So the other day here in the ‘hood — don’t recall whether I mentioned this — while I was walking the pooches along about 5 in the a.m., the hounds and I decide to make a side trip up a less-traveled lane in Richistan. (There are only so many times you can defile a mansion’s lawn without the millionaire charging out with his shotgun in hand…) Up this pleasant little side street a development of new Styrofoam-and-plaster McMansions is a-building, on a piece of land late a beloved horse property. Starting price: $800,000.
I’m thinking I’d like to explore the shells of these nascent shacks, but… As we approach the target of our proposed snooping, along come two skeletal-looking dudes, one on a bike, one on foot. They’re reasonably clean, freshly shaven, but obviously the sort we diplomatically call “homeless,” both bearing backpacks. In their near-identical scrawniness, they resemble each other so strikingly that you’d think they were brothers. But after they start to talk, you realize they’re not — they’re just acquaintances. Probably met in jail or camping on the street.
The pathological skinniness is a sign of meth use, and indeed, around here meth is the drug of choice. Some people, particularly a special type of stupid female, actually do get hooked on it when they take the stuff as a diet pill. It does cause you to lose weight, just as other kinds of speed will do.
Interestingly, both men were (at least on the surface) fairly mellow, friendly and downright neighborly. One, whom I took to be, possibly, the younger, had an odd kind of sweetness about him. When they first approached, I thought ahhh shit! I shoulda gotten another German shepherd! But nay: no overt evil intent surfaced. To the contrary, Ruby pounced the younger one, not to rip off his foot (as Anna would have done) but to try to love him to death.
They were so charmed by the adorable corgis that we all promptly became lifelong friends. If I knew which hobo camp they’re living in, I could probably get a bowl of beans at their shopping cart…assuming I brought the dogs.
While the kid on foot stood around and chatted, his more enterprising pal bicycled into the development, which was unfenced with all the framed-in houses standing open, and explored each structure. Hope the workmen didn’t leave any tools around, thought I. Then they went their way and I went my way and I reflected…
Yeah…
So today we walk up there and what should I see but a guy in a contractor’s pickup driving into the worksite. So I go up to him and say you should know these two guys were here about 5 a.m. and they were real innarested in your project…so maybe don’t leave any tools out…
He said yeah, he knew: the site had already been ripped off several times. Not once but twice they stole newly installed water meters…one of them with the water turned on!
I suggested it was probably a better way to get a shower than down at the shelter. He only dimly saw the humor in that. 😀 He said he was going to put cameras around the site.
Okay…. I refrained from asking what good he thought that would do, since you’d have to catch the perp to identify him, and by the time you get to the site he’s soooo long gone. Why, one wonders, does he not just rent some fencing?
Oh well.
So, that’s Life in These Newnited States.
Makes the south of France look damn good, doesn’t it? Portugal. Parts of Spain. Germany, for sure, if you don’t mind a little regimentation in your life. Yeah.
Yesterday being Memorial Day, the berserk hordes who now inhabit Our Great City headed out of town, leaving the city streets prett’ much empty. And good riddance to them: it gets less and less pleasant to live in a city that keeps growing like some unholy fungus from outer space…without regard to whether there’s enough water to support millions of people from now into perpetuity…or even until the day after tomorrow. Meanwhile, though, some of us do not quit working just because it’s a holiday: Luis the Arborist showed up at 6 a.m. sharp (uhm… more or less) to cut back the overgrown paloverde, palo brea, and olive.
I hate to do that to these beautiful trees. But the paloverde had sent two limbs up over the roof. One of these sprang from a trunk (it has four trunks) that had started to sag ominously under the weight…suggesting that the first good, hard monsoon that blows in this summer would drop a half-ton of tree limb onto my roof or the neighbor’s. The palo brea poses no threat to any structures, but it does crave to claw out the eyes of passers-by. Given the opportunity, it drapes its monstrously thorny boughs over the sidewalk, where they wave in the breeze right at head-height for a human. So that thing has to be trimmed back every year.
And yes, I do hate cutting them back, especially the paloverde. This morning there are NO birds in the side yard. As I’ve said recently, normally the place is alive with them. So presumably they were either nesting or taking shelter in the overgrown paloverde.
Before Luis came over, I inspected it to see if I could spot nests, but couldn’t see any. So thought it safe enough to let him have at it. But this morning’s absence of the flocks of sparrows, towhees, dove, and house finches suggests that was wrong.
However…the risk of a 500-pound tree limb falling on the roof kinda outweighed the risk of, alas, scaring off the birds.
Meanwhile, a Memorial Day shopping expedition was planned with friends VickyC and KJG. I had to arrive at VickyC’s house at 10 a.m., meaning the key errands I needed to do — grab some dog food and fill up the gas tank — had to be done early. Wrangling the tree guy around the dogs threw a monkey wrench in the plans to do those tasks.
Flew up to Walmart, which is close to the house and usually has the fancy dog food — overpriced though the stuff is for their customer base. But no…they had no chicken, only beef. Ruby the Corgi Pup is allergic to beef. So had to traipse all the way down to AJ’s. The Costco was on the way from the Walmart to the AJ’s, and by then it was past opening time.
Arrive at the Costco gas station to find it empty. Closed. Padlocks on the gas pumps. F!!!ck.
Moving on to AJ’s, they were mercifully open (not so merciful for their employees, but I have no idea what I would’ve done about the dogs had the store been closed…not many places carry this particular brand of overpriced dog food, and it takes two or three hours to cook a new batch of their regular chow).
This junket, as it developed, was a Drive Down Memory Lane.
Holy mackerel…do you have any idea how long it’s been since driving around our fair city was a pleasant endeavor?
The streets were essentially empty. Every yahoo and homicidal driver had freaking left town, Memorial Day traditionally being the first really hot day of the summer. Everyone who’s anyone and a great number who are no one heads out of the city, northward bound on often motionless freeways.
And I was reminded that — can you believe this? — once I liked to drive around Phoenix. Once upon a time it was actually fun to get in your car and just cruise the streets, day or night. As bored 20-year-olds, we had a game in which we would get in the car, the driver poised to take orders from the person in the shotgun seat. Said sidekick would flip a coin: heads we go left; tails right. And we would just drive around, exploring the city at random, usually ending up on the side of Camelback Mountain. If driver and sidekick were members of the opposite sex, this accidental destination presented some even more entertaining possibilities. 😉
So it was strangely pleasant. Despite the frustrations encountered at the Walmart and the Costco, I arrived home in an almost unheard-of good mood, instead of mad as a cat and grinding my teeth. Surprising! On any normal day, driving here leaves you wanting to bite someone.
Leads me to think I should think about living in a smaller city. Like, say, Prescott. Or the beloved Yarnell. Ah, Yarnell. Ah, 40 acres a few miles out of town. Yes. Please.
KJG and her husband, Mr. Fireman, just sold their house up against the White Tanks. They’ve bought a place in Payson, where they’re now in the process of moving. It’s on four acres of forested land and is really going to be a lovely place to live.
Our plan was to have lunch at a favorite place in lovely downtown Tempe, then make a run on our favorite European shoe store, which was having a 10% off sale. But just before we left, we discovered the restaurant was closed. So were all the restaurants in the vicinity of VickyC’s house.
So we came on up to the Funny Farm, where I happened to have a nice package of organic free-range chicken thighs snabbed from the local Sprouts. We cooked those up with some veggies and a side of fresh tomatoes, and enjoyed sitting around yakking for quite some time.
KJG remarked that she’s headed up to Payson this week to establish residence and clean cupboards, cabinets, closets, and everything else preparatory to the arrival of their worldly goods. Mr. F is staying here for the nonce, so that he can continue to pack stuff into their pick-up and trailer and to keep the crazy neighbors’ horde of cats out of the yard…the new buyers being innocent of the fact that KJG and Mr. F are moving because of the filthy cats’ defiling the house’s yard, walls, patios, and gardens.
Isn’t that something? Being driven out of your dream home, custom built for you in one of the prettiest parts of the Valley, by effing nut cases who board mobs of cats and refuse to keep them off your property! These people essentially hijacked the HOA, so the specific written covenants were not enforced and are never gonna be enforced.
At any rate, she remarked that she didn’t have enough silverware to leave some for Mr. F and take enough for her — they only have one set.
Mwa ha ha! Lo and behold, I just happen to have a whole set of fairly fancy flatware, purchased at Williams Sonoma about three years ago. Bought it because I was about to host a temporary roommate, and I knew the fact that my working stainless looked almost identical to my Christofle — which I use all the time — was gonna cause trouble. The silver, while it can be washed in the dishwasher, has to be loaded separate from the stainless. Well, the existing stainless set is such a close knock-off of the Christofle pattern that sometimes even I have trouble telling them apart.
As soon as the roommate moved on — joining her husband in San Francisco, whence he had decamped three months before her contract employment ran out — I resurrected the Christofle knock-offs. Old age: anything new makes you nervous. 😉
So she was pleased to take this practically new set, and I was delighted to give it to her. A great housewarming gift, eh? May she use it in good health, now and evermore.
By the time we finished stuffing ourselves and talking ourselves blue, KJG was getting tired. She and Mr. F have been schlepping up and down to Payson (a 2½ hour drive) carrying their worldly goods, all the while packing and trying to keep the Waddell castle pristinely clean (and cat-urine stink-free…). So she excused herself.
VickyC and I drove out to Tempe, where I spent a great deal more than I could afford on a new pair of dressy(ish) black sandals. My old ones, which I wear to excess, were completely shot: holes worn on the insole under the toes! So that was a pricey trip. Not as pricey as it would have been, though, had we found a non-fast-food restaurant open.
The ‘hood, being an inner-city sorta place, enjoys intermittent infestations of mail thieves and porch pirates. Here at the Funny Farm, we got the mail theft pretty well under control by installing a monster, fortified locking mailbox out at the curb. Keeping opportunistic thieves from walking off with Amazon deliveries is another matter, though.
No chance I’m giving some random Amazon driver a key to open the front door and drop a package into a “locker” inside. As for the locker you drive to…well…
a) Having to drive somewhere to pick up an Amazon delivery defeats the purpose of ordering things to be delivered. If you have to get in your car and do battle with Phoenix’s homicidal traffic, you might as well go to a brick-and-mortar store and give your money to a local business.
b) Even if that made sense (it doesn’t), the nearest “locker” sites are in places where I wouldn’t get out of my car on a bet. One is at the QT at the corner of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way, the area’s worst offender as a gathering site for panhandlers, addicts, and petty thieves. The other is another QT on the other side of the freeway, also in a bad area renowned for shootings and redolent with panhandlers.
So, if you live in these parts and you’re gonna order from Amazon, you’ll have to put up with their drivers dropping packages in front of your house.
In theory, the Amazon guys are supposed to ring your doorbell. But they don’t. They come into the courtyard (which is walled and has iron gates) and leave the packages in there. That’s a whole lot better than leaving them propped against a front door or the garage door. But it’s not 100%.
Our porch pirates are bold as Arizona’s summer sunshine. A couple of residents have captured clear and highly entertaining videos of these folks in action. One woman drives down the street at a conspicuously slow speed, searching for packages left in front. When she spots one, she parks in front of the house, saunters up to the door, picks the thing up, strolls back to her car and putters on down the road. She’s clearly stopping at every house where she can see a package from the street.
Well, the past two or three weeks, I’ve repeatedly found the courtyard gate standing wide open.
I’ve thought it was one of Gerardo’s guys carelessly leaving it open.
Thought it was me, not getting the gate latched well enough.
Thought it was a bum looking to sleep inside the walls.
Nope. Nope. And nope.
Last time it happened, I knew someone had entered the courtyard and left the gate hanging open because when I back my car into the garage, I gauge the distance between the left side of the car and the house by watching the courtyard’s wall as the car slides past it. If yesterday the gate had been hanging wide open — as it was this morning — I would have spotted it yesterday afternoon when I came in.
So, yeah. What we have here is a recurrent visitor.
Undoubtedly checking every few days to see if anything has been left.
{chortle!}
This is irresistible.
What should I have in my computer but a JPG of a return label for UPS, to be pasted on a package I returned the other day.
And how hard would it be to print out another copy of it? After jimmying the return address to insert a fake name and address, of course.
A-n-n-d…who doesn’t have a handy small cardboard box from Amazon laying around?
What could an average household offer as a gift to a porch pirate?
•An empty box, maybe, filled with wadded tissue paper? •How about a rock, wrapped with said fine tissue paper? • Maybe a mousetrap, set to snap shut on opening? •Rat trap, the better to break a finger? • Dog shit, perhaps, of which we have a plethora?
I found it’s pretty easy to mock up a fake UPS return label, if you’ve already returned a package to Amazon. They email the label to you; you have to download it, cut it out of the paper, and stick it on the package.
So: Open the file. Crop the image to leave only the return address data. Import the image into a Word file. Set your font to Arial 14 points and type in a fake name and address where the real one would appear on a real label. Use a text box to put this in place if necessary.
Piece of cake. This will complicate life for the pirate who wishes revenge — with any luck she’ll steal several packages and won’t remember where yours came from. If she doesn’t, a fake address will send her astray. Make it a fake street, so she won’t visit someone else’s home. “Erewhon Lane” works well — people who don’t read literature won’t recognize the anagram for “Nowhere.”
Load the box with whatever gift you wish to give the thief. Include a message, if desired. Carefully seal it up with clear packing tape and the fake label. Leave it out on the front step for the porch pirate to pick up.
Aaarghhh! 😀 It was a good morning in America, till my fine failing memory scotched it up. Yesterday afternoon when I put a pot of sun tea to steep on the flagstones by the BBQ, I said to my hot (indeed) little self, “Remember to bring that in lest the dogs bash it running around.”
Seems like a reasonable thought, doesn’t it?
The dogs usually go out the side door at any time other than early morning, because it’s shadier and cooler on the side of the house. In the morning they go out the back door. And any time they go out, they FLY out the door like two rockets competing to see which will get to the moon first.
Naturally what with the distraction of an entire day of singing and then a church potluck, I forgot the tea. When I staggered in the house yesterday evening, only one thing was on my mind: Fall face-down into the sack!
That’s my excuse and I’m stickin’ with it.
So, continuing the “Naturally” trail, we get home from running a mile. I toss off my clothes so as to jump into the pool, fling open the pack door, and the rockets FLY out the door in their accustomed style.
And they SLAM into the damn bottle of tea, which flips over, explodes, and scatters tiny razor-sharp shards of glass all over the quarter-minus.
For those of you who live in more civilized climes: Quarter-minus is finely ground gravel mixed with sand. It’s used to ape the natural look of the ancient desert floor in xeric landscsping.
What a MESS!
So I have to spend a half-hour cleaning up that menace.
First, check dogs: they seem not to have cut their feet and I can’t find any shards of glass stuck in their pads. That’s something, anyway. I guess.
Now it’s BOLT down breakfast, because I have to get out of here at 7:30 to take the car to Chuck’s for an oil change. That is about 12 minutes from right now, as we scribble.
Chuck’s 8 a.m. appointment means that I have to do this wack-sh!t jig to get out of the ‘hood. You can’t turn left off the main north-south drags that flank the ‘hood, except for Conduit of Blight, which is blocked by the damned train, which means you’ll have a five-minute wait at any left-turn signal. The train renders Conduit of Blight pretty much nonnavigable south of Gangbanger’s Way.
So to get to a road where I can reach Chuck’s garage, I have to drive through three neighborhoods to reach a southbound road that I can turn left off of, or drive through two neighborhoods, go a half-mile north, go east on Gangbanger’s Way all the way to 12th Street, then go south on 12th (adding another half-mile, meaning I have to drive a mile out of my way to accomplish this jig) to neighborhood street where Chuck’s resides (you can’t turn left into Chuck’s from the main drag that his garage fronts on, either), park in the alley behind the garage, walk in, and let the boys know I’m in their precincts.
So 12th Street is a half-mile east of Chuck’s. This latter route, then, entails having to go TWO MILES out of my way every time I take the car for an oil change.
In other words, our fine green-thinking City Parents’ traffic control schemes ADD to the air pollution and gas consumption problem that they supposedly address. You can be sure that if one little old lady is driving out of her way to go in the direction that she needs to go, so are a whole lotta other people.
Makes Yarnell look mighty good, doesn’t it?
Yarnell doesn’t even have stop signs. That’s how huge it is.
And so, away…to do battle with the effing rush-hour traffic! A good morning to you, too, America…
Incredibly gorgeous morning. Has been since 4 a.m. 😀
Seriously: the dogs and I were out the door at 5 a.m. — it was actually almost cool at that hour. This is one of the nicest times of year in Arizona. Mornings and evenings are lovely. And it gets warm enough during the middle of the day to go swimming.
The pool is now exactly perfect: water is warm enough to not freeze your gonads on contact but cool enough to refresh. And one of the lovely things about long hair is that if you get it wet on a 100-degree day, it will keep you cool for a couple of hours. Especially if you put it up, so it can’t dry so quickly. So at this time of year, it’s in and out of the drink all day.
Ruby is chasing the doves, who come into the yard in search of bugs and seeds. The hummingbirds have returned, and just now two of them are engaged in an earth-shaking battle for dominion over the feeder. Gerardo has rescued the yard’s three bougainvillea by discovering that the watering system somehow cut off. Fixed that, and now the most spectacular of them, on the east side, has revived. Haven’t checked the two in the west front yard, because it’s a hassle to get out there around the dogs and I don’t think of it whilst driving off.
A-a-a-a-n-d-d-d-d…natcherly, at 7:28 a.m. sharp, the neighbor decides to fire up his lawnmower. Thank you sooooo much, Jerkowitz!
People are so flicking inconsiderate.
The neighbors in general are more and more up and arms about the blight surrounding the ‘hood. Couple days ago, a pervert entered a home and made off with a nine-year-old girl. This was just west of Conduit of Blight, where drug-addled bums are brought to us daily courtesy of the city’s shiny new lightrail system.
The child managed to escape the guy and sought help from a neighbor. And to tell you exactly how addled the poor shit was, they caught him by dint of a police officer’s drawing. He must not even have tried to wander out of the area.
The other night I went to a meeting of a group called 19 North. This outfit purports to advocate for the neighborhood, but when you watch their approach, you realize that it really is a front organization for developers. We were told, with great pride, that a couple of investors have bought a pair of the run-down apartment complexes west of Conduit of Blight and are going to paint them and fix them up. (woo. hah.) We were told that a rec center thing is going in on Main Drag South.
And we were shown an architect’s rendering of the new low-income block of apartments Catholic Social Services is installing next-door to a development of $700,000 homes that was inexplicably built in the high-crime area at Main Drag S. and Conduit of Blight. We were told how beautiful and lovely and wonderful this would be. No mention of the word “projects” was made, nor was anything said about the blighted shopping center across the street from CSS, where an Albertson’s occupies the (rather interesting, once) building that formerly housed the Church’s local home for unwed mothers. This is the Albertson’s that I won’t enter because it’s unsafe to walk across the shopping lot, where once I was actually chased by a panhandler, where pedestrians have been shot dead standing on the corner waiting for the light to change.
No opportunity was given to ask questions during the speakers’ hour-long series of three-minute presentations. If you wanted to discuss an issue, you had to seek out a speaker after the show and discuss it person-to-person. In other words, NO, not a public forum. Subtext: NO, we do not care what you think about what we’re about to do to your area.
So…i dunno. Once again one is brought back to the question of whether one should move while one still can move. I’ve been in the ‘hood for almost 30 years now (dear God! it’s hard to believe!), and I ain’t a-gettin’ any younger.
Thanks to Gerardo, I have no problem keeping up the property. When I get to the point where I can’t clean the pool anymore (it’s so easy, I’d have to really be decrepit for that to happen), I can always hire a pool guy. So it’s not an issue of property maintenance. It’s an issue of safety and of future property values.
At the moment, values are rising steadily. We’re seeing what I believe to be another bubble — not as crazy as the last one (yet), but still, IMHO values are artificially inflated. My house is now worth $104,000 more than I paid for it, and supposedly would rent for something in excess of $1800 a month. Young people are moving into the area and upgrading madly — every second house is now painted battleship gray or eye-searing white, the colors of the moment.
This is, as I’ve mentioned before, exactly what happened in the gentrified neighborhood my ex- and I moved into, back in the Early Middle Ages. Property values have decidedly not dropped in that area: it remains in demand because it’s close-in and because denizens of the early 21st century think those 80-year-old houses are “historic.”
Today’s pups think the same thing of this area. My house is now 46 years old — in just four years it will qualify for “historic” designation. And this is one of the district’s more recent developments: houses over in Richistan, a block and a half away, were built in the 1950s. The pups have come up with an elegant designation for what we used to call “cheap cookie-cutter construction”: it’s now “mid-century modern.”
{chortle!} Well, kids. Whatever rings your bell. 😀
Especially if your bell rings loud enough to cause you to fork over more than three times as much to buy this house as I paid to move into the ‘hood…the day before yesterday. So it seems.
Literally. I paid $100,000 for my first house here, a block and a half from the present Funny Farm. The FF itself is now worth about $330,000. Is that crazy or not?
The bum situation and the ongoing battles with the city and the developers who own it do give me pause. Sometimes I think I should move: away from the bums, away from the blight, away from the Blightrail. Why am I staying here? I don’t have a job to commute to, and so the excuse that it eliminates a daily drive does not apply.
Unfortunately my entire social life is centered in this area. To say nothing of the fact that my son lives just a few miles away. And one is left with the question of where one would go.
To move to Whiteyville up north, to Scottsdale or Fountain Hills (Whiteyville East), or to Prescott would be almost ruinously expensive. Houses there cost as much or more than this place is worth, plus of course to move you have to pay thousands of bucks in Realtor’s commissions, repairs on the old house, repairs on the new house, a moving van… The only practical way for me to move would be to throw an estate sale, sell everything I own that my kid doesn’t want, pocket the money, move into a Tiny House in the middle of 40 acres, and furnish it with stuff from someone else’s estate sale.
Nor are the lily-white upscale areas of the city significantly safer. Not so long ago a guy was shot dead outside Scottsdale Fashion Square. Who cares where you’re shot: dead is dead, whether you’re outside an Albertson’s or outside Neiman-Marcus.
If I stay here, I’m going to have to do some serious fix-up pretty soon.
In the first place, the shrubbery in the front yard needs some serious hacking back. When I moved here, the house across the street was blighted. Some readers will recall that I used to call it Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. It was quite the eyesore. Not wishing to look at it out my front window, I had the guy who installed the xeric landscaping plant three layers of screening plants.
This foliage is now, shall we say, somewhat thick. “Impenetrable” might be le mot juste. It really is overgrown out there. I need to have two or three large shrubs — the size of small trees — taken out. That’s going to be expensive, and I’m not going to be happy about it because one of them sports the most amazing blue blossoms. Just now it’s covered with them. I’ll be sorry to see it go.
But it is a jungle in front and does need to be cleaned out.
Then, second place: that pool has got to be replastered. That is a $4,000 to $6,000 job. Exactly where the cash to pay for that is gonna come from escapes me. I’ll need to draw it down from investments before the Trump chickens come home to roost…which, I expect, will be a couple of years yet. I hope.
The roof. Hm. It was reroofed after the great hail storm of 2010. That event occurred in November, so the place was reroofed in December of 2010 or early 2011. So that puts it on the high side of 7 years old, closer to 8. Asphalt shingle roofing lasts about 10 to 12 years here. Though it looks to be in pretty good shape just now, soon enough it will have to be replaced. Again. That is now a (hang-onto-your-hat) $10,000 job!
So. Pray for another hailstorm. A tornado might do the job, too.
But still… By the time all is said and done, selling this place and buying a new place and moving a lifetime’s worth of furniture and doing all the usual goddamn repairs on a “new” (to me) house (always figure at least 10% of the sale price for those little surprises) would cost probably a helluva lot more than $14,000. A 6 percent realtor’s commission on what I believe to be a low price for this house (10 grand less than Zillow zestimates) would be over $19,000. And that doesn’t count other closing costs plus the joy of moving plus the usual fix-ups.
Financially, I probably would be better off staying here.
As for the bum situation…can you spell “German Shepherd”?
Available, as we scribble, at the White Gershep Rescue…
So yesterday my friend La Maya suggested we should go out to a nice restaurant for lunch, to celebrate the end of the semester for her and to catch up on life, the universe, and all that. Such an activity, as you can imagine, might entail having…you know, a conversation.
The uptown area, because it’s in full-out gentrification mode, is now littered with faux-gourmet restaurants that serve up non-fast food in surroundings more upscale than your standard McDonald’s. So off we went to our favorite northern Italian white-tablecloth eatery.
Grab the last parking space in the lot, climb out of the car, amble up to the door, and find: CLOSED. They don’t open till 3 p.m.
This, I’d suspected, since another friend has his office just down the road from the place. We used to eat there whenever the mood struck us, but the last time he and I descended on the place for lunch (as I now recalled…), we’d found it locked tight.
Oh well. Plenty of other fish in the chef’s kettle. We moved on to another favorite.
Closed.
Traveling on down the road… Our third choice was also closed.
We drove to five popular restaurants in the Camelback business district — which houses lots of lawyers, corporate executives, and financial advisers who can afford a decent lunch. Not one of them was open.
So we went to a place renowned for the racket it pumps into its customers’ ears. I hate this place because I can’t hear myself think inside there. But it has a patio, where you might hope to escape the gawdawful loud Muzak.
Not so much. The hostess goes to seat us on the patio…right underneath a blasting speaker! We explain to her that we dislike not being able to hear each other speak and wonder if they could please turn down the racket.
Amazingly, she does so.
We get settled, order a couple of iced teas, and peruse the menu. Before we can get past the salad offerings, B-R-R-R-R-R-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-C-K!!!!!!!!!!!
One end of the patio roof is supported by a small outbuilding, next to which she has seated us. A crew of guys is working inside there with a masonry drill!
The racket actually hurt your ears!
So we got up and left.
Finally we arrived at our sixth restaurant, an old-line eatery once frequented by the late Governor Rose Mofford (since she died in 2016 and stepped down from the governor’s office in 1990, that clues you to how old and traditional this place is).
Amazingly, unlike its millennial siblings, it’s so stodgy it opens for lunch. Isn’t that quaint?
And its management assumes you want to talk business, or at least socialize: no blasting “music” assaulting your ears.
What should we find on the menu but a hamburger whose description suggests it is damn near identical to the fancy overpriced hamburger at the B-R-A-C-Keria. We each ordered one of those, and since after driving to six restaurants we were well beyond the iced-tea stage, we also ordered a couple glasses of wine.
Jeez. Can you imagine?
We decided that our profound gratitude at finding a restaurant so outdated it evinces some consideration for its customers is, without doubt, a sign of our advancing age.
What is with places that insist on blasting you with unpleasant, throbbing Muzak while you’re trying to have a decent — expensive! — meal? (Those hamburgers cost 16 bucks, folks, and that didn’t include the wine.)
La Maya speculates it’s because people no longer converse with each other. They sit at the table poking at their mobile phones. If they have something to say to the person across the table, they text it.
If that’s not dystopia, I’d like to know what it is.
My theory is that restaurant owners want to force people to move on and clear the table for a new party as fast as possible. By way of doing that, they make the ambience unpleasant enough to discourage you from lingering over your coffee or wine.
And that is dystopic, too. The thought it brings to my mind is not printable.
Twice I suggested we go to my house where I could throw a very nice steak on the grill along with some exceptionally fine fresh asparagus and some fancy expensive grain, and where two unopened bottles of wine beckoned. She was having none of it, though: you don’t get tenure at an R-1 university without a certain stubborn persistence… She was determined to find a livable restaurant.
And we did. It was quite nice. I would go back there again, any day.
So the other day here in the ‘hood — don’t recall whether I mentioned this — while I was walking the pooches along about 5 in the a.m., the hounds and I decide to make a side trip up a less-traveled lane in Richistan. (There are only so many times you can defile a mansion’s lawn without the millionaire charging out with his shotgun in hand…) Up this pleasant little side street a development of new Styrofoam-and-plaster McMansions is a-building, on a piece of land late a beloved horse property. Starting price: $800,000.
oes cause you to lose weight, just as other kinds of speed will do.
