The following is a guest post by Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. Her blog covers living expenses, saving for your future, and the fun stuff along the way.
Nicole from Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured left a comment asking if I had seen this post at a new blog, Step Away from the Mall. It boiled down to a small rant about the fact that a couple looking for a $500,000 house in Texas could possibly complain about houses that were like mansions from the point of view of a guy that recently lived in a $1700 a month, 400 sq.ft. “apartment” in NYC.
Putting aside that the cost of living between NYC and Texas is amazingly different (and I assume the salaries are as well), his description of his 400 sq.ft. space brought back my memories of dorm living and right-out-of-college housing.
The smallest space I have personally lived in was a 10 ft by 12 ft dorm room that I shared with another girl in college. We shared the tiny bathroom with the two girls in the adjoining room. In short, I had a 5 ft by 12 ft space to myself—60 square feet.
You want to know the weirdest thing? I LOVED IT! I absolutely adored dorm room living. I loved the fact that a bunk bed and an efficient use of storage could make me feel like an adult in her own digs. I also loved the fact that I could poke my head out the door at any time—day or night—and find someone else to hang out with. It was awesome.
Fast forward 3 1/2 years, and the smallest space that I ever shared with Mr. BFS was our first apartment out of college. It was technically a one-bedroom 550 sq.ft. space that really felt more like an efficiency with an extra half wall. The kitchen was too narrow to fit 2 people into at once and the only place to put the computer was next to the bed. My favorite feature was a built-in book shelf next to the red brick fire place.
I loved the cozy feeling of that apartment too, but there were several times I came close to committing homicide while Mr. BFS played computer games 2 feet away from my head in the wee hours of the morning.
Fast forward another 2 1/2 years, and we own our own 1750 sq.ft. house. I have no idea if I could live in such small spaces again and be as happy as I was those few years ago. Hubby has his own gaming area and we have an adult bedroom with actual furniture and even a Tempurpedic (non-blow up) mattress. I am spoiled to say the least but still have very fond memories of the tiny places of my past.
What are the most cramped quarters you remember? Did you like them as much as I liked mine or do you think I’m nuts?
Oh, and Step Away from the Mall, you will hate this, but that 550 sq.ft. apartment we had in late 2004- mid 2006 was $399 a month. 😛 Feel free to join us low cost of living folks whenever you wish. 🙂
Last April my friend KJG’s almost-new RAV-4 was totaled when a speeding chucklehead ran the signal at an intersection as she turned left. Fortunately she was not gravely injured, although she spent a couple of nights in the hospital.
The police found witnesses who said the other driver had run the red light, and KJG was exonerated of any fault in the wreck. Her insurer proceeded to go after the perp.
So she was surprised to receive a subpoena for a court hearing in Peoria municipal court. The perp, it appeared, was contesting the ticket!
Because she was a bit unnerved by this, I volunteered to go with her to provide moral support. Meanwhile, she reported the development to her claims adjuster at USAA, who, upon looking into the matter, discovered that the guy who got the ticket for running the red was appealing on the grounds that he was not the driver, but that his brother had been behind the wheel. KJG already knew that the car’s owner had not reported the accident to his insurer, but this new twist was as surprise.
It turned out to be a pretty entertaining afternoon.
A witness to the accident was also subpoenaed, and the cop who wrote the report, a razor-sharp woman who reminded me vividly of Deputy Jo Lupo on Eureka, showed up. She was startled to learn, in the course of KJG’s testimony, that the witness got the story wrong and had her driving in a different direction from where she was coming from, but fortunately that proved to be neither here nor there.
The defendant alleged that his brother was driving the car, which belonged to his father, and that he—defendant—had not seen a police report and didn’t even know where the accident had occurred. When KJG and the witness said that despite a strong family resemblance they didn’t think he was the driver, the judge gleefully dismissed the charges against him.
Deputy Lupo The officer, with evident relish, announced she was going after the real perp, this time for the felonies of misleading an officer of the law and stealing his identity.
So a good time was had by all (except, presumably, for the brother, believed to be on the lam). KJG was not challenged on the issue of her innocence in the accident. The alleged driver was proven not to be the driver at all. The judge was grinning like a Cheshire cat at the details of this little drama. And Deputy Lupo got a new perp to chase.
Don’t you love it when people let it all hang out, in public? One of the joys of living in a big city is that people act up in front of God and everyone, knowing they’ll never have to see any of those folks again. Endlessly entertaining, and it’s free!
This afternoon I drove up to the fancy Costco at Paradise Valley Mall, there to return a couple of things and pick up two or three grocery items to tide Cassie and me over until the current budget cycle closes on the 20th. One of the objects I needed to return was fairly large, so I parked the car and snagged a grocery cart from in front of the store. Under the store’s portico, a woman’s voice reverberated off the concrete walls and overhang. A middle-aged woman with a toddler in a cart and another young child in tow was haranguing a young man, who looked like he was struggling to hold back tears.
Passersby were pretending nothing was happening, chatting and going about their business, as though women with small children holler at young men on the front stoop of Costco every day. Like me, presumably, they were trying not to hear, but it was impossible to block out all of her tirade.
“You’re 26 years old!” she went on. “I have other kids to raise now…”
The 26-year-old looked stricken. The scruffy-looking girl who was with him—the current love of his life?—looked like she was trying to will herself invisible. This child had some mileage on her, part of it over rough roads.
I dodged inside. In due course, the returns clerk forked over $200 and then took the cart with the junk in it. When I walked back into the 110-degree heat to collect another cart for the day’s shopping, the little tableau was still there. The curtain was rising on Act V. The woman, presumably the young man’s mother, continued to harangue. The soft-spoken young man’s words could not be heard, but the older woman’s certainly could. He did not interrupt her as she launched into another tirade.
It’s hard to guess what he did to set her off. Probably asked her for money, or maybe to take him in while he was weathering a spate of hard times. Though he was a clean-cut kid, he had a whiff of the loser about him. Maybe had a drug or drinking problem, maybe out of work, maybe broke, maybe some or all of the above. Maybe she was trying to practice some tough love. Or maybe she was fed up and had decided to wash her hands of him.
On the other hand… How would you turn out if you had a witch of a mother like that?
Moving on, it was back into the store and out of earshot.
Half an hour or forty minutes later, I exited those air-conditioned precincts, pushing a cartful of goods before me. The dragon lady was gone. But the young couple were still huddled on the concrete ledge outside Costco’s front door. He was smoking a cigarette, never a sign of high intellect among the under-60 set.
“Maybe you could find an apartment there,…” the girl was murmuring to the boy, whose expression looked every bit as despairing as it had while the older woman was yelling at him.
Soap opera in real life!The Dumb and the Feckless, episode 12,134. I love filling in the story of these urban dramas. Here’s my theory of the plot:
♦ The woman is the young man’s stepmother. He is the child of her last husband (not the current one) by a prior wife. Her former husband disappeared into the Amazon jungle while on a fling with a Brazilian floozy.
♦ An affable leech, the youth has succeeded in nothing except accruing a spectacular collection of traffic tickets, a few of them for DWI. Oh, and he’s very good at making babies:
♦ The two small children are his, by two loserly mothers. The volcanic woman and her current husband were saddled with the care of these kids when the infants were removed from the parental custody by Child Protective Services.
♦ Having been convicted on one of the DWI charges, our hero finds the felony that now appears on his police blotter makes it impossible for him to get even a minimum-wage job. He therefore has asked her either for money or for free lodging.
♦ She has decided, on the advice of her therapist, to quit “enabling” him. Hence her strident rejection of his request, whatever it may be. She hopes this will push him into fiscal and social responsibility. Maybe he’ll get a job, pay off his debts, settle down, and quit making her crazy.
♦ This is the first time she’s behaved as though she’s seriously saying “no” to him. Hence his shocked and dumbfounded grief.
Several elements remain to be explained. For example:
♦ Why were the two young people still outside the Costco after the older woman was long gone? Did she leave them there to find their own way home, wherever that might be?
♦ Or did they arrive in a different vehicle?
♦ If so, how did they know to find her at the Costco, or when she would be there?
♦ Were they stalking her?
♦ Or did they just accidentally run into her there? If the latter, what would possess him to ask her, then and there, something that would set her off like a Roman candle?
♦ What effect does it have on a toddler to hear his mother (caretaker?) berate his older brother (father?) before a crowd in front of a Costco?
What think you, readers? What’s the real story? And is it a money story?
Years ago I edited a huge report that comes out once every five years for the state Parks and Recreation Department. In it, the bureaucratic authors wrote several times about “managed recreation opportunities,” a term that neatly described their attitudes about you and me and the wilderness. When you go for a hike in the Great Outdoors, you’re not alone: Big Brother is watching you.
Big Brother is installing toilets at the trailhead, pouring loose scree on the trail (erosion control, not a deliberate attempt to break your ankle), putting up signs to herd you this way and that, and roping off areas you oughtn’t to see (clearcut forests, for example). Such “improvements” to the out of doors often do little or nothing to change the reason you’re there, but are simply crowd control or worse, crowd encouragement. Fewer toilets and tourist centers would mean fewer people thumping the wilderness, for example…but without them, how could your “recreation opportunities” be properly “managed,” eh?
These “improvements,” which cost money, often entail erecting a gate across roads that access the “opportunity.” Usually the accompanying gatehouses stand empty. But in the most popular places, such as Oak Creek Canyon’s Slide Rock, recreation managers staff the gates with ticket-takers and charge people to use the parks and forests for which we’re already paying with our taxes. “No Parking” signs go up for miles along the roads leading to the parking lot, so you can’t use your public lands without paying a second tax in the form of a “parking fee.” Effectively what this does is make the site inaccessible to those who can’t or won’t pay extra to use it.
The City of Phoenix hosts a number of desert preserves, land that was donated or purchased to preserve small stretches of desert, mostly graced by low mountains, from the fierce sprawl of development. Our city parents watched what was going on with the state’s efforts to manage recreation opportunities and took the lesson.
Over the past few years they’ve quietly been installing gates across access roads to all the city’s desert parks. When I saw the one they stuck up at Piestewa Peak (formerly “Squaw Peak”; the difficult name is a politically correct bow to folks who think the Anglicized term is an insult to Indian women and an effort to honor a young Navajo woman who died in Iraq), I wondered when they were going to start charging people to use the hugely popular park.
Well, the answer is “now.”
The City recently announced it would start charging five dollars (!!!) to park your car at the mountain preserves!
Understand, large numbers of regulars use these parks every single day. I’ve mentioned my friend Garnett Beckman, who at 104 is still going strong. She was one of those regulars; at age 65, when she retired from teaching, she began climbing to the top of 1,190-foot SquawPiestewa Peak every day. This produced an amazing effect on her health. She continued to hike there, all over the American Southwest, and all over the world…well into her 90s. When I went with her on one of her Christmas hikes to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, she was 84. So well known was she that a bench with her name on it has been installed three-quarters of the way up the mountain.
That would be one of the “improvements.” It’s gracious and lovely, as gestures go; but if you can hike 890 feet up a steep hill, you probably are tough enough to sit on a boulder or the ground to catch your breath.
Like me, Garnett was living on Social Security and not much else. There’s no way on God’s green earth that Garnett could have afforded to pay $5.00 a day for the privilege of parking her car at the base of the mountain. Neither can I.
I used to hike there or in North Mountain park several times a week myself. After I took on the 40-hour job at the Great Desert University, that went by the wayside, but one of my plans for this fall, after the weather cools and I’ll be teaching only one section at at time, was to get back into hiking.
For $50 you can get a pass to park for six months—a hundred bucks a year to use a park your tax dollars are already paying for.
These fees are supposed to pay for the “improvements” the City took upon itself to build. The gate, for example. The toilets. The running water. The tourist center.
North Mountain did not need a tourist center. While parking-lot bathrooms are nice for the kiddies, the truth is the trails are so sparsely vegetated there’s no place to hide to do your thing, and so most adults hold it until they can get back to their car and drive to to a bathroom. During the many years before some genius decided to run plumbing into the desert, the trails were never running sewers.
It is true that during the summer morons get themselves stuck up there on those hills with regularity. They don’t carry enough water (often they don’t carry any water!) or they go off the trails, and then they have to be hauled down on a litter or airlifted off the side of a mountain. But instead of gouging those of us who have better sense, why not charge the chuckleheaded and the feckless the full cost of sending a rescue team after them?
And it is true that the homeless mentally ill sometimes set up semipermanent camps in the desert parks, and so the city has to hire park rangers to chase them off. That problem could be resolved by providing decent mental health care services for everyone. Oh sorry, I know: s-o-o-o-cialism!
And it is true, I will not deny it, that a couple of times I’ve run into some scary dudes out there, including a man who chased me up a trail behind SqPiestewa Peak. None of the hired park rangers, however, were anywhere to be seen. I eluded him by hiding in a draw, pushing my bright blue day pack beneath me so my dun-colored clothes would blend in with the brush. Unless the city can put a cop at every bend in the trail, rather little can be done to stop that kind of thing. The laws have been changed so that women can carry concealed weapons into those parks, likely to be more effective protection than absent park rangers.
So what’s happening here is the City is using its “improvements,” most of them utterly unnecessary, as an excuse to start milking the cash cow that’s been standing there staring the city parents in the face all these years.
It’s amazing they haven’t gotten around to it before this. Piestewa Peak is so popular you can’t find a place to park at all when the weather is nice. Regulars who are acclimated to heat either go up there around five in the morning or wait until mid-day, when it’s too hot for most casual exercise walkers and families with young kids. Same is true on the north side of North Mountain, where you can access a milder trail than the one on the south side. The parks have been money waiting to happen for years. I guess, though, that the city council members figured they’d better wait for a really serious recession to pull this stunt; if they’d tried it with no obvious excuse, they’d have all been voted out of office forthwith.
So there you go. Another cut in our fair city’s quality of living.
Yesterday at four o’clock in the morning La Bethulia was awakened by a knock on the front door. A cop was standing out there, inside the courtyard. When she opened the door to him, he said, “I think we have something of yours.”
And thereon hangs quite a tale.
As it develops, the entire neighborhood was targeted by a band of burglars last night. One of them entered La Maya and La Bethulia’s courtyard and stole a small, slick piece of a table, apparently to use as a tool in burglarizing their neighbor’s house.
Meanwhile, the Next-Door Neighbor Husband awoke some time before 4:00 and walked out to the kitchen to get a drink of water. As he went toward the front of the house, he noticed the lights were on in his car, which he’d parked in the driveway. Looking out through a window, what should he see but a guy methodically going through the vehicle, stealing everything that wasn’t red-hot or nailed down and neatly stacking it all in a box.
Rather than confront the creep or try to scare him off, he called 911.
The 911 dispatcher told him that all the cops in our area were occupied, dealing with other burglaries in progress in the neighborhood! They sent a squad car that was, at the time, clear over on the east side. It took about a quarter of an hour for this crew to arrive.
While the cops were in transit, Perp strolled across the street and broke into another car, having carried all the loot from Neighbor Husband’s car around the corner to his accomplice, who was waiting in the getaway car. The neighbors watched as he looted that vehicle, too.
Eventually the police arrived. They trapped and caught the perp, but the guy in the getaway car escaped, taking with him everything his pal had taken out of Neighbor Husband’s car, including about $700 worth of stereo equipment. The officers did retrieve the piece of junk Perp had lifted from La Bethulia and La Maya’s yard.
Perp, it develops, has quite the rap sheet. He and his colleagues live next-door to each other, apparently in a colony of felons. They targeted our neighborhood last night, spreading out to raid the properties that interested them most.
Fortunately, they didn’t enter Neighbor Couple’s or La Bethulia & La Maya’s homes. But as you can imagine, the women were pretty creeped out, realizing the perp had been right outside the vast and vulnerable banks of French doors and windows that look out onto the enclosed courtyard. La Bethulia attempted to repair the lock to the courtyard door before she left for work, succeeding only in jamming the mechanism. So now that will have to be fixed, presumably by a locksmith.
What does this mean for us bystanders? Knowing that our homes are targeted now or one day will be targeted, what can we do to defend ourselves?
• First and most obvious: don’t park your car on the street. Clean out the garage and park your cars inside.
If you live someplace where you have to park on the street, for heaven’s sake don’t leave any valuables in the car. And don’t equip your car with expensive electronic equipment!
• If you have to park your car outside, drive a junker.
Perp didn’t touch the aging Toyota La Bethulia had left in the driveway. She bought her daughter’s car recently, when Daughter moved to Hawai’i, and she hasn’t had time to sell it. So the decrepit car was sitting right under Perp’s nose. With richer pickings nearby, Perp left the pile of junk unmolested.
• Lock your doors and windows at night.
• Alarm your doors and windows.
If you don’t have a burglar alarm system (they’re expensive and a nuisance…some of us do without them), you can get small, unobtrusive alarms that emit an ear-splitting squeal when their magnetic connection is broken. They’re very cheap and very easy to install—they run on small batteries and require no wiring. I bought a package of ten at Costco, and found they work on screen doors as well as regular entry doors and windows. So I’ve got one on the sliding screen for the Arcadia door and one on the security door in front. Security doors are easy to break into…but won’t Perp be surprised when he takes a crowbar to that thing!
Amazon sells them in packs of four as Mini Door & Window Contact Alarms rel=”nofollow”. I think they’re well worth the low cost. Fifteen bucks is sure cheaper than whatever a burglary might cost you.
• Don’t own a lot of expensive junk.
This basic tenet of the frugalist works nicely to frustrate burglars. SDXB was visited by burglars the night he moved into his house around the corner from me. Foolishly, we remarked that he could stay at my house that night, since his house was chaos…and we made that remark in front of the moving men. Equally foolishly, he had an NRA sticker on his truck, advertising his interest in guns. That night “someone” came through the only door that didn’t have a deadbolt on it (interestingly, they didn’t try any of the other doors or windows) and went through all his boxes looking for weapons. He had stored his guns elsewhere during the move, but they took a collector’s bow and all the knives and machetes he’d collected during his military travels. The bow was the only thing that really mattered…otherwise, his possessions came from thrift stores. Poor guys—they made a wasted trip.
• Don’t put an NRA sticker on your vehicle.
This is a big red flag that says “I have a gun in my house.” Thieves are attracted to guns as flies to molasses.
• Lock weapons, cash, negotiable instruments, and jewelry in a safe.
Gun safes are expensive, but your investment in arms also represents a big expense. More to the point, though, no lawful gun owner wants to contemplate having his weapons used in a crime or shipped across the Mexican border to be used in that country’s drug wars.
Be sure your safe is bolted to the floor.
• Insure your home and its contents.
If you do own anything of value, get a rider to cover it. While a rider does add a small amount to your homeowner’s policy, if you have to make a claim, you’ll be glad you planned ahead.
• Don’t even think a dog is going to protect your property or you from a burglar or home invader.
Though I had one German shepherd that chased off a home invader, that is not what dogs normally do. If you’re not home, it’s pretty easy to make nice to the dog. If it’s a protective or mean dog, all the burglar has to do is shoot it.
In our part of the country, burglars are given to tossing poison over the fence where targeted homes have a large dog. A day or two after the dog is out of the way, they come visiting again.
Rely on locks, alarms, and common sense instead. They’re a lot more reliable, and it’s fairer to the dog.
At 9:00 p.m. sharp, the sound of rockets flying and grenades exploding brought a cop helicopter overhead with its searchlight a-glare.
Around this time of year, the ghost shopping center at Dunlap and the I-17 puts on a fireworks show on Friday nights. They used to do it every Friday night, all summer long, but now that there are hardly any stores left for people to shop in, they limit the gala celebrations to a couple weeks on either side of July 4.
With Sally’s tree gone, I had a great view from my backyard! They shot off some spectacular colored showers of pyrotechnic stars, skyrockets, fountains…it was quite a display.
My old house was practically underneath the fireworks show. But now, deeper in the neighborhood and further away from the hectic intersections of Dunlap and the freeway, the view is often obscured by the neighbors’ foliage. Before Sally cut the big Aleppo pine out of her front yard, it fully blocked any sight of the mall’s fireworks extravaganza.
LOL! They always kick off with some loud firecracker-like things that sound for all the world like gunfire. And invariably, the first night of the season that the fireworks start, some newbie resident calls the cops and reports shots fired. Hence, a cop copter fly-by.
Well, I’d rather have the tree all summer (and winter) than one or two, or even several, fireworks displays. But it was fun to see the show.
Image: San Diego Fireworks. PD Photo.org. Public domain.
