Coffee heat rising

Real estate

Cruisin’ and Musin’…

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Cruisin’: yes. Cruising through classic North Central neighborhoods, eyeballing the real estate: the big old classic ranchers on their half-acre+ lots, admiring how handsome they are and remembering what it was like to live in Phoenix’s version of Upper Richistan…

Musin’: ohhh yeah! Thinking about how I just did NOT fit in with Phoenix’s upper middle-class strata. How after all the time we lived on East Hayward, a block off the famous and ritzy North Central, I’d made one (count her: 1) friend, a woman who’d come from the same direly deprived middle-class social strata as I had. Remembering how much I loathed the snobs who lived in that neighborhood, and how much they seemed to disdain me.

As handsome as those big old 1950s ranch houses are, how beautiful their emerald-green irrigated lawns, I would never want to go back there to live.

Still…it was entertaining to wander through the old neighborhood, eyeballing those big old houses (and thinking “thank God I’ll never have to clean that thing, or get someone else to clean it!”). The places were, after all, handsome 1950s and ‘6os mini-mansions in the “ranch house” mode: sprawling one-story affairs, each in the middle of a vast yard. Any way you look at it, 3000+ square feet is a lot of real estate to keep clean, whether you push that vacuum cleaner yourself or whether you supervise someone else at the job.

Living in North Central wrecked our marriage. Though I was already a bit bored with married life by the time we moved there, I surely wasn’t ready to fly the coop. A couple years of being made to feel like Poor White Trash, though, did indeed push me over the border…into the Never-Never Land of Singletude.

It’s surely fun to drive around and look at real estate, though. Lately, I’ve been thinking more of going back and getting a Realtor’s license — as my mother did. But instead of trying to sell houses, as she attempted, my thought would be to write about real estate.

Even without a license, back in my Young Journalist days I was able to get a passel of assignments to write about the subject, mostly for the local city magazine and a local business journal. An old crony of mine was editor of a national real estate magazine, and he would give me assignments, too.

I think that rag is justly out of business — and he has retired. But there are other real estate rags. And if you’re not trying to make a living from journalistic writing, it doesn’t really matter much where you publish. What matters is wringing interesting assignments out of the editors. Take a look at these, for example. It’s not a bad market. Looks like there’s plenty of room to pick up fun and interesting projects. And being able to claim a license would make that pretty easy.

***

Time having passed…

Cruising the real estate ads, ogling houses in Tucson. That town has its own distinctive character…I could live there happily, if only my son weren’t way up here.

My best friend and her husband bought a house down there, after he got a job with VisionQuest, a nonprofit that wrangled junior delinquents. The architecture and interior design of Tucson real estate is distinctive…and it’s something I do rather like. If I’m to retire and leave lovely Phoenix — i.e., L.A. East — that would be one place I’d consider.

But the evening grows late. I tire. More real estate dreamin’ (or something!) tomorrow….

Quack Day

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A-n-n-d…speaking of doctors, as we were yesterday…in a few minutes I need to head off to a dermatologist. One of my fingernails is lifting right off its bed — for, as far as I can tell, no good reason. I haven’t hurt my hand, and none of the other nails are doing that.

Well…no: not so. You could argue that the thumbnail is starting to do the same thing.

Hmmmmm…. An infection, maybe? Far’s I can remember, I haven’t stuck my paws in any caustic solutions. If I had, you’d think all the nails on that hand would be acting the same way.

This guy is a partner of the beloved Young Doctor Kildare, who once again has left the practice of medicine to take up the leadership of a charitable organization. I hope he and I get on (I adored YDK!), because these are my “doctors in the wild,” as the Mayo calls them. That is: doctors who do NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic.

😀  The Mayo is truly wonderful. But their doctors’ offices are located halfway to Payson. No kidding: they’re on the far northeast side of Scottsdale, almost an hour’s drive from here.

So I’m not inclined to safari all the way out there for just any li’l ailment that I don’t consider life-threatening.

***

So it was over to said local doc. No satisfactory explanation or diagnosis was given. But they want me to go to a neurologist.

And of course, getting in to see this worthy entails a whole new set of endless hoop-jumps! Goodie!

How do they get people to go to doctors at all, these days?

I am JUST NOT UP for this kind of hassle now.

So instead of hurrying home and making a new appointment with the new guy, I cruised up behind YDK’s offices, into a sprawling middle-class housing development of ticky-tacky stick-and-plaster homes.

My dear (late, absconded) friend Elaine and her (now late) husband lived there. I helped them fix up and paint the house when they moved in, which was how I got a good, clear, horrifying look at the place’s construction. What junk!!!! 

And when you drive around (and around and around and around and…) in there, what you see is square mile on square mile of junk.

How the Hell do developers persuade Americans to buy this stuff?

😀

In theory, it ought to be a nice place to live...but…but… Heh: but if you happen to look closely enough to see how the houses are built, you want to RUN away. The structures are as flimsy as flimsy can be. Really: if you’ve ever done any work on one of them, you know that “flimsy” overstates the quality of the construction out there.

So what you have in lovely Moon Valley is mile on square mile on square mile of tossed-together ticky-tacky. Expensive tossed-together ticky-tacky.

Well. Not spectacularly expensive — most of it isn’t, anyway, though there are some fancier(-looking) areas. But these are people’s houses. Houses that are supposed to last a generation or three.

Some of them, you’d be amazed to see last a decade, to say nothing of a generation.

****

Ohhh well. Here’s a rather interesting passage about a new theory of Alzheimer’s, speaking doctoring. It appears rather little is really understood about the condition…and it’s a condition that’s spreading to drastic proportions.

****

Tuesday
August 20

And now it’s quarter six, after several more sleepless hours. Might as well get up and walk the dawg before it gets hot.

What a life! Such as it is…

Soggy Doggy Day II

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Ick! It is SOOO HUMID out there at 7 in the morning that by the time the pooch and I got home from a leisurely mile’s stroll through the ‘Hood, I literally had to peel my jeans off my legs!

NASTY weather, hideously reminiscent of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…only without the beautiful beaches on the Persian Gulf. Just desert, repetitious middle-class tract housing, and swampy heat.

At the crack of dawn.

Garden spot, this….

Actually, it is a garden spot! 😀  Irrigated lots sporting bright green lawns; big ol’ 1950s ranch houses; huge and ancient shade trees; citrus trees abounding.

As we perambulated through the lower reaches of Upper Richistan, we passed a young dad pushing a pair of twins in a double stroller. Dad: white. Kids: brown. Cutest li’l thangs you ever saw in your life…and evidently adopted.

A couple of families over there have taken in youngsters from duskier races. A house on the main road into U.R. is home to two teenaged boys of the African-American persuasion; all the adults in the house are whitey-white. The young fellas like to practice basketball in the front yard, which is grand fun to watch.

As the sun has climbed into the sky, humidity is a balmy 30%. Clouds and haze lurk overhead. The AC labors mightily, groaning to keep the indoors moderately livable.

Loafing, I daydream about the Old Neighborhood, where DXH and I lived for well upwards of a decade after we were married. Loved that place!

It was so beautiful. Here’s the old house. It was so beautiful — even more so inside than outside. Built in 1929. Zillow claims it’s worth something over $1.2 million.

Yeah. Well…whatEVER.

It is a LARGE place, in a famed historic neighborhood, smack in the middle of the city. If you worked downtown, your commute would essentially be nil. Same if you taught at Phoenix College or worked in any of the gerzillion office buildings up & down Central Avenue.

I loved that house. Didn’t want to move. But…

We moved because we didn’t feel safe. The transients and the crime level in those parts will take your breath away. After a couple of hair-raising incidents — German shepherd notwithstanding — we moved to get away from the bums and the crime.

{sigh} I miss it, and I miss our classy neighbors.

But I don’t miss feeling scared half to death at night. Don’t miss the guy who broke in one night, chased off by said German shepherd. Don’t miss the guy who tried to break in, another night, but couldn’t get past the deadbolt. Don’t miss the bum who took up residence in D-XH’s car one night…he flew into a rage when D-XH had the nerve to climb in, start the engine, and begin to pull out of the driveway, headed to work.

No. Encanto is a beautiful historic district. But if you have any common sense, you don’t wanna live there.

Another Balmy Arizona Summer Day…

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I.e., you have to be balmy to keep on living here!!!  Just now it’s 106 in the shade of the back porch, 20% humidity. Clouds built up to the north, tantalizing with a vague promise of rain…but as we scribble, they’re burning off.

Arizona…what a garden spot!

Man, I’ll take San Francisco fog over burning heat, any day.

Speaking of the which: spent half the afternoon doing battle with the pool. The current Pool Dude seems to have f*cked things up royally.

Had to buy a big heavy bucket of chlorine tablets (none remained out there at the pool or in the pool shed). Dosed the drink with that stuff.

Next: decide whether to backwash…decided it’s toooo damn hot to wrestle with that task. Get the vacuum system to work properly: see that it’s picking up most of the debris. Think gotta clean out that filter NOW. Decide it’ll hafta wait.

ohhhhh gawd, tell me I don’t have to track down and hire a new Pool Dude.

See, the problem with these guys is a substantial proportion of them are jailbirds. If they’re on probation and they get into trouble — apparently that includes so much as a traffic ticket! — they end up back in the slam. This, as you can imagine, does not help to keep the algae outta the pool.

😀

Maybe what I should do is install some cages in the backyard where the Authorities could store the Pool Dudes. Then I’d always have one of the critters around to contend with the drink. And maybe I could even get the state to pay me for putting up the resident convicts….

Arrrrggghhhhh! What a place we live in!

Teeth hurt. Don’t know whether it’s from aggravated clenching or whether there’s an infection or some other such nightmarish pending dental bill. We shall see over the next few days, no doubt.

If I were a grown-up, I’d stumble out to the kitchen and bolt down an aspirin or an ibuprofen.

But I’m not a grown-up. Consequently, I’m bolting down a glass of wine. Oddly, that does nothing for the sore tooth.

Ohhh well. It sure tastes better than ibuprofen, though!

😀  😀

Driving around this afternoon eyeballing real estate.

Yknow, my mother was a real estate agent. Like me, she felt some strange magnetic attraction to Reel Estate. What it is, I do not know. But the whole business fascinates me.

I used to write about real estate for Phoenix Ragazine and for the weekly Phoenix Business Journal. Sometimes I think I should try to wriggle back onto a local publication’s staff — actually for awhile I wrote for a national real estate trade rag, but the truth is, I find the local market a lot more fun.

Yesterday I stopped by an open house and met a lovely young Realtor. Ohhh how ambition blooms forever… Well, I wish her well and hope she gets rich…or at least finds a nice rich man to support her. 😉 Real estate is one of those endeavors that looks like it should make you rich, but that at best maybe won’t make you poor.

***

Dog’s conkered out. I should conker out, too…dawgs having better sense than humans…

Such Good Pay…

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Ah, yes. I remember it well: My mother landing a job at the business office of the apartment development where we lived in San Francisco: Park Merced. It was a pretty place to live — even a beautiful place: upper-middle class, with handsome, modernistic high-rise apartments and sweet little garden apartments. Priced on the high side of San Francisco’s ever-pricey middle range. My father agreed to let us live there while he went back to sea, pretty much as a reward to my mother for spending ten years in the Hell-hole that was Saudi Arabia.

He was a cheapskate of the first water, though. Resented having to spend any of his (truly!) hard-earned cash on much of anything. And so, though I never heard them arguing about it (they didn’t argue in front of the brat), I’m sure he objected to the cost of the rent there.

No doubt feeling guilty (if not bored), my mother took a job in the development’s rental office, as a receptionist.

She earned $300 a month…and was downright awed! “Such good pay for a woman!” she crowed.

My father was less impressed. As a sea captain, he earned a living wage and then some. There really was no need for her to go to work, and the peanuts they paid her made little or no difference to our living standard. That, in general, was true of what most women were paid, back in the Day.

But y’know…this afternoon I had cause to reflect that even today I would have serious trouble living on what I could earn, with a Ph.D., a string of published books, and a track record of university-level academic jobs.

I happened to peruse real estate ads in our neighborhood. And…

hooooleee shee-ut!

Prices have gone through the proverbial roof!

The first place I bought here, about a block to the north and a block to the west of the present Funny Farm, cost a hundred grand. That amount equaled the my father’s lifetime goal for the savings he figured he would need to retire on. Just for the house alone!

  • Not for a car.
  • Not for living expenses.
  • Not for taxes.
  • Not for locking myself away in a nursing home when I get too decrepit to take care of myself.

My house is now paid off, over my financial advisor’s objections. And I think there’s enough left in savings to support me until they cart me off to a nursing home.

But…

But…….

Meanwhile, the alleged value of this house has gone SOOOO high that frankly, I’m not sure I can pay the taxes on it. Real estate prices have Californicated madly. Realtor.com thinks my house is worth $528,700. Redfin begs to differ, pegging the reasonable price at $629,873.

You understand: I paid an even $100,000 to get into this neighborhood — in a house that is the same model as this one. And thought that was ridiculous. It’s less than 1900 square feet. It’s magnificently crime-ridden, thanks to the slums just to the north of us. And if you give a damn about your  kids’ education — and would just as soon not have them tripping over a dead body on way into the local school (yes!!) — you would put your kid in a private or parochial school.

And supposedly this place is worth almost SIX TIMES what I paid for it????

SDXB moved to Sun City partly to get away from Tony the Romanian Landlord (a threat who lived right next-door to him at the time), but partly to escape the soaring property taxes in this area.

Prices have shot up over in Sun City, too, but not into the stratosphere….largely, I think, because most people in our generation don’t relish living in a ghetto for old folks. Plus it’s pretty remote from the central part of the city, where those things that are of interest in these parts take place.

If in fact this house is worth what the real estate sites claim, when I croak over my son will inherit assets totaling well over a million dollars. And that doesn’t count the value of his house. Or the amount his dad will leave him.

If he sells both places, he can move to Colorado and live like a king — secretly, he’d like to retire to Grand Junction, whence his grandparents came. He not only will get the value of my house and his, he also will get whatever remains in my investment accounts. Plus whatever his dad leaves him.

{chortle!} The kid will be a freakin’ millionaire.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean what it used to. It may not mean very much, come to think of it. But…better than a hit on the head, I guess.

Real estate values in Grand Junction aren’t much less than they are here. In fact, some of them by comparison are outright crazy. Right: to live out in the middle of fu**in’ nowhere!

Come to think of it, though…. Given a choice between Sun City and Grand Junction, I’d take Grand Junction any day.

Mercifully, that is not I choice I have to make. Not at the time being, anyway.

*****

GRONK!!

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Not to say “LOL”!

After a day of bopping around town, bouncing from here to the Mayo (halfway to freakin’ Payson) through the tract-house neighborhood where my son’s pals used to live to a thissa and a thatta…really, I don’t even remember!…Finally got home. So, so melodramatically tired.

One of the stops was a grocery store. Another was a Sprouts…which I s’ppose is a grocery store. Into the house with a fistful of eatin’ cheese and a bunch of food for lunch/dinner. Don’t recall what all that was, ’cause I’m too tired to remember it. Schlep and schlep and schlep…finally get home. So, soooo tired: just want to lay down.

Thinking about my mother, middle age coming on her as I reached my early teens.

In California, she took it into her head to become a real estate saleswoman. Quite possibly not one of the wiser choices she could have made.

But I suppose it was no worse than her career in door-to-door Avon Cosmetics sales.

Yah. No kidding. She did love make-up, and so in a weird pre-liberation era way, it made a kinda sense.

Another disaster for my father to laugh at and to mock. 😮

So now she goes out and she gets herself a real estate license. She goes to work for some woman who has befriended her, presumably so she (“friend”) can leave the amateur saleslady sitting on open houses while she — the REAL real estate salesperson — bops about town at will.

Before long, the erstwhile business partner decided…YES!!! THE FUTURE WAS AT THE SALTON SEA!

This boondoggle — a scam that promised to transform a wide spot in the road next to a stinky, stagnant pond in the middle of California’s hottest, most barren desert — led my mother to destroy my father’s new Mercury. When she drove that swell brand-new car through a sandstorm outside of Palm Springs, the wind literally scoured the paint off the hood and front end — all the way down to the bare metal.

You can imagine how impressed my father was. He was going to sea at the time, so by & large wasn’t home to put the eefus on her entrepreneurial efforts.

***

BING BONG!!!!

***

Bing bong? WTF? Who’s out front at three in the afternoon?

Aaaaahhh jeeez! It’s Wonder-Cleaning Lady. Just as I was about to lay my head down on a pillow…

Ugh! I can barely hold my eyes open. Much less figure out where the money I need to pay her is stashed. Or whether I need to go out and cash a check.

So much for that reverie.

BUT…on the subject of little old ladies and Realtor’s licenses…

I’ve taken the reeel estate course that’s supposed to prepare you to pass that exam. I’d need to review it…but it could be done. And…and…

Well: Here’s th’thing:

If I passed the state Realtor’s exam, then in theory I could get a job selling real estate in some local office. Or…FAR more to the point: it would be easy to persuade a local editor that he oughta hire me to cover the real estate beat. And that could be fun.

Truth to tell, I enjoy real estate: find the whole proposition highly entertaining. So I would enjoy interviewing people and tracking down story ideas and writing copy for local and regional rags. In fact, I used to write for a (now defunct) national real-estate magazine, inspiringly titled Real Estate Salesperson, as well as filling up pages of local newspapers with similar maunderings.

*****

And now a day has passed. Apparently in the commotion that accompanies house-cleaning, I forgot to post this squib.

Ohhh well!

The house is clean. I’ve developed a new and highly uncomfortable li’l ailment that’s had me trotting back and forth to the ER. Nothing much is helping it. Already had an appointment with MayoDoc set up for Friday, so that will be an issue to inflict on her. Goodie…life is grand, eh?