Funny about Money

Out the door before 7 this morning. Figured if Ruby and I got an early start, we could get back before the cleaning lady and the babysitter show up.

That appears to have been the case. No sign of any visiting women when we stumbled through the thick, wet, hot air to the front door. That’s something, anyway. I guess.

Hotter than the hubs out there. 

It may not be objectively so hot, but it’s wet and muggy and icky outside. Even Ruby, who normally wants nothing other than a beloved Doggy-Walk, was kinda reluctant to proceed.

Ugh. What I want today is just to be left alone.

But if I understand the new routine and the hideous new schedule correctly, THAT is not to be. My future apparently consists of a long series of babysitters. Women who come in and watch me. In my home. All day.

LOL! I’d run away to Sun City if I could. But don’t think that would succeed…m’hijto would just send the old-folks’ gendarmes after me. Then I’d find myself locked up in an old-folkerie.

My father moved to Sun City because the prospect of mausoleum-like silence appealed mightily to him. Seriously: Imagine a man who hates the sound of children laughing and playing…  That was my daddy!

Now, in his defense, I never had to work the swing shift, laboring all night and trying to sleep all day.

*****

Argha!  Babysitter showed up in the middle of the scribbles above.

😀

She IS a nice lady. I would find her particularly charming were I not a hopeless lone wolf. My problem is simply that I do NOT like people.

Growing up, I was the weird little kid: the girl who wanted to be an astronomer, never a mommy standing in the kitchen baking cookies. As you may recall from your own upbringing, “weird” kids are universally despised, and so I was treated cruelly by nine out of ten of the little darlings with whom I grew up.

And the result of that was a general dislike and distrust of other people.

Hilariously, our old-lady’s babysitter has a great deal of charm and is highly personable. That means, of course, that I’m reduced to having to behave myself. 😀  It also means I actually kinda enjoy her company.

Turns out she likes little kids. So…I’d love to bring her to the park, where Ruby the Corgi and I take our lengthy morning walk. Before office hours start, the park is full of young parents pushing their little ones around in strollers. It’s such a hoot! The li’l kids are hopelessly adorable, and the parents exude charm.

Just now, though, it’s HOT and HUMID and overall exceptionally icky out there. So we’ll have to wait until the weather calms a bit to haul her over there. 😀

Wunderground tells us it’s 103 outside now, at 16 percent humidity. I’d say it’s gotta be wetter than that: just ambling up the sidewalk, you break out in a flooding sweat.

Exploring Sun City on Zillow…ugh! Truly, I did hate living out there after my parents dragged me along when they retired, following my junior year in high school. Fortunately, I got into the University of Arizona in Tucson a year early, so I escaped Sun City within a few weeks of our arrival there. But even the relatively few weeks and months that I had to spend there: ugh, indeed!

But oh! My mother dearly loved it. 

No kidding: she thought Sun City was about the best invention ever to come along. Their little two-bedroom house was my father’s gift to her: a thank-you for the 10 unholy years she spent with him in gawdawful Saudi Arabia, and for the dozen or more remaining years that she supported him and loved him and housewifed for him, between the time they married in Southern California and the time they came back to the United States some 20 years later.

You couldn’t give me the place. When SDXB moved out to Sun City, he invited me to come along. I declined.

Nothing exactly wrong with it… Especially if you don’t mind hate and exclusiveness and whitey-whiteness and the roar of F-16’s blasting through the sky starting at 6:00 in the morning. Not my style…

So here I am in lovely, sweaty North Phoenix. Missing the boyfriend. Absent our friends. Wishing I lived somewhere else…but not knowing where that might be.

Well…yeah, I do: the San Francisco Bay Area. More specifically, Berkeley or Sausalito, where my relatives lived. But…har har!!! I couldn’t even begin to afford to live there. Besides, my son lives here…and so here is were I’m staying.