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Urban life

Gunfire in the Night: Bali Hai Is Calling

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300px-Ruger_P89_1Out of sorts most of the morning. Between you and me, I just don’t like it when the Cassie and I are waked up in the middle of the night by the sound of gunfire. Even when I get back to sleep, it leaves me feeling damn crabby come dawn.

It wasn’t even automatic or semiautomatic gunfire. Sounded like what my Ruger would sound like if I decided to discharge all its ammo in one happy little frenzy. Six (maybe eight — by the time I woke up a couple of shells could already have been fired) rounds:

BANG…BANG…BANG…BANG…BANG-BANG.

Fvck you very much.

It came from the war zone to the north, which is inhabited by a) a dangerous meth-dealing gang and b) a hapless contingent of America’s poverty-stricken underclass. So, the gunfire could as easily come from some happy drunk who, in a moment of inebriated joy, decided to ejaculate a loud noise into the air as from some entrepreneur shooting at his competition. Either way, though: trash. It’s trashy. Trashy. Trashy. Trashy.

Well, I’ve been looking at real estate and found a patio home in Scottsdale, near the border of North Phoenix. Still unfortunately south of the crucial demarcation line for the middle class, the freeway dubbed Arizona Route 101. But nevertheless: bordering a fancy country club to the east and a tract of $600,000 shacks to the south. One could practically walk to the Whole Foods.

But do I really want to move to 56th Street and Cactus? To do so would be to say good-bye to friends, church activities, and son. It’s a LONG way from North Central, longer still when you’re old and it’s after dark. Why? Just so I don’t have to listen to gunfire in the night?

If I’m going to move away from everyone and everything I love, I’d just as soon move to a whole ‘nother town. Prescott, for example.

Which brings us to my neighbors’ activities.

The guy has hooked up his fifth wheel to his truck. The thing’s a VAST living room on wheels that stretches as long as the north side of his house. To frost the cake, he’s now got himself a four-wheel ORV, which he’s stacked on top of the damn thing. LOL!

I waved at him as he was pulling out of the driveway and hollered “HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!”

He emitted a maniacally joyful laugh.

His wife said they’re headed out on Thursday, long to be gone for the holiday.

Smart folks, those.

But…are they smart enough?

Think of how amazing it would be to get yourself a nice, fully self-contained RV — which I could acquire for about half the sale price of my house. Give the furniture to the kid. Donate whatever he won’t take plus all the old-lady clothing to the Salivation Army. Throw the jeans, the T-shirts, a jacket, the dog, and the pending new puppy into the machine, fill it up with diesel, and DRIVE AWAY.

Never to be seen again.

How far could you drive away from the sound of gunfire?

Rv_classaImages:
Standard Ruger P89, DanMP5, public domain.
Class A Motorhome, Claygate. Public Domain.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Stealing for Food

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My friends who live just below the canal right off North Central report their garage was broken into. Even though they’d closed the garage door that evening, someone managed to get it to open. (Around here, what they do is drive up and down streets with a door opener, clicking at every house — eventually it will hit someone’s code and up will come the door.)

Weirdly, the only things the guy stole were food, a few small tools, and a cosmetics case whose contents he dumped out and left behind. He didn’t hotwire either car; didn’t get into the car trunks; didn’t take any of the other stuff in the garage.

He emptied out their freezer, which held a stash of Costco meats and things the wife cooks and stores for future use. Because their relatives are about to descend on them for the holidays, my friends had stocked up, so the guy got a good haul of things to eat.

Because of some problems with a mentally ill neighbor, they have security cameras trained on the front of the house. So…they (and the cops) were able to see that the door quietly rolled open along about 10 p.m. There’s a walking path along Central one house to the west of theirs, and so probably the guy was just strolling up and down there pointing his door opener.

He had enough sense not to dart right in  — the vics might have caught him had they heard the door opening and come out to check. Instead, he came back about midnight and just carried out the loot, unmolested.

Isn’t that something? We’re living in a society now where people have to steal to eat. Now there’s a point of pride…

And speaking of weird thefts, my neighbor across the street reports that someone walked into their backyard and stole their swimming pool cleaner, right out of their pool!

I think I saw that guy. He was parked in front of my next-door neighbor’s in a pickup filled with pool gear, looking like a pool serviceman. Since Terri does use a pool service, I just assumed he was her guy. Wrong, apparently.

He saw me, too, so that’s probably why he didn’t come into my yard and grab Harvey. That, and the fact that the gates are locked.

Some time back, Terri told me that her pool service dude was supposed to repair her Hayward pool cleaner. She comes home from work, looks in the pool, and realizes he hasn’t fixed it — he’s REPLACED it with an old, scruffy-looking unit! She was furious. When she confronted him, he tried to deny it.

Thought she’d fired the jerk, but maybe she’s still using him. If that’s the case, evidently he gets his replacement parts from the neighbors’ backyards!

And the do-gooders wonder why we don’t care to part with our Smith & Wessons? LOL! Well, okay, it would be hard to shoot some wretch who needed food, unless he tried to brain you with a frozen roast. And I suppose ripping off a $300 pool cleaner doesn’t quite merit the death penalty. But you never know with these characters — most of them are high on meth and other drugs, and they’re just as likely as the law-abiding homeowner to be armed.

Why?

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why, why, WHY…..

…when you get on the road, does every moron in the land get in front of you?

…when people see you backing out of a parking spot and must be able to grasp that if you’re creeping out from behind some honkin’ huge opaque SUV you can’t possibly see them coming, do they drive right behind you?

…do they do the same damnfool thing when they’re on foot?

…after the first idiot almost gets walloped in this maneuver, does the next idiot coming up behind him do the same goddamn thing?

…on the day you decide to get a flu shot, does every Walgreen’s in the city run out?

…do people pay Safeway $4.33 a pound for apples that are available, in the same variety, a half-mile down the road at Sprouts, for $1.99 a pound?

…do people pay Safeway $1.99 a pound for old yaller onions that can be had, less than three minutes down the road at Sprouts, for 58 cents a pound?

…are customers who shop in Safeway so fuckin’ rude? (Oh…I know: because they’re getting ripped off every which way from Sunday!)

…if Safeway can get small, ripe avocadoes, can’t Sprouts get them?

…when your patience is short and your temper is frayed, do two HUMONGOUS flatbeds loaded with heavy equipment elect to occupy the only two lanes on the road, side by side?

…does a radio station that has a decent format and plays cowboy music pleasing enough  to provide an occasional break from the nonstop NPR yak-a-thon decide to change that format and schlock it up?

…do the onions frying on the stove decide they’re cooked when you have exactly half your hot rollers pinned to your head?

…does algae grow on the bottom of your Brita pitcher?

…do the greyhound rescue people have to trot out their dogs at a suburban pet store halfway to freakin’ Tucson, and do it during the accursed, mega-gawdawful rush hour?

…would anyone deliberately choose to live in Tempe, Arizona?

…on earth did I ever imagine a full-grown coursing hound would be a good match for a short, squat herding dog that looks a lot like a rabbit?

P1010966Rabbit

Corgi
←

Rabbit
→

paduak_web

↑Large hunting dog
Not a corgi
Not a rabbit

Brand-New Whole Foods…Meh?

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Sashimi_for_saleWell, that was disappointing.  This weekend I dropped by the brand-new Whole Foods market that just opened in the old, empty site of a long-defunct Linens ’n’ Things. It’s right next door to the Trader Joe’s where I often shop and just down the street from the new Sprouts. So I thought wow! This is gonna be great.

But…maybe not so much.

To begin with, the place was just mobbed, it being the first Saturday after the new Whole Foods opened. I don’t enjoy crowds, and I don’t like navigating chuckablock jammed parking lots. And I particularly dislike the type of crowd attracted to the joint: in this town, people who are very wealthy (or pretend they are) are so self-absorbed and so rude that you just want to kick the twits. They think they own the road, the parking lot, and everything around them. And as for dumpy little old ladies in blue jeans? They look at you with a sneer on their face if they happen to notice you, which mercifully isn’t often because most of the time they look right through you. They’ll run you down in a parking lot, they’ll run you down with a cart in the store, and they’ll actually push you aside if they get a chance.

This is not an illusion. It’s very noticeable in certain parts of the city and in certain shopping centers. Shoppers at the AJ’s at 67th and Union Hills  behave that way routinely, and you’ll see it at the Whole Foods on Mayo Boulevard in Scottsdale and at Kierland Commons in Scottsdale and at the Scottsdale Quarter…heh!

There’s a reason we call it “Snotsdale.”

Social issues aside, I wasn’t at all impressed with the store, once I got inside the thing.

At the outset, it was instantly clear the building is not large enough for a retail operation with such grandiose pretensions. They’ve crammed so much junk into it, so tightly, that there’s hardly any room to move around. So customers shuffle from department to department in ambling lines, like madding crowds at Disneyland.

Then they’ve filled what space they have with stuff that’s just out-and-out absurd. A juice bar, for example, where you can buy glasses of fresh-squeezed juices for upwards of $6.50. A sit-down eaterie/coffee house at the north entrance that forces you to wind your way through stunned-looking noshers (who, in the time-honored manner of their social class, will not step out of your way but feel it is their privilege to block all and sundry who wish to pass). Giant tubs of locally roasted coffee beans, with a giant roaster display thing taking up an enormous amount of space…but no espresso beans that I could find, BTW.

Most ridiculous, however — IMHO — is that they’ve installed a freaking bar, front and center!

No joke. There’s a bar at the front of the store. It’s billed as a “pub” and serves 87 gerjillion varieties of boutique beers, many on tap. Plus food and champagne and four TV sets tuned to sporting events. For your convenience, unless you’re stocking your weekend cabin at the Pinetop Country Club, you can even pay for a small number of grocery items while you’re hanging out in the bar.

Now, it’s not that I have any objection to a nice, fun bar. Au contraire. As you may have noticed, I tend to enjoy my boozie-poos to a fault. So I’m not throwing asparagus at the patrons of said bar. It’s just that…well, the merry din coming out of a successful bar is less than conducive to deciding whether this avocado is ripe, whether that Hawai’ian mango is a better choice than this Mexican papaya, whether you’d like a pound of ahi or a nice chunk of wild-caught salmon, and whether what’s needed today is a cab or a syrah. It’s not a background that I find very comfortable when I’m trying to shop for groceries.

It was very loud and very annoying.

There was a whole lotta drinkin’ goin’ on there. One Yelper even noted a customer walking around the store with an open beer. This means that driving in the vicinity of 20th Street and Camelback, which was already plenty chaotic, is now going to be downright dangerous at pretty much any time of day or night. Nothing like a responsible corporate citizen, eh?

Deciding never to return to that place was a proverbial no-brainer. Far more disappointing, though, is the realization that I also won’t be shopping at the Trader Joe’s nearest to my house anymore. I am not going to do battle with some rich bitch or effete twit over a parking space for the privilege of buying a few artichokes, no matter how excellent and inexpensive they may be.

Happily, the Trader Joe/Whole Foods combo exists at a much calmer venue at Tatum and Shea, across the street from a mega-yuppified Fry’s on the fringes of Paradise Valley. Both strip malls have parking that’s up to the job, and the design for that Whole Foods is not bat-sh!t inSANE. The store is much larger, which means it can accommodate fun clothing, 1950s-style make-up (which is what non-toxic, cruelty-free lipstick and mascara are: perfectly awful, waxy stuff reminiscent of the Avon products some of us can recall kiping from our mothers’ dressing tables and painting on our young faces), a very fine sushi counter, and all the fancy foods and drinks you crave. With plenty of room to move around without being bowled down by the Entitled set.

The intersection of Tatum and Shea is a far piece from my house. However, by the time I reach Home Depot, I’m halfway there. When I’m on the college campus, it’s on my way home (more or less). And when I was a young thing living in the effete lawyer’s and doctor’s ghetto that was the gentrified Encanto district, I used to drive to Tatum and Shea at least once a week to do my grocery shopping, since there wasn’t a decent supermarket in the Phoenix city limits after Stan Felix’s redoubtable Madison Pay ’N’ Take It closed down. At least not that any of us could find at the time.

So it’s not that big a deal. It’s just…what? déjà vu, in its weird way?

Image: Nigiri sushi for sale at Tokyo supermarket. MichaelMaggs. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Stupid People

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Argh! We’re surrounded by Stupid People.

No. 1 Stupe would be moi.

Left the house before dawn this morning, for the daily two+ miles through the neighborhood. Knowing the sun would be glaring in my eyes within twenty minutes, I took my favorite old pair of prescription shades and hooked one temple thingie over my T-shirt’s collar. After one turn around the park, I ran into my friend Harriett, and we proceeded further, yakking away.

So busy was I with talking I failed to notice when the glasses fell off my shirt and tumbled to the ground. Not until I walked in the front door did I realize I’d lost $200 worth of wire and plastic!!!!

Irreplaceable wire and plastic, we might add. No matter how much I beg and plead, I can not persuade a glasses dispenser to give me a new pair of glasses in this old Rx. They insist on using the new one, and not once in god only knows how many years has a current prescription been as strong or as effective as this pair. God damn it — officious bastards.

I’ve got one last pair in this old prescription — clear ones, not shades — that I use for night driving. When they’re hanging on my nose at night, I can see the road clear as a bell. My regular glasses in the current prescription? Really…I shouldn’t be driving with those on at night. It’s not a “night vision” problem; it’s a the goddamn prescription isn’t strong enough problem.

Oh well. Stupid me: now I’ve lost an indispensable tool that I won’t be able to replace.

Speaking of stupid, in the gray dawn hours I came upon the couple who take their great Dane to the park and let it run loose for an hour or so. Stopped to chat and pet the Dane — it’s much smarter than its humans, though they’re kindly and gentle creatures. As we were strolling toward the park, I mentioned, in a friendly way, that I had a German shepherd that hated dogs and would fake “friendly” until the other person’s dog would get within reach — and then she would rip into its neck.

This didn’t register.

“I couldn’t take Anna to the park because people would have their dogs off-leash and she would harm any dog that came up to us — that meant my poor dog never got to take walks at all.”

Dumb as posts: this didn’t register, either.

Later as I hike up the east side of the park I see the male dolt standing out in the open hollering. The dog is way the hell and gone over on the west side of the park — bear in mind that this plot of land is a full mile around.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog…

The dog ignores him.

Eventually, after about eight or ten minutes of this nonsense, the dog starts to move vaguely in his general direction.

Over on the other side of the park, the female dolt is sitting at a park bench. She now takes it into her head to call the dog over to her.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog…

So what they have there is a big, honking clown of a dog that does not come to call and that they allow to run off a quarter- to a half-mile away from them in a public park used by people who may be afraid of dogs, people who may dislike dogs, runners who look like prey to dogs, dogs that may be protective of their owners, and maybe even the occasional German shepherd that craves nothing more in life than to wag cheerfully to lure over the stray pets of morons who let their dogs run loose and RIP THEIR GODDAMN THROATS OUT!

You think I jest, don’t you?…

Having discovered the glasses were lost, I jumped on my bike and retraced my steps, to no avail. Over, again, on the east side of the park, I encounter the air-head who rides her bike with a big mug of coffee in one hand and a large energetic pit pull trotting along beside her. Off-leash, of course.

We see each other every day and say hello, so I ask if she’s spotted a pair of shades on the ground. She says she’ll keep an eye out for them. I stop to say hello to the dog, which, while not slaveringly chummy like the Dane is at least fairly mellow if unchallenged. For godsake…she doesn’t even have a collar on him!

What part of anything that scares this animal, like a car wreck nearby or a fire engine flying past or a German shepherd trying to remove his jugular vein, will cause him to run off does she not understand?

This dog probably could have held his own against Anna. Maybe. When she worked herself into a towering rage, she was something to behold. I don’t think I’d care to come up against her even if I were a pit bull.

Speaking of stupes, Other Daughter and her schizophrenic husband have a little tortoiseshell tabby that they dote on. They let this animal run loose in the neighborhood, being of the species of moron that imagines leaving the cat out is somehow good for the cat. Nevermind the pack of coyotes who’ve taken up residence. Nevermind the cars. Nevermind the delinquent across the street who thinks it’s fun to lay rubber on the block-long road in front of your house. Kitty must go out.

Welp, Kitty has moved in to my yard. She likes to sit on the wall around my front courtyard, and she marks the gates with plenty of spray. Pulling Cassie loose from that delicious stink-fest is quite a task, when it’s time to take her for a walk. Cassie loves cat stink. I could do without it.

But what I could especially do without is having this damn cat use my backyard as a toilet. The desert landscaping in back is crushed granite…approximately the texture of cat litter, which is exactly what Kitty thinks it is. Yesterday I’m sitting in back reading the paper over my morning coffee and what do I see but Cassie nosing up something and happily munching away on it.

Yup, you guessed it: cat shit.

Why do dogs like to eat cat shit? Why??????

WhateEVER…I don’t want it in my backyard.

So the question now arises: how to keep these morons’ cat out of my yard?

I suppose I could go up to the pound and get my own pit bull. Problem is, you can’t leave a dog outdoors in the heat here. Some people do, but that’s another variant on Stupid. It’s cruel to start with, and a fair way to shorten your dog’s life to end with.

As a practical matter, Anna the GerShep and Walt the Greyhound did a pretty fair job of keeping the cats out of the backyard, because they could go in and out at will through the gigantic dog door I carved in the back wall. Anna liked to go out and take the morning air now and again, thought she didn’t spend more than half-an-hour at a time in this hobby. That, apparently, was enough to discourage cats from taking up residence.

However, a pony-sized dog is not the only thing that can go in and out that dog door… Especially after the Garage Invasion episode, I would just as soon leave it bolted shut. Because Cassie won’t use a dog door, I’ve become accustomed to the old-fashioned way of serving the hound’s needs (pay attention and get up off your duff when the dog goes to the back door!). And I have no desire to change back to the Burglar Entry method.

Besides, why should I have to take on the expense and hassle of another dog because stupid people can’t take care of their cat responsibly?

No, you can’t trap a cat and take it to the pound. Well, you can. But what will happen is that if you try to leave it off there, they will charge you ninety-six bucks! The pound and the Humane Society here are so overrun with feral and stray cats that they don’t want people to bring them any more! So they hit you with a stiff gouge for turning in a stray cat.

The alternative is to trap the cat and take it up to Lake Pleasant and drown it, or simply to let it loose in the desert to be eaten by coyotes (not until it’s devastated some more of the native birds and small creatures, we might add — cats are hell on native wildlife). This activity, however, is illegal. It has been deemed animal cruelty. And the law will put you in jail for a good long time if they catch you dumping a cat.

And that brings us back to the question of how to keep these people’s cat out of my backyard.

I could resurrect the dragon’s teeth, strips of nails I tied up there to keep Son-in-Law from jumping the fence after the interlude in which he told Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend that he would come into my yard whenever he felt like it.

Hm. Now there was a time when the hassle and expense of owning a German shepherd was worth it. LOL! She caught him coming in the side gate. He never tried that again. 😀

The dragon’s teeth are very tacky. And really, I do not feel like drilling holes in 2-inch strips, pounding nails through them, and wiring them to the top of the wall. Like I don’t have enough to do with my time?

Satan and Proserpine, the house’s previous owners, bolted a strip of vine lattice along a short stretch of the west wall. I think they did it because they wanted some privacy, because they never planted vines there. And in fact, it does work to block the view from my neighbor Terri’s westside window. Which is moot, because she has heavy drapes that she never, EVER opens.

But the lattice has another effect: it blocks the cat from getting over the wall there. Too narrow for her to climb up on, and too high for her to jump over in a flying leap. I could, in theory, buy hundreds of feet of wooden lattice and bolt it to the block wall.

This would be a) expensive as hell and b) more hassle than the human mind can conceive.

Possibly the proposed pit bull would be cheaper and less of a nuisance…

I could super-glue broken glass to the top of the wall, in the Mexican mode.

This would be tacky, too, but possibly not as tacky as strips of nails. Also, during the SDXB-vs-Schizophrenic Son-in-Law adventure, I was advised that the police likely would look askance at a litter of broken glass along a wall, especially if an officer elected to jump the wall in pursuit of, say, a Garage Invader.

I could sprinkle mothballs on the tops of the walls. Unfortunately, these are toxic. If the cat knocked some on the ground (which it certainly would, because it jumps on the wall and walks around all the time), Cassie might get into them. Same effect when a breeze causes the paloverde or one of the other plants to brush across the top row of blocks.

Or I could wire or tie a layer of chicken wire along the top of the wall. That will be almost as pretty as the nail strips, eh?

Or maybe I could go out and buy several containers of cat repellent and sprinkle that atop and along the base of the wall. Reviews of such products look less than encouraging, though; 34 people panned the stuff at Amazon, vs. 21 who rated it great, sorta OK, or pretty much worthless. One reviewer suggested it would work well as a kitty snack.

Anyone who knows cats also knows that when you elect to do battle with one, the loser is going to be you.

“Have a Great Week”…gimme a break!

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Our neighborhood group e-mails its current newsletter:

Sonoran Palmetto Neighborhood Assocation
Safety Alert

Please be careful and aware of your surroundings!

From a neighbor: 200 block of West Shady Way. Our friend’s mom, was the victim of an armed robbery outside of our house this evening.  At 5:55 PM, she was getting some things out of her car in front of our house and a guy walked up with a shotgun and told her to give him her purse.  She held on to it, but he pulled hard.  He also grabbed her keys from her hand.  A white 4-door sedan had dropped the guy off, pulled up to the front of her car, and then he jumped in and they sped away.  I saw the guy approach her with the shotgun and ran to the front door in time to see him jump in the car (AZDL BAA6440).  She is shaken but okay.  Police reports were taken, credit cards canceled, etc.  Chances of them hitting this neighborhood again are slim, but thought you all should know.

From a neighbor: Our Jetta was ransacked last night 8/28/2013. Several items stolen from inside vehicle  and trunk. We are at 5xx W. Go Ask Alice Avenue.

From a neighbor: I want to let you know to let others know that we were burglarized on Monday afternoon. Corner of 17th Dr. and Feeder St. Broke in window and grabbed cash and things to hock. My husband saw him running down our alley after he got startled by him coming home and jumped out of our bedroom window. He was Caucasian, dark, long sideburns, blue flannel shirt. He jumped into a 4 door gold Mitsubishi sedan with a Mexican male driving it. Police have info.We will be buying security screens now.

GOVERNOR’S ADVISORY COUNCIL ON AGING
INVITES YOU TO JOIN US FOR:
SENIOR ACTION DAY
Thursday, October 3, 2013
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Here’s an opportunity for you to have a dialogue with Advisory Council members, invited legislators, local officials and have your input shared with state agencies for planning purposes.
Beth El Congregation
1118 West Glendale Avenue
Phoenix, Arizona 85021
Questions? Call 602-542-4710 or
e-mail us at: gaca@az.gov .

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this alert.

Please keep your eyes open for similar situations and call
Crimestop at 602-262-6151

Have a great week!

{snark!} “Have a great week.” Indeed.

Honest to God. This kind of stuff invariably gives me a gigantic jerk in the direction of selling my home and moving somewhere else.

I like living in the central part of the city and I love my house, but sometimes I feel like fleeing to North Scottsdale, far away from the slumlords’ properties that infest the mid-town area (this scene took place about two miles from here; I could walk or bicycle there if I felt like toting my Ruger that far). As long as the city allows the blight along I-17 to fester, the middle-class neighborhoods that house the city’s main tax base are endlessly put at risk.

The family whose mom encountered the armed purse-snatcher probably lives in a house with a carport. Homes in that neighborhood were built in the 1950s and early 60s, when the North Central area was pretty much out in the country, and overall crime was not much of a problem here. Most houses had carports in those days — no one felt a need to lock up their car behind a garage door.

Also, absent an HOA, quite a few naïfs jam their garages with junk and then park the rolling stock on the driveway or even on the yard. Then they’re surprised when their cars are broken into or stolen, and when someone accosts them as they’re hauling the groceries in the front door.

There aren’t many gated communities in this part of town. Those that exist are mostly apartment complexes, or small housing developments way outside my price range. I’m not interested in living in an apartment, and I don’t much care for gated communities, either. Anyone can jump a six-foot wall or simply meander in behind one of the residents; and I can’t think of anything less inviting to one’s friends than to make them punch in a secret code to get to your front door.

Really, all the housing east of 15th Avenue and west of 7th Street between Bethany Home (about as far south as one would like to go, until one gets into the downtown historic neighborhoods) and Dunlap (the northern border of North Central) is astronomically priced. Because my neighborhood is just on the fringe of that district, property values here are slightly lower. If I sold and got full price, I probably could afford to buy something in some treeless tract halfway to Yuma, under the F-35 flight path. Ugh.

Maybe what I need to do is unsubscribe to the neighborhood association’s newsletter. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, eh?