Coffee heat rising

Roar…Roar…Roaaaarrrr….

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Argha! Another cop helicopter, whirling around over the neighborhood to the north of us. At least, for a change, this one is not hovering right over the house. /eyeroll/

The ‘Hood isn’t exactly Crime Central, but neither is it a place of sweetness and tranquility. We reside on the southern edge of a suburb called Sunnyslope, which is Crime Central, swarming with drug dealers, delinquents, burglars…and even the occasional murderer.

This fine circumstance brings us cops. And cops. And more cops. Many of them riding in noisy, buzzy helicopters. Dare to go to bed, dare to go to sleep, and you’ll bring on the serenade: BRRRRooooaaarrrrrrrr…

Reassuring in that it lets you know the policia are on the job. Un-reassuring in that it lets you know they’re chasing some sh!thead around your neighborhood.

Get up. Walk through the house. Check that all the doors are locked. Turn on the outside porch lights, the better for the cops to chase their prey.

These regularly recurring events lead me to regularly reconsider whether I want to stay here.

Do I want to move back out to Sun City?

Ugh, no!

Okayyy…. Do I want to move down into the neighborhood where M’hijito lives? 

Hm. Those houses are 20+ years older than these, poorly insulated, expensive to run. Right in the middle of everything, which is cool in some ways — you can walk to the spectacular AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store from his house. But at what cost?

> Noise
> More Noise
> Still More Noise
> Traffic
> Traffic
> Still More Traffic
> Astronomical utility bills
> Higher property taxes
> Insane water bills
> Bums sleeping in your yard…

Naaaahhhh…. Ain’t goin’ there!

The Valley does offer other suburbs and other neighborhoods that are a little less…active, shall we say. Fountain Hills, for example. Moon Valley. Sun City: inactive to the point of stasis. But is that really worth spending thousands of dollars on selling the shack, buying another one somewhere else, and moving?

I think not. 

Soggy Doggy Day

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{glub!} Rain, rain, and more rain, pouring down from a lovely pearlescent gray sky. Dawg and Human are stuck in the house. From faraway Luke Air Force Base, we’re serenaded by the constant roar of fighter jets, practicing their take-offs and landings. Birds outside the back door squabble. The pool system kicks on: seems to be working OK.

Way, waaayyy too wet to take Her Dogship for her morning doggy-walk. Too wet for the Human to poke her own schnozz out the front door. Or the back door. Or the side door.

We’re trapped!

Carless in Gaza as we are here, now that M’Hijito has kiped my car, we have no way of even getting to the grocery store.

Well. That’s wrong: we could impose on the Uber driver who lives across the street. Wouldn’t he be pleased?

Or we could walk through the rain and the puddles, getting home good & wet and good & cold. Naaaaahhhh…

We could pester M’Hijito to take us to the store, since this predicament is his doing. That would interrupt the work he does for his employer….hmmmm…. Why do I suspect it might be better to swim on over to the grocery store all by my little self?

But weirdly: WHAT a beautiful day. 

Actually, when you live in Arizona, you think clouds are so rare and so exotic that whenever they lurk overhead, you fall into a trance of awe. 😀  It is, one must admit, a strange kinda place for human habitation. Made stranger by the presence of humans… 😉

Yuch! Another Tuesday

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HORRORS. Today is Tuesday. 

That means this evening is soaked up and f**ked up by the endlessly annoying weekly physical therapy session.

hup hup jump jump roll roll hup hup groan moan hate hate HATE. Boyoboy, do I hate the physical therapy sideshows. 

Not that they hurt. They don’t, especially. But that they are…

  • boring
  • pointless
  • useless (they do nothing for the pain: all that works there is time)
  • endlessly reminiscent of the annoying PE classes that used to aggravate me no end in junior high and high school
  • time suck for my son, who ends up sitting around there for two hours waiting for them to release me
  • and a fukkin waste of time

What is working on the injured limb is
a) the passage of time; and
b) careful, steady, NORMAL use of the joint in walking, sitting, climbing, and whatnot.

For those two obvious, very stupid reasons, the time waste feels even MORE annoying than it normally would

Hmmmm… Almost 6:20. No sign of my excellent son. Maybe I have the wrong day?

One can only hope.

Let us traipse to the back room and look at the old-fashioned paper wall calendar…

****

Hmmm…uh huh! I have that we were supposed to be there at 5:30.

It’s 5:23 now: so saith the MacBook. Maybe it was that Mijito was to pick me up at 5;30. That would get us to Nuisance Central a little before 6:00 p.m.

Call.
Get the Kid.
And yeah: that speculation was…sorta in the ball park.

The enormous value of a healthy offspring is that the critter retains its marbles as you slide deeper and deeper into senility!

😀

Summer Storm-time

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1:40 p.m.
November 18, 2025…still!

Fine freshet of an Arizona afternoon storm is y-rollin’ in. kerBOOM!  Thunder growls angrily in from the west. The sky has turned ash gray as clouds gallop ahead of the wind. Ruby the Corgi loafs on the bed, gazing out the window…apparently unfazed.

What un-fine timing. Tonight M’ijito is dragging me to the brain-banging booooring physical therapy studio, there to blow away another two hours going hup-hup-hup-hup-hup-hup-hup-hup-…..to amazingly little avail.

Ugh. If I’ve got to waste my time, I’d rather waste it loafing with Ruby.

Ohhhhh, well. It gets one out of the house. I guess. And presumably onto the rain-soaked streets…

Meanwhile, the pain is sloooooowwwleeee easing off, about an atom’s width at a time. Eventually it will go away. Then with any luck the ludicrous physical therapy antics will also go away.

The other evening I got SO frustrated with the mindless, pointless hup-hup-hupping that I sneaked out of the gym and ran off down the street. M’jito had gone off someplace (no doubt even more bored than his muther was), so I contrived to slip out and trot away without getting caught.

You can be sure he won’t let that happen again, eh?

Already it’s seemed a strangely long day. It’s only about a quarter to two. yet if feels like we ought to be rounding on 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. Why? Probably the thick cloud cover: the sky is a uniform dark gray, so you can’t estimate the time (not on a bet) by studying the height and angle of the sun.  And lookee there! It’s raining again!

How do I not want to drive through the rain, in the dark, for the privilege of a pointless hup-hup-hup session?  ARRRGH!  Let me count the pointless ways!

How DO they know????

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Heeeee!!! Seriously: how do people know…for example, when you’re so tired all you want to do is go back to bed, along about 10 in the morning?

That’s when they break out a jackhammer and start RRRATTTA-TATTA-TATTA on the foundation of their house.

No kidding! That’s what the guy catty-corner across the road is up to: jackhammering up the foundation. 

What…

A…

Racket!

This stunt, he pulls just as I’m sitting here thinking I feel AWFUL and what I wanna do is climb back in the sack and go back to sleep. 

Jerk! 

Well, I can’t complain. The morning’s half over — coming on to 9:30 a.m. — so one can’t bellyache that he’s rousting us out of the sack early.

Raining this a.m.: so can’t take the dawg for a walk. I’m stuck here listening to the jerk’s serenade.

These houses all have concrete foundations. They’re laid over clay soil, meaning that when water seeps under there, it can make the soil expand and contract, merrily cracking the flooring.

Truth is, my own house has a number of cracked floors. For reasons I cannot fathom, though, these cracks fail to split the tilework laid on top of the concrete. So even though I know where the cracks are, there’s only one place where a crack running through a couple of tiles is visible. Just two tiles there are affected…so in theory, they could be replaced.

Good luck getting the new installation to match the surrounding mortar… 

 

 

Roar! Roar! ROOOARRR!

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And HOW glad am I that I don’t live in Sun City anymore?

GAWD, what a racket emanating from that place this afternoon! And it’s a good 20 miles from here…

We’re talkin’ jet engine noise. Sun City is just down the road from Luke Air Force Base, where what must be a VAST fleet of fighter jets resides. And yeah: damn near every day: ROAR ROAR ROAR!

My mother, who dearly loved her home in Sun City and was one of the rightest-wing of all possible right-wing patriots, used to coo on and on about how glorious the roar from the air base was. It’s the sound of FWEEDOM! she would emote.

Yeah. If the sound of World War III bearing down on you is the sound of fweedom, that must be it, all right.

Ugh. What an awful place!

At any rate. just now even our North Central Phoenix ‘hood is too damn close to Luke.

WHAT!

A!

RACKET!

And yeah, if I could move even further from it than we are here, I sure would.

Oh, well…  Round and round the ‘Hood with the little dog this noon. Beautiful day. And the place seems to grow handsomer with each passing month and year, too. I think it’s because of the location, mostly. And the quality of the aging tract houses, which were fairly upscale when they were built and which remain so.

SDXB and I really fell into it when my Realtor brought us to this place. Both of us bought houses here. And neither of us lost $$$ in the transition.

He has since moved to Sun City. Having lived there when my parents were there, you couldn’t give me the place. But I guess he likes it.

You do need to enjoy the Sound of Freedom to fully appreciate the joint, though. Ugh!