Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Never a Dull Moment in Crime Central…

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So Ruby the Incredibly Fierce Corgi and I go for a walk along about dark. We circumnavigate the lower reaches of Upper Richistan and then roam back to the Funny Farm. As we reach our street, I notice a cop copter circling around over the nearest intersection with Conduit of Blight Blvd, about three lots in from were we used to live.

Charming. We trot along briskly and get back to the FF before anything happens. Into s. the house. Lock the doors. Go on about our dog & human business.

Dinner consumed, we climb onto the sack and prepare to loaf before turning out the lights. And that’s when I learn, from the local Play-Nooz accessible on the laptop computer, that the ruckus down there was no mere fender-bender. The cops were trying to chase down a dangerous, armed fugitive.

Charming.

Luckily, he missed us. Otherwise instead of playing with this computer, I’d be (again!) in the middle of a hostage situation.

We should be used to this stuff by now, eh?

And I guess I am. My li’l heart is not even going pitty-pat. What? Another gun-slinging perp? BFD!

One reason I moved into this house is that my previous home was just about four or five lots down the street from Conduit of Blight Blvd. In addition to carrying all sorts of drama to our doorsteps, that thing was (still is) very noisy. So much so, you couldn’t leave a window open, security screen or no security screen. The present Funny Farm is far enough away from CofB that we don’t hear much traffic noise or a lot of weee-uu weee-uu  weee-uu  from cop cars, ambulances, and fire engines.

But…the crime rate, one has to admit, seems to be increasing. A few months ago, the kids arriving at the grade school across the street had to step around a dead body laying on the sidewalk to get onto the campus.

Now, if I had a kid, we would be sooooo gone after a performance like that…

But I don’t have a kid. I have a dog and a pistol. So we’re still here.

So far…

How Do We Love Hallowe’en?

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Let us count the ways….

Seriously: I get SUCH a kick out of the annual Hallowe’en shindig! And I believe most of the neighbors do, too.

The WonderAccountants and I have made an Annual Custom of sitting out on their driveway and handing out candy. It is SUCH a hoot! The kiddies are as cute as can be, and the teenagers are as goofy as they can be.

😀

We have a low-income neighborhood to the north of us. The kiddies in those parts know that Riches are to be had in our parts. So they descend upon us in all their adorable masses.

Most of them are dressed up in goofy costumes, which are more fun than life to see. But even those who don’t gussy themselves up are having a great time, and THEIR fun is contagious to us driveway-sitters.

Meanwhile, the locals buy or make elaborate outfits for their kids, and those are a great deal of fun to eyeball, too.

In short, it’s our chance to enjoy the kids, which we all do with great delight.

Happy Hallowe’en!!!
NOW AND EVERMORE

A Balmy Afternoon in Lovely Phoenix

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Speaking of garden spots where you duck for cover as the local F16’s blast by you (as we were this morning), jet planes have been roaring over the back yard half the afternoon.

Bored with that racket, I got in the car and went for a real-estate-ogling drive. Frankly, I didn’t see much that interested me — a few districts in North Central Phoenix are better than this one, but none of them outrank it significantly. Did find an area in the shadow of the North Mountain that I’d never noticed before. Drove around and around…kind of a nice spread.

But not so nice that I feel any interest in looking at the real estate offerings there. Certainly not to the tune of another hundred grand…

Like Southern California, North-Central  Phoenix is gifted with a monotonous sameness. The houses are much the same, the road layouts are much the same, the neighborhoods are much the same, the schools all look alike. Ugh.

* Berkeley, this place is not.
* San Berdoo, it is not.
* San Francisco, it is not.
* Hollywood, it is not.
* San Jose, it is not.
* Santa Barbara, it is not.

One could go on and on. Any city that is not like any other city: that’s a category into which Phoenix will never fit. The boredom factor is astonishing! 😀

By and large the whole place is monotonous, dull, middle-class, and boring.

It’s four in the afternoon, and jet airplanes are still roaring overhead. Most of these are now passenger planes, coming into or flying out of Sky Harbor Airport.

I’ve been home less than an hour and the phone has jangled three times, bearing exciting messages from phone solicitors. How can I say how sick and tired I am of jerks who call me on the phone trying to peddle stuff?

They must be able to sucker people in…otherwise, their employers wouldn’t waste money hiring them to dispense phone hustles.

Yes, the damn phone CAN be turned off or disconnected. But that means I’ll miss calls that matter — a call from my son or a friend, for example. How do I resent having to disconnect a service that I pay for to block the constant hustle? Lemme count the ways….

WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU…. HONK HONK HONK!!!

Another ambulance or cop car roaring up Conduit of Blight Blvd…on and on and weeeuuuing on and on…

What a place!

Duck! Cover! Or something….

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Pour a cup of coffee; prepare to sit down on the back porch to take the morning air; and you get RRR-R-O-O-O-A-A-R-R-RRR!!!!

Cop copter charges over the house. Circles around the ‘Hood,. Roar roar roar….

Meanwhile, twenty miles away, out at Luke Air Force Base, a squadron of fighter jets practices take-off and landing: rrrRRR-O-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R-R-R!!!!!

My mother, who used to take her morning coffee on the back porch of their little Sun City house, professed to love the sound of fighter jets taking off and landing by Dawn’s Early Light. All very patriotic, no doubt…but definitely not my favorite symphony score.

The atmosphere has quieted down a bit now. Whenever it gets to be after 9:00 a.m. — at which hour I can turn left out of the ‘Hood — I’m headed to AJ’s, there to buy some more coffee. And melon. And bread. And dog treats… and… Argha!!!  The endless grocery list!

The Sprouts, which carries far more fake-gourmet items than the Albertson’s supermarket across the street, leaves enough to be desired to make the 20-minute trip to the overpriced AJ’s worth the journey. For one thing, I do NOT like being pounced and panhandled in the parking lot — pretty much inevitable at the neighborhood Sprouts. The Albertson’s has posted an armed, uniformed guard out front, which makes one feel safer there. Now…if only they’d carry a larger array of yuppified products, they’d never get rid of me. 😀

But they don’t. To get the fancy treats and overpriced dog food, I have to travel to the AJ’s. To get the rich black coffee: AJ’s. To get a piece of steak that’s worth the exorbitant prices most stores are now charging for beef: AJ’s.

****

SDXB on the phone. He and New Girlfriend live in Sun City, directly under the flight path of those Air Force jets. And like my mother, they regard the racket as “The Sound of Freedom.”

No doubt they’re right.

Too bad, though, that Freedom can’t turn down the volume a bit! 😀

SDXB loves living in Sun City, as my mother did when she was holding forth out there. It takes, I think, a certain mentality to like that lifestyle. Personally, I’ll take the sound of kids playing over the melody of F-16 engines blasting. But whatEVER: each to his/her own, eh?

Speaking of the which — sound, that is — the serenade of not one but TWO emergency vehicles wafts in through the screen door…. WTF d’you suppose is goin’ on out there now?

Looks like it was a good thing I dawdled over this blog post and killed time yakking with SDXB before I started out for the store. Fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, and I could’ve been in the middle of whatever that mess is.

***

And I would have missed the beloved Pool Dude, who just showed up at the door to collect his well-earned wages.

What a nice man! Probably a paroled murderer…but what the heck. He does a primo job of murdering pool algae.

Seriously: when a dear friend’s son got in trouble with the law (irrationally: not his fault!) and was thence thrown in the slam, we learned that one job regarded as “good” for paroled convicts is pool maintenance.

And considering what Pool Dude is earning — f’rgodsake, I just paid him $400!!! — if you worked at it and were even moderately competent at handling money and billing, you could in theory make a decent middle-class living at it.

Well, OK: part of the 400 smackers was for a large bucket of chlorine tabs. That stuff is expensive as hell, and if you’re buying a better quality product, it’s even more expensive than that. And the bucket the guy got — presumably from a pool product wholesaler — weighs more than I can pick up. So presumably it will be some months before we have to buy more chlorine.

Welp. I’d better get up and get outta here before the lunch crowd gets on the road.

And so, AWA-A-A-A-Y!

Just one minute of peace…puhleeze, police?

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Argh!!! Cop helicopters buzzing all over to the northeast of us. NOW what?

They’re right over the canal, which suggests someone — very probably a kid — fell in. But…the area they’ve been covering — quite a few square blocks — suggests they’re after a perp.

LOL! Speaking of perps, WonderCleaningLady seems to have made off with my whiteboard pen. Now I’ve got to traipse to the store and buy another one.

My jaded point of view on life predisposes me to assume she stole it. That, of course, is BS. Most likely, she picked it up while dusting, dropped it in a pocket, and forgot about it. No: MOST likely is that I picked up, used it once, set it down, and now can’t remember where “down” was.

For me, though: the result is the same: gotta go buy another one. GRRRRRRR!!!

😀

The cops have retreated.

Whatever they were up to must have resolved itself fairly fast. Either that or the perp took off running fast enough to escape our boys.

WhatEVER. Close and lock the doors.

Ruby likes to roam in and out through the kitchen door. But sometimes that’s just not practical….

Moving: A Bad Idea

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So here I am: coveting the Old Neighborhood. Thinking how much I’d love to move back down into the historic mid-town Encanto neighborhood, where DXH and I spent the first 15 years or so of our marriage. Where M’ijito grew old enough to pass through the first several years of the tony private grade school where we sent him. Where I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation, got it accepted by a prestigious publisher, finished the degree, and thereby made myself unemployable.

Ahhhh, the good ole days!

Ruby and I traipsed all over the place this afternoon, from our old part of the district through the expensively tony Palmcroft neighborhood, into the park…round and round.

I loved our time in the Encanto/Palmcroft district, and greatly regretted feeling we needed to move out. Before we sold our beautiful historic home and moved up to the North Central area, DXH had told me we would put our son in the highly respected Madison schools, the best public school district in the state. I figured Cool! He could get a first-rate K-8 experience, meet and make friends with offspring of the prominent North Central set, and from there proceed with the other Richistani kids to attend the weighty and prestigious Brophy Catholic High School. Or, failing that, go through Central High School, without doubt the state’s best public high school.

Well. Uh…no.

Once we got moved, DXH refused to switch the kid into a public school. So there we were in Snobsville North, where I knew no one and no one felt any craving to make friends with white trash of my ilk.

(No, in case you haven’t figured it out: My parents were not professionals, they were not even college graduates, and they knew nothing about how to function as socialites…)

The marriage didn’t survive that fun period. I ended up  back south where the WT live, and then eventually skipped around to the far side of the tony North Central district, landed in some apartments on the north side, and extracted a full-time teaching job from Arizona State University.

At any rate, leaving the Encanto District to move up to North Central meant leaving behind beloved neighbors, beautiful historic houses, and a wonderful central location close to cultural and entertainment amenities. Eventually it also meant me leaving behind the marriage, the lawyer, and the trying social life…and the beloved neighbors, the beautiful historic houses, and the central city location with its proximity to cultural and entertainment amenities.

Ohhh well…

Since then, a lot of things have changed. A full-time job at the Great Desert University meant I could support myself. My parents’ dying, one at a time, meant I had no one to nag me to stay in the (highly advantageous) marriage. But their demise also left me with enough money to support me for the rest of my life. I bought into a decent neighborhood on the fringe of North Central, and here we are.

But I still miss the lovely Encanto district. Cruising the area, I wondered: would I like to sell my house here on the fringe of Sunnyslope and move back downtown?

The answer is mixed. A lot of things are improved up here on the north end of North Central, as compared to the picturesque historic Encanto district. But a lot of things are de-proved, as it were…

Why move?

  • Sunnyslope is kind of menacing. It is, after all, a high-crime area.
  • We therefore have lots of noise from cop helicopters.
  • Then there’s the noise from the annoying lightrail train.
  • The noise from  traffic and sirens on Conduit of Blight Blvd amplify the racket.
  • And we do have some interestingly sh!t-headed neighbors.

Why NOT move?

  • I could in theory walk to two markets & a drugstore from here. My spectacularly superannuated great-grandmother used to walk that far several times a week in Berkeley: straight uphill. Here, though, to get through the heat and dodge the panhandlers and thieves, you have to drive to the stores or use Uber.
  • M’hijito wants this house.
  • I don’t know anybody downtown anymore.
  • Young people who don’t like older people infest that place — Encanto is Encanto because of the young people who covet the beautiful historic homes. Discrimination against elders is a real thing, and it’s likely to be far worse there in Yuppieville than it is up here in a more diverse neighborhood.
  • It’s even noisier there than it is here (she says,. as a plane buzzes overhead…).
  • One wonders: why spend that kinda money for not much improvement in lifestyle?
  • The pool here is an expensive nuisance, but it could be drained and decked.
  • The Romanian Landlord’s tribe are shitheads, but WGAS? And what guarantees that you won’t have shitheads there?

Many more nuances come into play:

  • Care of elders: soon enough, I may have to hire someone to come in to care for me, or else move into a long-term care facility.
  • This house is paid for and in good condition. If I pass it to M’jito he could move in here and have a palatial little shack with a pool and about four times more space than he needs.
  • On the other hand, who wants to pay for and ride herd on four times more space than you need?
  • Unloading this place and moving into a care facility might greatly reduce my taxes.
  • This area is really not very safe.
  • But then, neither is the area where M’jito lives. Toss-up!

The truth is, I don’t know which way to jump because it probably doesn’t matter which way one jumps. Either way presents a set of pro’s and a set of con’s.

So…we’re cast back on that reliable old adage:

When in doubt, don ‘t.