the thing. Whatever, it doesn’t work anymore.

But today, after I talked with the Cox folks again about this problem, not one nuisance phone call has come in since dawn!

Suspicious, I’ve called the landline number a couple of times from the iPhone. The clunker phone does seem to be working. So the only thing I can figure — and hope! — is that Cox’s call-blocking system DOES work.

Meanwhile, my son has gone off to Colorado to attend some obsequies for his late grandmother — more on that later, when I feel like writing more. Just now, I’m going to bed, before the dogs change their minds!