Coffee heat rising

Late October in the Desert

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Incredibly gorgeous morning! Clear, cool but not cold, not even crisp. People out pushing their baby strollers, walking their dogs. My mind wanders…

…to the horror of potential incarceration at the Beatitudes, a venerable Phoenix old-folkerie. Honestly: I’d rather be dead than locked up in an institution. Must figure out potential alternatives…

* Hire someone to come to the house and care for me? Apparently Luz (Cleaning Lady from Heaven) used to do this.

* Stay someplace overnight, but keep the house and return here during the day?

* Buy an apartment in someplace like The Terraces? (The Terraces is an old-folkerie.)

* Allow self to be forced to buy a place at the Beatitudes (an old-folkerie on the gawdawful level), but after the dust settles, go out and rent an apartment someplace else, keeping it secret?

* Buy a house in M’hijito’s neighborhood, so he feels better about being closer to me? Hire someone to help care for it?

Looks like #1 is probably the only truly viable choice. That or 1 & 5.

Right now, I don’t need #1. I have no problem caring for myself:

* Fixing meals
* Shopping for groceries
* Cooking gourmet(!) meals
* Bathing, grooming
* Tending the pool
* Riding herd on the hired help
* Caring for the dog

The big issue, really, is the purloined car: not being able to get from Point A to Point B without hiring a driver. But is that really a very big deal?

* A guy across the street drives for Uber and is usually available.
* Otherwise, Uber does its own roaring business in this neighborhood: no problem calling for a driver.
* When my son’s nose is not on the grindstone, he probably can schlep me to most routine destinations (grocery stores for example).
* But that may not be necessary: we have not one, not two, but three major grocery retailers and two drugstores within easy walking distance. And two computer stores. And a veterinarian. And a hair stylist. And a nail salon. And…hmmmm…Is anything NOT within walking distance???

My Aunt Gertrude was a very practical woman…so, my guess is that she moved from her sweet Berkeley bungalow into a fancy old-folkerie because her son forced her to move, not because she felt any urgency to do so. She could have gotten by in that house indefinitely, with hired help to come in and handle the cleaning, the shopping, and the errands/appointments. And what an asset to have handed down to her son: it’s now worth over $1.2 MILLION!

Such are the ravages of time, eh?

Truth to tell, I suspect that over the time left to me, this house’s value also will explode…right along the lines of Gertrude’s house. And how would I love to be able to pass along something over a million bucks to my son? Zowie!!

Glorioski Morning

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Truly: a genuinely beautiful day has dawned. Ruby and I loaf in the west side yard, having traipsed all over the neighborhood.

Dodged Mr. Coyote while on that junket. Fortunately, the coyotes here are more scared of the humans than the humans are scared are of them…and that is irrationally scared. So our wild doggy friend melted away into the landscaping as we strolled past.

LOL! I do carry a walking stick on these doggy-treks. Not to help with walking on the utterly flat roads here. But to serve as a shillelagh if one is ever needed.

Gorgeous day or no gorgeous day, chances are the Dawg and I will head back to the sack in fairly short order. For reasons unknown, I’m feeling unduly sleepy.

In these parts, you’re more likely to need a shillelagh to defend against a human predator than to beat back a coyote. But this morning, not even one of the two-legged critters was in evidence. So, it was a nice day for a doggy-walk.

And right now, it being Sunday morning, the ‘Hood loafs in the Silence of the Tomb. It’s very, very quiet out here, except for the annoying roar of yet another jet plane. We’re far enough from the commercial airport AND far enough from Luke Air Force Base that the planes are well overhead by the time they get this far. But…not far enough overhead to completely silence the things.

One of my mother’s oddities was that she actually LIKED the sound of fighter jets charging around overhead. “It’s the sound of freedom,” she would simper.

Nothing like another World War to bring you a spate of freedom, eh?

Ethnic Hatred

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They did hate him. Yes, indeed. WHY, I never fully understood, except that he was THEM and we were US.

My parents were born & bred to think of themselves as Yankees: specifically, as Whitey-White natural-born Americans.

This, despite the fact that my father was at least a quarter Choctaw Indian. More like half, far as I could tell. But he believed himself to be all Honkey.

Anyone who was different from them, my parents hated. With élan, we might add.

Welp, my boyfriend Paul was no American Indian. He was Eastern European, as a matter of fact. Far as I could tell, his people were mostly Bohemian.

Whatever, they apparently didn’t come up to my parents’ standard of whitey-whiteness…though to my eye, Paul was as white as or whiter than me.

Paul was the first love of my life. And oh, my: I was in love with the man.

We met in my sophomore year at the University of Arizona. Got a-goin’ and kept on goin’ until I was in the middle of senior year, when my parents finally succeeded in breaking us up.

There was a point at which, though, I realized that if I married Paul, I would never see my parents again. That’s how much they hated him. And I was very close to my parents: especially to my mother.

And “never see my mother again” was not, to tell the truth, what I wanted for my future. So, at the point where I realized that probably would be the outcome of any serious affair or marriage with Paul, I gave him the heave-ho.

He was shattered. I was deeply unhappy, too. But alas, I was not willing and ready to break up my family for a man.

So, that was that.

Every now and again, I think of Paul — as I was doing this afternoon while traipsing around the neighborhood on foot.

Would my birth family really have been permanently shattered if I’d married Paul?

Well. One never knows. But I suspect the answer is “yes.” That is how much they hated the guy. If I went with him, it would be at the cost of leaving them behind.

And that seemed…ungrateful, hm?

Would Paul and I still be married if I’d thrown over the family traces and gone off with him?” 

Very probably not. And here’s why:

One afternoon we were loafing in bed when he started to tell me what his best buddy was up to.

Buddy was a married man. Had been for at least a year or more. At the time, his wife was advanced — very advanced — in pregnancy. As Paul and I lay in bed chatting, he remarked, with sincere approval, that his buddy had picked up a chippy in a bar and was f*cking her merrily. Having a great time! Paul approved of this heartily; because, after all, the buddy’s wife “couldn’t give him any.”

Got that?

She’s so bloated in pregnancy that she can’t accommodate his dong, so it’s OK for him to pick up a barmaid and jump into the sack with her.

Right…Then…And…There: That was the end of my interest in Paul.

If he thought it was OK for his buddy to f**k a chippy while the wife was too bloated to entertain him, then Paul would figure it was OK for him to do the same. WOW!! What a guy, eh?

So, it was out the door with me, that very night.

I’m sure he wondered what got into me. Altogether too much of him, we might say…  {chortle!} WhatEVER: I threw him out of my life that week. The proposed marriage never happened. The grand life together never happened. The great careers together never happened.

Thank goodness, eh?

Slow Morning in Citrus Central

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Loafing my way through the morning… 😀  The miniature killer watchdog has dragged me around the park and through the neighborhood. We have chowed down. And now we loaf.

One of the nicest things about loafing, here at the Funny Farm, IS the Funny Farm. It’s such a pleasant place to sit around doing as little as possible.

Just now the automated watering system is drenching the decorative plants and the trees. The automated pool system is running the swimming pool’s sparkling water through a set of filters. The Human is considering whether to get off its duff and walk over to the Sprouts, or whether ’tis better to sit around munching chocolate chips and guzzling coffee. The Dawg is busy guarding the backyard.

To my mind, the biggest issue or problem with staying in your freestanding home into (and with any luck, through) your dotage is having to wrangle the hired help. Most are honest & hard-working, but some leave something to be desired in those categories.

The citrus trees, for example, need to be pruned. Since the beloved Gerardo hasn’t done that job so far this year, I’m assuming either he doesn’t want to do it or he doesn’t know how.

But that’s a generous assumption: OF COURSE he knows how to prune the damn citrus. He’s been working here, in darkest Citrus Central, for years. That he hasn’t done the job by now means he doesn’t want to be bothered. Since we know he surely does know how to do the job, we also know he doesn’t wanna do the job.

And that means I’ll have to track down some new victim to do the job. And in the department of don’t wanna, that one ranks high.

Guess I should annoy him by phoning and asking if he’ll come back.

But…ugh! Not now.

Beautiful Dog-&-Human Night

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Ruby the Corgi dragged her Human all over the north part of the neighborhood this evening. And what a beautiful evening it is! Really one of those incredible Arizona nights…just gorgeous.

We walked northward, past my old Arizona Highways colleague’s place: Jerry Jacka, one of the great landscape photographers of the Southwest. Then up past our now-absent friend Marge’s house.

She, we assume, must either have passed or have been consigned to The Beatitudes, a skin-crawling prison for the elderly. She appeared to be well into her 80s…maybe even older than that.

Her house — a classic Southern-California style 1970s ranch house — has been swarming with workmen. It’ll be interesting to see what transpires…

She told me she wanted to leave it to her son, who lives out of state. She wanted him to have it as an outpost to use when he’s here on business, which is apparently every now and then.

Our grown kids, though, usually do NOT have the same ideas about large and expensive investments as we do. My guess is, he’s cleaning it up and fancying it up so he can put it on the market.

It’s really not in an ideal location: only a block or two south of Main Drag North, one of the most hectic surface streets in the city. When you live next to a busy road like that, you get used to the racket from the traffic. But…whaddaya bet Sonny hasn’t done any such thing? He probably thinks it’s a zoo up there, and has no intention of hanging onto a piece of real estate pasted to the edge of that unholy road.

Ohhh well. Nothing stays the same, eh?

 

A Day Not QUITE from Hell…

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But close. Very close. 

Why?

Well…where on earth to start?

Let’s start in the neighborhood computer store.

My laptop crapped out; needed the attention of a computer tech.

My son has my car, so I can’t drive the computer across the city to the Best Buy, where I have a warranty that covers it.

Shee-ut. So I pick up the gadget and hike the six blocks to the neighborhood computer store, down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. Haul it in. Explain the problem. “Oh…” says the ninny at the service desk, “We don’t fix that issue.”

Wonnerful. I do have a warranty at Best Buy. But taking the machine to that august computer dealer entails a half-hour or forty-minute drive through nauseating traffic, plus a good 15 or 20 minutes of standing in line. “Know anyone nearby who can work on it?”

She sends me across the street to the electronics store over there.

Hike across six lanes of homicidal traffic. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand…

“I dunno what the problem might be. You need to take it down to the Best Buy.”

Yeah: the one I just passed over because I didn’t want to make the half-hour drive in each direction.

Hike back into the parking lot, mightily pi$$ed.  A military jet ROARS over, emitting a terrifying racket.

Reminds me of how much I hated living in Sun City, just down the road from Luke Air Force Base, which sent its ROARING jets over our homes every morning starting at about 6 a.m., and serenaded us for the rest of the day.

That reminded me of Sun City’s other horrors, not the least of which was its incompetent, misogynistic doctors. The bastards who made my mother’s final suffering ten times worse than it had to be.

Or maybe a hundred times worse. When does stupidity morph into outright evil, anyway?

By now, as you may have intuited, I was having a just LOVELY day.

Circled back to the Funny Farm. 

Here at the house, I stumbled across an ancient computer power cord. And LO! The damn thing fits in the laptop’s plugs!!!

We’re now attached to an outlet, and it looks like the critter is going to keep on working. Apparently the problem, such as it was, had to do with the present power cord, which must have broken or worn out.

Do miracles ever stop?

* The palms of the hands are still buzzing.
* The upper gums over the front teeth: still buzzing.
* The soles of the feet: still buzzing.
* The ears whistling at high volume, nonstop.

Somehow, none o’ that seems to matter much.

* Computer breakdown
* Idiots in computer store
* Roaring jet
* Sun City memories & horrors
* Persistent peripheral neuropathy

WHAT a wonnerful day!!!!