Ruby has done her daily chore of dragging the human around the neighborhood…today hauling through wet, gray, threatening air. Wunderground predicts a 50% chance of rain…and a high of 114 degrees.

Garden spot, eh?

The sunrise, though, was utterly spectacular!  One of the most gorgeous sunrises or sunsets I’ve ever seen. So I guess that was worth a soggy-doggy morning.

As we scribble, though, the sun has gone behind a layer of dark gray clouds. Presumably those will soon be dumping water on us. Hot water…

Ohhh well….  Here we are, back online…uhm…I think. We’ll find out after I go to post this squib.

Gerardo the Miracle Yard Dude and his cohorts are out in the yard, working like animals in Arizona’s UNGODLY summer heat. August is our worst month. But, for reasons I can’t imagine (most likely he has bills to pay, hm?), he volunteered to prune the (overgrown!) paloverde tree on the west side of the house.

Not a good time to hack up a tree, that’s for sure. But…you can be sure he wouldn’t have offered to do it if he didn’t need the money. Damn near killing your crew with heat exhaustion is not a normal strategy.

Let’s just hope this exploit doesn’t kill the tree. It is on the west side of the house, after all…so it serves its purpose in savings on air-conditioning bills.

On the other hand, even I could tell that it presented a serious risk of falling on the roof and doing some major damage. The amount Gerardo is charging for this venture (which he didn’t tell me beforehand…otherwise I wouldn’t have let him do the job) is fukkin’ ruinous…but a fraction of what it would cost to chop down the tree and then repair the roof and the attic if it fell on the house in a storm.

So I can’t complain too much.

On the other hand…that doesn’t make me like it.

And yes: trees.  MY GAWD, the man charged me FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS to prune that weed tree off the roof and away from the yard.

He said, though, that he’d talked to my son. And he claimed he told my young Hero (and Keeper…) how much he was gonna charge. So…one can only hope that was true. Because if M’hijito is blind-sided by a $450 landscaping bill, he is gonna be ENRAGED. Seven ways from Sunday.

Ohhhhh gawd! Never get old,, whatever ya do!  First off, you lose control of your life. Then, you’re assaulted by one hassle and one headache after another — none of which you personally can do a damn thing about. The person in charge of your bills has to do all that…and you may be sure, he won’t appreciate it.

***

Ohhhh well. I truly do like Gerardo and his guys. They’re all such nice men, each and every one of them. To say nothing of gentlemen who work like oxen (!!no exaggeration!) Seriously, you’ve never seen anyone work as hard and as steadily as those guys do. Just…freakin’…jaw-dropping!

They do hard work and good work. Whatever they apply themselves to, they do a great job on it. And they apply themselves to A LOT!

Amazing guys. No question of it. 

{chortle!} Yes, I indeed DO panic easily….

But this morning, things are working better and looking better.

What a fine few days these have been!

No kidding: over the past few days, not one damn thing has worked properly, whether has had to do with the computers, whether it was the bank account, whether it was the garage door opener, whether it was the pool equipment…WHATEVER, it busted or it stopped dead.

Good thing the kid made off with my car, eh? With that kind if miasma hanging over my neurotic little head, who knows what horrors would have transpired if I’d tried to drive through Phoenix’s rabid traffic.

And now, speaking of “it don’t wanna work,” let’s see if this post will go online…

That, my friends, is another way of saying “hotter than the hubs of Hades.” 

The hapless woman my son hired to babysit me — he thinks I can’t take care of myself alone anymore — is bored out of her mind. The reason I’m unlikely to get hurt while I’m sitting around all day by myself is that…

* I go noplace;
* I do nothing;
* I sit around watching the dog as she does nothing.

Oh, well. If that’s how he wants to spend his money, far be it from me to contradict him.

Haven’t persuaded the poor lady to drive me to any stores or other amusements, mostly because I don’t need any new provisions and surely do not want to go out in that unholy heat.

What to do? How to deal with this new headache?

Well…

1. Make a list of things that need to be done (or at least can be done) while I’m under her control.

2. Be nice to the poor soul. She’s probably as terrorized as I am about this whole wacky thing.

3. Since my son has cut off my driving privileges, get her to drive me to stores (even those within walking distance) at least several times a week.

4. I walk a couple miles every day, for exercise. See if she would like to come along on these walks, after the weather gets cool enough that we could leave around the time she gets here.

Godlmighty, this fiasco is making me crazy. Pretty clearly, I’ve passed a milepost on the road to senility. And some major changes are going to have to be made to accommodate that. The big hope — the big stumbling block — the big screaming nightmare…is that I’m not yet so batshit that I have to be locked up in an institution.

I hate, loathe, and despise communal living. Hated every minute of living in the college dormitories. And that is NOT the way I want to wrap up my life.

This job will be made tougher for our New Lady by the fact that I refuse to pay for television. I will be DAMNED if I’m gonna pay to have advertising shoved in my face. Plus about 90% of what’s on TV is just not worth paying for.

So…that means she doesn’t have any pap to amuse her when she’s here. She must think I’m even crazier than I am. And she must be excruciatingly bored.

So…THAT means we’ll have to come up with things to do and places to go while she’s here. Better confer with her along those lines: mostly to find out what she likes to do and figure out when and where we can go for those things.

Also must ask my son if he thinks we should go ahead and pay for cable TV, so she will have some drivel to watch while she’s here. I’d just as soon not have brainless blah blah blah emanating from one of the rooms, but…if that’s what it takes to keep some poor soul in our employ, I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

{sigh}

Guess I’ll have to get used to the whole damn fiasco!

Garden spot, eh? Dontcha wish you lived here?

Oh, you do live here? My sympathies!!

If my father were still living, I’d brain him for dragging me and my mother to this unholy place. Ohhhhhh well! Too late! 

She loved it, though. She even loved the unholy roar of the fighter jets from Luke Air Force Base, just outside of their home in Sun City. “Ohhhh,” she would simper,” “it’s the sound of freedom!”

Well. No, muther. That’s the sound of World War III, headed our way. 

Ohhh well. Whatever chimes your bells.

She did love Sun City, and incredibly, she did love the sound of those gawdawful war planes. Or at least, so she claimed.

****

Hey! PRESTO CHANGEO!  Amazon just showed up at the front door with a package of wonderful Bigelow teabags. SIX BOXES of them!!!

Who’d’ve thunk it?

Now I won’t have to buy tea for a good year! One fewer hassle, eh?

Y’know…that isn’t something that I would’ve thunk, at the time I moved into this house here in (un)lovely Central Phoenix. But y’know… Amazon is some kinda Godsend.

By now I can’t even count the number of trips that outfit has spared me, traipsing around overheated, batsh!t Phoenix. I hate driving around this city, and you may be sure I like walking around it in 110-degree heat even less. Now that my son has kiped my car, Amazon’s deliveries pay for themselves many times over.

Without that car, at this time of year I’d have to make shopping trips at 6:00 in the morning, the instant the Albertson’s opens. And frankly, walking back and forth to the local stores, with our honored passing drivers hollering obscenities at me, is NOT what I wanna do at any time of the year.

If my son weren’t here, I would be SO GONE from this place. If I stayed in the Valley: probably to Fountain Hills. If not: to points in California, Colorado, or the Mogollon Rim. You couldn’t keep me here: not on a bet.

But…he IS here in lovely central Phoenix. So here I am, too.

And yeah: Amazon is one thing that makes this place more or less livable.

The Dawg and the Human have made their daily circumnavigation of the neighborhood. Mercifully, at this hour no fruitcake is haunting the park, therein to shout obscenities at an 80-year-old hag. And it’s a little early for the workmen pounding hammers at the nearby house that’s being rebuilt into a mansion. So…it was a quiet morning.

Whenever my son inherits the Funny Farm (assuming we can engineer things to make that happen…), he is going to fall into a sh!tload of money. These houses are going up and up and up and UP in value, because of their central location and their upper-middle-class style.

Still, I must say….I wish I were in Berkeley, whence my mother’s family emanated. So pretty, and so cool! Much classier than these parts. And, o’course…much more expensive. The Human and the Dawg couldn’t afford to live there, not for love nor money.

So…here we are, sweltering in the Southwestern desert, short on culture and high on sweat. What a place!

To me, the horror of it is that she truly never wanted to stop. She had NO INTENTION of quitting the accursed cigarettes, no matter how sick their sidestream smoke made me. And she never did. Eventually the habit killed her.

“You’re so susceptible!” I remember her whimpering that about my tendency to come down with every virus that floated past on the breeze. For the luvva gawd! Is it even remotely possible that she didn’t see that what made me “so susceptible” was her trashing my lungs with her fucking sidestream smoke?

Much as I hated grade school, junior high, and high school, today I have to say: THANK GOD for public schooling. Those hours on campus got me out of her house and out of her unholy stinking miasma for at least some part of the day.

What incredible evil!

To my mind (what remains of it…), the thing that was so disturbing was that she knew what she was doing. She read widely in popular and middle-brow publications: and those were awash in reports to the effect that smoking causes cancer. Journalistic publications of all kinds ran article after article going on about how smoking causes cancer. It was on the evening TV news reports. It was EVERYPLACE.

But she believed — truly did believe — it was all blather emitted by Big Brother in a campaign to control the thinking and behavior of the general public.

Once, as I recall, she even said so explicitly: used the term “Big Brother.” /eyeroll/  How stupid can you get?

Do you need to be told? She died of tobacco-induced cancer. A pretty damn hideous way to go…

Whew!!!  It is BEYOND hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there!!

My father would have called this a Rasty Nasty Day, after Ras Tanura, the hideous American oil outpost where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Twelve long years in that unholy dive!!!  He had figured he’d make enough to retire, if they saved every penny, in eight or ten years. Yeah…

Well…he almost made enough to retire on.

He wasn’t a real educated fella. Inflation, for example, was kind of an alien concept for him…  So, when he made his calculations for how long he’d have to work out there before he could retire and take us home to the States, he missed his goal by some six years.

About the time this projection unwound, my mother came down with a horrific case of amoebic dysentery. The doctors out there told her she needed to go back to the States –ASAP — to be treated for that fine ailment. This gave her an excuse to grab me and flee back to California, where her relatives lived. It also accelerated his retirement plans: he stayed for another year and a half, until his current contract ended, and then came back to join us in the States.

So that was a blessing (big-time!) for me and my mother. Couldn’t have been great for him, but at least she and I got out of that Hell-hole.

At any rate, where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf, the climate was hot, muggy, humid, and hotter than the Hubs. Just a HORRIBLE place, certainly for the gringo set. As a little kid, I didn’t know any better. But my mother, raised in Upstate New York, suffered terribly — from the climate as well as from the endemic disease.

And now, here on August 23 of Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, I indeed have been around long enough to know better. And believe me: if my son weren’t here, I would not be here in steamy Arizona. No how, no way!

But he persists, because his dad is here. His dad  persists, because Dad’s job planted him here…and because his present family is also planted here.

Well. Arizona ain’t as grim as Saudi Arabia was. But…it does have its trying moments.

And right now, we’re in the middle of them! 

Seriously: it feels like it could start to rain out of a clear blue sky…something that, yea verily, I have seen in Arabia. But there’s neither clear nor blue out there: the sky is draped in ugly, thin gray clouds.

Haven’t heard from my son today. Hope he’s getting through this balmy day all right. His house is in a historic district and was built when every home was “cooled” (heh!) with something called “swamp cooling.” This was an early form of evaporative cooling. Worked fine when the weather was dry. Give it some humidity, though, and “swamp” would be the operative term, all right!

Even if you replace the evap unit with a modern air-conditioning unit, the result is not very effective. That, I reckon, has to do with the way the ductwork is built. Or…something.

***

I should call him up and pester him. But frankly, just now I’m reamed steamed and dry-cleaned, and so do not feel like speaking to any human beings. Today the new housecleaners he hired to replace the beloved Luz surfaced. Meeting them and introducing them to the shack and whatnot was surprisingly tiring. I just don’t do well with new people….and when the New Person is expected to work for me (the poor soul!)…well…it’s a trying experience all the way around.

Not sure whether they’re expected to surface once a week….or what. That’s one of the questions I need to pester him with.   Poor guy! He must think I’m totally non compos mentis. And…hmmmm…with every month of advancing age, I seem to drift further in that direction.

Unclear whether that’s really so, or is only a time-enhanced illusion. I asked my beloved Doctor in the Wild about this. (A “doctor in the wild” is one who does NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic). And he insisted that no, my marbles are still intact and I should quit worrying about that.

Nice to think so. But o’course…he doesn’t see me every hour and every minute of every day. This marble-loss business seems to come and go, depending on stress levels, time of day, and whatnot.

Ohhhh well...  The dinner chow is hot! (Hoorayy!) And the  human is ambling off to bed whenever she finishes scarfing up that stuff.

And so, away!

Amazon finally delivered the dog food. Thank GAWD! There’s a trek to the grocer that I don’t have to make.

The crazy-making peripheral neuropathy, while still present, has fallen back some. It’s much milder.

A couple of babysitters….ahem! housekeepers hired by my son are slated to show up this morning. If in fact they do surface, I’ll have them take me to the store.

This, alas, means I should not be scribbling blog posts but instead should be compiling an elaborate shopping list.

Meanwhile, I desperately need a haircut. If the babysitters do show up today, I’ll have them take me to the salon down by the neighborhood grocery store. Since I can walk there (would druther not, in this heat…but one does what one has to do), I’ll make an appointment for the “cool” (hah!!) of another morning.

And I guess we need to go into a store to buy some sugar.

That did get ordered…but it has never surfaced. Problem is, we have two parallel streets with almost identical names here: Erewhon Road and Erewhon Lane. Delivery people regularly confuse the two. And when they drop something off at the house on Erewhon Road, the residents there just steal anything that is misdelivered.

This has become such a problem since the City moved those idiots into the house there that I seriously  have considered selling my house and following SDXB out to Sun City.

That’s serious, indeed….  I loathed living in Sun City with my parents, and most decidedly do NOT want to move back out there. But I can’t afford much else within the Phoenix city limits, other than an apartment. And I’m not fond of living in apartment buildings, either.

Yea, verily: I love my home, I love my neighbors, and I love my neighborhood. And so no, I sure as Hell do NOT want to move away!