Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! WordPress let me into the Funny about Money site!
Who’d’ve thunk it? Especially given that this is a Whatever Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong day. Ugh!
After slamming around and bamming around and hurting like Hell and trying to figure out how to talk my son into driving me to stores (since he insists he doesn’t want me to drive) and realizing that ain’t a-gonna work and crashing the computer and re-crashing the computer and spavining the sore shoulder even more with the damn laundry and…gawdlmighty…here I am with the computer unplugged and for reasons incomprehensible the extension cord not reaching to where it usually goes (did Wonder-Cleaning-Lady move the cords? WHY?????).
Bang around and slam around and bang around some more. Figure out what W-C-L did to suit her taste in extension cords. Undo that tidy mess and reconstitute my own untidy mess.
Think maybe I can slither down to the Sprouts on the corner, where His Lordliness is unlikely to catch me, and get most of the things I need. If they don’t carry toilet paper (for unholy and unknowable reasons, the Funny Farm’s supply of TP is bare!), then I can sneak across the road to the Albertson’s, put my life on the line dodging panhandlers, and pick up the paper goods there. Whee. What fun.
So whenever the dryer buzzes again and the stuff in there is (painfully!) unloaded, it’s off to the store. Ohhhhhh goodie…I can hardly wait.
Y’know, I rather hate grocery shopping under the best of circumstances. But here in this state of Invalidism, the last goddamn thing I wanna do is take on the traffic, dodge the bums, find something (anything) that resembles a decent roll of TP in the Land of Politically Correct groceries, dodge some more bums to slither back to the car, trudge back up to the ‘Hood through annoying traffic and around stoners stumbling into the roadway,… AAAARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH!
***
Grrrr grrrr grrrrrrr….. This is just ducky. See that pile of cheap apartments? You can walk there from my son’s house. It’s right around the corner from his place.
Translation: Neither of our neighborhoods is safe. This whole damn city is L.A. Redux, a hole in the desert into which to house trash.
And mayhem has become pretty much SOP: business as usual for lovely North Central Phoenix.
This morning the neighbors here in the ‘Hood awakened at dawn to a serenade of gunshots. Nobody on the neighborhood Facebook page is fessing up, but apparently either a couple of sh!theads had at each other as they cruised the public streets, or one of the householders took off after yet another home invader.
{sigh} What a garden spot!
If my son were not living in the central district — by way of being close to both his father and to me — I would be soooooo GONE from this place. Really, it’s very dangerous. Centrally located and convenient: just dandy. But it’s also centrally located and convenient for every sh!thead in the Valley.
Truth to tell, the only Maricopa County districts I would choose to live in are Cave Creek/Carefree and Fountain Hills. Either is a good hour’s drive from here, through homicidal traffic. And that factoid makes Sedona and waypoints outside of Tucson look good. For that matter, Santa Fe looks mighty good by comparison, too.
But meanwhile…the centrally located districts where we live are OUTTA SIGHT when it comes to prices: as we see when surfing the million-dollar range for rather ordinary, aging upper-middle-class shacks. It really is L.A. redux. How are they getting people to pay these insane prices?
M’jito is now working 100% out of his home. This saves his employer vast quantities of money on office space — meaning the good ole’ days are unlikely to return. Meaning, further, that going forward, most white-collar folk may be working from homes, meaning…they can live anywhere they choose. And so…WHY would anyone choose to live here, when one could live in…
* Sedona
* Prescott
* The suburbs of Tucson
* Fountain Hills
* Flagstaff
*Anywhere but here?????????
Man! If I were a young person and in that fine position, you may be sure I would NOT be camped in mid-town Phoenix. Even if you wanted to hang out in this general area to be close to relatives, there are many better places to set down.
In fact, I would be trying to persuade the honored parents to move out of the central districts, since neither of them has a commute to worry about anymore. Get them to move where you want to live, and follow them there.
***
Egad! One of the neighbors has posted, on the local Facebook page, that their dog spooked, ran off, got hit by a car, kept running, and is now lost.
Ruby and I are on our way out, to search for the wayward pooch. Hope it has survived and is still in the ‘Hood somewhere.
Outta here!