Coffee heat rising

Soggy Doggy July 4!

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Wow! Is it ever hot and wet out there!

The Hound and the Human just got back from cirucmnavigating the park. 😀  All sorts of July 4 shenanigans are going on over there. WHAT a hoot!

Hot and overcast: Thermometer reads in the 90s…under the shade of the back porch! Patchy gray clouds loom overhead. To the east: high, streaky white clouds look like they were applied with a paintbrush.

The park: more fun than life!  You never so SO MANY adorable little kids running around, shooting back and forth around their handsome young parents. A small band is banging out clichéd music. Dogs are frolicking. Cops are loafing.

Too, too good.

Meanwhile, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such icky weather here. Normally, when we say “it’s a dry heat,” we ain’t kidding. Today, though: it looks like Saudi Arabia out there: hot and dripping wet! The sky: coated with gray overcast. The air: like a steam bath. And it’s supposed to hit 116 here this afternoon.

Well…guess I can be glad I’m not still in Saudi Arabia, where this kind of weather was par for the course during any given summer day. Rasty Nasty’s weather report for today predicts 57% humidity; no rain; temps in the low 100s.

Garden spot!

My father worked down on the docks of the oil camp where we lived. He was a harbor pilot: steering tankers and freighters in and out of their parking spots. Surely a job exceeding “horrible.”

At any rate, he was on track to accruing enough capital to retire and move us all back to the States when my mother came down with amoebic dysentery. That did in his beautifully laid plans. He had to send her and me back to San Francisco, where she was locked up in a hospital for weeks. The doctors (probably at her behest…) told him she was NOT to go back to Arabia. He took a job in the Bay Area, shipping out of the East Bay. And so we escaped that horrible place.

Thank God!

ARF!

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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Yow!!  Is it ever HOT out there!!!

Dawdled half the day away and so didn’t get out for the usual morning walk. Stupidly, I figured I’d go on out along about 3:00 p.m.

Bad idea. Extraordinarily bad idea.

As we scribble, it’s a mere 103 degrees out there, in full sun. 😀 Might’ crisp, eh???

Oh, well. Undeterrable, I take it into my feeble head to stroll past my old house and SDXB’s old house…not far from the Funny Farm, really: just a block to the north. My first house here was about two blocks to the west, on the same street as SDXB’s place.

Ye GAWDS!!!!!  

It must be a little damp out there, because it feels like the damn place has turned into an electric oven. Actually, Wunderground tells us the humidity is only 4%. So…dunno why it feels so unholy hot out there, except maybe because it’s late in the afternoon.

Ohhhhh well… Made it back to the Funny Farm without passing out, which just now seems like a bit of an accomplishment. We won’t pull THAT stunt again!!

***  😀 ***

Seriously, I do need to get off my duff and get that exercise walk in: EVERY DAY. Problem has been: various visitors and pests have been descending on me first thing in the morning, so I’ve had to sit around until they’re gone….and by then, a whole lot of other chores and tasks are waiting to get done. And by then, too, it’s already to goddamn hot to be frolicking up and down the sidewalks.

So:

After this, the Dawg and the Human shoot out that door no later than 7 a.m.  

That will get us back here by 8:00 — earlier, if we’re lucky. And though it’ll be getting hot by then, it won’t be paw-singeing or human-fainting. Yet.

Gosh, I miss SDXB.

Not so much as I’m willing to follow him to Sun City… Been there: ain’t goin’ there again. But I do wish he hadn’t moved away. He was a good neighbor and a pleasant friend.

He likes Sun City, though. Dwelling in a mausoleum never much appealed to me (hated the place when my parents lived there). But he and New Girlfriend seem to enjoy it and the unholy roar from the Luke Air Force Base fighter jets….loveleeee.

My mother loved it, too. She used to sit on her back porch every morning sipping her coffee over the morning paper and, when I was around, socializing with me. Incredibly, she actually claimed to LIKE that ungodly airplane racket.”Ohhh! It’s the sound of fweedom!” she would simper.

“Noooo, muther! That’s the sound of World War III, comin’ your way.” /eyeroll/

That was something I never could understand! The noise was just SO unpleasant…and forgodsake, first thing in the morning! 

Mysterious, people are….

So, anyway: After this, Ruby and I are out of the sack at dawn and on the road! That should get us back here before the worst of the heat comes up. Still will be hot: at this time of year we’re looking at temps in excess of 105 degrees. But nigh unto dawn, it should be tolerable.

There’s Hope! (?) !

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Apparently Amazon is about to hugely expand its grocery delivery service. If that’s so — speaking of “huge” –it would solve a vast problem for me.

My son has purloined my car, believing that old bats shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Never mind that I’ve never been in a serious accident. Never mind that I haven’t even been in a fender-bender in years. Ohhhhhh no!  Old bats mustn’t drive!

Well… The truth is the main reason I do drive around here is to pick up groceries and drugstore items. This New! Improved! delivery service from Amazon (whose service already is pretty amazing…) will virtually eliminate any need for me to drive around at all, except to get to a doctor or a dentist.

A-a-n-nd-d….right across the street we have an Uber driver. He or one of his colleagues can schlep me to appointments. Meanwhile, if Amazon delivers, I’ll have almost no need to drive anywhere at all.

Jeez.

It’s like going back in time. 

When I was a kid, we didn’t own a car. Didn’t need one. Taxis and public transit took us everywhere we needed to go.

If that holds forth again any time in the near future, it’ll save a huge amount of money…and the PITAs of car fueling and maintenance, and repair will GO AWAY!

Can you imagine?

One of Those Days, Continued

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Magically, the toilet has started working properly. Yep: outta the blue. This was shortly after I’d called WonderAccountant to get the number of the excellent plumber we share.

The telephone started working, too. Why?????

So I had to phone her back and call off THAT excursion. She must think I’m even crazier than I am.

Tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts and not a DAYUM thing I can do about it. Too early to reach the dentist on the phone; plus it wouldn’t matter anyway because I can’t get to his office without a car.

There’s a dentist down the road from the Funny Farm, but I don’t have their phone number…so that is going to entail walking down there in 100-degree heat and soggy humidity. And…very probably finding them Not Open.

W.A. sounded a bit harassed this morning. Probably (as usual) working too hard. Having her nutty neighbor pester her over the phone surely cannot help her own sense of harassment… {sigh}

I fear it may be getting time for me to move into one of those horrid old-folks’ institutions. You know: where you live in a dormitory and you have staff baby-sitting you and execrable food served up in a dining hall.

Ugh. Any day I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim. But…what are you gonna do?

Doggy Day from Hell

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Migawd!  I had SUCH a sh!tf!t of frustration this morning that now Ruby the Corgi will not come out from underneath the toilet, where she’s hiding.

That’s after I stalked out of the house and hiked all the way around the park and back, by way of unwinding. She’s been under there nigh unto an hour, and still refuses to come out.

Helle’s Belles!

Well, I don’t know how to calm her down. Offered her all sorts of prime doggy treats: she’s having none o’ that.

Horrible morning.

Actually, meteorologically it’s quite pretty. It’s just that…well…what we have here is One of Those Days: when everything you touch, look at, or think about goes wrong.

Tooth aches. That’ll be a fine bout of dental surgery, no doubt.

Peripheral neuropathy is making the hands and the lips go BZZZZZZZZZ!!

Dog remains terrorized.

Toilet sounds like it’s leaking. Again. That’ll be another spectacular plumber’s bill.

Computer screen decides to “zoom in,” expanding the size of everything in view by about 120%.  “Zoom out” command does…exactly nothing.

Without a car, I’ll have to carry this damn computer to the repair shop: through the heat and humidity.

Yep. Just a few minutes after 7:00 a.m., and we’re already looking at ONE OF THOSE DAYS. 

***

Yea, verily: come 7:40 a.m., one of those days is what we’ve got.

Somehow, the computer fixed itself. How, I do not know.

Toilet: still leaking. Why: unknown.

Let’s try flushing it again to see if, by some miracle, that’ll stop it.

Nope.

Dork with the stuff inside the tank.

Nope.

So…that’ll be another fine plumber’s bill. Hot dayum!

Tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts tooth hurts: upper left molar. Too early to call the dentist. Plus: how am I gonna get over there without a car?

Helle’s Belles!  This is gonna be ONE OF THOSE DAYS.

Ohhhh well… At least the Dawg relented, climbed out from under the terlet, and is now snoozing atop the bed.

Yep.
This.
Is.
Gonna.
Be.
ONE OF THOSE DAYS. 

notes

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In retrospect, I resent people — esp my parents and teachers — for maneuvering me into positions that I wouldn’t have selected if I’d understood them better and that now I can’t get out of. Positions that affected my entire adult life.

If I had understood that as a National Honor Society student I could almost surely have landed a scholarship or fellowship to Berkeley or Stanford, you can be sure I wouldn’t have skipped my senior year in HS to go straight to the dowdy University of Arizona…so that my father could retire a year early. I would surely have gone to the University of California at Berkeley or, if my parents insisted on staying in So Cal, to UCLA.

Even if I’d stayed in secondary school one more year, he could have retired. He could have dragged me to Arizona and enrolled me in an AZ high school…allowing himself to quit his job that year early. To get me and them into Sun City (where young people were officially unwelcome), all they had to do was say I was living on a college campus, not with them!

Now, the truth is, he could hardly have been expected to understand the mediocrity of a degree from the UofA: to him a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. My mother probably understood that I would have been about 100% better served with a bachelor’s from UC…but she did have enough sense to keep her mouth shut around him.

What other things would I have done differently if I’d had a fukkin’ clue??

  • Majored in a subject that would get me  decently paying job, not a receptionist’s position + a high-earning husband
    • Such as????
      • Business
      • Accountancy
      • Justice Studies
      • Politics? Government?
  • Gone to UC Berkeley or even Stanford
  • Refrained from marrying the first decent man that came along
  • Continued directly from the B.A. to graduate school…but didn’t I actually do that?????
  • Gone straight into a Ph.D. program. Even though my undergrad degrees didn’t qualify me for graduate programs in anything other than English or French, a Ph.D. in either of those would have landed an academic job.

It feels incredibly stupid to me today.

But I wasn’t stupid. I was ignorant. I didn’t fully understand how the U.S. educational system worked. I didn’t understand how one university differed from another, and why. I didn’t understand why I needed to major in a salable subject, not in Mickey-Mouse woo-woo like English and French.