It looks like it’s still a distance from where our house and barns were located. But…wayyyy too close for comfort.

{sigh} So…I guess I’m glad we sold out and fled to the Valley. But darn it! I still do miss that place…and the ranch house and the barns…and the horses and the cattle…and the river and the trees…and… {sob!}

It’s so beautiful up there! And the weather is soooo much nice than we get in the Valley…even a hot day is nothing like 110 degrees.

But…I guess whenever I pine for that good old place, I really do need to remind myself that it has some drawbacks. Like…raging brush fires!

BING BONG!

ohhhhh gawd, what now?

CLEANING LADY, that’s what’s now!

Awwww jeez!

She just got done at the WonderAccountants’ house across the street, and now here she is, all set to shovel out the Funny Farm.

It’s MONDAY! I thought she came on Thursdays. But…that’s senility for ya!

So now she’s in the back of the house, shoveling out the bedrooms. And I’ll tellya: THERE is a job I’m sure glad I don’t have.

She does a wonderful job, we might add. Which, presumably, testifies to her remarkable level of energy. How she holds up through a full day of wrestling with other folks’ messes just flummoxes me!!

Anyhow, even though I’m totally not in mood to have somebody around all afternoon, I’m still mighty glad to see her.

Well…at least I’d bestirred myself, early this morning, to pick up the breakfast dishes and load the dishwasher. This meant not too much mess to clean out of her way.

Y’know, that woman must be strong as a horse. Just cleaning one house — my own! — wears me out. She does three in a single day. Apparently just about every day.

If I had her job, I’d be taking today off! Sprained an ankle…and now can barely limp around the house. DayUM, but it hurts. But I don’t suppose it’s gonna kill me. Not anytime soon, anyhow.

Darn it, though! Her arrival means a bunch of things I’d planned to do will not get done this afternoon. One of them was bathe and wash my hair. Ohhhh well…it’ll wait till after she leaves.

Other stuff: it’s now too hot to go outside and walk around. With my car purloined, that means I can’t make it to the grocery store or the hair stylist. Ohhhhh well…that many fewer things to have to do today, eh?

What we have out here in the side yard, where we take our morning dose of caffeine, is BIRDS. Hordes of wondrous birds.

Just now, the Bird Theater is dominated by a flock of beautiful doves. A slew of white-wings waddle around out here, grumbling at each other and searching for the seeds I’ve failed to put out this morning. Those critters do make for a fine start to the day.

A variety of songbirds are holding forth, as we scribble. What a symphony! Tweedle tweedle twee cheepee cheepee cheepee cheepee TWEE-uu TWEE-uu chirpita chirpita chirpita squaaaa squaaaa chirp chirp chirp chirp!!!!

Too delightful for words.

Hm. Maybe that’s why birds don’t have words???

• I should take the dawg for a walk, before this gorgeous morning turns hot.
  • Too lazy. Who, me? set my coffee down???
• I should drag the hoses around the yard.
  • Too lazy. What? get off my duff???
• I should go back to bed.
  • Too lazy. That would entail getting off my duff and hiking to the bedroom…

Ohhhh well!  What can I say? Other than, maybe, Let’s go back to bed! 

My imaginative little discovery, contingent on my son stealing my car out of my garage — “I don’t need a car to get around here! ” — turns out to be the single stupidest thing I’ve ever thought, said, or written. 

Yeah.

Today, as the sun made its way across the sky, I took it into my thick little head to walk down to the Albertson’s supermarket and pick up some dog food for Ruby the Corgi. While I was in the vicinity, I wanted to talk with a lawyer who practices in that shopping center — no, nothing drastic… Just a business matter. So: grabbed my home-made roller cart and headed on down there!

• Walked.
• And walked.
• And dodged panhandlers.
• And walked.
• And fried.
• And walked.
• And fried some more.
• And walked…..
• Holeeeeee shee-ut!

The business lawyers whose office I’d seen so often in that shopping center were…GONE!!! Their space was empty.

Dayum!

The other lawyers, the ones across the parking lot, said they don’t do business law. But if I ever get arrested for drunk driving….

Yeah.

By now, I was just fricasseed!

Went into the supermarket; hung out with the security guards for awhile. They put up with me, kindly, while I cooled down a bit.

But…now I had to get home. And that entailed walking block after block after block after block through searing, GAWDAWFUL heat.

Honestly: for a few minutes there, I wasn’t at all sure I was gonna make it.

Got up to the church. No one there; all the doors locked. Just a couple of bums hanging out in the shade.

Stumbled across the vast, black asphalt church parking lot. Staggered into the ‘Hood. Hotter and hotter and hotter….

Trudged and trudged through the residential part of our ‘hood. Hoped my neighbor Tom would be out…he and his wife Carol would let me inside to cool off, and keep me there long enough to be sure I wouldn’t pass out.

Nope. No sign of those two.

Hauled the empty cart along, and hauled it, and hauled it, and hauled it. Finally came to my house…not at all sure I could make it through the courtyard to the front door.

But I did: unlocked the door (clumsily: hands not working well) and staggered into the house.

And now here I yam, parked in front of the wonderful table fan. Dog snoozing on the floor: thank GAWD I didn’t take it into my feeble little head to take her with me this afternoon!

It’s much, much hotter than I’d estimated: 108 degrees, sez Wunderground. That may be an understatement!

At any rate, I made it home (miraculously!) and am now cooled down.

I guess I’m going to have to go out and rent another car — or maybe buy one. Obviously, I can’t get around on foot, not in this heat.

My ears are whistling.

My heart is pounding.

I probably should go to the ER. But without a car and through this unholy heat, how on earth would I get there?

In an effort to bop me about the head and shoulders, he slipped into my garage and STOLE my car.

Did I call the cops?

No.

Well. Maybe I should have. But no, I ain’t about to sic the gendarmes on my kid.

So it’s been parked in his garage for lo! these many weeks. And my garage has been miraculously, pristinely empty for lo! the same many weeks.

And y’know what?

I don’t miss the damn thing!

Matter of fact…hang onto your communal hats,, dear readers…matter of fact, I’ve discovered that I’m glad to be rid of it. 

• No kidding. Because…no everything! 
  • No expensive gasoline refills
  • No nuisancey trips to the garage for regular maintenance
  • No surprise expensive repairs
  • No concern that someone will steal it

Turns out we have an Uber driver living right across the street…one of half-a-dozen such worthies who inhabit the ‘Hood.  If I need to go someplace that I can’t reach on foot, or where I have to haul stuff around, that Uber driver is FRONT AND CENTER.

And an occasional cab ride with a neighbor costs a fraction of what it costs to store, maintain, and fuel a gasoline-run vehicle.

Huh. You’d think, after having lived in London for awhile (where few if any residents actually owned a car), I’d have known that. Known it a long time ago! But oooohhh no!

It’s a cultural thing, I guess.

Another cultural thing — one that has sprung up in the past five or ten years — is that the  ‘Hood is awash in small businesses that cater to one’s daily, weekly, and monthly needs.

• Three major grocery stores (one of them a beloved Sprouts)
• A hair salon
• A veterinarian
• A nail salon
• A computer store
• Another computer store!
• A dentist…

It goes on and on and on…. Literally, there’s almost NO service or product that I can’t access — easily — on foot from my house. All of these and then some are within a few steps of the Funny Farm!

Why on earth did I never notice this???  

And why has it never registered with me: the piles of money I could have been saving over the years, simply by patronizing the businesses within walking distance or by hiring a cab to take me to more distant places?

Y’know, the same circumstance held forth when my mother and I lived in San Francisco, during the few years between the time my father went back to sea (he was an oil tanker captain) and the time he finally made his escape into retirement. He bought himself a fancy-dan Chrysler: quite a nice car. But because he was floating around on a ship most of the time, he never drove it.

Neither did my mother. I think she lived in fear of damaging it, which would have brought the heavens down upon her head. But more to the present point: we didn’t need that car in San Francisco. The city had more than ample public transit…and that’s what we used to get around. I rode a bus to school. The grocery store was within easy walking distance. My mother and I rode a streetcar to visit her relatives in Berkeley. If push came to shove, we might occasionally hire a taxi…rarely.

Well…. Nowadays, Phoenix is much like San Francisco was, in that you don’t need a car to get around here! Especially not with a fleet of Uber cabs in the offing.

And therein lies the crux of our present son-inspired discovery: I don’t need a car to get around here!  That thing taking up space in my garage was really just a hole in the concrete into which to pour money.

***

Well, we now have a cave on the south side of the house. My son parks his chariot in there when he comes to visit. And he’s more than welcome to it.

It has occurred to me to repurpose it as an art studio. But…do I wanna do that? Really? Something else to take care of???  

My inclination is to leave it as it is: an empty hole for His Lordship to use at his convenience. It will get his vehicle in out of the sun, come summertime: a highly desirable circumstance. Otherwise, it can just sit there. Empty.

And costing nothing!

Credible. Highly credible.

Yes. It IS seriously hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. Dawg and I are back in the house, after a brief circumnavigation of the neighborhood lane to the north of us.

LOL! Wunderground gives us an EXTREME HEAT WARNING extending from 10 a.m. tomorrow to 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Well. Sure. OK.  “Extreme”?  Seriously?  105 to 109 degrees at the height of the afternoon?  Well. Whatever you say, dear Wunderground.

I’d call that an ordinary Summer afternoon in (un)lovely Phoenix.

Yeah: hotter than Hell. You expected a balmy spring afternoon (un)lovely Phoenix, come the first days of summertime?  Good grief!

Gosh, though….this IS a pretty neighborhood. Hotter than Hell or not, it’s an attractive place to live. Think Ruby and I will stay…. 

And…that’s a serious threat…uhm…thought. Matter of fact, I’d sure like to be able to leave this house to my son. It’s a handsomely designed and well-built little castle. If and when he inherits it, he could easily sell it for half a million bucks. (Yeah: that’s only $500,000, which is about par for the neighborhood these days.)

Think o’that! He could sell this house and retire on the proceeds. Or sell his own pile and move in here for the duration. Both houses are worth about the same.

Mine is a decade or three newer than his..so this place is likely to cost him less to maintain. Plus it has a pool. Yeah, a PITA of sorts…but also mighty nice at this time of year.

LOL! A Phoenix radio station, extant some years ago, used to have a talk-show announcer who would start the day with his trademark greeting:

It’s another beautiful day in Arizona!
Leave us all enjoy it!

This particular illiteracy was apparently some sort of Midwestern dialect.

Today is another muggy, damp day in Arizona. No clouds to speak of, but the air is just plain soggy.

Just back from trudging around the park with Ruby the Corgi. Absolutely positively NOT in the mood for a morning stroll through air as thick as Jell-O. But now we’re home (at last!). The coffee is steeping. The dog is flopped on the hallway floor; the human is flopped in its favorite easy chair.

My son wants me to compile a grocery list for him. He doesn’t get the picture — and won’t, no matter how desperately I try to explain. To wit: I don’t do grocery lists! 

Nope. I know what I need, and when I get to the store, I patrol the aisles…grabbing whatever I see that needs to be replenished. Ask me face to face what those needs are, and…I dunno. 

So that will start the day with an annoyance, both for me and for my excellent son, who proposes to haul me to said store. Pore guy!

Day-dreaming while hiking this morning: remembering the Moon Valley home of a now long-gone friend. When she and her husband moved into the house, it needed a lot of superficial fix-up work. I went over there to help them: paint, drywall repair, window caulking…

It was kinda fun, though it quickly devolved into boring work, and more work than I’d had in mind doing.

Work! It’s bad for your health!

Man! Speakin’ of stupid ideas: as my brain cooked, my mind wandered to my father’s ill-fated marriage to the hair-raising Helen: the woman he took up with after my mother died.

You wanna talk about mistakes? Lemme tellya MISTAKE!

Couldn’t have been much better for Helen, either: the two of them must have been magnificently miserable after they moved in together. But him? My gawd! What a dragon lady that woman was! 

He had been unendingly happy with my mother: for decades. They were deeply in love. She was a compliant and loving woman. And they tended to think along the same lines…or at least, if they didn’t, she stifled her thoughts and made herself agree with him.

Helen, au contraire, was a woman of strong will and her own opinions. No one told her what to think, and no one told her what to do. Particularly not some guy.

He was utterly bereft after my mother died. The result: after he met Helen at the old-folkerie where he moved, he stupidly proposed marriage.

Guess he imagined one woman was much like another. That, as we know, is far from true. The result: several years of utter misery for my father.

He refused to divorce her, because — wailed he — “she’ll get all my money!”

I was too stupid to come up with a counter to that. I should’ve said Daddy! Your daughter is married to one of the most powerful lawyers in the Southwest. She’s not gonna get all your money…or any of it! 

But no: nary a word from me.

That, to produce an excuse for me, came after years of having had the sh!t beat out of me. True: I was kinda afraid of my father, even as an adult. So I wasn’t inclined to gainsay him. If he thought she’d get all his money, well…no doubt she’d get all his money. Right?

Big mistake. I should have advanced my dainty little foot and spoken up. But…well…I figured that even if he heard a word I said, he wouldn’t be swayed. He would do what he would do because…that was what he did.

As a practical matter, with that lawyer in the offing he probably would have listened to me. Or at least have taken an afternoon to meet with said lawyer and discussed the matter. So…because I kept my mouth shut, he lost a substantial part of his shirt. My bad, eh?

Well, anyway: after decades of prior marriage for each of them, they didn’t think of looking at new  matrimonial arrangements in any unconventional way. So…off they went to the altar in the typical manner: blending all their worldly goods as community property.

Don’t do that, folks.

What you want in a second (or later) marriage is sole and separate property. And you want to keep it that way!  Talk with a lawyer BEFORE you tie the knot; understand what you’re doing and be sure your lawyer reviews things properly.

If my father had done that — well, to be fair: if the two of them had done that — their lives would have been a lot happier and a lot calmer than they turned out to be. And they could have untied the knot fairly easily, with lots less pain. 

Oh, well. At least we got a little exercise. Ruby is flopped under the master bathroom toilet: in Canine Estimation, the coolest spot in the house. The Human is parked in front of a fan, swilling iced coffee.

In the Olden Days, when Whitey-Whites first lived in these environs, people would leave town for the summer. They’d go up on the “Rim,” as the high country is called, and pass the hot months there.

Yea verily: we used to own a ranch up there. We co-owners would betake ourselves to that place whenever we could.

Sure do wish we still had it!

But oh!  The little kids in the park are so delightful, frolicking around in the dawn heat! Ruby and I loafed and watched the urchins burn off the parents’ calories. Eventually it got too warm to linger, and so we ambled back to the Funny Farm.

And here we sit, continuing the loafing chore.

Thank goodness we found Pool Dude!  Otherwise, I’d be out there in the backyard with the brush and the vacuum right now, cleaning the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money. And lemme tellya: loafing, that is NOT. 

{chortle!} I do love the pool, though. Really, I ought to be out there right now paddling around in the drink. But oh, my…it really IS fricaseeing hot outside. Having come back from the park nicely parboiled, I can’t move myself to go back outdoors, even if it entails cooling off in the luxurious pool.

Phoenix, Arizona: Garden spot…

Actually, it only seems so: Wunderground tells us the current temp is a balmy 95 degrees.

Brrrr!  Break out the jacket!

Actually, 95 isn’t all that hot for Arizona. I think it’s a little sticky out there, though: but…but…no!!!!  Only 4% chance of rain; Wunderground claims we have 6% humidity.

Right, guys. R-i-i-g-h-t…

Left Ruby home while I took a short hike around the ‘Hood, not wanting to fricasee the little pooch. Being only around 6 or 8 inches tall, her furry body would be one helluva lot closer to the frying pavement than my tall, thin, and unfurry one.

Came across a neighbor beating himself to exhaustion: Here in the middle of the afternoon, the guy had DUG UP HIS LAWN to pull out part of the irrigation system, which he was trying to repair. Lordie!!!  Beat me some more!!! 

All of which goes to show that some people are even crazier than I am.

Looked around the neighborhood just south of ours, wondering….would I like to move over there?

• The houses are bigger, fancier, nicer.
• It’s a slightly more upscale slab of the neighborhood.
• Closer to the park: much to Ruby’s advantage.
• Further from the ever-threatening Sunnyslope slum…

But…but…seriously?  What AM I smoking???

• Yep: the houses are bigger, fancier…and commensurately more expensive to air-condition.
• The lots are irrigated, meaning someone has to be paid to come around and mow the grass every week or two. (Mine is gravel: virtually maintenance-free.)
• Close to the park means close to the traffic, close to crowds, close to noise.
• Further from the slums means…nothing. Two or three blocks a difference in the crime rate does not make.
• Rich people make me kuh-RAZY. No, I do not want to move into a more affluent slab of the ‘Hood.

Ahem! Okay, so much for THAT idea.

Movin’ on…