Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Creepy Paws…

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…or is that “pause”? No: decidedly paws.

Wherein, after staying up half the night doing battle with the damn computer, I decided to excuse myself from choir this morning (it was after 9 a.m. before I re-established contact with the earth — the dogs hadn’t been fed, I hadn’t been fed, I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee, and I most surely had not bathed, painted, and combed myself). So that indeed did create a pause, about a morning’s worth.

During this moment or three of relative quiet, I decided to clean off the garage cabinet tops, which have been piled high with clutter, so that I could stack the leftover carpet tack strips up there and get them out of my way. In the course of that chore, I happened to notice some bird dew had dropped on the car’s hood, so went off and soaked a paper towel by way of cleaning it off.

The hood clean, I start to walk around the car wiping off other specks and smudges. And at the back end of the car, what should I find but big, greasy black pawprints all over the white paint on the car’s back gate. Obviously, my hands get dirty now and again…but with garden dirt, not with black grime. And the handprints are bigger than my mine, by quite a bit. Pretty clearly someone has tried to figure out how to break into the back lift gate.

You can manually open a Venza’s lift gate. But it’s a real PITA. You have to know exactly where the button is to open the thing (it’s a button, not a latch-like thing), and you have to push it just right. And of course the car has to be unlocked, which it was not.

So I wipe that mess off and proceed on around the car, where I find still more paw-prints around the driver’s-side passenger door.

He must have seen the satchel that holds the Scottsdale Bidness Association stuff — a basket for our weekly drawing and assorted such junk. I’d put it in the back of the car but then ended up not going to the east side last Thursday. It was hidden in a crate under a blanket, but I had to take it out so as to load up the crate with Costco junk, and I’d forgotten to put it back in its secret place. So he probably thought that thing was a woman’s purse.

Charming.

If that’s the case, then the prowler visited either in the Walmart shopping center or the church parking lot. Since WM has a couple of armed security guards prowling around, it’s likely the perp visited the church. People’s cars have been broken into there…which makes sense. If you were looking for a car to rip off, wouldn’t you select one in an affluent church’s parking lot rather than at a Walmart in a low-income area? 😀

Image: DepositPhoto, © domnitsky.yar

 

Clash of the Cultures

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So one of the neighbors called the cops on a young couple who are regular visitors from the other side of Conduit of Blight Boulevard. Usually these two come through the ’hood pushing their toddler in a stroller, presumably making their way from the depressing apartments to the west of us into the park, a much nicer venue in which to enjoy the company of a small child. They had a friend with them — maybe a relative, but because I think they’re Latino and he was decidedly of the African persuasion, let’s call him their friend.

This little group was doing nothing wrong. They were not peering into backyards. They were not stealing bicycles or potted plants. They were not fighting. They were not harassing anyone. They were just walking along, engaged in a lively conversation.

As they walked by the Funny Farm, all three dogs went screaming BATSH!T, because the passers-by were making a little noise — unusual noise, that is — especially Friend, who was carrying on about some event at the top of his voice, in that aggressive rap tone and meter that some people affect. The young mom, at one point, advised him to quit making a drama out of everything, which elicited a spirited defense of his personal approach to Life, the Universe, and All That.

They were not committing a crime. They did not appear to be about to commit a crime. They were not doing anything out of the ordinary. They were just…well…acting ghetto.

Apparently some of the residents here can’t cope with that.

Hence, not one but two squad cars. Yes. Four cops in two spectacularly marked sedans came cruising down the street after the three pedestrian desperadoes, to do…what? Give them a lecture on how to behave properly in Whiteyville?

Argh.

You know, there’s no reason to believe the young man was intentionally offending or even had any idea he was offending. The couple has moved through our space comfortably for weeks, and so he probably felt right to home. There are people that you recognize right off the bat as dangerous, even as immediately threatening — like the two felonious looking dudes with the bloodhound. But these folks were not that. That kid could not have scared me if he tried. Which he did not.

He wasn’t hurting anyone or anything. He wasn’t threatening. He was just being what he is: a goofy kid.

Here’s what I think about that: If you are going to live on the edge of a ghetto, you must expect to meet people, now and again, who exhibit ghetto behavior. They must expect to meet people, now and again, who exhibit up-tight whitebread behavior.

Get used to it.

It’s part of the Zen of living in a big city: you get used to the many different styles of its many different people. If you don’t like it, move to an HOA in the boondocks and commute to work an hour or two each way.

One of the few redeeming features of urban life is that it is interesting. The main thing that makes urban life interesting is the rubbing together of cultures: the coexistence of people with different viewpoints and different habits.

That’s why we live in the city.

Peace in the War Zone(?)

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Aw, c’mon…We live in Arizona. 80 degrees leaves a guy shivering!

So some guy was shot dead just around the corner last night — over by the freeway, but still within walking distance of the Funny Farm. That would explain the excited burst of cop sirens along about 9 p.m.

Blasts of alarm have become so commonplace I no longer pay much attention to them. If the cop helicopters take up residence directly over my block, yeah…I’ll get up and lock the doors. Otherwise…please, dudes: make my day.

Occasionally (well, we could say more like about once every three days), I reflect that it’s probably past time for me to look for housing in some quieter part of town. Or of the state. I suspect that one reason my (former) mother-in-law has lived to 103 is that she dwells in peace: Grand Junction is about as quiet and laid-back as it gets. She hasn’t been subjected to a lot of environmental stress from traffic noise, cop and ambulance sirens, endless copter fly-overs, car alarms, house alarms, barking watchdogs…or, presumably, from daily newspaper reports of mayhem.

That kind of background stress has got to take a toll.

If you’re going to live in Arizona, the answer is to move away from Phoenix. The city, except for a few enclaves and the gentrification-engineering of the downtown district, has largely deteriorated into a gigantic slum. Areas that once were modest middle-class/working-class areas are now mostly working poor or not-working-at-all. To give you an idea: teacher pay (these areas were places where public school teachers would live) is now so low here that the state cannot hire or retain teachers at all. Some districts have no senior staff; most teachers leave the trade after three or four years.

The result of right-to-work-for-nothing laws is that you end up with large segments of your society living in poverty. And poverty, alas, brings with it drugs, alcohol, psychological suffering, and crime. Hence: a neighborhood shopping center where you dare not carry your purse across the parking lot, or where the residents drive miles away from home to buy their groceries at safer venues; people getting shot dead on the street corners; and criminals moving into your neighborhood.

The other day the dogs and I were walking over in Richistan when abruptly we came face-to-face with two of the scariest dudes I’ve seen in a long time. One of them…well…you know how some men get a certain “look” about them after they’ve been in prison for awhile? They put on weight because of the bad food (which they’d probably eat on the street anyway), but they also put on muscle because they pass the time working out; they also take on a kind of self-defensive aggressive demeanor that can be distinctive. One might even say…heh!…arresting.

Well, one of them looked like that: the biggest, baddest dude in town! 🙂

The other was a smaller, fairly slender punk riding a bike that was too small for him — i.e., it no doubt had been lifted out of someone’s yard. It was 80+ degrees and he had on a sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, hiding his face. Uh huh…a man has to keep warm, eh?

They had a big old bloodhound with them. It wanted to go after the corgis, but the big bruiser kept it under control. He was polite and well-mannered — his companion was reclusive, but the tank came across like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. It was painfully obvious that they were casing the neighborhood, looking for the best houses to burgle.

There’s a Humane Society shelter just up the road. These guys go to the shelter, “adopt” a dog, and use it as a ruse: they’re “walking the dog” while they’re checking out your house to rip off. So: no question that was what was going on.

The problem with moving out of Phoenix to someplace quieter and ostensibly safer is…well, there are two problems:

a) The suburbs, home of white flight, are now ALL homeowner’s associations. Developers build their tracts as HOAs, and they stay HOAs. I do not want to live in an HOA. I have enough layers of government to deal with, thank you very much; I don’t need another bunch of busybodies bossing me around.

Nor, just between you and me and the lamp-post, do I especially want to live in a lily-white ghetto. Weirdly enough, I happen to like a little diversity in my surroundings.

b) They are halfway to California. They’re so far away from anything that, like my friend KJG, you find yourself driving until you’re blue in the face any time you want to shop or meet your friends or go to any events. I don’t want to live on the road to Mandalay, thank you.

Smaller towns here are poorly provided with infrastructure. Medical care in Arizona, by and large, isn’t great to start with. In a place like, say, Yarnell or Patagonia, it’s nonexistent. You live there at your risk…especially as you get to the heart attack age. And most small towns in Arizona are pretty grody: you want to see poverty here, you visit the rural areas.

Arizona’s closest approximation of MiL’s home town, Grand Junction — the largest town on Colorado’s Western Slope — is Prescott. And it surely is a nice little burg. A little touristy, but not excessively so: it also has a Costco and grocery stores that serve real people who really live there. It has a few decent restaurants, and it has a cultural life of sorts.

But it’s not cheap to live there. Housing prices are fairly high, and the cost of gasoline and groceries is significantly higher than in the big city. And there, too: although the county medical center is one of the three best in the state, that actually ain’t sayin’ much. It’s hot in the summer — cooler than here, but still warm enough to need air conditioning — and cold enough in the winter that it sometimes snows, meaning you couldn’t get away with leaving the heat off all winter long, the way I do here. And there’s a chronic water shortage. So utility bills would be significantly higher.

Plus of course the cost of moving house takes your breath away.

So I dunno…I probably don’t want to move away. But if my son didn’t live here…if I didn’t have the church choir…I surely would.

Image: DepositPhotos © Xalanx

More Money than Taste…Adventures in Scottsdale

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Taste: New Business Club Venue

So this morning it was off to a Denny’s for the weekly meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association. This greasy spoon locates itself in Darkest Scottsdale, just off the 101 on Indian Bend, almost adjacent to the Pima Reservation.

For years, we met at The Good Egg at Hilton Village, a formerly upscale strip shopping center now trending to (for Scottsdale) down-at-the-heels. All the serious Richerati have moved north, leaving their formerly fancy digs to aging middle class types who favor joints like Trader Joe’s and My Sister’s Closet.

The Good Egg was an OK place for our get-togethers: it had the advantages of a central location and a veteran waitress whom we all loved. And it had a little alcove where we could sit around a long table (cobbled together with little restaurant tables) in relative privacy. It wasn’t great — the food was mediocre and the coffee was dreadful — but it sufficed.

However, after the Egg was purchased by First Watch, things took a sharp southerly turn. They changed the menu choices, in some ways for the better, but the cooks seem not to have enjoyed any additional training. They replaced the plates with these big square (ostensibly stylish) things that take up so much room on the table it makes eating pretty clumsy, and they cheapied down the amount of food they put on the plates. The coffee went from the Egg’s “bad” to “even worse,” something that can only be described as an amazing achievement in reverse customer satisfaction. They redecorated and in doing so covered one of the walls with stupid-looking fake antique tin ceiling tiles, which not only look horrible but bounce decibels and jack up the noise level. And they honed the staff’s customer disservice skills. The manager quit and went to another restaurant. Our beloved waitress stayed but seemed to grow unhappy and distant.

We began looking for another place to meet. We tried several restaurants, one of which had wonderful food (a real rarity in an American coffee-shop type eatery) but whose seating left much to be desired.

Others seemed to offer no improvement or simply cost too much — one place wanted to gouge us extra unless everyone ordered an expensive breakfast entrée. Since two of us don’t eat much at breakfast and since none of us wanted to pay upwards of 12 bucks for a few pancakes whipped up from a mix, that outfit lost.

I personally haven’t been in a Denny’s in years, not after they served up a cup of coffee in a mug bearing some woman’s bright red lipstick. When I asked for a clean cup, the idiot waitress refused to replace it! So that was it for me, where Denny’s was concerned.

But everyone else in the group liked the place; so it was go there or quit the club. Besides, it’s in Scottsdale, not in grody mid-town Phoenix.

To my surprise, the joint is much improved over the old Denny’s on Camelback, which was pretty much a true greasy spoon. And the service was excellent: the waitress was running her feet off. The booth where they put us, not realizing we intended to descend on them en masse, was comfortable, and the ambient noise level was low enough that all 12 of us could hear ourselves talk.

And amazingly, the food was not too toxic. The coffee was OK (one helluva lot more than you can say for First Watch), and the food seemed more than adequate — and abundant. My friend Steve sat next to me; he ordered his usual bacon and scrambled egg combo: the bacon was crisp but not overcooked (last week at First Watch I noticed they served him several strips of black stuff) and neither were the eggs.

So we’ll be going back there. We now have a standing reservation for the back room.

Taste: Furniture

The Pavilions, where the Denny’s in question is housed, is a sprawling shopping center that climbs over a couple of main drags. There is a lot of commerce around there. As we were standing around after breakfast chatting, I noticed a Front Gate Outlet.

Front Gate is an upscale furniture retailer. They sell a lot through a catalogue, and the prices are in the “if you have to ask” range. But…hm? An “outlet”?

So after we broke up, I went over there to check it out.

Really. Some people really do have more money than taste. And Scottsdale is the home of the more monied than tasteful.

You never saw such ugleeee furniture in your life: big, clunky, dark, looming stuff, and not a stick of it inviting to sit down in or to eat off of or to store your tchochkes in. Uglee outdoor furniture. Uglee indoor furniture. Uglee area rugs. Uglee bedding sets. Uglee everything!

Sat down in one curious-looking chair and found it so uncomfortable I couldn’t imagine why anyone would buy it.

And the prices? Take your breath away. $3500 for a nothing-special leather sofa that you could get at Macy’s for $1800.

Tastes: Grocery stores

Well, one advantage of schlepping that far across the city is that the easiest way to get there is across Shea Boulevard. Though the trip will burn a lot of gas, ultimately it may save gas, because it takes me right by all the stores I usually shop at.

There’s a Home Depot in the Pavilions — you could walk there from the Denny’s. There’s also a Target in that shopping center.

And at Tatum and Shea there’s an Albertson’s, a Trader Joe’s, a Whole Foods, a Penzey’s, and a gigantic Fry’s mega-supermarket.

So, in theory, if one were to assiduously maintain one’s shopping lists, one could do all of one’s shopping on the way home from this weekly meeting.

That would go a very long way toward keeping me out of Costco, and it also would mean I wouldn’t have to drive from pillar to post to get all the food and household items I favor. Hell, I’d already be at pillar and post.

Images:
Denny’s in Texas: Billy Hathorn CC BY-SA 3.0
Armchair: Deposit photos: © AnatolyM

Hilarity of the Day

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So I’m on my home from the Costco up on the I-17, eastbound toward the ‘hood on GangBanger Parkway. To amuse myself while driving up the concrete riverbottom and through the dreary low-end commercial districts, I’ve been counting the panhandlers. Four on the way up there. Seven on the way back.

At the corner of Conduit of Blight Boulevard and Gangbanger Parkway, I spot a fellow who clearly has just jumped off the train at the end of the line, where the bums, nodders, tweakers, and panhandlers are required to get off.

He’d be a handsome sort of fellow, tall and wiry with a beard just going to gray, if only you could catch him long enough to bathe him and break him of his meth habit. Oh well.

He’s pushing a wheelchair toward the stoplight, at a fast pace. Not wanting to miss the signal, he breaks into a run (a near-athletic run) and tears into the crosswalk, zipping along behind the wheelchair, which is loaded with a cooler and his “Disabled Vet” beggar’s sign.

Undoubtedly coming from or going to his favorite spot to take up his panhandling position! 😀

Pore, pore, pitiful me! How much do you suppose a man can earn, posing as pitiful on a street corner?

Ah, Linda…how we miss ye!

Also in the Department of Ludicrousness, I’m on my way out the door, headed for said Costco Run, and as I pull out of the driveway, what should come stumbling up the street but two tough-looking broads (pace, honored feminist friends! If it’s OK to call a sh!thead a sh!thead, it’s OK to call a broad a broad).

At first glance they look like idle teenagers, but closer up, not so much: they’re in their late 20s or early 30s, and they’ve got some serious roadwear on them. They watch me pull out of the garage, and as I head up the street they come to a stop in front of my house, where they loiter.

I go up the road, watching this in my rear-view mirror. Turn around in the neighbor’s driveway, come back, go back in the garage, close the garage door, and go inside to wait for them to leave.

Only…they don’t leave. Now they sit down on the curb in front of the house, one of them with her head between her legs looking very tweakish and the other on her cell phone.

Shee-ut. I need to get my errands done. My son is soon to be on his way over to drop off Charley the Golden Retriever for some dog-sitting, and I would like to be finished with these tedious chores so as to be here to greet him and the Honored Dog. Plus, believe it or not, I have things to do this afternoon.

I wait. They stick around.

Finally, I call WonderAccountant, who lives  & works across the street and whose office window looks directly out onto my front yard, and ask if she would keep an eye on the Funny Farm for an hour, whilst I run to the Costco. She reports that she can see the laydeez. She agrees to glance up from her Tax Prep now and again to check on the shack.

An hour later, I get back. She has watched. She has e-mailed:

The curbsitters were evidently representing a window replacement company called Kasich?? Or something like that.  One came to my door and the other one went to Terry’s door.  I saw them both walk down towards 16th avenue again together.

No further excitement to report!

Not yet, anyway…

🙂

 

Real Estate, Money, and Style

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So the handsome young Mega-Church Audio Engineer, who apparently earns a fairly decent living if the cars he and his wife drive are any indication, has put his house on the market. This two-child couple are classic urban upwardly mobile folk, the sort who buy in an aging neighborhood like ours and, bless’em, handsomely fix up decrepit houses that they perceive a) as better built than the present ticky-tack and b) quaintly Mid-Century Modern.

♥

The house they bought was a crumbling rental right behind the house SDXB  used to live in.

The original owners, a reclusive pair who had lived there for at least a couple of decades, were thought to be mother and son. Whatever they were, they were quiet but strange: good old-fashioned slobs. They let the place run down year after year after year.

Way. Way. Waaaaaayyyy down.

Eventually they sold the place to the Perp, a guy who turned our neighborhood into his personal rental empire by converting every home he could grab from elderly original owners, who had no idea they were giving away their property for a fraction of its real value. The Perp did a little do-it-yourself fix-up, filled in the nonfunctional swimming pool, and rented it to some serious sh!theads. The last of his tenants was a guy who abused his children so violently that the neighbors across the street sold their home to get away from the sound of the screaming. They announced — to the Perp himself as well as everyone else — that the abuse was upsetting their own children so much they could no longer live there.

SDXB was up on his roof doing some shingle repairs, when he glanced down into the guy’s backyard and noticed the sh!thead had penned two young puppies in a cage out in the glaring 100-degree sun. He reported this to the Perp, who lived next door to him at the time. SDXB announced that if he saw this again he was going to call the SPCA.

But he didn’t have to: when the neighbor across the street made his announcement that he was moving because of the child abuse, the Perp (to his credit) (I guess) told his charming tenant that if he heard one more word of any such shenanigans, he was going to report them to Child Protective Services. By dawn the following morning, tenant, wife, and bruised children were gone, disappeared into the shimmering mirages of the Cadillac desert.

Shortly thereafter, Perp sold the house to a couple who took up residence there like normal people. The wife was a kind of DIY decorator who liked to do fix-up, and they did improve the place considerably. Not enough to where it looked like a normal house, but better. Much better. Amazingly, they excavated the pool. But they never so much as touched the decrepit, feral front yard.

They divorced. The wife got custody of the house. She turned it into a rental again and moved to California. Not surprisingly, the deterioration resumed.

What a wreck it was! And it’s right at the entry into our neighborhood, so anyone who was coming to look at a house for sale in our area saw, first thing out of the box, this slum property. Needless to say, our property values did not soar into the stratosphere.

Finally, along comes the present young couple. They get the house, and the first thing they do is shovel out the gawdawful landscaping. They, as it develops, are no-nonsense gentrifiers. After several years of painting and clean-up and pool renovation and interior restoration — much of it on a DIY or barn-raising basis, the house looks pretty darned nice.

Nice, but not gaudy.

Just a few days ago, they put the house on the market. They want $429,500 for it!!!

What are they smoking?

Some Biblical weed, apparently: last August they listed it for $399,500; about two weeks later they dropped the price by 20 grand, and then they took it off the market in October.

Not, when you come down to it, the antics of someone in his right mind.

Zillow thinks my house is worth about $317,000. His is the same model as mine; he’s persuaded Zillow that it’s worth $367,241…possibly by overstating the square footage. He’s claiming it’s 167 square feet larger than mine, suggesting he’s probably counting the garage in the livable space…which is illegal. Oh well.

I imagine this spate of grandiosity is inspired by the Amazing Starburst of the fix-up around the corner.

This vintage (real!) Mid-Century Modern babe was bought by professional fix-and-flippers after the ancient old guy who lived there finally passed away. It’s huge: 5 bedrooms, and the original owners converted the garage into a gigantic TV room, thereby manufacturing 2861 square feet in which to raise their several children.

The kids grew up. The wife died. The Old Guy lived out his life in the house, deaf as a stone, with his two miniature schnauzers. They had bushy gray mustaches. He had a bushy gray mustache. Pretty adorable bunch.

The speculators ran amok in upgrading the place. It looks like they put in top-quality stuff, and the style is Late Urban Loft. It’s quite a production…

It’s a little hard-edged for my taste. They painted all the woodwork, throughout, black. But you have to allow: it’s just the thing for a young couple, straight or gay. And young couples, straight or gay, are exactly the future residents we old-timers in the ‘hood covet.

Okay, so hang onto your hat: They want $624,950 for the thing.

HOLY shee-ut! We have arrived in Richistan!

After contemplating these phenomena, I came home and looked around the Funny Farm.

Could this $317,000 shack really be worth something over 400 grand? Hmmm…

Not much has been done to it since I moved in, about 13 years ago. Compared to the Richerati Moderne around the corner, it’s beginning to look a little shabby. Needs new paint, inside and out. Its handsome cabinetry and black appliances (and its oven that dies if you dare to turn on the broiler) are…well…getting a bit dated.

But it occurs to me that with minimal painting on the inside — minimal as in even I could do it myself — the place could be made to look a lot more up-to-date.

Fortunately, my friend Elaine, who chose the paint colors for this place, had a real flair for style. The color scheme was well ahead of its time. Those fancy new houses are painted in shades of gray and pale beige. So, interestingly, is the Funny Farm. The difference is, the living room is a sort of swamp green — well, that’s what we called it. It has an accent wall in swamp blue — a kind of deep aquamarine, sort of dusky blue-green. The hallway and adjacent accent wall in the dining room is this crazy Mexican orange, something I came up with and have loved a lot, but that I do recognize is pretty idiosyncratic.

If I were to paint the swamp blue wall in the living room that soft color of green (one of these houses has a wall in a very similar color) and then paint the hallway and dining-room accent wall the very lovely ivory white (almost beige but not quite) that inhabits the dining room, the family room, and the kitchen, that would bring the interior color scheme right up to date.

There’s not a thing I can do about the kitchen and bathroom cabinets and countertops. It might not cost that much to replace the counters with granite, but new cabinetry would run upwards of $15,000 or $20,000, which I surely couldn’t afford. Probably couldn’t afford updated countertops, either.

The exterior needs a whole new paint job, and that is going to cost $4,000 or more. The paint around the slab has crumbled away — it needs to be scraped off and the cracks sealed, a certifiable bitch of a job. I’ve really liked the colors and would probably just repaint in the same shades, except for the chimney. But all of the paint has faded, and so everything, walls, trim, chimney, you name it, would have to be repainted.

Interior painting I can manage myself. Exterior: not a chance.

But four hundred thousand dollah? Seriously? That’s almost twice as much as I paid for the place.

The neighbors and I think we’re looking at another housing bubble. These prices are completely out of proportion to what the houses are: 1960s and 70s tract homes elbow-to-elbow with not one but two dangerous slums.

But one could argue that we’re looking at gentrification of yet another close-in middle-class neighborhood, movin’ on up…and turbocharged by the ultra-stylish, über-urban light-rail line. For all its impracticality and all the unlikelihood that any of them are going to use it on a regular basis, the hipsters romanticize that light-rail to a high pitch.

The historic Encanto district, where the ex- and I lived after we married, gentrified just like this shortly after we moved there, and it has never un-gentrified. The house we paid $33,000 for is on the  market, as we scribble, for $824,900.

So…anything’s possible. I guess.