Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Wow! Clo$e call…

by

Sometimes you accidentally do things that redound to your benefit….or magnificently against your benefit.

Check this out: I almost bought a condo right in this area. Smack in the middle of rapidly redeveloping downtown Phoenix. Now, our honored leaders are about to insert TEN HIGH-RISE APARTMENT BUILDINGS there.

Can you imagine what a zoo that place is gonna be?

All very stylish, no doubt. But crowded, hectic, noisy, and expensive. Very expensive. If you’ve ever lived in, say, San Francisco’s apartment/condo districts, you know whereof I speak.

Mercifully, just in time I recalled that crowded apartment living is not my cuppa tea (been there, done that!). A zoo like that would drive me out of what little remains of my mind.

So I decided against it…probably one of the smarter moves I’ve made of late. Property values here in the ‘Hood are going through the proverbial roof. Indeed, it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to stay here as the taxes rise. I want to leave this house to my son, but am kind of flummoxed about how to pull it off, especially if I have to go into an old-folkerie.

If the slum apartments across Conduit of Blight Blvd gentrify — as they almost surely will, in due time — property taxes in our neighborhood will hit the stratosphere. Don’t know that I’ll be able to afford that kind of annual hit.

My son has a decent job, so if and when he inherits the Funny Farm, he should be able to afford to stay here. If not, he can sell the place and pocket a nice chunk of dough. Or pay off his own house and move to a better place of his own choice.

He has remarked that he’d like to move to his father’s hometown: Grand Junction, Colorado. It’s the largest…uh…metropolis (heh!) on the Western Slope. And really: it is a pleasant place to live, if you like a slower pace. His grandmother lived in Grand Junction until the end of her life, at an advanced age, and she was very happy there. She lived to be 106.

I’m not sure he understands quite what that means. Small-town life is distinctively different from big-city life…which is what we have here in Phoenix. On the other hand, Grand Junction is not exactly Payson: it is a large small town, no doubt of it. His grandmother managed to keep herself busy all the time I knew her, engaged in state-wide politics. So…I guess if you work at it, you can build an interesting life in a place like that.

At any rate, speaking of “interesting,” I sure am glad I’m not in a downtown Phoenix condo just now. The place is already more “interesting” than one would like. Multiply that times ten and…well…it does make Grand Junction look good!

Ah, the Good Ole’ Days…

by

Well, lookee here. This charming event occurred within walking distance of our beautiful old historic home in the Encanto district — the first house DXH and I owned together.

The Encanto/Palmcroft district really is a lovely area. I miss its pretty streets and friendly neighbors and beautiful park with its lakes, every day. I could walk to the grocery stores and the post office from my house. And did.

Actually…I could do that here, too. Older and wiser, though: I’m not that foolhardy. Today I jump in the car and lock the doors before opening the garage door to travel the few blocks down to the stores and such.

This is, after all, the Big City. A big, crime-ridden city.

Occasionally, I’ll drive downtown and cruise through that area, house-shopping: thinking maybe I’d like to move back. But…

But.. No.

It really is dangerous. Did we ever have some adventures in that house! And that was with 90 pounds of fur and fang as our room-mate….

My present area, while its ambience is a little more repetitively middle-class, is less than REAL safe for a lone woman to walk around in…but it sure ain’t like that place was.

Oh my goodness, so many adventures.

There was the night our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Wilson, awoke, got out of bed to stroll around the house, and spotted some guy sleeping on her back patio. Right outside her living-room door.

The night Greta the Ger-shep awoke in the middle of the night to find a prowler coming up the bedroom hallway. Somehow, she got between him and the door he’d come in. The panic was quite amusing.

The night my mother came down to stay overnight with me while DXH was out of town. We set up the sofa bed for her and get ready to say goodnight, when…she pulls a .38 out of her purse and sets it on the TV table next to her!

The morning DXH pranced out of the house, hopped into his car, and prepared to back out the driveway, step 1 in the journey to his office…. And found some very angry guy in the back seat. The fella was irked that anyone would have such bad manners as to wake him up at dawn!!!

That was life in the Encanto District.

It was so beautiful, so conveniently located, and the neighbors were so grand. But really: I’d never go back there again.

…ROARRRR….

by

Not only that, but ARF!  Yea, verily: ARF, we say!

11:38 p.m. and the cop copter is circling about to the north of us. And…when you are a dog, is there any chance in Hell that you’re likely to hunker down on the bed and stay in the sack while the cops are chasing robbers?

Hell, no!

Ohhh, no. Nothing would do but we had to trot outside and pee in the gravel.

😀

Fortunately, the policia and their prey are a ways to the north of us — the copter’s not directly overhead, at least. By the time Ruby charged outside, they were a neighborhood away, and receding. Now that we’re back in the house, all is quiet out there.

Ugh! L.A. East. Honest to Gawd, what a place this is!

What the Dickens?

by

It’s just NOT THAT COLD outside: 45 degrees on the back porch. But for some inscrutable reason, it seems a whole lot colder than that. Don’t know why it seems so chilly: no overcast, no wind; But colder ‘n’ a by-gawd.

No sign of the Beloved Pool Dude this morning, but the pool is totally, utterly, completely spotless. This suggests he showed up before dawn, before the dawg and I rolled out of the sack.

If he did…well, getting into the yard, wrestling with the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money, and then slipping away without alerting Ruby the Corgi was quite a trick.

That dog adores the man. She knows which day he shows up (how???) and lurks, watching for him so she can fling herself at him and try to love him into submission.

Truth to tell: if that pool were covered up and set to drain off any rain, the house and yard would pose no more trouble than living in an apartment. The desert landscaping just sits there — at this time of year, Yard Dude drops by once a month or so and pizzens a few weeds, and that is…IT. Even in the summer, when the weeds do grow, keeping them under control is no more than a monthly chore.

My next-door neighbor has done exactly that: drained the pool and left it empty. That thing has been an empty hole in the ground since before I moved in here, some years ago.

Problem is, the plaster dries out if the pool is allowed to drain. Then if you ever want to use the pool for swimming, you have to replaster the pool. No, Thank$.

But…but…on second and third and fourth thought… I can imagine installing a deck over that thing. Set up the drain so it’s somehow “open” permanently, meaning you’d never have mosquitoes to worry about and never have to fiddle with emptying out rainwater.

Still…people don’t buy houses with pools in these parts just so they can have a deck over a hole in the ground. Any such maneuver would surely harm the property value. At best, before you could put the shack on the market, you’d have to revive the pool and repair a sh!tload of damage.

Hm. Leaving it empty would be a convenience, all right: an expensive convenience.

AND FURTHERMORE….

Augh! Just as the human sets foot out the door to go down to AJ’s for some serious loafing (and grocery purchasing), WWWHHHHZZZZZZZZZ!!!  There’s Gerardo and his guys. Blasting away with their weed-whackers and their blowers and...arrrghhhhhh!

Sheee-ut. So much for lunch. Or dinner…or whatever I imagined it would be.

Now I’ll have to wait till those guys exit, stage left, before I can even turn on the grill and throw a chunk of fish on it.

Dayum! Better get off my duff and write them a check.  {sigh}

Doggy-Walk-a-Roonies

by

Honestly…circumambulating the park is only about a mile’s walk, assuming we don’t go through the Richistans. Dunno why that seems like a bit of a hike — because it isn’t — but for some inscrutable reason it felt like we’d trekked to Afghanistan and back  by the time we got home this evening. Ohhh well: we managed something resembling exercise, anyway.

Sooo many cute little kids! And o’course because corgis are notoriously cute, they think we’re even more adorable than  they are, so we pass any number of folks who coo and dote over Ruby the Corgi.

Out in the park, teams of Latin American athletes are always competing at this game and another, making the scenery even more scenic. Usually three or four games are going on at any given time, which provides a passel of handsome young men to admire as we pass through.

And WHAT a beautiful evening! Clear and balmy and blue…so lovely.

Now we’re back. My fingers refuse to hit the keyboard straight, so every phrase here is getting typed and re-typed and re-re-typed again.

I give up! AWWAAAYYYY!

One Ringy-dingy, Two Ringy-dingies…

by

Rousted out of the sack before dawn this morning: another goddamn phone solicitor!

The jerk companies that hire these folks recruit them out of the Far East: Philippines and waypoints. It’s broad daylight where the scuzzes are calling from…here, it’s still pitch black out.

This does not elicit a polite response from me.

:-/

But now its after dark again — evening dark, that is. Dawg and I are loafing on the bed. The kids across the street have been called indoors, interrupting their delightful play.

Yes: one of the ‘Hood’s finest attributes is the sound of children frolicking.

WHY would anyone want to live in a Sun City mausoleum when you can hear the music of kids playing, come evening?