La Maya and a cousin of La Bethulia’s dropped by early this morning to pick me up on the way to an estate sale in the fancy part of a far-flung arm of the galaxy. The house was located in the elegant suburbs of far, far, far north Scottsdale.
Actually, it dwelt in a small patch of tract houses surrounded by large, expensive late-model houses on acre-plus lots. The tract itself consisted of modestly sized structures—maybe 1,600 to 2,000 square feet—on typical tiny tract lots, what we dinosaurs would call “patio homes” but today’s mammals think of as full-sized family houses. Its saving grace was that its tiny backyard looked out over a vast swath of undisturbed open space, giving it a view across only lightly raped Sonoran desert all the way to the mountains that ring the Valley. Very pretty. Maybe even pretty enough to justify the $600,000 asking price for three tiny bedrooms, a single living area dominated by a wall of ungainly niches built to house a hulking television and an array of large speakers, and not a single wall anywhere broad enough to hold a decent bookcase.
At any rate, the owner had a flair for decorating. We got there a little late to grab the nicest things, but we did see a nice array of lovely Asian pottery and ceramics, many beautiful clothes (once incredibly expensive but all, alas, in the smaller petite sizes), and some very nice artwork. But Gini, the sale proprietor, kept slipping new things onto the countertops as buyers cleared the merchandise, and so, stepping into the kitchen at just the right moment, I scored this nice old carving set:
The blades are carbon steel, a feature much coveted in the Aptosaurus family. M’hijito loves the carbon-steel knives I passed to him after SDXB nabbed them in a yard sale and gave them to me. Tho’ they’re softer than stainless and can’t be left to corrode in a puddle of water on the drainboard, they sharpen easily and take a beautiful edge.
See those little decorative collars at the top end of the handles? Those are marked “sterling.” There’s no maker’s mark on the blade or fork, but the sterling silver deco touch suggests they’re good pieces, like everything else the woman owned. I think the handles may be bone or possibly horn, not plastic. And the blade has been sharpened many times.* The pieces have a little corrosion, as if they were put away and forgotten at some point. I’ll bet the owner inherited it, or else acquired it early in her marriage and kept it all her adult life.
Meanwhile… The tail end of Hurricane Jimena has been drifting north across the Chihuahan and Sonoran deserts, and now it has ambled into the Valley. On the way home we passed through a sharp storm cell, the lightning copious and the rain ferocious. About the time we hit the freeway it really started to fire-hose. People were pulling off onto the shoulder, but La Maya managed to make it to an offramp several miles north of our neighborhood. This put us in the middle of an electrical storm. At one point a lightning bolt struck just a few yards from us. Its C-R-R-A-C-K and BOOM shook La Maya’s sturdy RAV-4 and all three of us yelped at once!
But we outran it a little south of Thunderbird, where the North Mountains blocked the blustery clouds’ passage long enough for us to run ahead of the rain and lightning until we reached our part of town. We were mighty glad to see the rain, and just as glad to get off the road and inside a building!
It caught up with us as I was running from the car to the front door. Just had time to power down and unplug the Mac (which I had stupidly left sleeping despite the encroaching storm) and heat some breakfast before the lightning threatened to fry the local power lines. Now the noise and heavy downpour have come and gone, and we have a lovely steady rain, temperatures in the balmiest of mid-seventies. Lovely!
Next week will be very busy. I’ve fallen behind in my plan to stockpile posts, and so today’s post is today’s post. But have many things to share and so will carve out as much time as I can find this weekend to write and schedule the next few days’ entries. If I miss a day or two, it’s not because I’ve forgotten you but because this fall’s expected flood of work is starting to rise.
Am I the only so-o-o-cialist in the world who is annoyed at the way my homeowner’s insurance floats ever upward to cover the cost of homes that people deliberately build in harm’s way? Does anyone else wonder why local governments issue building permits in disaster-prone areas and why state and federal governments do nothing to discourage or prevent people from moving into areas where lives and property are put at risk? Is there really any justification for having you and me pay when houses built in the way of floods, tornadoes, and fires are reduced to piles of ash or sodden sludge?
In 2004, disaster-related economic costs in this country exceeded $145 billion, up from the $3.9 billion annual cost in the 1950s. The problem is not so much storms and fires allegedly related to global warming but the fact that too many people are building in risky areas. In Canada, where an expanding population is moving into forest fire-prone areas, citizens saw their homowner’s premiums rise 4.3 percent in 2001 over the previous year, a rise of 9.4 percent from 1997.
New Orleans was known to be at risk of disastrous hurricane damage for years before Katrina struck. Yet people were allowed to continue living and building in districts that scientists and government agencies recognized would flood—and flood catastrophically—when a major hurricane hit the city. Little was done to rebuild the eroded marshes and barrier islands that, before human intervention, protected the site where the city stands. Many parts of the coastal Southeast are prone to powerful storms and major flooding; the Midwest is notorious for its tornadoes, yet people are permitted to live in flimsy mobile homes throughout these regions.
And then we have California: what possesses humanity to build its homes in canyons whose ecology is evolved to thrive in brushfire?
Yes. Chaparral actually needs fire to germinate. Nature has designed plants that grow along the West Coast to function like torches. They’re bombs waiting to explode. This is something that has been widely known for years. But how do we respond? We let people build deep in a fire zone, and then we underwrite their short-sightedness.
When an insurer pays to rebuild a house incinerated in one of these fires, the operative word is we. The insurance company raises everyone’s rates to help cover its losses. This year the losses in California are likely to be huge. Topanga Canyon alone houses over 5,400 people. It is an area of extreme fire hazard and today is among many populated areas in the path of the vast wildfire presently consuming a large swath of Southern California, where more than 12,000 homes are at risk.
Why should firefighters lose their lives and every homeowner in the country see their insurance costs soar because foolish people insist on living in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains, areas where wildfires and mudslides are part of the local environment’s natural cycle? Instead of relying on insurance companies to cover untoward and foolish risk and then screaming when the companies refuse to insure homes in disaster-prone regions—or raise premiums out of sight—we should be passing laws that prohibit people from deliberately building structures whose likely destruction will hit everyone’s pocketbooks.
Now, I yearn to get out of the city’s anthill as much as anyone else, and if I had enough money to build a manse in the Santa Monica hills, I’d be sorely tempted. But maybe if people who crave and can afford a pleasant, quiet environment were forced to stay in the city with the rest of us peons, we’d all have more livable cities! If, instead of running away from poorly planned, blight-ridden urban areas, wealthy homeowners lived in their cities, the money and political influence they would bring to the urb would fuel renovation, improvement, effective crime control, enforcement of noise abatement laws, better schools, walkable shopping districts, decent public transport, and green space.
And the rest of us would have lower homeowner’s insurance premiums.
One homeowner died in this fire; his teenaged son suffered burns, as did four firefighters who attempted to rescue them. Four migrant workers also are thought to have died in the Harris fire. Nine hundred thousand people were evacuated, and a power emergency was declared after several major transmission lines, including the 500,000-volt power line from Arizona to San Diego, were damaged.
Allah be praised!That 90,000-mile megaservice that was supposed to lighten my bank account to the tune of $1,200? Chuck the Mechanic par Extraordinaire charged me $221.
Whence this generosity, you ask.
Well, he checked his records—he keeps computerized records of all his customer’s work—and discovered that I had insisted on changing the timing belt at 60,000 miles. Mike the Other Mechanic par Extraordinaire observed that there was no need to have changed it then: it should have lasted at least 90,000 miles and maybe more than that. He thinks the thing won’t need to be changed until the car reaches about 120,000 miles.
Think of that.
If I’d taken the car to the Toyota dealer, a) they wouldn’t have known the timing belt had been changed early; and b) even if they did, dollars to donuts they would have gone ahead with the full 90,000 whackaroo by way of extracting $1,350 (their price for the same routine service job) from my wallet. Really, Mike and Chuck could easily have gotten away without cluing me that there was no need to change the timing belt. I was resigned to having to pony up over a grand and had the money sitting on the altar waiting to be sacrificed to the gods of internal combustion. I would never have been the wiser.
Well! This leaves $1,000 in my post-Canning Day survival fund! Matter of fact, I probably can cover most or all of that $221 bill with this month’s paycheck, leaving the whole $1,200 in savings.
And that’s why honest mechanics never have to advertise.
Gawdlmighty! The 90,000-mile service on my aging Toyota Sienna is gunna cost $1,200!
It’s enough to make a strong woman faint. Well, luckily I knew about this and set the money aside. But that doesn’t make me any happier about having to sink 12 C-notes into a nine-year-old vehicle.
For the money, Chuck the Mechanic Par Excellence proposes to do the regular 90,000-mile service, change the timing belt, and replace the water pump, it being an opportune moment to do that—while the front end of the motor is off, anyway. I happen to know, too, that he’ll lubricate the squeaking steering wheel, probably for not much, and that he’ll check the brake pads, rotate the tires, and change all the hoses.
Suspecting that Chuck’s estimate was a little high, I called a couple of Toyota dealers. One proposed to charge me $350 for the basic 90,000 service; another wanted $300 for the same thing, claiming it was a “special” markdown from the usual price of $360. Uh huh. Then it’s another $300 for the water pump plus another $300 for three seals that may or may not need to be changed plus $65 for “outside belts.” Plus $335 for the timing belt. If I’m not mistaken, that would be $1,300 to $1,350, depending on which stalwart Toyota dealer one chooses to do business with.
Makes Chuck’s fee look like a bargain. And I know he’s not going to cheat me. Past experience suggests that is not always a given with automobile dealerships.
{sigh} So I made an appointment for a week from Friday.
Well, it’s a heckuva lot cheaper than buying a new car. Normally, I’d trade in a vehicle at ten years. But now that I’m about to be canned, with no hope (or desire…) of getting another job, this car is going to have to run until it falls apart. Chuck thinks it will easily get 150,000 miles, which should carry it another six years. And it could, in theory, run to 180,000 miles, or another nine years. Barring an accident, of course.
A crash that results in the insurance company totaling it (which right now would probably be a fender-bender) will leave me up the creek, since I do not and will not ever have enough cash to buy another car. Nor will I ever again have enough cash flow to make car payments. Every penny in savings, including the $18,000 I had set aside for the next vehicle, now will have to be rolled into the funds intended to support me in my dotage. If I can get this car to run ten more years, it will be the last car I’ll ever own.
Really, in ten years I’ll only be 74, and so I may still be competent to drive. What’s $18,000 now will likely be $36,000 then…hmmm… With no steady job, I’d have to set aside $3,600 a year to collect enough extra money to buy a car in 2019. {snark!} Now there’s a realistic goal!
😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆
Oh well. Thirty-six hundred bucks would buy 180 twenty-dollar cab rides. That’s a trip to the grocery store about every two days.
Too bad we don’t have decent public transportation here. Thirty-six hundred bucks—just one year of car savings—would buy 2,057 all-day bus or train tickets. That would be unlimited rides every single day for 5 years and 7 months! Alas, in these parts a single trip to the grocery store and home on the buses would consume a whole day. I could fill the entire remainder of my life with waiting at bus stops and then waiting for buses to get where I want to go.
La Maya and La Bethulia have made up their minds to sell their beautiful, hacienda-like house down here in the Valley and move to Prescott, a more or less historic town in the cool upland parts of the Colorado Plateau. The redoubtable La B is applying for jobs there, and if she lands one (a foregone conclusion!), the house goes on the market forthwith.
So La Maya invited me on a real-estate expedition to Prescott in the near future. That should be entertaining. She’s already spotted a couple of houses online that she wants to see.
Cottonwood tree in fall
I’ve toyed with the idea of moving to Prescott myself, and with two of my best friends about to make the leap, it’s something to consider again. Summers here are getting really obnoxious. Temps of 110 degrees are tolerable, but when it gets up to 115 (or higher) and stays there, day after endless day, it’s just not livable. And whether or not you believe in global warming, it looks like what used to be a fluke is settling into the routine now: these extreme temperatures have happened for the past several years.
After the recent astronomical power bill, I turned the thermostat up to 85 degrees. Eighty-five is balmy enough when you’re outdoors in the open air, or when you can open up the house and let the outside air flow through. But when you’re cooped up in a boxful of stale air, 85 degrees is just plain hot. The house felt hot when I came in the back door from work, and it feels hot now. Most of the rooms, including the office where I’m writing this post with two fans blasting on me, really are uncomfortable.
And of course, there’s the ongoing drudgery (and cost) of pool maintenance.
Just imagine living someplace where it’s always cool enough to sleep at night! Where the locals think a 90-degree day is pretty darned hot.
Dang. With retirement coming up and GDU beside itself with joy at the very thought of farming out online scams courses to underpaid adjuncts, MOVE TO PRESCOTT oughta be a no-brainer. But being myself, of course I have to chew over all the possibilities.
Number One issue: What, really, is it gunna cost to move up there?
The last move I made took me across all of a block and a half. It cost about a thousand dollars. On the same day, a dear friend moved about five miles across the city. She paid two thousand dollars, and the difference in outcomes proved that my choice was radically penny-wise and pound-foolish. I won’t go into detail about the cocaine-snorting movers whose discarded baggy clogged the toilet, causing it to overflow at exactly the moment my Realtor called to say the buyer was on her way over for the walk-through… Suffice it to say that it was The Move from Hell. After this, Funny ponies up enough to hire a decent moving company.
Well. To move my belongings a block and a half, the cut-rate chuckleheads I hired had to make two trips. Assuming I hire a major cross-country carrier, presumably they’ll bring a truck big enough to hold everything. Even so, it will take the better part of a day to load the contents of a four-bedroom house, and then it’s a two-hour drive to from here to Prescott.
Let’s give them ten hours for the first day; they stay overnight (do I pay for their time in a Prescott motel?); then they spend the better part of another day unloading.
If I don’t have to pay for their down time while they overnight in Prescott, then we’re looking at about $2,000. If they get paid $100 an hour for sleeping in a motel, dining, and eating breakfast, we can add another $1,000 to that. I’ll bet about $3,000 is conservative for a city-to-city move.
Now we have the cost of selling this house and buying a new one. Guess who gets stuck with all the closing costs? These days, sellers routinely are being asked to pay for the buyer’s closing costs, meaning to unload this place I’ll probably have to pay more than just the Realtor’s 6 to 8 percent fee (on $270,000, that will come to $16,200 to $21,600!). And how likely is it, really, that a Realtor who is invested in getting me to buy a house in Prescott is going to press for a seller to cover an out-of-towner’s costs, especially if that out-of-towner has sold her own home and now has no place to live?
We’re looking at a bare minimum of $19,200 in selling and moving costs…and that’s before we learn that the water heater is crapping out, the dishwasher doesn’t work, the refrigerator leaks, and the wiring is not to code! Add the usual three percent of purchase price for the inevitable fix-up and nasty surprises: since I’ll only be able to afford about $250,000 for the Prescott dwelling, that will tote up to a mere $7,500 in first-year costs.
So: this proposed move could easily take $26,700 out of my pocket. Or more.
Compared to a $50 increase in summer power bills…uhm… Does that compute?
Number Two issue: Once I get there, then what?
Well, I’ll have two, count ’em, two friends: La Maya and La Bethulia. My son will still be here.
I kinda like being able to see M’hijito now and again. Sometimes he even drops by on the way home from work! If I lived in Prescott, I’d be lucky to see him three or four times a year.
Then, if seeing my pal who lives in Waddell takes an Act of Congress and logistics like those required to move the Continental Army, how likely is it that I’ll ever see her again? Or VickyC, whose social life is so vibrant she has to be trapped with a butterfly net to get her into my slow-moving orbit?
And then we have the choir. Ah, yes. The choir. Prescott undoubtedly has ladies who sing in church. But I can tell you for sher: it doesn’t have a choir anchored by a half-dozen professional singers, nor is it likely that any choir directors up there are engineering a lot of performances by members of the fifth-largest city in the nation’s symphony. Betcha no one up there has a multimillion-dollar organ and a church designed to accommodate it, either… Do I really want to walk away from that, now that the director has agreed to let me come back?
Number Three issue: What if I don’t like it?
Another friend, having served on her homeowner’s association board during a difficult time and felt alarmed about the wackos who rose out of the swamp to threaten board members, decamped to Cottonwood, the blue-collar suburb (as it were) of Californicated Prescott. Her son lived there, where he worked with his father building upscale housing for wealthy California expatriates.
She was sadly mistaken in imagining her son would welcome her presence. He and his second wife decided her highest and best use was to babysit their brats. She was in a wheelchair; they lived in a two-story house. You see the mentality, eh?
Before the car wreck that landed her in the wheelchair, she had been a high-powered corporate executive. Child care was, shall we say, not her forté.
On top of this depressing turn of events, she found herself in a place where she had no friends, no social infrastructure, and nothing to do. She hated it. But because it had cost her a lot of money to move, she was pretty much stuck. And that’s where she resides, unhappily, to this day.
Well. If I can’t afford $26,700 to move up to Prescott (and I surely can’t!), as you might imagine, I won’t be able to afford a similar hit to move back into Phoenix. Or anywhere else. Once I’m there, I’m there. And the prospect of ending up in my friend’s predicament does not appeal.
And finally…
Number Four issue: Is the grass really greener on the other side of that fence?
The lawn is already showing the effects of a certain amount of blow-torching, wouldn’t you say? But the above three matters aside, it’s not altogether clear to me that, other than slightly more clement weather during two or three summer months, Prescott has $26,700 worth of advantages to offer.
Trade-off for a warm summer? Cold winters! It snows in Prescott. Rarely does the snow stick on the ground, but what does stick on the ground is ice. I personally am not fond of driving on ice. And while I think 60 degrees is fine for sleeping, 30 degrees does not seem like the ideal snoozing temp. During the winter, Prescott’s lows drop into the teens.
Brrrr, I say to that!
Then it must be remembered that Prescott is a small town. I am a city girl. Not only that, but I’m a raving bitch. Make one enemy in a small town, and you might as well start wearing a red letter on your bodice. I know: I’ve lived in a small town. They can be even worse than homeowner’s associations.
The past few mornings, Cassie the Corgi and I have awakened to 70-degree mornings. These days have been truly lovely until 10:00 or so…and we’re still in early August. Temperatures were tolerable enough, if warm, until the middle of June. So we’re really only talking about maybe six or eight weeks of really awful weather. The rest of the time, this is a gorgeous place to live.
And a lot of stuff goes on here. In a couple of weeks, Kathy and I will go to an evening of jazz to benefit a charity that VickyC supports. Recently we attended a very fine chamber music concert in the Phoenix Art Museum. And, for that matter, every Sunday is chamber music morning down at the church meetin’ hall.
Furthermore, the Valley hosts the largest community college district in the country. As long as I live here, there’ll always be teaching gigs for me. Not my favorite work, but better than driving the zoo train or selling cosmetics at Walgreen’s. Prescott has only three institutions of higher ed: an aeronautical school; a junior college, and a small, rather eccentric private liberal-arts college. None of these will pay as much as the Maricopa County College District, which itself is presently offering adjuncts about $500/course less than the Great Desert University pays, nor will they have as many openings. And while it’s true that GDU offers many online courses, a) there’s no guarantee enough courses will be available to keep me going; b) if you’re not physically present to remind departmental chairs that you exist, you soon will be superceded by someone who is present; and c) I have some ethical issues with online instruction, which I regard as passing fraudulent.
Maybe if La Maya and La Bethulia make their way to Prescott, I can have my cake and eat it too: stay here, save 30 grand or so, and visit them when the weather’s hot here!
If you haven’t seenSeattle’s best answer to a heat wave, check out Paul’s guide to how to make your own air conditioner, complete with detailed photos, over at Fiscal Geek.
It being hotter than a three-dollar cookstove here in lovely uptown Arizona just now, I decided the damped-down central HVAC $y$tem needed a little boost along these lines. Copper tubing is beyond my girlie handyperson skills, though…also beyond my level of industry, in 115-degree heat.
But a fan: I have a fan. It’s parked on my desk, where it blows directly on me, especially during the afternoon, when 82 degrees at the hall thermostat translates to about 90 degrees in the back bedroom that is my office. And down on the bottom of the deep freezer I happen to have an old gallon orange-juice bottle, filled with frozen water. That’s ice, for the nonengineers among us.
Not only that, but I have Arizona folkways. The old buzzards used to say (long before I was an old buzzard myself) that before the advent of refrigeration, the few hardy Phoenicians brave enough (or poor enough) to spend the summer in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun would stay cool by hanging wet towels over the cages of electric fans. This always sounded a little apocryphal to me…how did they survive electrocution, in the era of ungrounded plugs? But who am I to question my elders, eh?
So, I decided to try a couple of adaptations to Paul’s schema. These would rely on only one electrical device—the fan—rather than a fan and an aquarium pump, and would not require any manly tools to construct.
First, we have the Old Frontier version of swamp air conditioning.
This thing, in case you don’t recognize it right off the bat, is the rack that comes with a clothes dryer, on which you’re supposed to lay out flat stuff and tennis shoes to be dried, tumble-free. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve finally found a use for it.
And this? A wet rag. Actually, it’s a wet flour-sacking type kitchen towel.
The clothes dryer rack is clunky enough that it almost stands on edge by itself. Conveniently, though, our abbreviated five-foot shelf of reference works resides atop the desk, right next to the fan’s summertime abode.
This allowed me to prop the rack against a couple of the books, a maneuver that stood the rack up steadily enough to tolerate the wet rag without falling over and keeps the wet rag from contacting the electric fan. Just in case, though, I laid a section of the New York Times on the desktop, underneath the rack and its damp covering.
Then it was just a matter of…yes! turning on the fan!
Thar she blows!
This invention works best when the fan is set to full blast. At lower speeds, the wet towel, even though its fabric is pretty lightweight, blocks the air flow enough to leave you wondering what happened to the breeze.
The effect is…well…a bit swampy. Gives you some insight into why our City Grandparents decamped to the high country every summer.
Moving on… The first attempt with a plastic-encased block of ice looked like this:
Knowing the frozen bottle would sweat in the heat and suspecting its lid would leak, I put a cookie sheet (girlie tool) underneath it. Further concerned that the cold and possible condensation under the aluminum sheet could damage the fine surface of my superb cut-rate on-sale desk, I set a trivet under the bottle. This, I figured, would allow air to flow under the cold object, as well as around and over it.
In a later version, I put the trivet beneath the cookie sheet. This provided better balance. The slippery bottle, unevenly inflated as the water inside expanded while freezing, wanted to skid off the trivet; this arrangement proved a lot more stable. The aesthetic is tidier, too:
And how do these schemes work? Well, I’d say the ice block strategy is marginally more efficient than a wet towel on a fan. Interestingly, the ice block scheme cools better as the water inside melts and the plastic jug’s exterior sweats a layer of water. Probably the cooling effect comes from the water’s evaporation. In either lash-up, the fan has to be set on high to create any noticeable cooling effect.
IMHO, the effect is much enhanced by the application of ice to bourbon and water.
