7:34 a.m. Another soggy-doggy day in (un)lovely Arizona.
Just back from the morning stroll around the neighborhood with Ruby the Corgi. Ugh!!!! It’s sooo hot and sooo wet out there it feels like a seaside morning in accursed Saudi Arabia.
Not quite that soggy, though. There, you’d wake up to clear skies in the morning to see water dripping off the eaves like rain. By the shore of the Persian Gulf, the air was so wet that literally you could see it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. The morning drizzle, though, wasn’t rain. It was just humidity. So humid was the air that water would coalesce on the eaves and drip off in a nearly convincing simulation of rain.
Horrible place!
Arizona has its moments of horribleness, too. Fortunately, those don’t occur year-round. In another couple of weeks, the current damp spell will have dried out, and even at 80 degrees or so, an early-morning walk will be just fine.
Contemplating the fact that our corner of the ’Hood was built by the same company that built out Sun City, where my parents dragged me when they retired early. What a place!
No one under 50 was allowed to live there. But because my parents had enrolled me in the University of Arizona a year before I finished high school, technically I didn’t live there. I lived in Tucson. Right?
Far as I know, no complaints were lodged. I was a bookish kid, very quiet, so presumably none of the neighbors were discommoded. And yes: I spent 9 months out of 12 in Tucson; make that 11 months after we’d been there for awhile and I’d learned I could extend my escape time through summer school.
Anyway, my present house is remarkably similar to the tract shacks that filled Sun City. Ours are a little better than those — by the time Del Webb got to the Sun City phase of his career, he’d learned all the corners to cut. My house, for example, has a garage.
Yeah. You know: a place to park your car, with walls and a ceiling and a door that opens and closes?
Their house had a carport: an open shade structure with only enough space for one car. Mine holds two, in theory.
But the overall appearance is similar: low-slung single-story tract houses built with gray cinder-block walls and gray asphalt roofs. Ugleeeee.
But affordable. WTF.
Anyway, the dawg and I have circumnavigated the’Hood. That, at least, was a halfway decent way to start the day.
This is not a day I’m looking forward to. M’hijito is dragging me out to the Mayo Clinic this afternoon: a trip I hate for another visit I will hate. The doctors there are wonderful, of course. But my gawd! That drive!!! And doctors are not folks I wish to spend a lot of time with…they make me want to run away!
The Mayo is almost an hour’s drive from here, through horrible traffic. Hit the road at the wrong time of day, and you’ll be plodding along for a lot longer than an hour.
My local “doctor in the wild,” as the elite set at the Mayo calls doctors with their own practices, has moved to freakin’ Sun City! That’s an hour’s drive in the other direction from the Mayo. And…well… Lemme tellya: the horror show that we experienced with my mother and the damned doctors out there left me convinced that I would NEVER, EVER go to another doctor who practices in Sun City.
The quacks who attended my mother as she was dying of (obvious!) cancer were so incompetent, so lazy, so arrogant… The quacks out there are such ba!tards that…well… The medical “care” is among the top reasons that you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City. Horrible beyond horror.
So my son and I go just as far in the opposite direction. Certainly the Mayo is one helluva lot better than anything in S.C. But I’ll tell ya: overall, the Christian Scientists have got somethin’….
Anyway, just now the Out of Doors is hot, wet, icky. Pool Dude was just here slaving in the backyard: another of many jobs I’m glad I don’t have. Forked over $150 to him, for the privilege of not having to do that damn job for another month.
Honestly. If I weren’t pretty certain my son wants this house, I would sell it right now and move to a nice high-rise apartment on Central Avenue.
Heh! Or at least buy a house here in the ’Hood that’s free of a swimming pool.
After several years in apartments in San Francisco, I’ve had my fill of high-rise apartments and garden apartments and…whatnot. Gotta have SOME space between me and the clowns next door.
😀
At any rate, in a block house on a quarter-acre lot, Ruby the Corgi can bark merrily and not bother the neighbors. So for the nonce, that makes this house worth the hassle of pool care and yard care.
ARF!
