A-n-n-d…it’s 7:30 in the morning. Ruby and I are back from our regular one- to two-mile peregrination. Temp on the back porch has chilled down to a crisp 89 degrees. Brrr!
One nice thing about the present heat wave: we didn’t have to navigate around many other dogs. Usually it’s a zoo out there: everybody and her little brother, sister, and mother-in-law are out walking their livestock before time to leave for work. We encountered just one dog-wrangler…and that was just as we hit the road: one of the gay guys down the street, walking their two cute little pooches.
It’s overcast and extremely muggy. Surely we’ll get rain today…maybe even this morning. That is much to be hoped.
Wildfires are still raging around Rio Verde, a sub-suburb next to Fountain Hills. Back when I was working on the ASU Main campus, I seriously considered buying a place out there. It’s remote and very quiet (uh…well…except they don’t tell you that it’s right under the path of commercial flights coming in to Sky Harbor…), and yet despite the apparent countrified remoteness, it’s a straight shot down to Tempe.
Heh! Sure am glad I’m not out there now. Neither is anybody else: they’ve evacuated the area that I coveted…if I’d bought the house I admired at the time, I’d be writing this post from some motel room!
If we get rain this weekend — as it appears we will — that should break the heat wave, at least for awhile. August is always a bear in Arizona’s low desert, and we’re not even there yet. But even a few days’ relief will make the rest the summer more tolerable.
***
Half-past noon.
A noise emits from…where? A whack or a clonk.
Ruby goes on alert.
Understand: a corgi is basically a short German shepherd. Always on the lookout for threats to its flock: to wit, its humans.
She’s off the bed and headed for the back door like a furry rocket.
I grab the phone and a kitchen knife (GOT to get a functioning pistol!) and let her out.
She flies around the back yard, completing a circuit in a matter of seconds. Whatever or Whoever made the noise seems not to be out there. I call her into the house. Lock the door. Figure the most likely culprit is the endlessly noisy refrigerator.
Though I thought the damn thing had quieted down. WhatEVER. Don’t know who or what went clunk in the afternoon. But do wish Ruby weighed about 50 pounds more than she does.
*****
Holy God!
Sometimes reading the news is counterproductive. It’s SO horrifying that it leaves you wanting not to be more informed but less informed.
This poor woman…she’s got her family up at Lake Pleasant, a local artificial pond and recreational attraction. They’re wake-boarding and swimming, great fun in this heat.
At one point, the family was partying around. These people were experienced boat operators. The mom fires up the boat to pull one of the kids up on a wakeboard…and, God help her, she runs over her other child, a six-year-old. The kid was in the water because she had just been wakeboarding.
No emergency services responded to phone calls. Nearby witnesses helped get the child out of the drink, but she died before they could get her to a hospital.
What a horror! Poor baby…poor mother!
In less exotic realms, a bit after midnight this morning, one of our fellow homicidal drivers (you think that’s a joke, don’t you?) crashed head-on into a city bus, driving the wrong way up the road. Needless to say, he was despatched to his Maker.
The I-17 freeway northbound out of the Valley was closed for hours, thanks to not one, not two, but three wrecks. Lovely. That was part of a series of crashes that occurred within a few hours.
Once you’re on the 17, you’re pretty much stuck: you can’t get away until you come to an off-ramp, and those are pretty far-between. So a whole lot of people spent a whole lot of time twiddling their thumbs and grinding their teeth.
In another fairly routine road-rage episode, not one but two women got into it with a motorcycle rider; one of the women shot the guy and killed him.
Even in staid and boring Sun City: a golf cart collided with an SUV and shut down a major thoroughfare serving that normally motionless berg.
What a place!!