Coffee heat rising

Life in Hell…

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The day

Ahhh, another lovely August day in Phoenix: 104°, 29% humidity. WHAT a garden spot!

And folks: we got guys out there workin’ like horses in that unholy, soggy heat.

We start the day with a New Yard Dude, a fella I snabbed whilst strolling through Upper Richistan. For slightly more than twice what the beloved but perennially absent Gerardo charges, he agreed to shovel out the seriously neglected front and back yards. Thank you, dear man!!

He does a superb job, not a mere excellent job. The place is transformed!!

  • The weeds are gone.
  • The rampant tree branches are trimmed back.
  • The quarter-minus is raked and smoothed and niftied up.
  • The back-breaking heavy gravel in front is de-weeded and raked smooth.
  • The dog is in love.

Of all those, the last is the simplest, because the dog is in love with everyone.

The amount of soul-crushing work this gent did defied belief.

And then, God help him and all of us, he jumped in his truck to go off to another job!!!

He did miss the weeds in the alley (Upper Richistan doesn’t have alleys, so he probably doesn’t know that alley weeds are the homeowner’s responsibility). But that comes under the heading of No Big Deal: I have a gallon of concentrated Round-Up. Haven’t used it because I haven’t wanted to contaminate my few sprinkling or spraying devices with the stuff. But WTF? Tomorrow ayem I’ll take one of the sprinkling buckets, mix up some Round-Up, and drizzle it on the alley weeds.

One problem solved.

Next the phones/Internet/WTF.

A Cox guy shows up shortly after dawn cracks.

Along about the time New Yard Dude shows up, another Cox guy shows up.

They puzzle and figure and wrestle and wrestle and puzzle and figure and puzzle and figure and wrestle and finally, for reasons that no normal human can conceive, announce that the problem is SOLVED.

Uhhmmmm….

Ohhhkayy…heard that wind blow before.

We experiment with the phones a bit. Looks like probably…possibly…maybe they’re right. I dunno. I can’t tell. What I do know is that if the damn system works while the Marvelous Cox Dudes are here, it no doubt won’t work after they walk out the door.

Ohhh well and WTH. That just means these cuties will have to be invited back in the house. Wot a shame!

In the meantime, I’ve acquired another wireless doorbell to replace the one inactivated by the latest Sh!thead Attack. This, I must unpack, set up, and install at the front door and at the front gate.

Yes.

Unpack.

Have you noticed how spectacularly almost everything is overpackaged?

Took half my lifetime to slice and wrench it out of its ridiculous plasticized wrapping. Finally got it out. Read the instructions.

They want you to install these little flat battery things somewhere. But…but…WHERE is less than perfectly obvious.

After some unholy amount of time (so it felt) trying to figure out what the fuck they were talking about, I finally came to a guess that worked.

Now we have two of these things that have to be installed at the front door and the front gate, and a bingy-bonger box that has to find a home inside the house.

Wrestle wrestle wrestle Rassle rassle rassle Wrestle wrestle wrestle…finally…YES!!!!!! IT WORKS.

Yes. Now after three days of thrashing around, we have here a doorbell that rings when you push its button.

In other realms:

Half of a pair of dear friends passed away a few days ago. Not unexpected, but still…sad. Planned to return to choir this fall, now that the worst of the plague is dying down. But sadly, it looks like the very first thing we’ll be doing is singing at his service!

Heaven help us all. Especially him.

His wife moved them into the Beatitudes specifically so they could get care for a much aging man (he was 94), and because they had a lunatic next-door neighbor who truly was a threat. Never once did she say to him or to anyone else “I’m moving us there specifically to get care for you,” but now we see that must have been the case. Her daughter tells me she’s moving to California to live with the kids.

Where this leaves the beloved Connie the Long-Haul Truck Driver escapes me. Presumably her brother will have to overrule his exceptionally hostile wife to take over the kindnesses their father bestowed. Or else…heaven help us.

As we scribble, a cloud passes over the  mid-day sun, and the room’s light grows dimmer and dimmer…

Brave New World…redux

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God’lmighty!!!!! It’s 11:30 in the morning; I’ve been on the road since 9, burned a third of a tank of ga$, and so far have gotten exactly nowhere.

In the Getting Nowhere Department, for the life of me I cannot enter edits to clean up the formatting mess that is yesterday’s post. NOOO clue what’s the matter with it. Grayson the Web Guru doesn’t seem to know, either. Because, he offers, I copied and pasted it in from a different program?

Well, OK, could be: he’s got somethin’ there. I pasted much of it from MacMail, reproducing a narrative of adventures I’ve shared with friends. But I do that all the time!!!!!! If copying a passage from an email bollixes up the formatting so spectacularly that it can’t be fixed, then 2/3 OF THE POSTS I’VE INSTALLED HERE FOR LO! THESE MANY YEARS would be similarly up-gefucked.

It won’t let me fix the formatting. So I give up. The copy is not unreadable — just a bit funny-looking. The latest effort fixed all but about the first third of the post. Sooooo…fugeddaboudit… Let’s pretend it’s just ducky and move on.

What. A. Day!

It’s 102 out there, with 15% humidity. And not even noon.

Day from Hell started with a simple goal: trot out this morning to visit the nearest hardware store and pick up a battery-operated doorbell. One with two bing-bong buttons. This to replace the one that was disassembled by a thief.

No kidding. I’m sitting in my office and see a pickup pull up to the front of the house. Looks like a yard dude: he’s got a trailer full of yard debris in tow. Guy hops out of the passenger seat. I figure he’s gonna come up to the door and ask if I’d like to hire them to clean out the weeds that have sprouted (in gay abandon!!) since Gerardo and the boys were here.

He walks up to the front gate; pauses there; then turns around and RUNS back to the truck.

Turns out he’s ripped off the doorbell button from the gate!

Backstory:

This house has been owned by a succession of eccentrics. Before Satan and Proserpine (my immediate predecessors) bought the place, some chucklehead who lived here got the bright idea of RIPPING OUT THE WALL BETWEEN THE LIVING ROOM AND THE FRONT BEDROOM. No kidding. This clever strategy turned the front room into a cavern, and reduced the number of bedrooms from four to three. Thereby also reducing the value of the house by about 20 grand.

In the process he also ripped out…yes…the doorbell installed by the developer. Like most sane doorbells, this thing operated on electricity, and so it had wiring that ran through the very walls that Previous Moron Owner had declared redundant. So when S&P moved in, the house had no doorbell.

And when they moved out, the house had no doorbell.

BUT…you can buy handy-dandy battery-operated doorbells at the Depot. Most of these devices have (or used to have…) two buttons: one for the front door and one for the back door.

Since my backyard is secured like Leavenworth, this gave us a redundant button.

But it was rendered UNredundant when Richard the Incredible Landscaping and Construction Dude built a marvelous enclosed front courtyard for me. He installed wrought-iron gates in the wall around this thing. A-n-n-d…conveniently enough, most battery-operated doorbells come with two doorbell buttons. We put one next to the driveway gate (where most people enter the courtyard) and one in the customary spot beside the front door.

This has worked well.

Until that a$$hole stole the doorbell button by the gate.

Ohhkay…i figure i’ll go out and buy another doorbell and set of bing-bong buttons, just like the one I installed a few years ago when I moved into this place.

Well.

No.

Of course not.

They apparently don’t make the damn things anymore. You cannot find them for love nor money.

Beloved Ace Hardware store up by the QT doesn’t have them.

Similarly beloved Ace Hardware Store in the Basha’s strip mall doesn’t have them.

Today we learned that Home Depot doesn’t have them. Lowe’s doesn’t have them. The hardware store just off the I-17 that might have had them (because they had everything) no longer exists: closed, lost, and gone forever.

Any surviving unsold specimens (if they actually do exist) are available only on Amazon.

So. I spent the ENTIRE FUCKING MORNING driving from pillar to post through the heat and humidity, banging around amongst the homicidal morons, and accomplished exactly NOTHING.

Well. Except for witnessing some fine examples of humanity’s nuttiness.

Jayzuz!

Here we are in the Home Depot parking lot, having dodged oblivion twice on the way there. Cruising up to where the reasonably located parking spaces reside, I see a young HD employee collecting empty shopping carts.

Because, after all, no self-respecting HD customer would have the common decency to put the damn things in the li’l stables where you’re supposed to park them after unloading your junk, right?

The kid is heaving a long line of carts across the lot — he must be pushing 15 or 20 heavy metal carts over the tarmac.

Along comes a moron in a beautiful new pickup — all red and shiny and magnificent. He cruises past the kid and the kid’s choo-choo train of carts, then CUTS IN FRONT OF HIM and swerves into a parking space directly in the path of where the kid has launched the carts!

Hooleeee shee-ut!

I think omigod that whole train of metal shopping carts is gonna crash into the truck’s shiny new rear fender!!!!

Incredibly, the kid manages to stop the caravan just before it collides with the truck.

Trudge into the Depot. Ask around. Find a guy who knows about battery-operated doorbells. Nope, they don’t have any with two ringy-dingy buttons.

I know these still exist, because I’ve seen them on Amazon. Say g’bye. Trudge back out through the soggy heat to the car. Resume driving driving driving.

Cruise across the city, under the freeway, through the ever-present road construction, and over to the Lowe’s. First try to visit the Best Buy next door to the Lowe’s, because as we know Best Buy carries everything, no matter how eccentric. Forget that: they don’t open until an incredible 11 a.m.!!! It’s about 9:30 or quarter to ten by now, since I wanted to get an early start to beat the most crushing of the heat.

Lowe’s of course has battery-operated doorbells…but none of them have two doorbell buttons.

Sumbiche.

Drive home, ready to bite somebody.

Dodge a huge truck that tries to change lanes into the driver’s side of my car. Incredibly, escape unharmed.

Get home, mad as a cat.

SDXB on the phone. Tell him this sad story. He starts to lecture me about how to get the desired doorbell, unknowingly reiterating Every. Goddamn. Thing. I. Just. Told. Him. I’d. Done. This, evidently, because he suffers from male pattern selective deafness: this is a guy who literally cannot hear the female voice. And so it doesn’t register with him that he’s advising me do do all the things I’d just told him I tried to do.

Arrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Finally get off the phone, more or less politely.

Get online. Call up Amazon. And yup: there’s the very doorbell.

Order it up. It’s supposed to be delivered by 10 p.m. tomorrow.

That’s assuming, of course, that none of the ‘Hood’s ubiquitous porch pirates steal it before I notice it’s been delivered.

Dotage Daydreaming

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{Dunno what’s the matter with WordPress, but I simply cannot get the paragraph formatting in this post to stick, no matter how much I hassle with it. Sorry, folks…but some of the grafs here are going to lack extra spacing, ’cause I give up.}
***********
Wanna know how the weather can be searing hot and dripping soggy at the same time? Visit the lovely Valley of the Sun in August!
***{sigh}***
My dear friend and sorta substitute dad, L, passed away last week. To no one’s surprise: he was 94, and had gotten pretty decrepit over the past three or four years. Connie is one of his daughters…yea, verily, she’s the famous Connie the Long-Haul Trucker. Unclear to me whether she’s going to make it into town for the obsequies.
Connie is on the road, in Montana. Fortunately, the family is significantly larger than mine was. Lee has daughters on the West Coast and a fine son and daughter-in-law here in lovely Phoenix.
So plenty of middle-aged relatives are on hand to help J in her newly minted widowhood.
J dragged L out of their pretty patio home (which was her house, built years ago by J and her late husband) and into the Beatitudes. He did NOT want to go into the prison for old folks, and he said so vocally.
 
 But there was nothing he could do. He’d given essentially all his money to one of the kids; and the patio home belonged to Joan, 100%. So he really could not say “nnnooo i’m not moving into that place with you.” 
 
The Beatitudes, like every other old-folkerie that I’ve seen, is as depressing a prison as you can imagine, and for a person who starts out with an “i-don’t-wanna-be-here” mindset, it would be just hideous. As it no doubt was for L. But he was old, he was frail, he kept falling…and when he did fall, J, who’s 5′2″ in high-heels, couldn’t get his 6′4″ frame off the ground. Compounding the risk, they had a lunatic neighbor in the patio home complex, who kept trying to run L down in her car! The HOA, even though its president was the vice-mayor of Phoenix, could do nothing to keep this nut case under control.
Sooo…it made a kind of dismal sense for them to move into the old-folkerie, which has a whole staff of people on duty 24/7 to help in case of mishap. 
 
Common sense, however, did little or nothing to make the move palatable for poor L. 
 
I think they’re having a viewing down at the church just now. If I were a decent human being, I’d show up down there, huh? {sigh} Well. “Decent” is surely not my middle name. My parents didn’t believe in elaborate death celebrations — my father was a committed atheist who deeply loathed and despised all organized religion. So here I sit…
 
***
 
{sigh} How to cope with decrepitude????
 
***
 
For what it costs to move into that place, you could afford to hire one HELL of a lot of nursing and household care. J told me getting in there  took all of the proceeds from the sale of their house — which was comparable to mine. Here in the ’Hood, we have Marge, a neighbor whose son (only child) and husband predeceased her. She lives in a nice sort of North-Centrally ranch house (generous in square footage, not vast) a block or two south of Gangbanger’s Way, a major thoroughfare that traverses the Valley from the far west side to the SR 51 freeway. 
 
So instead of selling and moving into an old-folkery, Marge borrowed against ALL the equity in the house (which of course keeps growing as property values run amok…) and is using it to hire folks to take care of her in her home. 
 
I’m thinking that’s a highly viable idea. Our neighborhood isn’t very safe, though…so one would have to come up with a blandishment.
Another couple of pals, a gay couple of considerable class and professional standing (let’s call them J2 and L2), sold their home in tony North Central and bought a very nice two-bedroom apartment in one of the newer Central Avenue mid-town high-rises. The view is to die for…and that place is a two-bedroom apartment, as opposed to the J & L’s “two bedroom” cell at the old-folkerie — which is about the size of a motel room. 
 
Seriously: J & L’s so-called “two-bedroom” apartment at the Beatitudes is smaller than the one-bedroom garden apartment I rented in graduate school. It’s not a lot bigger than the studio apartment I rented with the salary from my first, vastly underpaid job. Meanwhile, J2 & L2 have two spacious bedrooms, a kitchen that’s bigger than mine(!!), a view of the entire East and North Valley, parking space in a real garage (not a tin-roofed lean-to)… And the light-rail runs right past the front of their building. They could walk to AJ’s, but why walk when you can hop a train? And Central Avenue is lined with restaurants of every variety.
 
Seems to me that if you were based in an upscale apartment building like that, you could pretty much duplicate the blandishments of the Beatitudes (possibly with the exception of the available 24/7 nursing care) without handing over your kid’s patrimony. Seriously: buy an apartment, and you retain equity in the dwelling; move into the Beatitudes, and you fork over all the equity that you extract from the sale of your home. Permanently. If you croak over while you’re living in a fancy condo, your heirs get your equity; if you croak over at the Beatitudes, they get nothing. 
 
Why on earth do you suppose this doesn’t seem obvious to people?
 
Consider my father, who moved into one of the first such “life-care communities” in the Valley. In 1977, he sold his house in Sun City for about four times what they’d paid for it in 1962, and it took ALL of the proceeds and then some to buy him — and only him, my mother having recently died — into a prison for old-folks. He still had to pay a hefty monthly fee. 
 
Before he stumbled upon the life-care scheme, he figured he would be able to leave me about $100,000 (about $521,000 in today’s dollars) plus the value of the SC house. After he sold the house, moved to the old-folkerie (forking over most of his liquid assets), and married the horrid woman who glommed onto him there, he lived in profound unhappiness for another eight or ten years. He would (IMHO) have been much better off to have stayed in his paid-off house in Sun City and used as much of his assets as needed to support himself comfortably. Or else…if the house was too depressing for him after the horror show he endured there, to have moved into one of the very nice patio homes out in Sun City, which he could have purchased for less than the net on sale of the house.
 
The point being, I s’ppose, that if you reach your dotage with enough capital to move into one of those dreadful places, you have enough to take care of yourself in your own home for as long as you’re likely to live. Take my father’s pension plus a modest return on his savings plus his Social Security, add ’em up, and you get more than enough to live on in his pleasant little paid-for house in Sun City.
A-n-n-d, with my mother gone, — relieving him of the cost of feeding her, clothing her, and underwriting her six-pack-a-day smoking habit — his retirement and savings income would have been more than enough to pay people like Marge’s helpers, who do the housework and the yardwork, drive her around, schlep groceries, and sometimes even walk the dog.
A high-rise apartment like J2 and L2’s, smack on tony North Central Avenue — where the lightrail glides by the front door several times an hour and within walking distance of a major regional hospital, of AJ’s magnificent grocery store, of a Sprouts, and of more restaurants than you can count — would cost just about the same as you would clear from buying one of our houses in the North Central district. If I sold my house today, tomorrow I could move in next door to J2 and L2, without having to come up with more cash than I would net on this place.
And…if I didn’t like it, whether now or any time in the future, I could sell such an apartment and move back to ground level, probably with cash in my pocket. At the Beatitudes, you have a short trial period in which to decide whether you want to spend the rest of your life there. Miss the deadline, and you lose all the money you gave them…which amounts to all the cash you would net on a four-bedroom house in a good neighborhood.
In other words, if you’re going to use up your assets to support yourself in your dotage, it looks very much like you could fund the old-age care you need by borrowing against a paid-up house to hire help, or (with luck) by using your savings. It would require you to keep a firm grip on your marbles, or else to have a trustworthy relative or agent to oversee expenses and spending. But the truth is, despite our presumptuous fear of Alzheimering out, most Americans do retain their marbles through their old age. Today about 10% of elderly Americans develop Alzheimer’s, down from 13% in 2011.  It gets less and less likely that you’ll become too air-headed to live on your own…

Life in the ‘Hood: Stay or Flee?

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Summer storms blowing in, along with a few gangsters and fruitcakes…

Didn’t notice this exchange on the neighborhood Facebook page yesterday evening:

***

Police website…
7:25 p.m.
August 13
Report of Shots Fired
North Feeder Street NW and West Feeder Street EW
[Map with dramatic visuals…
[This is one block from my house]
GV(Neighbor): I am at 18th and Feeder E/W, didn’t hear anything. Hope everyone is safe!
I can hear a helicopter right now , its circling right down south from my house
Funny: At Side Street and Funny Farm Drive, also heard nothing. Helicopters are hardly noticed, they’re so ubiquitous. Any news on what this shenanigan entailed?
***

….a-n-n-n-d…nary another word.

Could’ve been firecrackers, I reckon. We have a lot of nitwits around here who like to set off fireworks, which, annoyingly enough, are legal to sell anywhere in the county. I would’ve been swimming at that hour. Still would have been way too hot for an evening doggy-walk. As a practical matter, I don’t recall if we went out last night at all. But if we did, it wouldn’t have been until 9 or 10 p.m. By then it was raining, though.

***

Now as evening ambles in, we have a little melodramatic wind (not enough to do much damage, that I can see) and a sky full of dark gray and dimly white clouds that started out as thunderheads but now are pretty well shredded and turned into high overcast. If it rains tonight, my bet is that it won’t be much.

What a place! Why do I stay here?

Probably because there’s really no place much better, at least not that I can afford. In Paradise Valley, entire neighborhoods are fenced and gated off, with private security guards roaming the streets 24/7. Ain’t that reassuring for the rich and the tasteless?

Fountain Hills is probably quieter, but it’s as far east as you can get in the Valley, halfway to freakin’ Payson. Personally, I don’t find it inviting. Most of the houses are cheaply built — stick and styrofoam, tracty-looking. The place is lily-white and IMHO devoid of character. It’s a long way from shopping and even further from the folks I know.

Sun City is calm: haunted by the peace of the mortuary. It’s not entirely free of crime — some fairly eye-popping shockers have occurred out there. And those houses, too, are cheaply built tract numbers: better construction than Fountain Hills (most of the S.C. homes are built of block) but devoid of insulation. People who choose to stay there over the summer will fir out the exterior walls, lay on insulation, and then plaster over the top of it. So you get the effect of a typical stick-and-styrofoam tract house, only the structure has in effect two walls: one of cinderbock and one of styrofoam-backed plaster. To my mind, it’s a depressing place to live, made even more so by the fact that my poor mother died there after my father retired and dragged her out to the Arizona desert.

I’m fairly sure she expected to retire to Southern California — Long Beach or points south. She wanted to be in the Bay Area, but the cost of living there was well out of the question. Betcha she about fainted when my father stumbled upon Del Webb’s ghetto for old folks. 😀

Actually, I believe she liked Sun City. One time she remarked to me how much she loved the screened back patio where she could sit all morning over coffee and listen to the doves and quail hooting. It really was very, very quiet out there.

Heh. While yeah, I could do without the helicopter, siren, and lightrail serenade from Conduit of Blight Blvd and Gangbanger’s Way, I’m afraid I like the sound of children playing and teenagers carrying on.

Truth to tell, if my son were not here, I very likely would be long gone.

But..where?

Well, some friends have moved to Utah, the Provo area. But I feel no desire to live there. Another friend: gone to Portland. Brrrrrr!

Santa Fe is extremely cool (culturally, that is), but from what others have told me, its ambience isn’t a helluva lot safer than the Hood’s. Don’t know anyone there. Can’t work up a lot of enthusiasm for decamping to someplace where I’d have to build a whole new life.

Prescott is nice. I do like Prescott. But…. It snows in the winter. Gets hot enough to need air-conditioning in the summer. And the gringos have discovered it, big time: hordes of immigrants from the Valley and from California have flooded into the place. Hence: out of the frying pan…

View from the Mogollon Rim near Payson

Mr. & Mrs. Fireman sold their manse in the West Valley and moved up to Payson, where they bought a truly beautiful home on a nice expanse of forested land. They seem to like it there very much. Main problem: not enough infrastructure. They have to drive into town for shopping, and even to take the dog to a vet.

In Tucson, there’s an area called Oro Valley, spreading northward along the west flank of the Catalina Mountains. It’s very pleasant. And it has the advantage of being close to a major medical center, to a fairly arty city with a large, established university (cultural life!!!), to shopping, and to a major regional airport. I suppose if I were going to decamp to someplace where I don’t know anybody and where I’d have to build a whole new lifestyle, that would be the foremost candidate.

Ohhh well…. Long as I’m livin’ in a freestanding house on a quarter-acre of land with a pool, I reckon I might as well be swimming in that pool. And so, awayyy!

The View from the Steam Cooker

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Incredibly humid. Not all that hot at 5:40 a.m., objectively speaking, but so wet you’re dripping with sweat after you’ve walked the dog half a block.

That does nothing to put a leash on the morning Doggy Jamboree, though. Ruby wants to go to the park, which for the human entails a PITA of the first water: a mile of being yanked and pulled and jerked around, hauling the pooch away from dog fights and idiots simpering “ohhh don’t worry, they jes’ wanna plaaayyyy.”

And yes, I do know: Ruby behaves like that because she’s not adequately leash-trained. Those who’ve been around FaM for awhile will recall that I got her just as I was being wheeled away to have both boobs chopped off. Convalescing from that adventure a) took awhile and b) did not leave me much in the mood for wrestling with a dog. Consequently, she has grown up sweet, charming, cute, adorable, and utterly devoid of leash manners. And now that I’m old, I feel no more inclined to wrestle with leash-training than I did when I was enjoying invalidism.

Decide instead to roam north and west, staying in the low-rent section of the ‘Hood. And alas, “low-rent” is how it’s beginning to look: yard after yard smothered in weeds, some of the crops knee-high. The house owned (still owned?) by the jerk who used to try to pick fist-fights with the mentally challenged guy across the street apparently had an attic fire. Unclear whether anyone is living there, but nothing has been done to repair the holes in the charred roof and attic walls.

Huge thunderheads have built up in the northwest: they look like they’re over Yarnell or maybe over Wickenberg. That’s weird: usually those kinds of storms come in from the southeast, blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Wunderground reports major flooding in Las Vegas, which is sorta vaguely in the Yarnellish direction…but it seems unlikely that we could see clouds over Vegas from this far away. Just now, sez Wunderground, it’s 94 here with a predicted high of 104; 38% chance of rain.

Our neighbor’s pipe-installing dudes are lumbering back and forth out there in their truck, apparently lost. Must be a new driver or crew…they were down the street the other day heaving around in the heat. Nothing like a little plumbing crisis under a 105-degree sun, eh?

Stagger home. Tumble into pond. Dog has a frenzy.

Ruby hates, hates, HATES it when the Human gets into the pool. She barks and screams and yells and charges back and forth outside the gate, totally frantic. Guess having fallen in the drink a couple of times herself, she thinks I need to be rescued. ASAP. So…if I’m in a hurry and don’t feel like cornering the dog and locking her up, that kinda puts the eefus on the morning dip.

***

And now the dog is fed, the human is fed, the dishes are washed, the garbage is hauled out, the random trash is picked up out of the alley, the email is read and answered, the sheets are dried and folded, another load of laundry is in the washer, the yard dude is summoned to clean up the weeds and trim the tree limb off the neighbor’s roof, and the human…is going back to bed.

Weather, Arizona-style

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Yes, Virginia: there IS a weatherman in Arizona.

Actually, quite a few of them. Arizona has three (at least) climate zones: low (hot hot hot!) desert, plateau (temperate in summer, cool enough for maybe some light snow in the winter), and mountain (pleasant in the summer and colder than a by-god in the winter, festooned by the occasional blizzard). Lovely Phoenix is, as you no doubt have guessed by now, in the accursed low desert, Death Valley-like in summertime.

And yea verily, it has been hotter than the Hubs here, reaching figures above 112 off and on. That’s for June and July.

Come August, come the so-called “monsoon,” a rainy season caused by a shift in prevailing winds that blows humid, hot air up from the Gulf of Mexico and gives birth to towering thunderheads and violent local rainstorms. Just now, for example, it’s 8 p.m. Outdoor temp is 98°; humidity a mere 15%. Rain not predicted, at least not for this evening, despite thunderheads all around the Valley’s perimeter.

I’ve been letting the AC keep it at around 78 inside the house. Apparently that’s a bit too balmy: just got a “balmy” bill from the power company: $345.71.

Lovely.

I’ll probably have to draw that down from Fidelity, since the checking account is already running low, what with the exorbitant gasoline bills. Pisseth me offeth. It’s 81 in the master bedroom. A breezy 79 in the middle (guest) bedroom, which is directly under the air conditioning unit and so gets air fresh out of the fridge.

If I had any sense, I’d decamp to the bed in there. But not only do I not have any sense, but the dog and I do not fit well on a single twin bed. So far I haven’t accidentally kicked her off in my sleep, but that’s an imminent hazard.

Turn the ceiling fan to “shamal,” and you get a  nice little breeze in here…or, some might say, a cyclone. Not very restful, though it does create the illusion of a slightly cooler temperature.

Hm. Speaking of shamals, in Dhahran, just up the road from where we used to live on the /s/ lovely Persian Gulf, it’s 6 a.m. just now: 94 degrees out of doors; 33% humidity.  Ah, what a garden spot! Makes Arizona look like a temperate paradise.

Which it is, most of the time. Dhahran is not, most of the time.