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Urban life

Real Risk, Perceived Risk

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Venus-pacific-levelledWhat a beautiful, peaceful evening. Venus, a brilliant diamond, shone in a deep sapphire sky when the corgis and I set out to jog  a mile-long course through the ’hood. The dimming sunset, still glowing orange, backlit tall palm, ash, and pine trees to the west.

Two houses between here and Richistan, very nice houses, are on the market. One is a fix-and-flip, acquired from a very aged man who probably was the original owner. The other has been upgraded a couple of times over the past decade and is significantly further from Conduit of Blight than the Funny Farm.

I consider, as I pass each house, whether if I had a sh!tload of money I would wish to buy one of these places. And the answer is no.

In each case, the house’s next-door neighbor has two or three large, deep-throated barking dogs that go berserk whenever anyone walks by on the side walk with their own dogs, their children, their friends, or their door-to-door fliers. Across the street from each house was at least one neighbor harboring large barking dogs.

apr13dogNow of course, I have barking dogs, too. But when mine are yapping, they don’t act like they’re going to come through the window and grab you by the throat. Nor are they left outside in the yard at all hours of the day and the night — most of the time if they bark at a passer-by, it’s from the living room. They’re not guard dogs and they’re not intended as guard dogs.

A lot of people in this area have large, fierce dogs — more than one of them — because they perceive that the area is unsafe.

But is it?

True, the district just to the north of us, less than a mile away — really, just a few steps across a main drag from the northernmost homes in the ’hood — is notoriously crime-ridden, the territory of a notable meth gang. The district to the west of us, where aging apartments continue to deteriorate and an abandoned golf course has become a campground for homeless drug addicts, also has a high crime rate and an increasingly sketchy ambience.

But that’s the nature of the City of Phoenix: it’s a patchwork of enclaves. Anywhere you look, you’ll find upscale neighborhoods full of doctors and lawyers and business tycoons cheek-by-jowl with drug-infested slums. If you want to live in uninterrupted affluent homogeneity, you pretty much have to move to Scottsdale…which, because everybody knows its inhabitants have plenty of money and plenty of loot to steal, is as much a target of burglars and thieves as any other part of the Valley. Apparently we Phoenicians like it this way: we do nothing to change it.

So it is that our neighborhood, flanked by blight on two sides, is a hotbed of risk.

Well… I’ve taken to walking the dogs every evening after dark. Nary a resident is to be seen outside: they’re all parked in front of their televisions or their computers. You could break into a car, steal a tchotchki off a front  porch, peer in a window without anyone ever noticing.

Never once have I seen a bum wandering through the night or a likely burglar slinking by. Except for the occasional coyote — which isn’t any more interested in confronting you than you are in confronting it — after dark there is nothing out there that looks like a threat. Not a burglar, not a bum, not biker, not even a kid in a hoodie.

During the daytime, you see an occasional derelict. Once in awhile you’ll see someone who’s obviously casing houses. But not often. Usually you can walk a mile or more through the ’hood without every seeing anyone but a few workmen and some wandering neighbors.

This is the very house we lived in!
This is the very house we lived in!

That was not so 30 years ago, when my ex- and I lived in the then gentrifying Encanto neighborhood, a picturesque remnant of small-town Phoenix that, like the ’hood where the Funny Farm stands, was discovered all at once by a horde of young upwardly mobile urban adults. It quickly became known as “the lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto” — because it was within easy driving distance (even walking distance) of the downtown hospitals and law firms.

The Encanto area’s zip code had the highest per-capita drug use in the city, at the time. Despite the efforts of some developers to pave it over with a freeway, it survived a great deal of pressure to force the young would-be city-dwellers out to the suburbs. Today it’s one of the city’s bragging points.

Exactly the same thing is under way here: the ’hood is the New Encanto. But unlike Encanto, the ’hood is not overrun with derelicts and criminals. There are a lot of homeless mentally ill riding the buses and trains up and down Conduit of Blight Blvd., but not so many actually inside the neighborhood — local opinion to the contrary.

When we lived in Encanto, you couldn’t poke your nose outside the door without seeing a bum or two roaming up the street. One family, a block to the south of us, was baking cookies while watching television of an evening. Since everyone was in the house and they felt safety in numbers, it didn’t occur to them to bolt all the doors and windows. A bum watching from the alley noticed this and observed that the wife would come into the kitchen, stick a pan of cookies in the oven, and then go watch TV while they baked for 15 minutes. During one of those interludes, he just stepped into the kitchen, picked up her purse, and made off with it. 🙂

Not all these exploits were so funny. One of my neighbors was hacked to death by an ax murderer, having surprised the guy robbing her house when she came home from the beauty parlor. Another was studied by a man who knew a) where to find the only window in the house that was not alarmed and b) when her husband was out of town. He took the opportunity to spend an entire night beating and raping her.

We have never had anything like that happen here. We’ve had some close calls, but no real horrors. Yet.

But interestingly, few people in Encanto kept large, fierce dogs. I had a German shepherd that I’d inherited from a neighbor. The lady behind us had a doberman pinscher. Our babysitter, a street to the south of us, had a pair of airdales. One couple in our car-pool had a pretty ridiculous bloodhound. But otherwise, that was about it: I didn’t know anybody else who had big dogs.

Here, everybody and his little brother has a large, fierce dog with a threatening bark — or two, if possible. Cassie has been pounced twice by loose German shepherds. You can’t walk around the park without coming across someone with a big dog running loose — on Sunday mornings a bunch of locals bring about a dozen large dogs over there and let them run around, illegally, off the leash. Encanto Park was bum heaven, but you never saw a dog off the leash there. You didn’t see many dogs at all, come to think of it.

Homeless_man_in_AnchorageThat says to me that people who live in this neighborhood are scared. The number of derelicts visible in these parts is a tiny fraction of the number of car-sleeping and window-peeping and yard-toileting natives who used to hang out in Encanto. Yet people apparently perceive a great deal more risk here than they did there.

Yes, we do have some incidents: the bum that jumped a wall to diddle with a couple of small girls being the most recent. And yeah, I did enjoy the Great Garage Invasion. But in the 13 years we lived in Encanto we had…

• The cat burglar on the roof
• The Night of the Screaming (in which I chased off a rapist by hollering “fire” at the top of my lungs)
• The burglar who was chased out of the house at 2 a.m. by our German shepherd
• The ax murder
• The night-long rapefest at the neighbor’s house
• The guy who took up residence in a neighbor’s car and was pissed when he was thrown out so she could go to work
• The guy who tried to push his way in through my front door even as not one but two German shepherds stared him down
• The guy who chased one of the nannies in Palmcroft
• The guy who followed me even as I was pushing a baby in a stroller (I dodged into a neighbors’ house)
• The couple who used our side yard as their latrine

It kinda went on and on. On Mondays, the head secretary at my office (yes, Virginia, in those days admins were called “secretaries”) would ask me what new story I had for them…and I usually did have one.

We hardly ever have things like that happen here. We have a hell of a lot more dogs than we do bums and criminals. Heh…maybe one fact follows the other as the night the day?

I doubt it. I think people are just scared. Unduly scared.

It doesn’t do to be scared of the bogeyman, you know. You’re usually bigger than he is, and nine times out of ten you’re a hell of a lot smarter (your brain not being clouded by dope or booze). A dog is nice company, but it’s not real protection. A gun is reassuring until you consider the fact that you’re more likely to shoot yourself in the foot than to wing the burglar.

The best protection? Keeping your wits about you.

Venus over the Ocean: Brocken Inaglory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Venus_with_reflection.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5223759

Thanksgiving Weekend…only moderately lazy

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The young guys across the street, a bunch who personify the maxim that men never really shake off boyhood, are amusing themselves by riding around the neighborhood on the three-wheel motor-cart lash-ups they’ve found/built/customized. They are very funny, very silly, and highly amusing to watch. They have, bar none, the grandest time in all history with the things.

Old people never tire of watching young people be silly. 😀

We enjoyed a great deal of charming silliness last night, celebrating Thanksgiving dinner with my son’s friends’ families. They have children who attained a high pitch of excitement with lots of people and lots of food in the offing.

Our hosts have taken up residence in a new(ish) styrofoam-and-stucco tract north of Happy Valley Road, once regarded as halfway to Prescott but now just another suburb of Phoenix. The houses are tucked up into the low hills to the north of the city, which makes for a pleasant, deserty venue with easy access to hiking trails. The grade school their children attend offers Mandarin Chinese, which gives you a clue to the residents’ dominant social class. Upwardly mobile, we might guess. Homes are reasonably modest in design and lot size, very pleasant on the inside: all and all, a nice place to raise your kids.

If I were slightly more footloose, it’s an area I’d seriously consider moving to, by way of getting away from the blight and the noise. It’s certainly quieter and safer than the ’hood. On the other hand, I surely would not want to drive in and out on the freeway to go to choir. Twice a week! And since the choir forms the mainstay of my social life, I’m not inclined even to think twice about the possibility of moving to Whiteland. Can’t even imagine what I’d do with myself up there…

Prices are a lot higher, too. Think of it: $420,000 for this pleasant but nothing special house, elbow-to-elbow with the neighbors. Friends’ house is two stories, presumably (therefore) somewhat larger…but still: right on top of the neighbors, with the neighbors right on top of them.

Bum habitat or no, one thing you can say about an alley is that it keeps the neighbors behind you at arm’s length.

In my neighborhood, a comparable house (in square footage) would sell for about $350,000. Maybe $375,00. Over in Richistan (another half-mile from Conduit of Bight Blvd): $450,000 to $500,000, unless you were on a half-acre+ lot, in which case you’d be pushing $750,000.

Welp, speaking of Real Estate, I decided to spruce mine up. The wall on the east side of the lot, which faces a neighborhood street and takes the full blast of the morning-to-noonday sun, has been looking pretty decrepit. The beloved Bila the Bosnian Painter, having forgotten that I asked him (lo, these many years ago!) to paint that wall to match the house, was a bit blind-sided when I said, as he was finishing up, “But aren’t you gonna paint the wall?” So I think he diluted the paint he had left to spray it, sans base coat.

The result looked OK when it was fresh, but over the course of a year or two it deteriorated. It now looks amazingly bad.

westwall

The other day my son asked if someone had tagged the wall with graffiti.

The effect is compounded by the enthusiasm of cinderblock for soaking up water and dissolving in it… along the inside of the wall there’s a soaker hose, which keeps the cat’s-claw vines alive. The cat’s claw keeps my privacy alive.

The mortar has fallen out of the seam between the bottom and the second row of block, and what little paint Bila managed to spray on there has peeled off.

So today I scraped off the loose paint and filled the cracks with DAP. I’d planned to paint the wall, too, but what with the usual drive back and forth to the hardware store, the whole morning was soaked up by that chore. So I decided to put off the paint job, per se, til tomorrow.

repairjob

The fill job ain’t great, but it’s probably better than nothing. DAP will take latex paint. I had to stuff so much of the gunk in there, I expect it’ll take more than a couple of hours for it to dry enough to justify slopping paint over it.

Tomorrow. Paint tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the cat barrier along the top of the wall looks pretty…uhm…eccentric. Along most of it, fortunately, the cat’s claw is growing across to hide it. But there’s a section where there’s really no way to hide the madness.

It’s not going, though. In the absence of an HOA, I can fight Other Daughter’s cat collection any way I choose: and securing a double row of carpet tack strips across the top of the wall works quite nicely.

That doesn’t mean I especially want to FLAUNT the double row of carpet tack strips.

Interestingly, there’s a whole bunch of old, unused dripper heads along that sunbaked strip. I don’t know if water still goes to them — they’re plugged off. But if it doesn’t, surely Gerardo can easily string new hose along there. I’m thinking what’s needed is either some cat’s claw growing on the outside of the wall (the inside is paved with brick and houses a tin shed), or maybe a Lady Banks rose or a bougainvillea.

This boug grows at the south end of the wall, where it’s generously protected from frost by a fierce Texas ebony tree…

bougwestside

The photo does the boug injustice. It’s a spectacular plant that causes passers-by to pause and comment on it.

I’m thinking…how about another boug?

Directly on the street, a bougainvillea is likely to freeze in the wintertime.

On the other hand, we haven’t had a hard frost in several years now. And it’s unlikely that we ever will again. Global warming has come to Phoenix, and it appears to be here to stay. Once it’s well established, a boug is pretty hardy.

On the other other hand, of course, it will try to take over Southern Arizona. It’ll have to be trimmed back from the sidewalk, lest I risk lawsuits. (Bougainvillea thorns are akin to tiger’s claws.)

But. It could be worth the risk. Gerardo seems to take a certain perverse pleasure in cutting back bougainvillea. I believe he hates it. One of these plants — to say nothing of two of them — would cover that wall within two or three years, hiding the top of the Satan’s hideous (but very useful) tin shed and also disguising my hideous (but very useful) cat barriers.

And it does discourage the bums from using that strip of the yard as their night toilet.

Another reason to delay the paint job: I’m still not quite over yesterday evening’s nervous breakdown.

When M’hijito and I arrived at my house after last night’s chivaree — there to retrieve his dog, brought to keep my dogs company — we opened the front door to find two big puddles of dog barf, right inside the door.

STINKING puddles of dog barf.

The entire house from one end to the other stank of dog shit!

To understand why this is a concern — as in “HOLY sh!t” — you have to understand something about dogs.

A dog is like a goat: it will eat anything. Alas, though, a dog does not have a goat’s intestinal fortitude. Many of the bizarre items dogs eat are given to creating intestinal blockage, just on the far side of the pylorus. When this happens, the dog can die within a matter of a short few hours. It is a veterinary emergency. A very, very, very expensive veterinary emergency. Symptom number one: throwing up barf containing fecal matter.

Well, of course, I’m freaking out. My son, who understands little about dogs, is trying to keep me calm by assuring me that I’m neurotic and crazy. This is not helping.

Because Cassie and Ruby snack on raw carrots (a potential blockage-builder, come to think of it) and the puddles contained pieces of carrot, we knew the Barfer was not Charley. My son went off into the darkness with his dog, leaving me to deal with a house that smelled like a Tunisian toilet and a pair of dogs one of which may have been pounding on Death’s door.

Neither dog had a tight, distended, or obviously painful belly, and neither dog was behaving strangely. So I decided to take a chance, delay bankruptcy, and refrain from rushing them to the emergency veterinary. But as you can imagine, it was a stressful night which left me,  by the light of dawn, cranky, unhappy, and on edge.

The dogs are fine today.

And it eventually occurred to me why the puddles of barf were redolent of the parfum de dog sh!t. Ruby still occasionally indulges her puppy fondness for coprophagia. She probably scarfed down some little treats in the back yard.

Yes. This, in addition to the possibility of potentially terminal intestinal blockage, is another reason that dog barf can smell…uhm…a lot like a Tunisian toilet.

Oh well.

It being Black Friday, every moron and every fruitcake was out on the road this morning, charging around in hopes of saving a few bucks here and a few bucks there. Under the best of circumstances, they all get in front of me. But today, getting to the Home Depot and then later to the TruValue was a horror show. Never saw so many morons concentrated in one place in my life.

Lest you think I exaggerate, Phoenix was recently congratulated as the home of some of the worst driving in the country. We do not take an honor like this lightly. We are, however, disappointed to come in at eighth place. We will, in future, try harder…

Life in the Big City, chapter 666

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Play-Nooz helicopters are hovering over the ‘hood, gawking at the latest little drama on Conduit of Blight Boulevard. Another resident of the slum apartments on the other side of Conduit of Blight wandered out across a six-lane 40- to 50-mph thoroughfare — now bisected by a freaking train that speeds up and down there  also around 45 mph.

A specific set of people seems to have a predilection for jaywalking. I don’t know if it’s a general disrespect for the law, a sense that they’re so oppressed by law enforcement anyway that it doesn’t matter if they jaywalk, or whether they’re so ill-fed that malnutrition so interferes with common sense that they don’t see that traffic signals are there to HELP them, not to interfere with their rights. Whatever it is, they wander out across the road, often right in front of a car, and if you don’t jam on your brakes you are going to hit them. Then it’s your fault, even though they’re idiots.

It’s one of the joys of living next to low-income apartments, along with the panhandlers in the grocery-store parking lots and the guys with teardrops tattooed on their faces standing in the check-out lines. And now of course, we also get to enjoy trains bonging, honking, and clanging up and down the road, because poor folks and transient low-income apartment dwellers don’t have enough political clout to stop the boondoggle from being built under their bedroom windows.

LOL! One reason you can hear the trains constantly bonging and honking way to hell and gone over here — a half-mile away from the thing — is the nitwits wandering back and forth across the road. They’ll stroll right out in front of a train bearing down on them.

Where does the impulse to walk out into traffic come from? It seems to be a cultural thing: nine times out of ten, the perp is a member of a conspicuously oppressed population group. It’s like “we don’t have any other way to assert our power, so we’ll do it by making the traffic stop for our convenience.” This morning’s Deceased wandered into the road before dawn and an 80-year-old woman hit her with an SUV. A 20-year-old woman might not have seen a person stumbling around the middle of a main drag in the dark, especially if she was wearing dark clothes. But not all drivers are at the height of their lifetime physical abilities.

Man! I remember coming home from GDU West, back when I used to teach night courses. It was about 10 o’clock at night. I was flying along Peoria or Dunlap, both of which pass through vast low-income tracts (most of Phoenix is a low-income tract, thanks to our right-to-work-for-nothing law). And “flying” is the word: I’m a pretty aggressive driver even now, and in my more salady days I was that in spades. I’m lookin’ down the road, and I don’t see anything. Everything looks clear. I’m tired, I just wanna get home, I’m at altitude, and my jet engines are set on “cruise.”

Luckily, someone turns into the oncoming lane from the left, a couple hundred feet up the road. As his headlights swing across the darkened street, he backlights a moron, all dressed in black and jaywalking in the middle of the block. Holy sh!t.

If that guy hadn’t pulled into the street at just that minute, I would’ve hit the idiot. From my perspective, he was invisible.

This isn’t New York City, where traffic moves at a crawl. Speed limits on Valley surface streets are set at 40 mph. Traffic lights are coordinated so you’ll always hit the green if you’re going about 45 mph. Go any slower, and you’ll stop at Every. Single. Traffic. Signal. So most people drive at right around 45 to 50 mph, all the time. If you’re hit by a vehicle moving at 45 mph, you are toast.

No, you’re not. You’re the jam for the toast.

Wouldn’tcha think that would be obvious?

Moving? Secure Your New House Well

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The burglar's handy toolkit
The burglar’s handy toolkit

Once again, a homeowner moves in and shortly afterwards someone comes visiting and steals him blind. The latest incident —  in which the thieves took some $15,000 worth of the guy’s tools — happened in a solidly upper-middle-class East-Valley suburb, lending some truth to what the cop told me at the time of the Garage Invasion episode: that this stuff happens all over the city, pretty uniformly, and it doesn’t much matter where you live.

Around here, moving companies apparently will hire anyone with a strong back and enough hunger to take a job hauling furniture and boxes. The result: some moving guys “moonlight”…literally. So, often people will get themselves moved in and then within a few days or weeks find some uninvited guests have carted off their possessions. And equally often, it’s painfully obvious that the intruders knew how to get in, what to look for, and where to find it.

When SDXB moved into the fixer-upper he bought here in the neighborhood, he (and the moving guys…) found the back door was unsecured — no functional deadbolt on it, and a glass pane in the cheap Home Depot-style door. Moving all his junk in was quite a job, and at some point along the line, he and I remarked that he should come over to my house for dinner and stay the night there, rather than trying to dig out his sheets and shovel aside junk so he could use the bedroom there.

Next  morning he found the back door open and all his boxes cut open and rifled through. They were looking for weapons: they took all his good hunting knives, and a machete he’d picked up as a souvenir while he was stationed in Guatemala.

Mistake #1: He’d pasted an NRA sticker in his truck’s window.

Fortunately, SDXB had the foresight to stash his small arsenal of pistols, rifles, and shotguns at his mother’s place, so the thieves didn’t get any of his armaments. But that’s what they were looking for.

After SDXB moved to Sun City, the new owners of his house had almost the same thing happen. By then, of course, the doors had been secured. The City (which bought the house and handed it over to this couple as part of a relocation project when one of the barrios near the airport was leveled for a new runway) had paid for some very nice renovations. The couple goes off to shop or socialize and, in broad daylight, burglars enter the house. They know the dogs are harmless, and if they haven’t already become pals, throwing a couple handsful of dog kibble all across the kitchen floor made them best of friends. This time the perps stole several hundred dollars in cash, which (you may be sure) a family from the Third-World barrios near the airport could not spare. The couple did have homeowner’s insurance, but the insurance company refused to reimburse them because they couldn’t prove they even had cash in the house, much less how much it was.

A cop and his family moved in down the street. Wasn’t long before someone raided his shed and stole some tires he’d stored there. Unsurprisingly, in that case the perp was caught.

We all know, I suppose, the basic security rules of living in the big city (or in any place where your possessions aren’t red-hot or nailed down). But to those, let’s add a few strategies to keep your possessions and family safe during and after a move.

• Never place an NRA sticker on your vehicle! And don’t leave any copies of American Hunter laying around where movers can see them. Advertising that you’re a member of the NRA is the same as advertising that you have guns in the house. If you want to support the NRA, send them a check.

• Assume any crew of moving men is suspect. Don’t buy a moving company’s assurance that their guys have worked there for ten years.

→ Be present and watchful during the entire moving process.
→ Don’t leave the house to get food or run errands while the movers are present.
→ Do not say, within their earshot, that you intend to go out for dinner, run errands, or stay somewhere else overnight.
→ Emit disinformation in their presence: say you’re taking time off work or (better yet) that you’re retired or unemployed and always around the house.
→ Don’t mention owning any valuables while movers are working — don’t talk about jewelry, guns, cash, tools, hobbies that might entail marketable tools or products, collectibles, or the like

• Hire a reputable moving company. Using a nationally recognized company such as Mayflower’s interstate moving services will help improve safety.

• Stash jewelry and sentimental items at someone else’s house or in a storage unit while the move takes place. Leave them there for several weeks afterward.

• If you’re in the trades, stash your tools at the shop or at a friend’s or relative’s house, and move them into your new house later, without benefit of moving men. If you keep your tools in your truck, park it — locked — inside the garage (and lock the garage, too).

• If at all possible, have the locks rekeyed and high-quality deadbolts installed before moving day. If you don’t have access to the house before then, get a locksmith in on the day of the move.

• If the house has an alarm system, learn to use it right away, and activate it.

• Install security doors with pick-proof Medeco or Schlage locks. These are expensive and available only through locksmiths, but they are so worth the cost.

• F’rhvevvinsake, if you park your car or truck on the driveway, don’t leave the garage door opener in it! 😀

Image: Burglary tools found in bank, Canadian Illustrated News, 1875. Public Domain

Happy Hallowe’en(?)

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halloween themeSomebody no doubt got grant money for this WTF research. It may even have been taxpayer-supported grant money. You, too, can be surprised and shocked that 30% of kids will kipe an extra piece of candy when left alone with a bowlful of temptations!

Actually, the surprise is that 70% will not.

The political preference angle is pretty entertaining, though: in an overall politically liberal neighborhood, more little kids will gravitate to a table offering free candy from the Democratic presidential candidate rather than from the Republican’s table. Oddly, the researchers seem not to have tried a similar “experiment” in a politically conservative neighborhood, so we may never know whether children are partisan or whether they just happen to like Barack Obama’s face better than they like John McCain’s. 🙄

Far more interesting, IMHO, is this op-ed rumination from The New York Post on how the over-parenting Grinch stole Hallowe’en.

Have you noticed how high the stress levels have become in our culture? People are afraid of everything! We’re scared of our food. We’re scared of our air. We’re scared of the weather. We’re scared of guns. We’re scared of burglars. We’re scared of the cops. We’re scared of terrorists. We’re scared of Big Brother. We’re scared of our cars. We’re scared of panhandlers. We’re scared of sugar. We’re scared of salt. We’re scared of laundry detergent. We’re scared of our schools. We’re scared of dogs. We’re scared of cats. We’re scared of strangers. We’re scared of our mother. We’re scared of our laminate flooring. God knows we’re scared of clowns!

The only thing we’re justifiably scared of is our choice of Presidential candidates. Which, I suppose, is the same as being scared of clowns.

Heh heh… I wonder how many trick-or-treaters will show up dressed as Hillary or Donald?

Hallowe’en is my favorite holiday. Because the ‘hood borders on several low-income neighborhoods infested with violence, prostitution, and drug houses, people who are unfortunate enough to have to bring up families there bundle their kids up and bring them over here, where it’s reasonably safe for them to walk from door to door after dark, and where it’s only moderately insane to knock on a stranger’s door.

The kids show up by the pickup truckload.

In response, here in the neighborhood a kind of informal block party has grown up. Everybody sets up a table and chairs (and scary decorations!) on their driveways, the easier to view the happenings and dispense candy to the hordes of cute little kids. A great deal of socializing goes on and the show proceeds.

The kids are adorable in their spectacular outfits. Because many of these parents can’t afford to buy an expensive costume, a lot of the children show up in wonderfully creative hand-made costumes. It’s really fun to see what they’ve come up with.

So this evening we’ll convene in my neighbor’s driveway. For the first time in years, I bought a giant load of Costco Hallowe’en candy. Last year we ran out of a stash of 150 pieces. So this year we’ll have 300 pieces.

It’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts.

Vector image by Aleksandrsb, DepositPhotos

Shots Fired…

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Not at the Funny Farm, thank God. But down the street.

Up early this morning to get ready to take some friends out to breakfast. Very early: since I won’t eat restaurant breakfasts (especially when I’m trying to drop eight pounds…), I have to get something to eat before going out to eat. 😀 So the dogs and I are are sitting around reading the morning play-nooz headlines, the doors open to let the dogs out in back and to let the cool air and the mosquitoes in, when wap wap! Shots ring out.

Shee-ut.

Well, it was a ways off — probably on Main Drag East/West. Could even have been on the next arterial south of that — the night was quiet and the air still.

But it’s annoying. People take pot-shots at their fellow homicidal drivers on the city streets. It’s really not very safe to drive around near a gang-infested slum, a term that describes most of the territory west of Conduit of Blight Blvd.

Yesterday afternoon a cop helicopter buzzed the neighborhood at rooftop heights for a good forty minutes. They were mostly over La Maya and La Bethulia’s house.  So common are these events now that I couldn’t find even a passing mention of it on any of the news channels. The two women being out of town, I couldn’t get the dope from them, either.

And where are they? Yarnell, of course. Thence to spend several days in Sedona. {grump!}

Sometimes I think…really…I should sell this house and move to Yarnell or Prescott. Or at least to Fountain Hills.

But…my son is here, and the choir is here. My whole life is based in North Central Phoenix. Fountain Hills, a quiet tract just east of Scottsdale, is close enough to that tony tourist trap that one could drive into town for some expensive groceries and high-end clothing. But it’s surely too far from the church to commute in twice a week…and at my age, there’s NO way I’m driving way to hell and gone out to Fountain Hills at 9 p.m., after midweek choir practice.

Nor do I especially want to live an hour’s drive (when it’s not rush hour) away from my son.

Speaking of driving the homicidal streets, yesterday I washed Phryne for the first time. She’s easier to launder than the Dog Chariot, because she’s not as tall…but the job does still require one to climb up on a stepladder.

And speaking of Phryne LaVenza, lemme tellya about Toyota’s later-model six-banger. HOLEEEEE SH!T!

This thing behaves like the old, titanic Mercedes-Benz engine used to behave: the one designed for drag-racing on the Autobahn. In my ex-husband’s great old Mercedes, once you were at speed, you could just barely touch the gas pedal and the damn thing would shoot off like one of Werner von Braun’s wildest dreams.

Welp. Yesterday for the first time I got on the freeway in the Venza. Traffic was relatively light, it being not quite rush hour.

Mwa ha ha! At last, a chance to let her rip….

More or less: I didn’t even floor it. I just pressed the gas pedal down. The damn thing shot off like a rocket! From 55 mph, I’m sure you could hit 85 in 5 seconds. Maybe less.

So…though her shell is made of plastic that even the cheesiest pistol could penetrate, you could probably dodge the shitheads’ bullets if you knew someone was taking aim! Assuming no morons were blocking the way ahead of you. 😉

It’s quite a powerful engine. That, and of course the Venza is much lighter than the old Mercedes used to be. Those cars were made of metal. A fair amount of Phryne’s body will not hold a magnet. Some of it will. But a lot of it is just plastic. And the newer designs are a lot more streamlined than the old Benz was — I imagine it cuts through the air a lot more efficiently.

Hm. I have gotta take Phryne out on the open road and see what she really can do…