These jamborees get better and better.
Arizona’s “monsoon” has finally arrived. What IS that? Rain, that’s all. It’s a late-summer rainy season. This is the time of year when reasonably tolerable 110-degree “dry” heat gives way to unreasonably intolerable swamp heat. Rainstorms blow in from the Sea of Cortez whilst it’s hotter than the hubs of Hades, combining soggy air with annoying temperatures. Sorta like a Georgia summer. ’Ceptin’ we don’t have no bitin’ flies…
Had to drive to the far West side to revisit the dermatologists, whose work of art looked less than artistic this morning. The current actinic diagnosis was regarded as just on the edge of flipping over to carcinoma…and it grew so fast it was enough to scare the bedoodles out of you, me, and a person with a degree in medical science. It’s not acting like previous frozen-off lesions have, so I called and asked….they said “get your butt out here.” That entailed about 90 minutes of driving through heat and unpleasant traffic.
There’s a big anvil cloud rising up like an angry cobra, off in the east. So I expect we’ll get more rain, more wind, and more mess in the pool.
The pool is cloudy again. Now it’s green cloudy, not gray cloudy. Just when I think I’ve got it fixed, it clouds back up again. Dumping wads of chlorine plus a third of a bottle of Skill-It into the water this morning did not help. Just dumped in more wads of chlorine plus more soda ash. I will be surprised if this works.
I think the filter needs to be cleaned. Its pressure gauge hasn’t moved off 10 psi since they replastered the puddle. And…y’know…THAT ain’t normal. Ohhhh no. You have no idea how ain’t normal that is.
I also suspect the plastering crew failed to apply stablizer when they refilled the puddle. That would explain the chronic cloudiness, and it would especially explain the volatility of the chlorine.
The pool replastering dude is supposed to come inspect on Friday. I called and suggested they should give me an estimate on jackhammering off the goddamned Pebblesheen surface and applying plain old-fashioned white plaster. He was audibly alarmed.
If you have or dream of getting a pool, for godsake do not EVER apply PebbleTec or PebbleSheen. I don’t know what that stuff is doing, but it has totally screwed up the system’s chemistry. And brushing the algae off the surface is a lost cause: the accursed coarse surface EATS pool brushes. It wrecks your pool cleaner, too, BTW.
Moving on…
I spent I dunno how long this morning driving around the neighborhood trying to map out a two-mile dog-and-human walking route that will take us out of the way of the Shi-Tsu Lady who, propped up with braces and two canes, hobbles along with her aggressive, lunging little doggy pest in a path that intersects our way. This remapping project is not an easy trick, since our usual route goes through the shadiest, coolest part of the ’Hood…and when it’s 90 degrees at 5 in the morning, “shady” and “cool” are fully operative terms.
No matter when I leave the house or what route I try to take through Richistan, we do not seem to be able to avoid the Shi-Tsu lady. The issue is that her little dog goes batshit berserk when it sees Ruby the Corgi, who tends to respond in kind. This would be annoying but maybe not problematic if this lady were not 93 years old (her admission) and barely ambulatory.
Here’s the issue:
Our lively old gal only barely has her 25-pound killer dog under control. In fact, she does not have it under control. And given the state she’s in, a frantic 25-pound dog could indeed pull her off her feet, with dire results.
I do not want this sweet old gal to get hurt just because I happen to be walking along her morning route with my dog, whose mere presence drives her dog into a frenzy. So…this is developing into a problem, since she surfaces over there no matter what ungodly hour I leave the house. Get out at 4:30? There she is. Have a halfway decent night’s sleep and leave the house at 5:00 a.m.? There she is. Wake up at 3:00 a.m., manage to get back to sleep (sort of…), and don’t hit the road until 5:30? There she is!
This is a problem, because when I see her I have to cut our walk short, and we don’t get the two miles needed to keep me in shape and the dog…doggish. Another potential problem has insinuated its way into my hot little brain: liability. If her out-of-control dog lunges at my lunging out-of-control dog, yanks her off her feet and breaks her hip (or her back, or God only knows what), what will be my liability for any such fiasco?
Dollars to donuts, a lawsuit will ensue.
So now I’m trying to find ways to get the doggywalk in without having to encounter this woman.
Welp, I made a little discovery. At one point the Shi-Tzu Lady remarked that she lives on a neighborhood street we’ll call Gentrification Lane.
The other day I drove past Gentrification Lane, a cul-de-sac off one of the streets on our route. Glancing up the road, I spotted a couple of white, unmarked mini-busses…the kind used by places like the Beatitudes to ferry the inmates to doctor’s appointments and occasional grocery-store outings. Hm. What if…thought I…what if she’s not actually “aging in place” in her own home but lives in one of those convalescent homes various marginal operators slip into neighborhoods?
So I drove down Gentrification Lane yesterday morning, on the way home from the gas station, where I needed to score a couple of overpriced gallons from the QT to fuel a junket out to the far west side and back.
Yeah. There are two houses down there that are suspiciously run down and do not look…well…like anybody who cares how they look lives there. Side by side. In the middle of an area full of upscale houses with high-value maintenance.
Look up the addresses and find, lo! one of them is owned by Hacienda Health Care, a place in which one vegetative patient was notoriously raped and impregnated by an employee. Said outfit was in the news a couple years ago when relatives found maggots in an out-of-it elderly patient’s surgical wound. Here in lovely free-market Arizona, though, this fine enterprise remains in business.
Intriguingly, Tony the Romanian Landlord has gotten out of the house-rental business and into the quasi-nursing home game. After the economy recovered from the recession, he bought a house over in South Lower Richistan, which he razed to the ground and replaced with a two-story boarding house, which he presented as a convalescent home. He kept this for a few years, and then about a year ago sold it.
Then someone — Tony, dollars to donuts — purchased a house at the intersection of Secondary Feeder N/S and Main Feeder E/W and converted it into a residential care home. It had been a rental for a long time — well maintained and stable, so we know Tony was not the landlord. It was a rental before Tony came on the scene. And out of Tony’s price range, so one would think. But now I learn from my neighbor Josie that she managed to get out from under the truly grinding care of her demented husband Manny (whose marbles long ago fell out his ears and rolled off to Yuma) by getting him into Medicaid nursing care.
And where is he? In that house! He gets out and wanders around the corner there, looking kinda lost and embittered. That house last sold for $430,000…right about the time Tony sold the boarding house. It’s now estimated to be worth over $750,000.
And what do you bet Tony is either renting that house on Gentrification Lane to Hacienda or runs it as a nursing home himself and contracts to Hacienda for customers?
When he had the boarding house…uhm, first convalescent home…, he put Pretty Daughter over there in charge of it, as its “manager.” So now she would have Experience and could hire out to places like that as an administrator.
Never a dull moment here in Paradise. 😀