Coffee heat rising

Did She Know?

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Yeah, I believe she did. 

She knew exactly what she did, as she quietly and pleasurably and quite deliberately smoked herself into the grave.

She knew her stinking habit would kill her.

And she knew (quite correctly) that it would make her little girl sick.

The connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer became known in the 1950s.

Forgodsake, I was born in 1945.

So…yeah: when I was five years old, she knew she was making me sick.

And make me sick, she did: one gawdawful respiratory ailment after another after another. 

Yeah. I remember her simpering, one day, “Poor Dee! You’re so susceptible!” (Her nickname for me was Dee Dee. As a toddler, I couldn’t begin to pronounce the wacksh!t name she and my father inflicted on me, so baby-babble became the source of my day-to-day name.)

Gawdlmighty. If you believed your child was “susceptible” to every respiratory infection that came along and then some, WHY in the  name of God would you sit there and puff toxic fumes into her face?

Makes her sound stupid as a post, doesn’t it?

She wasn’t, though. She actually was a surprisingly smart woman — if hugely uneducated. What she was? Addicted, that’s what she was.

She was addicted to nicotine.

Even if she’d tried to stop smoking, she probably couldn’t.

Understand: She was never awake when she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth or her hands.

You knew when she woke up in the night because as you lay in your bedroom,  you could smell the f**king stink from her cancer stick: she wouldn’t lift her head from the pillow before lighting up.

She even took the damn things into the shower with her.

And — surprise! — they killed her. 

Pretty horribly, we might add. You don’t wanna die that way.

Evil, on an astronomical level: That describes the tobacco industry.  No one who is associated with it can be regarded as anything other than evil. It is an entire, huge industry based on murder.

That’s what tobacco products do: they murder you. In pain and agony and stinking horror.

Don’t let the ba*tards do that to you.

Wow! Quite the Freshet

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HOOOleeee maquerel! Just had a little freshet blow through that…well…it was impressive. That’s for sure.

It dumped enough rain to fill the pool’s water level up to the coping. FAST! In less than half an hour.

Well….the water level wasn’t high. But neither was it low. About average, I’d say. Probably would have taken the hose 45 minutes or so to add that much volume.

Looks like the clouds may be breaking up. Hope so. If this keeps on much longer, we are gonna have a problem: it’ll overflow the pool. Right now, the water is up to the coping…which means this little freshet added about two inches to the water level.

And that, folks, when you’re talking thousands of gallons, is a whole lotta water.

Wow! Back Online!!!

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Well! I did a superb job of dorking things up here at FaM a few minutes ago. Knocked the site completely offline. Disappeared my life! 😀

Looks like we’re back online now.

Honestly! Life in the 21st Century….how does anyone stand it? 😮

Oh, well. Here in the 21s, we seem to be back online. Loafing on the bed and gazing out the window at a gray, soggy day.

***

Having left the Furry Friend at home, the Human set out for a prolonged stroll. And yeah: it was a little too hot and a little too swampy out there to be hiking around the’ Hood.

But there were some compensations…

Did say “hello” to the beloved mailman. What a nice fella!

There’s a job I wouldn’t wanna have, not on a soggy day like today.

Still…one suspects it would not be the Job from Hell. Have you noticed how up-beat most mailmen seem to be? They’re uniformly cheerful, polite, and kindly. Now…consider all the other trades whose representatives are….uhm…Otherwise.

****

And now, speaking of jobs you’d druther not have… Here are Gerardo’s yard dudes….ROARING around out there!

And when we say ROAR, we ain’t kiddin’. They bring the uproar from Hell every time they visit.

Dammit! All I wanna do is take a goddamn NAP!

None o’ that, thankyouverymuch. Fuggeddaboudit. 

Well…f’r sure, I don’t wanna have to mow and weed-whack and prune this yard’s vegetation. So… {heh!} … I can’t complain TOO much.

😀

Another Icky Arizona Day!

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So we moved on from yesterday’s icky-sticky day to a rainy-looking but dry day. WHAT is going on out there?

😀

Oh well: nothing we can do about it.

The sky is festooned with thick gray clouds. Has been all morning…yet no actual rain. The Human loafs on the bed with the Dawg, watching the darkly muddled sky, in too much pain to maneuver a doggy-walk.

Somehow I spavined a hip. NO idea how! Presumably slept catty-wampus on it overnight. Whatever, it hurts, hurts, and HURTS some more. That obviates the morning hike. Hence: loafing.

Tired of hurting, this Human is.

Icky Sticky Day!

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What a nasty Arizona summer day!

So humid that it’s overcast. And hotter than a three-dollar cookstove, as my father used to say: at 4:15 in the afternoon of a summer day on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Feels a whole lot like that, right now.

Just back from a brief perambulation of the ‘Hood. It was WAY too hot for that stunt! Whatever possessed me to go out strolling around in that swamp?

Gosh, how do I miss San Francisco?  Let me count the ways….

Wait! I can’t count that high!

Well, thank goodness for Amazon! They carry the type of crunchy brown sugar I like. Like it or not, you may be sure that I do NOT feel up for trudging through this heat and humidity to buy it at the grocery store.

Ordering it online, of course, means I have to wait for it. But that’s unlikely to kill me. The stuff is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Somehow I guess I can survive that long! 😀

Seriously: this is one of the ickiest days I’ve seen here. Back porch thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of an overcast day. Not all that hot, for Arizona — far from it! But sticky and gray and gummy. Just ugly weather.

Not fond of Arizona, really. If Ian the Great didn’t live here, you couldn’t drag me across the state line…  For sure, I’d be…where…?

* The San Francisco Bay area
….or
* Western Colorado
…..or
* Parts of Nevada
…..or
* Mars…

Anyplace but here, really.

Honestly! I thought my parents had lost their collective marbles when they moved to Sun City and dumped me into school at the University of Arizona.

Forgodsake, I was set to go to UC Berkeley! I assumed that was where I would go to undergraduate school and possibly grad school.

But oooohhhhh no. It was off to, forgodsake, Tucson for their little darlin’.

Okay, they weren’t educated or sophisticated people. To my father, a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. He surely would have understood the quality of a degree from Harvard or one of the elite women’s schools. But otherwise: there wasn’t much difference. Not in his mind.

Certainly not enough difference to pay a ton of money to get a degree from a decent public university.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up with not one, not two, but three degrees from Arizona universities. Because I myself, lacking close family with degrees from private schools — Cal Berkeley was our highest mark — I had no idea what the gradations between degrees from public schools might have been. If I’d known, of course, I’d have insisted on going to a California undergraduate school. Or to a private college. But…well…I hadn’t a clue. No more than my parents did.

In-freakin’-infuriating!

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Jayzuz! Finally got the grill operating and the associated stuff organized. What a PITA!

And now I should hike down to the Albertson’s (my son kindly having purloined my car) to restock and to replace stuff that was stolen. Not up for that just this moment.

The barbecue grill has been dorked with. Think I got that un-dorked…but we shall see.

What kind of people do that kind of thing?

Right now, I’m under the weather and too sick to traipse from hither to yon to replace and repair things. So most of this stuff will have to wait a day or two.

But we ARE left with the “what kind of people” question. Should I fire my cleaning lady? There really isn’t much of anyone else who could have fiddled with this stuff. So it’s probably safe — or at least in the ball park of “safe,” — to assume that she’s responsible for these handy-dandy PITAs.

Yea, verily: there’s no question that somebody has been in the yard, and they dorked things up with élan, Whoever came a-visiting did so with the purpose of making trouble.

And make trouble they did.

What with the spavined hip, I am in too much pain to hike to any of the nearby supermarkets. Guess I should ask the neighbor — Mrs. WonderAccountant — to drive me to the store the next time she goes. That would be a lot less hassle than wrangling with Uber.

Still….that feels like an imposition on her.

What a mess!!!