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Stay? Or Move While You Can? The Old Lady’s Dilemma

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Had a 1 p.m. appointment with the skin doc yesterday, to get another sun-induced precancerous lesion removed. Normally I drive 9 miles north on the I-17 to the Loop 101, which will carry me 21.3 miles west and south to Indian School Road. From there it’s only a couple miles to the doctor’s office. (Think of that: 30 miles to find a decent doctor’s office! In the fifth-largest city in the nation!)

Well, stupidly when I go to turn off the surface street onto the 17, I go south instead of north (focusing what remains of my mind on getting to Indian School, eh?) Rather than get off the freeway a mile or two down the road, turn around, and drive back up to the 101, I decide to just drive down to Indian School and then proceed west the 10 miles across the surface street to 103rd Avenue. Said route is shorter, but more hectic.

Garden spot, west…

Surprisingly, this works exceptionally well! Everyone else is on the freeways wrestling with gawdawful traffic, and Indian School, now an eight-lane thoroughfare, is basically empty. I fly low through the westside blight and, to my astonishment, arrive at the doctor’s office a half-hour early. It’s only taken about 30 minutes, in spite of driving almost half the way on a surface street. This is a drive that can easily absorb almost an hour. On the effing freeways.

Huh. That was innaresting. So when I get out, I decide that instead of taking on the nasty freeway, I’ll drive all the way across the city on Indian School to Conduit of Blight Boulevard, and thence northward to the ’hood. Unless I get in a wreck, it’s unlikely the Venza will crap out in the (dangerous!) slums this route traverses. And anyway, being stuck in among lovely Maryvale’s title loan companies, marijuana dispensaries, warehouses, and corroding trailer parks surely would be no worse than being stuck by the side of the Interstate.

So I start driving driving driving, and once again I literally fly across the city. Hit every light green, and only one or two morons get in front of me or threaten to side-swipe me.

Now I arrive at Conduit of Blight.

You, too, can live in a fine shack like this…

SDXB and I used to live right down the road from this intersection. He, I, his mother, and his daughter & grand-daughter occupied four dwellings in a pretty, retro (read “agèd”) garden apartment complex that had been condominiumized. It actually was a very pleasant place to live, with irrigated lawns and huge, mature shade trees. Right behind it, to the east, stood a 1950s middle-class neighborhood that was in the process of gentrifying — it was sandwiched between our complex and the Phoenix College campus, and being just north of the VERY hot Encanto district was a target of the young and the upwardly mobile.

When I started to think about buying a house, I looked at a place in that neighborhood. It was very charming, and I almost bought it. SDXB talked me out of it, because it had an enclosed addition, and they’d kind of jury-rigged the air-conditioning ductwork into it. He thought the system would not cool or heat it efficiently, the power bills would be astronomical, and the room would never be especially usable.

Well. HOLY mackerel, did that man save my petootie!

I get to Conduit of Blight and start to drive north…and that whole area is a freakin’ slum! My god, what a wreck. The bank branch where Tootsie (his mom) used to do business: gone. The Greek/Italian restaurant where the local cops would hang out when they were off-duty: closed, and replaced by some bizarre…shady-looking…something. Stores where we used to shop: replaced with schlock, or empty and boarded up. Formerly solid middle-class to lower-middle-class housing: rotting away.

When I call this road “Conduit of Blight” on Funny about Money, I ain’t kiddin’.

Move to Phoenix and live next to this lovely train!

Drivin’ drivin’ drivin’… Arrive at the intersection where you turn east to get into the Costco parking lot. That area, which houses low-rise office buildings (three or four stories): blighted. No wonder Costco plans to close that store when the lease runs out! The office building where my son’s pediatrician used to practice: taken over by some kind of low-end social service thing, billing itself as a “school” but clearly…ghetto.

Not until you get almost to the southern border of the ’Hood do you start to pass beyond clear and present blight, and even then the apartments on the west side of Conduit of Blight are…well…shall we say, “low-end.” They’re Section 8 housing, a vast tract of alarming seediness.

SDXB may have been right to have moved to Sun City when he did. Amazingly enough, that was 16 years ago(!!!). I moved further into the ’hood at the same time he moved out to Sun City, getting myself as far from the obnoxious light-rail project (which runs up CofB Blvd, carrying the blight with it along with the drug addicts) as it was possible to move and still be in the marginally affordable part of the neighborhood. If you call $350,000 houses affordable…

I guess they do, nowadays.

What. A. Mess!!!

Which brings us back to the now-perennial question: Much as I love my house and love my neighbors and like living in a centrally located district, how wise is it to stay here into my dotage? In just another five years or so, moving house will be so difficult for me (given my age) that it may be impossible. And if this area goes to blight…one would not want to have to live in anything like the sh!t I drove through to get up here from mid-town.

The ’Hood has much in common with the historic Encanto District, which gentrified in our generation and which has remained gentrified — our house, for which we paid $33,000, recently sold for a million bucks. It’s a VERY hot area, because it’s centrally located (how do I hate driving on the homicidal streets of Phoenix? Imagine having to make a 30-mile commute to work through that stuff every goddamn day of your life! And back home: 60 miles a day!!) and because local people think older construction is better built than the new stick-and-styrofoam ticky-tacky. Lots are larger — my lot is about a quarter of an acre — and structures are built of block. Not necessarily a good thing, but people imagine it is. Which is what matters, I guess. And they think these 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s houses are — ohhhh! — “mid-century modern!”

Home, sweet (former) home

Well, we thought those old 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s houses were quaint as could be, too…so it seems to me that what we have here in the ’Hood is exactly the same thing. Encanto was surrounded by blight. The fanciest section — Palmcroft — was bordered by slum on the West, and the rest of the district had tired, run-down tracts to the south and east, with commercial stuff to the north. Not bad commercial stuff, but still…

You couldn’t put your child in the public schools there, because middle-class kids by and large don’t know how to use a knife or a club. One of our neighbors tried it and found their son, at the end of first grade, unable to read at all — the teacher had been reading their little kiddie books aloud in class and sending the kids to “read” them to their parents as homework…and this kid had simply memorized the teacher’s performance! One day they realized he couldn’t read street signs and billboards, and so asked him to read some other kiddie book. That’s when they discovered he couldn’t parse out a word! 😀

Ah, Arizona.

Same is true here: you’d be batsh!t crazy to put your kid in the public school that serves this area. Now, however, the city has capitulated and allows people to send their kids to any public school they choose, and so that gives young parents the option to live in a centrally located area without having to earn a king’s ransom to put the kids in private school.

If the ’Hood stays Encantoized — that is, if the present wave of gentrification sticks — it should be safe enough to stay in my home up to the end. But if it doesn’t? Holy sh!t. Moving out of here 10, 15, or 20 years from now — even if it’s possible for me to do so at all — would be quite a challenge.

So I agonize: whether to stay here, where I like it, or whether to get out now while I still can. We’re pushing the point where “still can” will no longer be operative.

Well, speaking of agonizing, gotta get up and work on the yard. And so, away!

Invasive Species…

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Lookit this!

Two of these little cuties showed up at the backyard feeder this morning. They’re rosy-faced lovebirds, formerly called peach-faced lovebirds: a type of African parrot imported for the profit of pet stores.

They’re adorable as can be, charming…and a squawking invasive nuisance. They gather in flocks, and if they take up residence in a tree outside your bedroom window, you will be rising with the sun each day, when they do. People think they’re harmless, but I would suggest, just from today’s observation, that they are not.

With only one of these small birds perched on the feeder, none of the whitewings would go near the thing. Neither will the finches. They were afraid of that parrot — and twice as scared of two of them. See that vise-like beak? That thing, I would suggest, is capable of removing a dove’s leg in one snap. Doves, interestingly, learn quickly and somehow manage to spread the message among their cohort. As soon as the first parrot showed up, the whitewings took off and refused to revisit the feeder. They perched on the roof, but would not come into the yard.

Hm. By way of experiment, I tossed a few handfuls of seed on the ground.

Ruby thought that was grand. The doves wouldn’t come to ground, but she sure would: she ran out there and started scarfing the birdseed. 🙄 How does this dog do it?

Called the dog. She was willing to trade a few bites of kibble for the birdseed bonanza. A few of the doves ventured in, but most kept their distance.

A foreign bird that chases the native whitewings out — a whitewing is a large bird, btw, much bigger than these little “lovebirds” — is not a benign invader.

After a bit, Ruby noticed someone walking their dog past on the front sidewalk, causing her to fly into a frenzy. This scared all the birds off, but since the whitewings are accustomed to Ruby’s stürm und drang and realize it signifies nothing, the doves quickly re-established their claim to the feeder. The parrots, mercifully, did not reappear.

Yet.

Speaking of invasive species, this morning I realized that of late we’ve seen a lot fewer drug addicts stumbling around the neighborhood. They still infest the “convenience”-store and gas station parking lots at the corner of Gangbanger’s Way and Conduit of Blight, but they don’t seem to be hanging out as much in the residential area.

That said, though, neighbors have been complaining of encampments in the park, over in a nook right behind a bundle of $700,000 homes. As you can imagine, these campsites are not welcome.

All the city has to do, of course, is set the park’s sprinkling system to come on for a few minutes a couple times during the night, and that would get rid of the bums. But…the truth is, the city doesn’t know what to do about the homeless drug addicts, and so the default strategy is to just let the tax-paying homeowners live with them.

One of these worthies has taken up residence in the alley that runs behind the Funny Farm. That, presumably, would be the one who’s using the berm along my wall as her toilet.

This morning on our 5 a.m. doggywalk, we encountered only one bum, a big bull of a man bicycling up the border between lower and upper Richistan, conversing with himself as he rolled along. 🙂 Hey…who else is there to talk to at that hour?

He seemed a little unnerved by me and my shrimp-sized dog, possibly because I’ve taken to carrying a hefty shilelagh with me. But…seriously, dude? What do you think a little old lady and a 23-pound pooch is gonna do to a big bruiser like you?

LOL! Yesterday whilst cruising around the city, I spotted a shady-lookin’ character riding a kid’s bike and carrying two bicycle wheels looped over the handlebars. He was headed toward a pawn shop.

Yeah. Well. You’ve got to pay for your dope somehow. Our beloved brethren…

The Small Joys of Life in the Desert

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Mwa ha ha! Just pressed “BLOCK” on a spoofed robocall number…the first nuisance call that’s gotten through in days. Literally, the nuisance call rate has dropped from a dozen a day (or more) to one a day (or less). woo-HOOO!

Out the door with Ruby the Corgi at a few minutes after 5:00 this morning. Gorgeous morning…and there was nobody out there!

Yes: just a few minutes earlier than usual, the hordes of dog-walkers haven’t stumbled out their doors. Nary once were we lunged at by massive, just-vaguely-under-control guard dogs — the cost of living on the margin of a high-crime “neighbor”hood. On our entire mile-and-a-half route, we ran into just one other dog person: the guy who has the herd of corgis! So of course we had to hang out for a minute or two and chat, he and his dogs being eminently civilized. 😀

Believe it or not, yesterday — June 2nd — was the first day of serious swimming here at the Funny Farm. First time I was able to get into the pool, stay in it, and actually swim around for awhile. The water is still cool, but not so crisp as to raise goose-bumps.

Normally, summer begins around the first week of May. The snowbirds leave town in April, so scared are they of temps in the 90s. NG usually heads for her Denver digs early in April, while IMHO it’s still passing balmy here. So this whole extra month of sweater weather at doggy-walk time and — best of all — no air-conditioning(!!!!!) at any time has been quite the little Godsend. Last month my power bill was $134, some sort of all-time record low for this time of year.

So that’s pretty surprising.

The chard seeds I planted in the pots where their predecessors lived for a good four years, through frost and scorcher, have already sprouted. So, before long I’ll have fresh greens to go with the various dinner menus, rather than frozen spinach.

But speaking of large, threatening dogs populating the local byways, one is always reminded (if by nothing else, by the constant roar of helicopters overhead) that we are gentrifying a neighborhood bounded on two sides by high-crime areas. The corner of Gangbanger’s Way and Conduit of Blight, about a half-mile from the Funny Farm, regularly scores the highest arrest rates in the city. A perfectly acceptable and invitingly shoppable Sprouts resides .8 miles from my house, door to door. I could easily walk down there to shop, adding some exercise and saving, over time, a whole lotta gasoline. But…noooo way! It simply is not safe to walk on Conduit of Blight. Even if you were carrying heat, it wouldn’t be safe.

This means that even to go down to the corner market, I have to travel in a locked car, putting two layers of steel between myself and my…uhm…neighbors. It also means that as a practical matter, I shop at the corner market a whole lot less than anyone should have to. Today, for example, I need to restock because I’ll be spending most of the day tomorrow volunteering at the church and getting stitches pulled out of my gums. To do that, I will get in my car and drive to the AJ’s at Central and Camelback, a 10-mile round trip rather than a 1.6-mile stroll.

I find that deeply annoying.

It happens because the City has neither the will nor the resources to keep vagrancy and crime under control. Things like this happen, for example…all. the. freakin’. time. The sh!thead who set this fire, which incinerated a dozen apartment-house renters’ cars, lived in the apartment’s parking lot, where he was sleeping in his van. Residents complained repeatedly about the guy, but were (they claim) ignored. The apartment building, which once was a fairly nice place, is now owned by the City of Phoenix and is, shall we say, not recommended by Google reviewers who have had the misfortune of living there. It is smack in the middle of one of the most hotly gentrifying districts in the city.

As we scribble, the itinerant perp is under indictment for murdering his father. Why exactly he’s free to wander around and set fire to parking garages remains unclear. Well, no, it doesn’t. We know the reason: the City of Phoenix and State of Arizona do not give one thin damn about the safety of law-abiding, tax-paying residents and so neither entity does a thing to preserve said residents’ safety and property.

The presence of wandering sh!theads and the prevalence of crime petty and major come under the heading of “life in the big city.”

Which brings us to the question of why on earth do I stay in this place?

This morning, with that perennial concern in mind, I was looking at real estate in Fountain Hills, a middle-class suburban redoubt on the far side of Scottsdale. For what I can net on this house, I could buy a more or less comparable place over there. Quite a few such shacks are on the market just now.

Problem is, though…I don’t want to live in Fountain Hills.

Because…

a) It’s too damn far away from where I go and what I do.
b) The houses are cheaply built, even the ones that cost somewhat more than an arm and a leg. Views are gorgeous, but the architecture is junque.
c) Apparently there’s no gas service out there. So every house has ultra-expensive electric air-conditioning, and no house has a gas stove.
d) Scottsdale (where you’d have to shop for just about everything) is just not this Walmart Girl’s style.

If I’m going to move away from all my friends, from my son, and from everything I do here, I might as well live in Prescott.

But…I don’t want to live in Prescott.

a) It snows in Prescott. I like my swimming pool and I ain’t leavin’ it behind.
b) I know no one in Prescott and have no desire to build new networks of friends and business acquaintances.
c) If it costs an arm & a leg to air-condition a shack in Phoenix, you do not even want to know how much it costs to heat a place up there!

I could afford to live on the far west side of Phoenix, in one of the Sun Cities. These have exceptionally low crime rates and are, shall we say, quiet. As in the quiet of the mortuary.

But…I don’t want to live in Phoenix’s crowded, tacky, Southern-California-style suburbs.

a) That area has everything you could possibly want now…but it is just mobbed. Awful, crowded, hectic streets and shopping centers everywhere you go outside of the mausoleum-like Sun Cities.
b) I’ve lived in Sun City and am not doing that again, either.
c) Like Fountain Hills, the far west side (on the California side of the slums that spread outward from Maryvale, the kernel of west-side blight in this city) is too damn far away from where I go and what I do.

Beyond the SoCal ticky-tacky (by an hour’s drive or so) is Wickenburg, the West’s Most Western Tourist Trap. Now…I could stand to live in this place. Absolutely. And I could afford it. Except…

a) Out there in the borderlands of the boondocks, that gorgeous yard is going to attract rattlesnakes and coyotes. Ruby the Corgi couldn’t be allowed to walk around out there unattended. Not and live long, anyway.
b) If Fountain Hills and Sun City are too far away, Wickenburg is on the far side of the galaxy.
c) I cannot live without a Costco.

It’s hard to imagine how I could find a place comparable to this one, which has everything I like in a dwelling and few things (other than the resident drug-popping transients) I don’t like, in an area that is safer, centrally located, and reasonably affordable.

So, as they say, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Attacked!

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Yesterday evening Ruby and I were trotting through lower Richistan, past a house that a young couple with kids is renovating, when the morons’ 80-pound German shepherd roared out of their front yard and attacked my little 25-pound corgi. I tried to grab her and pick her up off the ground, but every time I’d reach for her, the dog came after me. Ruby, meanwhile, being a shepherd dog herself, after a second of terrified shrieking, shifted into full defensive mode and launched herself at the attacker.

Fortunately, the pooch’s humans heard me screaming and came running to call off their dog. But not before the animal had harassed and terrified me and my dog.

One of their cute little kids hollered after me, as I was stalking off down the street having delivered to the parents a volley of…uhm, shall we say “vulgar criticism” at high volume, I’m sowwy!

{sigh}

God, but I am tired of stupid. What IS it about people that they think neither common sense nor the leash laws apply to them and they can do as they please as long as a cop isn’t standing there watching?

Our house. Can you believe this place went on the market recently at over a million dollars?

True: it’s scary living here. I was among the cohort who gentrified Phoenix’s historic (and now spectacularly overpriced)  Encanto district. The ’Hood is effectively the New Encanto. And we have similar problems with transients, crime, and endless assaults on our quality of living by moneyed interests that own the city government. Encanto had (and still does have) many more transients than we see up here. Its Zip code had the highest per-capita drug use rate in the city, and the crazy (sometimes horrifying) incidents occurred so often that our office manager used to ask me, come Monday mornings, what new tale I had to tell. And I usually had one.

What were those tales? Ohhh…the day a burglar murdered an elderly neighbor by chopping her to death with an axe he found in her garage. The night a man tried to bump a lock in the exterior door of a room next to where I was sitting in front of the television (and was within about a second of succeeding when I realized what the noise was, ran to the front door, and screamed FIRE!!!!!!! at the top of my lungs). The cat burglar/rapist on the roof. The guy who watched a neighbor until he knew when her husband was out of town (which was fairly frequently), cased the house until he found the only window that wasn’t wired for a burglar alarm, climbed through it, and spent the night beating and raping her. Little things like that…

Consequently, I’ve had German shepherds all of my adult life. And I’ve had them explicitly as protection dogs. Only now that I no longer have the physical strength to handle a large, high-drive dog have I switched to smaller breeds. Here’s what I’ve observed about the breed, after several decades of handling its representatives.

First lemme tell you somethin’: if you bought yourself a GerShep to protect your kids and their buxom mother, you need to know about German shepherds. And you need to have better sense than to leave your dog out in an unfenced front yard.

The German shepherd has been harmed in many ways by overbreeding to develop “guard” tendencies. The result is often an unstable disposition, which can make for a very dangerous dog. Consequently, if you choose to own a German shepherd, you need to keep it under control at all times, and you need to be aware of its power and its potential to do harm. Yes: my shepherds have chased off home invaders (one poor guy is still running…said to be approaching Siberia about now).

Yes: my shepherds made it possible for me to walk around Encanto Park as a nicely endowed young woman without harassment. But I’ve also had a shepherd that tried to attack my mother-in-law and then me and then a veterinarian – the vet explained that some breeds are prone to a kind of mental illness that causes this behavior, and that once such a dog launches into an attack, it cannot be called off. This, he added, is the direct result of ill-advised breeding practices. If, like me, you’re a German shepherd fan, you should be aware that these conditions exist.

A German shepherd is like a .38. You don’t leave your revolver sitting on the coffee table. Similarly, don’t leave your German shepherd sitting around an unfenced yard and don’t let it off the leash in public. It’s a good thing to protect yourself – but not if you put innocent people’s safety at risk.

Harmless as the new-blown snow…

Dog Joy!

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What a wonderful morning!

I thought I was supposed to be down at the church office shortly after dawn cracked, to stand in for one of the volunteer receptionists. So I arrive, plug in the computer (having brought 27 pages of client copy to while away the time), and settle in.

Shortly, in pops the Boss Volunteer.

“Hey! You’re supposed to be here this afternoon. I’m on this morning.”

😀

Well. Ahem. Naturally I suggest that if she wants the morning off, I’d be happy to switch. (“Happy” being a highly qualified term in this context.) What a shame: she has to pick up the grandchild shortly after 12:30.

Out the door like a rocket!

Arrive back at the Funny Farm to find the dog moping under the toilet in the back bathroom. (Don’t ask: I have no clue why the dog thinks the cubby under the toilet amounts to a dog den.) At the words let’s go for a doggy walk, she shoots out of the bathroom and flies to the front door

Out the door like two rockets!

It’s still cool enough to manage a mile-and-a-half circuit of the ’Hood.  It’s a strangely lovely little enclave of affluence, despite being bordered on two sides by drug-ridden slums.

Over in Lower Richistan, one house harbors a huge, beautiful jacaranda tree, now in full, brilliant blue bloom. It is the most gorgeous tree you could ever hope to see.

Across the lane into Upper Richistan, an elderly lady lives in a big old sprawling mansion of a ranch house on about an acre of land, which she keeps up like a park. Her property is meticulously, spectacularly groomed. Most days when we pass there, her yard service, whose proprietors dub themselves “Paradise Ponds and Gardens,” are there puttering around. They must visit almost every day. The place reflects it, too.

Other shacks there are less ostentatiously landscaped but equally tidy — they don’t require a gardener’s daily attention, but nevertheless they’re expensively mown and trimmed.

As usual, we run into morons. Honestly…it’s hard to understand how some people ever learn to tie their shoelaces….

First one is putzing up Feeder Street NW, evidently in no hurry. The hound and I are stopped on the sidewalk, under the stop sign that clearly says traffic crossing Feeder is to cede the right of way. We wait for him to go by.

But no. Ohhh, nooooo! He’s polite. And the little dog is so cute he’s driven to feel even more polite. He stops his car. I wait for him to go by. He waves his paw at me, a sappy grin on his face: go ahead go ahead!

I hate that. I just hate it when some idiot thinks he’s doing me a favor by stopping in the right of way and frantically motioning to proceed in front of him — illegally. What the hell is the matter with people?

Does he really think that my standing there for three whole seconds while his car passes by is THAT big an inconvenience to me? Does he seriously believe he’s doing me some great favor with this silly trick? Does he truly not grasp the concept that urging someone to cross a road illegally puts that person at risk?

God, but people are stupid.

This particular brand of stupidity irritates me most radically because I once got T-boned when some idiot stopped, waved me across in front of him (and the as-yet unnoticed guy tooling along in the lane to his left…), and I took him up on it. With my infant son in the car. In that case, we had two idiots in collaboration: him and me.

So we make a loop through the forested lanes. On the homeward leg, toward our low-rent tract, we encounter a woman with a large furry dog in tow. She is not paying the slightest bit of attention to anything that’s going on around her. She holds a phone up to her ear. From the phone blares a stream of dopey-sounding music. She is, in a word, entranced…

Not caring to discuss the time of day with her barely-under-control dog, I cross the road so as to put some distance between us and the oblivious woman and her not-at-all oblivious beast.

It notices. It lunges at Ruby, growling and barking.

Recovering from nearly being jerked off her feet, the Blithe Soul coos, “Ohhhh, what a cute little dog!”

“Uhm… Uh huh.”

“Grrrrrrrr ARF ARF ROARRRRRgrrrrrrrrrrrr”

“He’s really friendly. I usually let him off the leash so they can play!”

holy shit! “Please don’t!”

I dodge across Feeder Street Northwest, hoping some driver in a ball-busting hurry will come blasting between us. Fortunately, she’s too interested in the racket coming out of her toy to pursue the idea.

At any rate, it was a beautiful morning (and remains a beautiful day). The little dog was beside herself with doggy joy to come out from under the toilet and circumambulate the neighborhood. That was a very, very happy dog.

Human, too.

I realized that I was secretly (not so secretly, maybe) relieved not to have to sit here all morning, editing a client’s copy while nothing much happened in the office.

Indeed, a small revelation dawned:

What do I want to do in retirement? What do I most want to do with the small portion of time remaining to me?

I’ll tell you what I wanna do.

♦ I want to loaf.

• I do not want to work.
• I do not want to master some hobby.
• I do not want to participate in volunteer efforts.
• I do not want to lobby for some worthy political candidate.
• I do not want to travel.

♦ All I want to do is loaf.

♦ That is, I wish to do as little as possible. Nothing, preferably.

♦ Nothing is plenty enough to keep me busy.

• Today, for example, I need to traipse up to Home Depot to pick up a bag or two of potting soil, therewith to plant some new chard and refresh a number of other plants.  While there, I probably should get a basil plant to replace the one that’s expiring of old age.
• Or maybe go by AJ’s and spend too much money on something good to eat.
• Or take the dog for another walk.
• Or just anything that does not require the expenditure of anything resembling mental or physical energy.

Loafing. The highest and best use of one’s time.

One Don’t-Wanna DONE!

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Admitted: I’ve let the Don’t-Wanna tasks pile up. You know: those little nagging chores that need to be done but can be put off. And put off. And put off some more…

The present case in point: a mound of Mexican primrose that has grown in the backyard for several years. Some there are who regard this plant as invasive, but in my experience it stays where you put it. Assuming, of course, that you put it in a flowerbed, not broadcast seeds over a hillside… 😀

Well, the primrose around the pool is very happy, but over the past year some kind of bug got into the backyard mound.  Because gardening is a laissez-faire proposition here at the Funny Farm, I never got around to doing battle with the critters. Think I sprayed them a couple times with dilute Dawn detergent — an effective insecticide, but you have to get it on the little beasts. And because the mound is kind of out of sight from the back porch and the pool area, it’s been out of mind, too.

Result: as spring is sproinging, those plants are nothing but sticks. Green sticks, promising a possible resurrection. But sticks. Meanwhile, the pool is alive with beautiful pink flowers, and some are even growing in the crevices between the flagstones. So it doesn’t look like the mound is going to come back this year.

So this morning being unduly cool, I trotted out there and pulled up or broke off all the denuded sticks. Presumably it will soon grow back — it’s hard to kill this stuff. And when it does revive, I’ll have to remember to mist it with Dawn every week or two.

A-n-n-n-n-d…what else remains to be done, having been put off interminably through all the tolerably cool winter months?

  • Trim back the plants along the east and west ends of the pool, which now block passage to all but the most intrepid of sherpas.
  • Pull out the primrose that’s gone a bit wild in its adopted home between the flagstones
  • Replace the now very agèd chard (it’s lasted a good four years!!) with new grown-from-seed babes
  • Clean out the flowerbed around the olive in front. That’ll take half a day.
  • Pull out dead plants in pots on west side; replant or else haul the pots away. Figure out why they’re not getting watered adequately.
  • Put Luis up to removing the overgrown Texas ranger in front. Get him to thin the trees.
  • Fertilize and deep-water the roses
  • Treat paloverde, Texas ebony, and desert willow with borer killer

None of these is very difficult. And in fact, despite a year of neglect and the rainiest winter on recent record, there just isn’t all that much that needs to be done.

This house is absurdly easy to take care of. But of course…I planned it that way.

It’s such a pretty little house now, I really don’t want to move: bum invasion, Conduit of Blight, Gangbanger’s Way, and outsized property taxes notwithstanding.

My friends who moved to the Beatitudes retirement home sicced that place’s marketing department on me. This morning a woman from their sales office called and asked if I wouldn’t like to take the grand tour and listen to her pitch.

Well. Sure. I’m willing to do that. They’re building a whole sub-campus of patio homes that look to me one helluva lot better than an apartment in a vertical hive. So yeah: I’m curious.

But…the fact still remains: I don’t wanna move out of here.

What I really would like is to live here until I die. Which is not at all out of the question, given how minimalist the maintenance tasks are. All that would be needed to keep me here into my full dotage will be a competent cleaning lady and a good yard dude. A decent handyman would be nice, too. And no matter how many people I have to hire to keep this place up and myself in food and clean clothes, the cost would be nothing compared to the cost of living in one of those old-folkeries.

And despite the Bum Express delivering drug-addicted derelicts to our front doorsteps, the fact is that this is one of the few even vaguely affordable in-town neighborhoods — if you think of $350,000+++ as “affordable.” Young people have discovered it. And they’re gentrifying in swarms. Just on Ruby’s short doggy-walk circuit, four houses are being renovated, big-time. One fix-&-flipper just sold for $729,000 — an outrageous amount that represented a shameless rip-off of an elderly single man, that’s true: but there it is. It still goes on the record as what these houses are “worth.” Even though that price is ridiculous, it nevertheless will push our values inexorably upward.

At this point, I could afford to move to Prescott, a sweet and scenic little burg where property values are inflated by incoming Californians. If my son didn’t live here, I probably would. But as long as he’s in these parts, I expect I will be, too.