Coffee heat rising

Hotter than the HUBS!!!

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…of Hades, of your race-car wheels, of your stove burner! HOLEE maquerel, is it hot out back. Fox 10 News sez it’s 110; Wunderground claims a mere 107 degrees.

You understand: it’s 8:15 at night and DARK out there.

Yeah: 110 degrees by the dark of night…

Wrung the little dog out as fast as she would go…which means she’s likely to roust the human in the middle of the night… 😀  Oh well… At the moment, she’s loafing atop the bed again, as is her pet critter, the funny-looking human. The AC is pounding away….let’s hope it holds up through the night….and that we don’t have to call a hapless repairman tomorrow. Or anytime during this present heat wave.

Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have! /eyeroll/

Hope M’hijito is making out all right. His house was built in the 1950s, back before air-conditioning worked especially well here in lovely uptown Phoenix. The place does have a real air-conditioner these days —  not an old-fashioned and clunky evaporative cooler. The older places, though, were not built for modern ductwork…so it remains to be seen whether his place will be habitable tonight.

This Human, on the other hand, was not built to be awake half the night… And so, awwwayyyy… Off to bed!

And Now…WTF????

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Yesterday was a true, certifiable Day from Hell. Seriously…by bed-time, I knew that if I weren’t trapped here by owning the damn house outright and by the piddling retirement income and by the craving to live vaguely near my son, I would be SOOOO OUTTA PHOENIX!

But now…we have this morning. WTF?????

  • The weather is clear and more or less temperate. On the warm side, but highly tolerable.
  • The peripheral neuropathy: present, but tolerable in intensity.
  • The dawg: prancing along happily.
  • The hole-in-the-ground-into-which-to-pour-money: functioning normally this morning.
  • The toilet: now working normally.
  • The house: spotlessly clean after Wonder-Cleaning-Lady’s ministrations.
  • The laptop computer: apparently working normally again.
  • Outside temperature in the shade of the back porch at 7:30 a.m.: only 100 degrees.

Weird. 

The hound and the human got out the door early enough to circumnavigate the park without melting in the heat.

The babysitters M’hijito hired to ride herd on the Crazy Old Bat have not surfaced (thank Gawd!), or else they came by here while we were doggy-walking and simply ignored the note I left on the door for them, asking them to wait a few minutes until I could get back to the house. Good riddance, say I!

So…I dunno why the Manifestations from Hell have settled down. And I ain’t askin’!  Just hope they STAY settled down for awhile!

WHY do people live here???

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7:38 p.m.  The sun has gone down. And it’s 105 degrees under the ventilated shade structure on the back porch.

Central Arizona. Maricopa County. What a HELLISH place to live! Why do people settle here, anyway?

I got here because my parents dragged me here, when my father attempted to retire. (Failed, thanks to a major recession: he had to go back to work for another couple of years, much to his despair.)

Yeah. They thought Sun City was about the most brilliant village the human mind had ever conceived. Fine ticky-tacky houses. Gravel yards — no grass to water! Kids prohibited: no brats screaming outside your window when you’re trying to take a nap. Blacks prohibited: no negroid types pushing down your property values.

Yech!!!!!

As soon as they got moved and settled into their new brick hovel, they sent me down to Tucson and enrolled me in the University of Arizona. Because I was a National Honor Society scholar, they accomplished this by pulling me out of high school a year early: I never even set foot in a senior-year classroom.

Sun City is grim enough. Central Arizona forms the cake beneath that frosting: hot, intellectually backward, graced with bigotry….what a place! The UofA is a more or less adequate intellectual institution…though nothing like the school where I was set to go: U.C. Berkeley.

So…my arrival in Arizona was an encomium to disappointment.

And I do have to wonder, sometimes: if you don’t have a well-paying job here, WHY would you come here, and why would you stay here? Given that you have any choice in the matter…which I did not.

Why do I stay here? Well…I’m pretty well glued in. Everyone I know these days lives here. My son lives here. My jobs have been here. My paid-off house is here. My freelance business is now based here. Reckon I’m set here.

But it wouldn’t have been my choice….

How Things Work Out

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Stumbling around through the heat this afternoon — without a car now, I have to walk to every local destination — I happened to think back on my parents, and on how much they loathed and detested my college boyfriend.

This guy was more than a boyfriend. We seriously intended to marry. And our relationship comprised all the features of married life, with the exception of the spoken vow, “…I thee wed.”

Why they hated Paul…well…that’s something that’s always flummoxed me to some degree.

I believe it was his ethnicity: he was Eastern European. And as far as my parents were concerned, anyone who wasn’t Us wasn’t quite human. The prospect of my marrying him and supporting him through a career (he became an academic administrator at the University of California, a highly successful line of work) and bearing his quasi-Asian children…well…that was more than they could bear.

They regarded our relationship with horror, and they made that horror as clear as they could.

Our love affair was going hot and heavy when I made the decision to break it off. Paul was shattered. I felt utterly hideous at having faced him down and told him, as he wept, to go away, that we were finished. But…that was what I had to do.

§ § §

I was my parents’ only child. And the knowledge that if I continued with Paul, I would never see my parents again…well…that was more than I could cope with.

It might have been a different matter if they hadn’t done everything a human being could do to love their child, to support her, to guide her to academic and economic success. But it wasn’t a different matter. And abandoning them — which is what I would have been doing — was simply too ugly a prospect to contemplate.

So…instead of saying good-bye to my parents, I said good-bye to Paul.

And…away I went, into the Southern Arizona dust.

Eventually I came north, got a job with a Phoenix law firm, and married a very promising young lawyer. That match lasted a couple of decades and produced an excellent son. Then I wandered off into the sunset again.

Heh! I do rather more wandering than I should, evidently….

But again, things have worked out. I’m dwelling safely and in reasonable comfort. Own my home outright. Have had an entertaining and productive career. Published several books. Nothing to complain about there.

I guess. But…

Sometimes I wonder…

?

Disaster of the Day…

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Well: make that mini-disaster of the day. And now that my excellent son has addressed matters, it’s the non-disaster of the day.

The Old Bat turned the garden hose on in the swimming pool, by way of bringing the water level up to normal. Then she wandered off and forgot about it.

Right.

When I remembered, the water was all the way up to the level of the deck, within about a quarter-inch of overflowing!!!

Called M’hiijto to ask his advice on how best to address that little fiasco. He announced that he was on his way!

Gosh.

Well, on his way he indeed was. When he got here, he flang around and banged around, drained off the excess water, fixed this and fixed that. So…now the pool is back to normal — or at least, so it appears.

That was close! Another ten minutes with that hose roaring away, and the pool would have overflowed. Allllll over the yard….

At this time of year — early July — the air is SO hot and dry that the excess water will evaporate off in a couple of days. Disaster mitigated! 

***

Just now, though, there ain’t gonna be much mitigating going on for awhile.

***

Added to the Pool Frolic, we also have a fine case of tinnitus. 

Every now and again, I’ll get a spate of this — squealing and ringing in the ears. But it usually goes away overnight, if not in a few hours.

But nay! Not this time! Climbing into bed, we’re going into the third night of wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…..

Ohhhh gawd!

I’ve kind of learned to ignore it. Kinda…sorta… You can’t, in reality, ignore a constant high-pitched squeal. But after awhile, you get used to it. The noise is still there, but it doesn’t stop you from sleeping.

Heh! It certainly isn’t keeping Ruby from her beauty sleep. She’s conkered out on the foot of the bed. Funny little dog. What an adorable companion!

 

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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Hot, humid, NASTY day. Back-porch thermometer says it’s only 98 degrees out there. (This: at sunrise!)  Add another 10 to that, and you get a feel for this morning’s balmy temperature.

The air outside is so wet it almost feels like Arabia….and where we lived was right on the (icky, sticky) shore of the Persian Gulf. No water dripping off the eaves, though. Out there, that was a phenomenon we used to wake up to, when the air was like this.

Too gummy outside to take the dawg for a walk. So…we’re becalmed in the house, loafing in the breeze of an electric fan set to “high.”

Once again, I’m brought around to the Classic Question of my daily living: Do I really want to stay here for the rest of my conscious life? 

Well…. 

The answer is yes, primarily — maybe only — because my son is here. If he were to move on, I probably would pull up stakes, too.

Where would I go?

Ideally, back to the San Francisco Bay Area.

But of course, I can’t afford that. {chortle!} Even back when I had a job, I couldn’t afford it.

Hmh. Think o’that: A Ph.D. and umpty-umpteen years of university teaching experience will not get you into a home in the place where you want to live! 

Jeez.

Why am I here?

Because my dear parents spotted Sun City as we were driving through the state one day. Oh my! They were so thrilled!!  Imagine: a whole, gigantic housing tract with NO KIDS.

Seriously: my father hated kids, especially when they were tearing around outside during his daily nap. Why he let his wife have me…that’s a question that escapes me. I think it was because my mother’s grandmother nagged them into spawning a child: she wanted a grandchild, and she thought my mother should absolutely positively NOT go childless.

At any rate, we’re here because Sun City banned children: a brilliant innovation, to my father’s mind. As soon as he could retire, he dragged us here. I was sent off to Tucson — to the University of Arizona — and they settled into stodgy retirement.

And the place was de facto strictly segregated. My father didn’t want any n*****s around him…no way, no how. And apparently that still holds, out there on the (un)lovely west side. One of my friends — who happens to be of the dusky persuasion — bought a house out there. He lasted about six months before he was hounded out!

Lovely Uptown Phoenix is not the only moderately desirable place to live here, though. If M’jito were to go back to the Bay Area — which I decidedly can no longer afford — I would probably move either to a suburb in the hills outside of Tucson or to a tract of standardized housing on the east side of Scottsdale. Both districts have better weather. And my guess is, the crime rate is probably lower in either place.

Sun City? Not my style! {heh!} A suburb built on Hate. 

Just groovy.