Coffee heat rising

Real Estate Awe

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Wanna see something that’ll drop your jaw? 

Take a look at this mansion…

The place is in Fountain Hills, an upscale tract on the northeast side of Scottsdale.

WHAT A WRECK! And they want four hundred grand for it!

Hey. Fountain Hills is real tony and all that…and yeah, you could walk to the Mayo Clinic from there. But…good lord! EVERYTHING in this shack would have to be renovated, including the pool and the landscaping.

Well. I guess it tellsya: Rich people will let real estate go to wrack and ruin, too. 😀

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But doesn’t it boggle your mind? I mean, when you consider what that place should be worth… Fountain Hills is one of the toniest subdivisions in the Valley — probably in the entire state.

I can’t even imagine letting a place like that…in a location like that!…go down the tubes.

Even if they used it as a rental, it’s hard to believe anyone with half a functioning brain cell would have turned it into a wreck.

Four hundred grand at auction. Hell, I wouldn’t give them four hundred bucks for it. Just imagine what it will cost to restore that place to a livable house in a radically upscale subdivision!

Clicking through the images takes your breath away, doesn’t it?  Really…the best you could do with this place is to level it and build a new house. And that would require you to get your hands on it for one helluva lot less than 400 grand.

Wow!!

Palm Tree Heebie Jeebies

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Should I have those trees taken out?

The WonderAccountants — my neighbors straight across the street — removed the palm trees that were growing along the edges of their pool. And they surely seemed not to regret it…yea, verily, Mr. W.A. was very pleased.

Whose idea was it, in the first place, to plant PALM TREES next to a swimming pool??? They don’t throw enough shade to matter. But what a mess those damn things make!!!

Every year, I’ve got to get someone in here several times per season to shovel out the palm tree debris. And once a year, someone has to climb 50 or 100 feet up each one of the damn things and prune out the dead fronds and seed stuff.

What kind of moron plants a palm tree next to a swimming pool? To say nothing of FOUR goddamn palm trees, which is what we’ve got surrounding that pool in the backyard!

Next big project, I guess, will need to be to hire a lumberjack to come in here and cut those damn things down. My neighbors across the street — the beloved and brilliant WonderAccountants — did exactly that. And they’re pleased with the result.

Accenting today’s palm tree conundrum, we have today’s unholy weather. Incredibly hot. Incredibly humid: 9 percent humidity, saith Wunderground (that, I would say, is conservative).

Truth to tell, though: I dunno that I’ll be staying here long enough to make it worth the cost of hiring someone to come in and chop down those damn palm trees. My son would like to consign me to a cringe-making old-folkerie called the Beatitudes. It’s better, as far as I can tell, than other places like it in the Phoenix area. But…it still is basically a prison.

Still…I hafta admit: it’s hard to see how I could manage staying in my home, on my own, until I reach the Last Breath. The cost of hiring someone to babysit me through these final years would be just brain-banging. Plus…who is going to ride herd on this worthy person? My son, after all, has a job, of all the astonishing things.

So he can’t be here keeping an eye on any such character.

Hm.

Here’s a thought. Wanna see me scare the bejayzus out of a young man?  😀  Picture this:

We could hire a babysitter for me, right?  Only instead of having her come here to ride herd on me, we have me and her go down to my son’s house (he works out of his home) and stay there during the week days.

Voilà! If I can be trained to stay out of his hair, he can do his work, and the sitter can fix lunch and dinner for us both and then drive me back to the Funny Farm.

Doesn’t THAT sound like fun?

😀

Mwa ha ha!

Good(?) Morning, America!

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NINETY-FIVE DEGREES in the shade of the back porch, at 7:00 in the morning!  Hoooleeeee shee-ut!  How hot IS it supposed to get today?

Hmmm….  Saith Wunderground: 108 degrees, with 23% humidity.

Dog and Human are just back from our morning stroll — around the park and through the hood, the air so thick you could swim through it. Yea, verily: it’s mighty hot and sticky out there.

Ohhhh well: at least we’re exercised. After a fashion.

What new horrors are on the calendar?  Checking…

Hmmmm… Doesn’t look like anything. One can only hope…

What I am hoping is that my son doesn’t have one of the housekeeper/babysitters slated to descend on me this morning. What a NUISANCE those women are!

Not through any fault of their own. It’s my eccentricity that creates the problem. I strongly prefer my aloneness. I really, really don’t like people underfoot. And especially not strangers. Not hired help.

Oh, well. If one of the poor dears shows up, I’ll make her drive me to the Sprouts and the Albertson’s. That’ll soak up the better part of her morning, anyway. Then maybe I can pretend to take a nap, which will extract an hour or two of relative privacy.

At any rate, at least the little dawg is exercised, and we got out before the pavement could burn her feet. If there’s any question in your mind about whether this place is a precinct of Hell, all you need to do to resolve that question is to visit in June, July, or August.

I could brain my father for dragging us here when he retired. Too late, though: his brains have been reduced to a pile of ashes. 😀

Seriously, I assumed that we would stay in San Francisco, near my mother’s relatives. Or at least in Southern California, where my parents had lived before we decamped to Saudi Arabia.

Jayzuz! TEN YEARS in that Middle-Eastern Hell-Hole. Can you imagine?

Actually, for my mother and me it was a mere nine years. Toward the end of his planned sojourn out there, she came down with amoebic dysentery. Almost died from it. But she did recover, at which point her doctors told my parents that she needed to get out of Arabia and come back to the States, where she could get better medical care and get away from the endemic parasites.

So, to his infinite disgust, my father had to quit the job that he figured would support him into early retirement. He sent my mother and me to San Francisco (where surviving members of her family lived); stayed in Arabia until the end of his contract (another nine months); and then got a first mate’s job shipping out of the East Bay.

Poor guy! All his plans went down the toilet. He’d figured to spend another year or two in Hell, and then retire — that’s how much Americans got paid out there. But alas, ’twas not to be!

Thank Gawd, from my mother’s and my point of view…

Anyway…the air here is not as soggy this morning as it used to be by dawn’s early light in Araby. But by comparison with what’s normal here, it’s darned sticky!

Out the Door Again….

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…And into the swampy morning. Ugh!!!! Is it ever HOT and WET and STICKY out there!

But we managed to make a circumambulation of the garden spot that is our neighborhood.

Walked by SDXB’s old house. The city GAVE it to a woman who was dispossessed of her own home by construction of an airport runway. As you might imagine, she seems kinda uncomfortable here in Upper Middle America: basically she hides inside her house. Ring the doorbell, and she won’t come out.

She will, however, purloin any packages that Amazon leaves there mistakenly. The street number is the same as mine, AND the road name is almost identical: Lane instead of Way. Even when I enter an extra line in my address for Amazon, reading “WAY, NOT LANE!” they still deliver things to her place.

Guess what I should do is have Amazon purchases delivered to my son’s house. But…what would be the point of that?  If I have to drive to his place to buy something, I might as well just walk across Main Drag West to buy it.

{sigh} Sure do wish SDXB were still living here in the ’Hood. He moved to Sun City, where he’s living (I think…some question about that) happily ever after. He quickly picked up a new girlfriend out there…meaning she’s the one who has to take care of him in what apparently is his final illness.

I’ve lived in Sun City. Hated it! Wouldn’t go back there on a bet. Not if you paid me!

  • The jet engine racket from nearby Luke Air Force Base defies belief.
  • So does the level of Hate among the locals.
  • At the time I was there, they didn’t have a decent grocery store. If frozen crap and junk food appealed, you were fine. But if you wanted fresh veggies and meat: fuggedaboudit.
  • It’s a long, LONG way from where my son lives. I’d hardly ever see him if I moved out there.
  • The houses are cheaply built. You, too, can air-condition the Great Outdoors!

The ‘Hood is centrally located, on the high end of the upscale North Central section of lovely uptown Phoenix, bordered on two sides by dire slums.

Hmmmm…looks like our software is hanging. So: outta here! 

Thank Goodness for Amazon!

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Saudi-style weather: Hot, wet, sticky. Eighty-four degrees right now, at 7:20 in the morning: 105 predicted.

Out the door with the corgi, at dawn’s early light. Everyone else has the same idea: we have to circumvent the park to evade the potential dog fights.

Cleaning lady on her way this morning. That….

wait wait wait! It’s not the cleaning lady! WonderAccountant (who lives across the street, BTW) reports that her understanding is the woman who is supposed to show up is more on the order of a babysitter…hired by Dear Son.

Ohhhhh gooooodie…  

Just what I need: someone new to poke her nose into my business…

Mwa ha ha! Today, what we’ll have her poke her nose into is a grueling trip to Sprouts!  Poor babe….

Seriously: I need a few grocery items, but not enough to justify trudging block after block through 100-degree heat. If any such person does show up, what we’ll do right off the bat is put her up to schlepping around.

Hmmmmm……  Along that line, d’you suppose Sprouts delivers? If it does…how does one engineer that?

Hmmmmm….. They do deliver, but….the process to order up stuff is brain-banging. And it’s not clear that they deliver in this area.

Anyway, I can order up the dawg food from Amazon. Fresh groceries: apparently not so much.

Well. Let’s see if the proposed woman shows up here. If she does, first thing we do to make her crazy is ask her to schlep us over to the Sprouts. From there: straight downhill, the poor child!

😀

 

Lunch at the ‘Que…

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Got a steak and an ear of corn on the grill. But.. WTF? They don’t seem to be cooking!

It is horrifically hot out there in the backyard. The meat and corn oughta cook by themselves: just set ém out on the back table, eh? But they’re hardly browning…surely not charring, that’s for sure!

Hm. The grill is on. There’s plenty of propane. But it’s barely running.

Guess I’ll have to put this stuff on the stove to cook. Then call the BBQ guy to come fix…whatever’s wrong with it.

Goodie! Just what I wanted to do on a 100-degree day!