Coffee heat rising

Glorious Morning in the Gorgeous ‘Hood

Well. It ain’t exactly “gorgeous.” But it’s exceptionally pleasant: a big green park, irrigated lawns in every direction, handsome 1950s and 60s ranch houses punctuated here and there with newer stately mansions. Inviting enough.

The corgi and I set out at dawn to circumnavigate the park and then traipse through the northerly flange that comprises Upper Richistan, the pastures, and a tract of what must once have been a toney suburb.

Drifting northerly, up toward Gangbanger’s Way, we come to the long cul-de-sac where our dear elderly friend and co-hiker used to live. Apparently the house still belongs to her, tho’ she’s gone: nowhere to be seen. As she sank deeper into the sands of Old Age, she was consigned to a “life-care community” — read “nursing home.” Exactly the fate, as she told me many months ago, that she hoped to evade.

I think she must still be living (if being stuck in one of those places can be called “living”), because the house stands there vacant, its furniture (visible through the front windows) still just as she left it.

Her plan was to leave the house to her son, who lives in another state.

Why did she believe he would want it? He doesn’t live in Arizona! She must have thought it would make a good investment for him. He apparently thinks otherwise…but oddly, has not disposed of the place. Months after her disappearance, it stands there vacant. I’m afraid that detail — vacant, not sold — indicates the worst: she’s infirm but not free of these earthly chains. Locked up in some nursing home or old-folkerie. God help her!

The little street makes for a nice neighborhood. But alas, that extends only to the visual aspects. It’s a block south of Gangbanger’s Way, where motorcyclists and hot-rodders roar back and forth into the night.  Even where my house is — at least a half-mile away, probably more — the racket is so crazy-making you can’t leave a window open at night.

People get used to that noise. My first apartment stood right on the curb of a hectic main drag called Thomas Road. My mother couldn’t understand how I could bear to live there — whenever she visited, the traffic noise would about drive her bats. But I didn’t even notice it!

So, I imagine that must have been the case for Garnett, too.

Meanwhile, closer to home: Some developer is building a passing huge mansion over in Lower Richistan. It’s unclear to me whether this lumbering (heh!) structure is to comprise two dwellings — i.e., a pair of townhouses — or whether it’s going to be one house. The latter, I think. They’ve got the frame up and have installed most of the fire-proofing. This morning they were applying brickwork and drywall over that.

Won’t the neighbors be thrilled?

 

Over the Hills and Through the ‘Hood…

Beautiful morning!  Edging on to 10:15 as we scribble: a warm mid-morning, “hot”by some standards. Hmmmm….  Wonder what the mechanical opinion is?

{tap tap tap…Enter...}

Gosh! It’s only 82 degrees out there! Feels a LOT warmer than that.

Which implies some humidity is lurking around… Oh, yeah: 20 percent!

Whew: A fifth of the atmosphere you breathe in as you stumble around the streets is…water!

What a kick, though: roaming through the reaches of the ‘Hood! I’ve lived here for one helluva long time. I think SDXB and I had been here around 10 years by the time he decided to move out to (un)lovely Sun City. Having lived there before, with my parents, I refused to go. To my mind SC defines “miserable place”….

And it defines “static”: as in unchanging and unchangeabloe.

The ‘Hood, however, has evolved. 

When SDXB and I moved here…what?15 or 20 years ago, maybe? — this was a mid-middle class collection of look-alike ticky-tacky tract houses.

Today?

My goodness...what a difference!

Over the past decade, the homes here have been gentrified, re-gentrified, and mega-gentrified. These 1960s plugs of boredom have been updated, fancified, and turned into”classic” — even “historic”– houses. Lawns and trees have spread across the gravel landscape. Ticky-tacky Nineteenth Avenue has taken on the spiffy, ultra-modern light-rail trains.

And now…what a place it is! I dunno what these houses are worth today, but you can be sure none of them will go for the hundred grand SDXB and I paid!

Well, hell! We have the freakin’ Internet to tell us what the thing is worth now. Let us look up the Shack’s address…

holeeee mackerel!

The “Zestimate” for the Funny Farm is $522,700.

Seriously?

And my old house, a block east of Conduit of Blight Blvd???

Gasp! Zillow thinks one of ém is worth $568,700. It’s the SAME MODEL, the SAME SIZE as our first house here!

And how much does Zillow think that place,located handsomely where you can be serenaded by car, bus, and train noise 24/7, is worth? $522,700. 

Most recently sold for a mere $389,000.

Good grief.

And yet, it must be admitted: as the area has matured, it has grown more handsome. Hiking up and down the old avenues was a pleasure. The houses have been well maintained. The city has kept up the streets.

And that fact alone: the place has gone uphill, not downhill; at the worst stayed steady in quality and value — that has gotta be worth A LOT. 

My father would faint dead away, if he could see these prices.

Y’know, when he retired (for the first time…) in the early 1960s, he figured a savings pot of $100,000 would see him and my mother through the rest of their lives in solid, middle-class comfort.

By the time I graduated from college — just four years later — he had to go back to sea. That’s how much the dollar’s value fell in just four years!

Makes it damn hard to plan for retirement. Or to figure you’ll ever really be able to afford any retirement.

How, really, do younger people manage to afford any kind of life at all, long-term? Really, today in calculating for retirement, you’d have to figure you just weren’t gonna retire. Not until you were hopelessly infirm, anyway.

Welp! I can’t stand it another minute! Gotta pick up the Funny Farm’s litter collection. Then fall face-first into the sack for a stupefied nap.

Real Estate…Run Amok!

!Jayzuz!!!  Just look at the INSANE prices for houses in our old neighborhood! Just a few lots down the street from our place: $1.3 MILLION.

We paid 30 grand for our house there — the first home we co-owned with a bank — and thought that was just outrageous. Lookit that, for 1900 square feet! Our house was 3,300 square feet…

These shacks are all within walking distance of our old house:

Good lord!!

Well, I guess I’m damn lucky to have this house up in a North Central district. And to have it paid off. By the time we’re ready to sell it, the thing will be worth enough to purchase the moon.

Actually, I hope I’m able to stay here until I croak over. Then M’jihito will get the house — and presumably the proceeds of its sale — which will allow him either to pay off his own house or to sell it and move into my paid-off shack. Or to move wherever he pleases.

Not sure he even wants to stay in the Phoenix area. He’s talked about moving back to Grand Junction, Colorado, whence his father emanated. It’s a little hickish for my taste…but if he could get this kind of money on the sale of my house and his, he could live like a king there.

Is There a Place for Me?

{sigh} As I grow to hate the noise and the crime and the loony toons more and more, I wonder: IS there a place for me in (un)lovely Central Arizona?

Quite possibly not.

North Central Phoenix, where the Funny Farm presently resides, is…what?

* Aging

* Cheaply built, by and large (okay, okay: but better than most newer districts)

* Crime-ridden (no, I would not live here without a pistol and a dog. Why do you ask?)

* Spectacularly noisy

* Low on decent schools (you have to put your kid in private or parochial school if having them learn anything matters to you)

* Segregated (but so is everyplace else around here: Arizona is, after all, a Southern state)

* Hotter than the Hubs: essentially unlivable during the summer, for many folks

So… If I weren’t here in Noise Central, where would I be?

Sure wish I was at the ranch, yea verily even as we sit here and contemplate the local lunacy.

La Maya & La Bethulia moved to the Monterey area in California. Beautiful spot.

But…I can’t afford to live in California, not even (like them) in a trailer. Nor do I especially want to: habitable parts of that state are crowded, noisy, hectic, and spectacularly expensive.

So….where would I go, if I could?

Dunno. The Oro Valley outside of Tucson, maybe. It’s bit on the annoyingly suburban side for my taste: not fond of driving halfway to Timbuktu to fill a grocery cart.

Prescott, a small town up on the Rim north of Phoenix, is very pretty and has its charms. Expensive, though. Lacking in the big-city amenities I’ve come to expect.

Flagstaff: Colder’n’a by-gawd during the winter. Also lacking in little amenities like decent medical care and upscale grocery stores.

Yarnell: a wide spot in the road on the road from Wickenberg to Payson, waaayyy out in the middle of nowhere. Quiet, relatively cool, pleasantly hick-ridden. Our ranch was located just outside of Yarnell.,..and boyoboy, I sure do miss it!

Fountain Hills: A pricey suburb on the northerly edge of Scottsdale. Nice, toney area. My cousin lives there: not necessarily a recommendation, since she decided, some years ago and for unknown reasons, that she can’t stand my existence.

Sun City: Hate Central. And directly under the flight path for the daily jet airplane exercises at Luke Air Force Base. Noooo, thankee!

Truth to tell, there really isn’t anyplace within reasonable living distance of my son’s place and my own stomping grounds that I can even begin to afford. I’m incredibly lucky to have snabbed the Funny Farm before real estate prices rose into the stratosphere, and certainly could not afford to buy anything comparable within reasonable traveling distance of my son’s place.

So…???

Okayyy… After that fine system crash, let’s amuse ourselves by seeing whether Funny (via Firefox) will reboot…

{scribble scribble}
{Save Draft}

hmmmm

WordPress’s “Page Setup” looks funny…but…but… I dunno…it kinda looks like the site is online and…MAAAYYYBEEE it’s gonna work…

*****

Reminiscing and daydreaming about the Good Ole Days living in our beautiful mid-town Phoenix Encanto neighborhood.

  • Our house was so pretty.
  • Our neighbors were so fine.
  • The central location was so handy and dandy.
  • The burglars and wannabe rapists swarmed in such merry abundance…

I do miss it. But on the other hand…I don’t miss it. 😀

Cruising the real estate ads…gosh, here are all these beautiful old houses. Our friends Jan and Ed’s place!! Zowie!

It was a pretty house to begin with. After they’d been in it for awhile, though, it was freaking gorgeous.

Wonder what our old place looks like, now that several passels of yuppies have spent time in it… It, too, was freaking gorgeous — that was a good 20+ years ago.

Those houses are selling in the million-dollar range now. THAT, you may be sure, is something you couldn’t get here in my present tony neighborhood.

Hmmm….  Frankly..,.

I loved the house and I miss it. But I don’t miss…

* The traffic noise
* The airplane noise (we get about as many planes here, but the Encanto district was much closer to the airport than we are, so our noisemakers are higher overhead)
* The panhandlers
* The burglars
* The sirens from the two nearby regional hospitals
* The sirens from the fire station the accursed city installed right behind us
* The third-rate public schools, making private school tuition NOT a choice
* The ancient, rickety plumbing

Hmmmm…  Money doesn’t buy common sense, eh?

😀

Drivin’…Drivin’…Drivin…

Had to cruise through the district called Moon Valley y’day. It’s a sub-suburb of the North Phoenix area. A dear friend and her husband — both now Late with a capital “L” — used to live there… I drove past their house, which, amazingly enough, is still standing.

Amazingly,” I say, because the architecture up there is SUCH sh!t…it really is hard to believe those places remain upright. 😀

What junk. At the time my friends moved in, I went up to do some repairs and upgrades — yes, my daddy DID teach me how to use a hammer, a screwdriver, and a paint brush. And I was just astonished at the pi$$-poor construction. The walls and floors were such cardboard that when you stood there painting, barefooted, you could feel the heat radiating into the structure a good three feet along the exterior walls and into the living room. You don’t even wannna know what their summer power bills must have been!

Still…despite the junk building, it’s kind of a pretty area: upper-middle-class, neat and tidy, nestled in among the desert hills.

Drove all over the tract, wondering if I’d like to sell the Funny Farm and move up there.

And…well…the answer is No. Not on your life!

While my house isn’t exactly Buckingham Palace, it’s nevertheless reasonably sturdy. Centrally located. Almost within walking distance of my son’s house. Absolutely walking distance to an Albertson’s supermarket, a beloved Sprouts fancy-Dan overpriced grocery store, a storefront doctor’s office, and a train line that would take you to the ultra-beloved AJ’s market and to the kid’s house, if you had the patience to deal with Phoenix’s public transit.

{sigh} I do miss my friends, though. They were a good 20 years older than me, so it’s not surprising that they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. But gosh. They were fun and smart and full of ginger!

Why can’t humans live forever?