Coffee heat rising

The Big Apartment Adventure

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Well…make that “the LITTLE apartment adventure.” The hovel in question was the first place I rented all by my young self, with the proceeds from my first full-time office job.

LOL! Yes, it was tiny. A one-room studio with a fold-out bed that disguised itself as the sofa when it was put away. But oh my: I was proud of it. And I did love living there.

I’d finished the bachelor’s degree at the University of Arizona and come back up to the Phoenix area with no place much to live and nothing much to do. Quickly found that living with my parents in Sun City was decidedly not my speed. So I landed a receptionist’s job at a law firm (yeah: that’s what a B.A. and a Phi Beta Kappa key got a female college graduate in 1966…) and moved into that cute little apartment.

Yahoo! FREE from Mom and Dad, and NO ROOMMATE. 

What better way to define Nirvana, eh?

Well. Probably like you, I wouldn’t think much of it today. But boy oh boy, was it the business then! 

Ahhh, the good ole’ days!   😀  😀  😀  😀

Love Escapes Blindness at the Garden Gate…

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My father openly called him a sh!thead. My mother didn’t use that kind of language, but she made it more than clear that she agreed with my father’s assessment of my Dearly Beloved Boyfriend, that junior year at the university.

Ooohhhboy, did they loathe the guy! 

And y’know, from the vantage point of decades, I can see they were right.

Real right. He was a dyed-in-the-wool jerk.

It took him to teach me that, not my parents. 

LOL! I dated him for…what? two and a half years, as an undergraduate. That’s how long it took for me to figure out that…well…yeah: he was a jerk. 

How’d I find out?

Well… One afternoon we were laying in the sack, after a lively frolic. Talkin’, as old loving couples will do. The subject of his best buddy’s wife came up.

Buddy and Wife were a couple who had been married for…what? maybe three years? Whatever: they weren’t kids. He had a full-time job. She was a loyal spouse and all…

By this time, Wife was advanced in pregnancy. Like…six or eight months along.

As we loafed in the sack, Dear Boyfriend was going on about how brilliant his buddy was for picking up a chippie, whom he was merrily diddling on the side. You understand: Buddy was a married man. One whose wife was about to produce his first child for him. 

Yeah.

I don’t remember whether I made some judgmental comment about this state of affairs. Probably not…probably more like asked some naive question. WhatEVER: in the course of conversation, Dear Boyfriend remarked that it was really a good thing that his pal had gone out and picked up a floozy, since the wife was so advanced in pregnancy, she couldn’t entertain him. “A man,” said he, “has gotta have it!”

Uhm. Yeah.

Evidently my parents had somethin’ in their assessment of his character: they believed him to be a scoundrel.

When he said that, I thought, “My parents are right! This guy is a TOTAL lout!”

Within a couple of days, I gave him the heave-ho. And I’ll tellya: his heart was broken! 

Oh, the drama! Oh, the tears! …And oh! f**k you, pal! Out he went. 

My friends were abhorred. (Of course, they didn’t know about the uber-pregnant wife.) My parents were delighted. Dear Boyfriend was shattered. I was disgusted.

Whew!! Close one!

I was lucky that I didn’t marry him…because I fully intended to.

Not until he explicitly TOLD me what my life was gonna be like if I married him did I realize what a raving jerk he was. This, despite my parents having told me so, time after time after time.

Talk about love going blind at the garden gate...or, in my case, going deaf. I simply refused to hear what they said. Not until he spoke for himself (the idiot!) did his unadulterated jerkitude register with me. To this day, I can’t believe I was lucky enough that the guy let his mouth babble on — while we were laying in our own coital bed!! — so as to reveal what a gutter rat he was. And to reveal that my parents were right about him….

LOL! I suppose the moral of the story is if you’re a jerk, learn to keep your mouth shut. Or maybe…I dunno…pay attention to what your parents say about the current Love of Your Life. 

😀

Awww, jeez! Guys!!!!

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Dare to sit down to breakfast, and ARF!!!!

Get up to see what the Hound is arfing at, and see Gerardo’s wondrous gang of yard dudes out front.

Dayum!!!

Get off duff. Trot around: pick up junk, put junk away; set up pool so guys can work around it; pick up more junk, put more junk away; pick up and discard mounds of dog sh!t… Finally get the place ready for the men.

Stumble back in the house. Look out front to see if they need me to go out there and unlock the side gate…

and…

and….

THEY’RE GONE!!!!!!!

WTF??????  Nary a sign of a yard dude! Or a yard dude’s truck!!

ohhhh…kayyyy…. So where’s the dog?????

Ruby!

RUBY!!

R-U-U-B-E-E-E-E!!!!!!

Nary a small fuzzy corgi!

Ohhhhh shee-ut! Did they open the gate and let her out?

Frantically search around and search around and call and call and search around and search around and call and call and…and…

Lo!
Here she is! 
Ambling out from underneath the toilet.

ggrrrrrr….  This is gonna be one of THOSE days, ain’t it?

Glorioski! Glorious Day, Glorious Future

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Wow! What a gorgeous morning. Intermittent overcast with big, fluffy, cottony clouds. Cool but not cold. The sky wants to rain, but can’t work itself up to that much effort.

Ruby and I frolicked through Upper Richistan, as usual admiring the big ole’ expensive houses and their big, expensive irrigated lawns. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Ours isn’t “gorgeous,” but it’s adequately pleasant. Mid-middle class homes on lots that put enough space between neighbors.

Ruby loved up some workmen…cuteness is like some kind of joy drug for most people. We went on our way eventually. Now we’re back at the house.

And the Human finds itself wondering what next? 

Despite the family track record for longevity, we can pretty safely bet that I don’t have all that much longer to go. Relatives who have lived into their dotage have uniformly been Christian Scientists…tee-totalers, that is.

I ain’t no tee-totaler and never have been. My first boyfriend introduced me to wine when I was about 17, and I’ve been lapping up the stuff ever since. As we know, anything alcoholic is a handy device for shortening your life span. So I think it’s safe to figure I’ve got maybe about 10 years left — at most. Probably a little less than that.

The best I can hope for, I think, is to drop dead…and thereby avoid ending up in some nursing home or prison for old folks. That’s not outside the realm of possibility — as I say, the forebears who dropped dead in their late 90s didn’t drink. I do (with élan!), and so it’s safe to assume I’ve probably cut a good 10 years off the inherited lifespan. But that still would leave me another 10 years. Ten years that I do NOT want to spend in an old-folkerie!!!!

And therein lies the challenge: How to stay out of one of those horrible places. 

They soak up your life savings…and I want my savings to go to my son. Not to a holding pen for old bats. But….

But I have yet to figure out how to protect those savings for him, especially if I live much longer. Even more especially if I live much longer and get sick. How to evade those eventualities, though, does escape me.

If I manage to stay healthy into my dotage, though, M’hijito should inherit enough to retire in comfort…forthwith. By then, it’ll be time for him to figure out how to evade life in the old-folkerie…  😀

Hup hup hup hup…

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Waiting for M’hijito to arrive, collect me, and haul me off to the physical therapist’s gym, there to spend the next two hours going hup hup hup hup hup….  

Wish I knew for sure that a brain-numbing evening of mindless exercises actually works to ease the peripheral neuropathy, or whether the fading of the numbness and the buzz was the result of  Time and the River Flowing. Blowing away three hours on hupping and bupping is NOT how I would choose to spend my time. Seriously!

Well. Either the exercises are working or time is doing its job: dunno which.

The neuropathy is slowly — VERY slowly — getting better, though. So I guess if there’s even an outside chance that the hup-hup-hup routine is helping, it’s worth killing yet another evening on it.

But how many MORE evenings to squish with this stuff are we looking at? It feels like such a painful waste of time… Well, not painful in the sense that it hurts (it does not) but in the sense that I hate boring myself stupid when I have many more interesting things to do.

What would I do tonight, instead of killing an hour in waving my arms around?

* Walk Ruby from one end of the neighborhood to the other.
* Write a post for Funny about Money (hmmmm….)
* Watch the idiot box for awhile
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet

ooohkayyy… So, yeah: I don’t have anything much to do that’s any better. But at least I’d be wasting my time on my choice of time-wasters, not theirs.

 

Hotter’n’The Hubs…

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Okay, okay…not THAT hot. But it is humid, sticky, and too damn warm out there.

Ruby and I: freshly back from circumnavigating the park. It’s after 2:00 in the afternoon, which makes it a bit too hot to be frolicking around out there.

That notwithstanding…the dawg LOVES it. 

*****

My honored son, in a fit of filial righteousness, has made off with my car. Interestingly, though, this makes little to no difference in the Human’s frolics. Within easy walking distance, we have a computer store, a Sprouts, an Albertson’s (bloated supermarket), a Fry’s (bloated cut-rate supermarket), a pet store, a hair salon, a record store, a bookstore…and on and freakin’ on.

As a practical matter all this maneuver of his does is prove, indisputably, that one does not need a car if one lives in this neighborhood. Just now the human and the dawg have stocked in…

  • a pile of canned dawg food
  • a fine bottle of cold white wine
  • uncounted bottles of beer, cold
  • bread
  • cocktail tomatoes
  • chocolate chips
  • coffee beans
  • maple syrup
  • Parmesan cheese
  • corn on the cob
  • artichokes
  • asparagus
  • lamb chops
  • scallops
  • steak
  • more steak
  • fish filets

….and on and on and on…

So…somehow we seem not to be in much distress. 😀

Probably will wait until the day after tomorrow to make a cool-of-the-morning run on one of the nearby supermarkets, there to reload a bit. No hurry, evidently.

This has got to be one of THE best neighborhoods in the city in which to live car-free. As a practical matter, with an Uber driver living straight across the street, a train line running up main drag west, and a herd of public busses, there really and truly is no reason to own a car here.

It’s almost as good as San Francisco. When my mother and I lived there — back in the Dark Ages — we hosted my father’s fancy Mercury while he was off on the ships at sea. But we rarely drove it, except to rev up its engine a bit. Because we didn’t need to!

We were within easy walking distance of all the places we needed for daily errands, work, and school. And the busses and streetcars would take us just about anyplace else.

Amazingly, that’s now much the way things are here. 

Not what you’d expect of Phoenix, a powerfully car-centric, L.A.-style city. But things have changed enough over the past six or eight years that if you live in the right districts, you really don’t need to own a car.

And the presence of Uber drivers converts that to REALLY don’t need to own a car. An Uber driver lives right across the street from the Funny Farm…and another half-dozen lurk here in the ‘Hood. So all you have to do is pick up a phone to get a cab at the front door…for one heckuva lot less than it costs to own a car!

So…depending on my son’s whims, I’m thinking I’ll let him keep my car at his house. If he doesn’t want it taking up space there, we’ll sell it. Because…frankly…with a car rental place a block from the house and the Uber guy lurking across the road, I don’t need a car anymore!!!!!

Jeez.

Why own a giant liability on four wheels when you can get around conveniently in cabs and rentals?