Coffee heat rising

Real estate

Real Estate…Run Amok!

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!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?

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{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…???

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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…

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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?

E-freakin’ NUFF

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Hey there, Sprouts management: lissen up!

I quit!!!!! Those weekly, biweekly, even triweekly trips to the beloved neighborhood Sprouts?

DONE!

GONE!!

NO FREAKIN’ MORE!!!!

This afternoon’s gamut-run marked THE LAST TIME, absolutely positively THE last time I will shop in the Sprouts just down the street from my house.

NEVER….

fukkin’

AGAIN

You cannot go into or come out of that store without being hustled by panhandlers.

And y’know what?

As a woman alone, the LAST effin’ thing I want, as I head home from the grocery store, is to be hustled by panhandlers.

Some of whom are bloody aggressive.

Today was it. I am simply NOT GOING INTO the Sprouts at 19th Avenue and Northern, ever again. And NOT COMING out of the Sprouts at 19th and Northern, ever again.

No. No way. No how. Never fukkin’ ever again.

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LOL!!
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Quite the li’l hissy-fit, eh?

I’m good at that. 😀

Well…one does hafta say that the constant hustle from the panhandlers at our neighborhood stores is…well…a bit of a nuisance. 😀

Across the street from the Sprouts et al., the Albertson’s has hired a full-time, armed (!!) guard to stand out in front and chase off the pests. That is, I’ll say, the main reason I shop there. Otherwise, I’d never go into the shopping center at all.

But the time is fast approaching when a ten-minute saving on the drive will not be worth the hassle of shopping in those stores.

Then what???

I will say, the main reason I still live in town — that is, in the central parts of the city — is to be close to routine shopping…to avoid the endless annoying drives.

***

My friend VickyC lives in a beautiful old — as in “seriously, elegantly antique” — house in the historic mid-town district. I’d love to have that place!

{ahem!} But maybe not love so much the burglars, the sex perverts, the constant airline noise, the police and ambulance sirens, the traffic noise, the… Aggghhh!

Too bad those districts can’t be a) safer and b) quieter! 😀

We used to live in that area. Never again!

You shouldn’t HAVE to own a live-in German shepherd and keep a pistol stored under the sofa cushions to feel safe in your home.

Gorgeous Morning

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The sun has risen on a magnificent clear day. Ruby the Corgi and I have circumambulated the ‘Hood, and now we’re back in the shack waiting for the water to heat so as to make a pot of awesome coffee. And I think…

I’m thinking about a friend of mine and his wife, who was one of my graduate students…

…he used to get up in the morning and walk to work, while she got up and made trouble. And oh, my goodness! Could that lady make trouble! She went to graduate school to learn the best techniques. Seriously: she had taken an M.A. and then pursued a Ph.D. in political science. 😀

They lived in a handsome patio home within walking distance of a prominent horse track, where he had a moderately prestigious job.  Meanwhile, her day job was to make trouble in the condo association. She was very good at it.

When they started finding death threats taped to their front gate, they decided to sell up and move to a house in a nearby development called Moon Valley. And that place was a piece of junk!

I know, because I helped them repair and paint the interior before they moved in. The south-facing wall was so flimsy and so spectacularly uninsulated that the tile floor was actually hot under my bare feet for a good yard inside the building. And flimsy indeed: you could take your fist and punch a hole through the outside wall. Reach inside, unlock the front door’s deadbolt, and let yourself in.

No kidding: it did happen.

He came down with cancer and died, not at all pleased with his wife’s behavior. She shifted around to a few condos and apartments here in the Valley; then moved back to the Midwest, where her family lived. Can’t find her online, so I figure she must have passed away by now — she was no spring chicken when I knew her, and that was some years ago.

Ah, the thoughts that occupy one’s mind on a gorgeous morning….