So tell me, what type of drug use engages Q-tips, chewing or bubble gum, and (maybe) a stiff wire swimming-pool brush?
Yesterday evening — late afternoon, actually — the dogs were barking around out in the backyard, generally being ignored or hollered at. Then at one point Ruby abruptly went ABSOLUTELY FREAKING BATSHIT!!!!
With the possible exception of two very angry German shepherds, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog fly into such a frenzy. And I’ve had a lot of dogs in my altogether too lengthy lifetime. This dog wasn’t yapping. She wasn’t barking. She was screaming. Truly screaming like a person might scream.
Well, I was very tired and feeling under the weather and mighty tired of hearing dogs bark — not for nothing was Cassie surrendered to the dog pound with the reason, “barks.” So I yelled at them to shut the eff up and then hollered them back into the house. They settled right down when offered Dinner.
Dogs live for Dinner…
Welp, this afternoon when I went to take some garbage out to the alley, I discovered what had set Ruby the Corgi off: Somebody had been camping outside the back gate, evidently up to no good.
I know what the Q-Tips are used for. I know that gum is often favored by people who are wired to the teeth on stimulants like meth and Ecstasy. But the wire swimming-pool brush, the type used to scrape stubborn algae off the walls? whaa????
One drug users’ message board suggests using a “wire brush” to clean your meth pipe . But I don’t think they mean a brush that’s six inches long by a couple inches wide. Part of it was mashed down, as though it had been stuffed inside something or used to scrub something. Sooo…could be, I suppose.
Speaking of “very tired,” this sort of sh*t makes me feel very tired of my neighborhood. It’s the stuff of dreams about moving far, far away.
There’s something to be said for an alley. It adds about 20 clear, vacant feet between you and the neighbor behind you. It puts two walls instead of just one between you and said neighbor.
And there’s something to be said against an alley: it’s a burglar thoroughfare, a campground for bums, a coyote freeway.
Our alleys are particularly well designed as bum campgrounds. The builder set up the back gates so they would open onto vestibules inset in the fenceline, for reasons no one can guess. Maybe he thought this would encourage neighbors to hang out and chat with each other whilst hauling out the grass clippings and the trash. Maybe some stupid city regulation mandated it. WhatEVER…the effect is to create little cubbies where people can sit on the ground and sleep, drink, or do dope.
Annoyed, I picked up the paraphernalia the creep(s) had left behind, and then dumped a little dogshit on the ground out there. Tomorrow my son is bringing his golden retriever over for a weekend of dog-sitting. Now, that animal can create a gigantic mound of manure. His product is going into the Bum Armchair, too.
Then later this afternoon I’m sitting around the castle thinking about how I should be working and thinking about how I still feel awful and do not want to work and may never want to work again when Ruby flies into yet another rage, this time at the front door. I don’t see anyone out the front window, but I can’t view the whole courtyard from the window. The front door is protected by an iron security door, so I open the interior door and discover that someone has opened the east gate and left it hanging open.
They haven’t left any advertising nuisances. So that suggests most likely they walked up to the front door and tried to open it. Finding it locked and attached to a barking dog’s trigger, they took off.
{sigh}
Do I need to get the pistol out? It’s usually locked up. It’s a hassle to haul it out, and more of a hassle to prepare it to blow away some harmless burglar. I do not want to get the pistol out.
But then I didn’t want the dog to keep on screaming, either. Possibly not getting the pistol out is a symptom of the same overall sense of fatigue and laziness.
I need another German shepherd.
What kind of dog is like the GerShep of 35 years ago, an animal whose health will not run you into the poorhouse, whose temperament will not open you to lawsuits, and whose intelligence rises to the level of discerning? It must be large enough to remove a burglar’s foot, when need be…
Yesterday when I went over to the westside to hike with SDXB, we passed some very nice suburban tracts. One of them looked like the houses might be more or less in my price range. No slums bordered these tracts. None of the houses looked rundown. No police helicopters hovered overhead.
Sometimes I think I should sell this place and move to Scottsdale, to the west side, to Yarnell, or to Prescott. Someplace where bums do not smoke or inject drugs outside your back gate, where armed robbers fleeing the police do not come to ground in your garage, where idiot City Parents do not destroy your neighborhood with a misguided electric train boondoggle, where property taxes are still relatively low, where cop helicopters are not given to parking over your roof, where my dogs are not driven batshit once a day.
But then I’m reminded of the reality that I…can’t…afford…to…move.
Maybe I could afford a small, camper-style RV, though. The dogs and I could live in an RV. Then we could go wherever we pleased. Preferably someplace sparsely populated and quiet. Very, very quiet.
This sounds horrible. You should keep your eyes peeled just in case a deal comes along because this isn’t a good situation to be in. Sorry to be restating the obvious here.
It’s a function of living in one of the meth capitals of the Western world: http://www.safetynewsalert.com/top-9-states-for-methamphetamine-use/ A police officer told me such incidents occur all over the metropolitan area, pretty much uniformly. If you ask a cop, s/he’ll tell you there’s not all that much difference from one part of the city to the next.
Oh, wow, I can’t imagine having to live like that. I’m glad you’ve got dogs to sound the alarm in case someone tries your door in the middle of the night.
Well, there’s not much the poor soul can do to get in. After the Late Great Garage Invasion, I outfitted all the exterior doors with steel security doors and insanely tamper-resistant deadbolts. If you try to drill one of those deadbolts, it’ll break your drill. 😀 They’re pretty hard to pick, too.
Since the house contains little of any value, as long as the burglar gives me enough warning to either get out a different door or lock myself in the office, not much will happen.
Sorry to hear of your troubles Funny. Might not hurt to “test the waters” and see what your place is worth…then go from there. I know you are capable but life is short and if you have to fight like you’re at the Alamo everyday….holding off the “barbarians” with dog poop….sheez.
I think the RV “nirvana” is a dream that many have when they get tired of a very tedious and expensive life. I share your dream of life on the road … the freedom…no bills…living as a vagabond. I have explored the possibilities myself and DD’s are fearful that if something happened to DW that the homestead would be history and I would wind up living in a camper or worse a van… You may enjoy a blog by a fella living the vagabond life at Simplifi 2.0….boy the pictures this guy takes….and the job he did on his VW bus…well …. just crazy…take a peek.
Glad to hear you and SDXB got to enjoy some time on the trail….haven’t heard a lot about him lately…hope all is well….
I doubt if I can afford anyplace that’s as good as the house I’m in. The property values here are a little depressed because of the slums on the west side of Conduit of Blight, which border the freeway and extend westward through what once were decent working-class and middle-class tract housing developments. Because of the low wage rates here — this is a right-to-work state, which translates to “right to work for next to nothing” — poverty is widespread.
Poverty breeds drug use and crime: that’s all there is to it. Unless you’re very wealthy, in Arizona you put up with the peccadillos of poor folk.
My house sits on a quarter-acre of land. It’s solidly built of block and was nicely updated by the previous owners. The immediate neighborhood is pleasant and gentrifying; it’s sandwiched between an area of $500,000 to $700,000 houses on the east and a strip of decrepit, decaying apartments on the west. That’s pretty typical of the Phoenix area if you want to be centrally located. The house is relatively inexpensive to operate because it’s in a district served by a utility that does not gouge its customers excessively. Most of the Phoenix area is served by Arizona Public Service, whose rates are simply outrageous — my son pays over $300 to NOT cool his 1200 s.f. house in the summertime, and he doesn’t heat the house at all in the winter. And the area where he lives is no better than mine; worse, actually.
A comparable house in an area further from outright slum but still within the Phoenix city limits would cost at least $100,000 more than I can get for this one — and remember how much will be lifted out of my pocket during the sale, in closing costs! I would end up having to take out a loan for $150,000 or more to get into a better central neighborhood (if there is such a thing). This house is paid for; that is the ONLY reason I’m not living with my son or under the 7th Avenue Overpass with the meth-heads.
To move to Scottsdale, I would have to move into an apartment. I’ve put in my time in apartments, thanks.
To move to a single-family home I could afford, I’d have to buy cheaply built newer housing (we’re talking Styrofoam cup on a slab, here…) on the far east side or the far west. These are too far away for me to continue, for example, singing in choir. And they’re jammed elbow-to-elbow-to-elbow on tiny little lots with no room between the neighbors, who try to keep the peace with ubiquitous HOAs. I don’t want to live in an HOA, nor I do wish to live in my neighbors’ laps.
And you would not BELIEVE the construction in the newer tracts!!!!! One of my friends discovered the reason the roof in her new house was leaking was that when you climbed into the attic you could see blue sky where the builder hadn’t bothered to install flashing.
LOL! That’s just the stuff you can see. 😀 Don’t even ask what’s inside the walls.
Comparable housing at a reasonable price is available in the older parts of Sun City. But… a) Sun City is way to hell and gone on the west side — again, I would never see my friends or my son again; and b) I don’t WANT to live in Sun City!!!!!!
LOL! SDXB bought an RV at one point. We tried the RV life and found it to be less than ideal.
The real problem with it is that unless you’re used to living in the neighbors’ laps, you tend not to think of setting down in a campground as a “vacation.” Our idea of camping and hiking is to get WAY away from other people, but most RVs need to be parked on level ground with facilities such as running water, electricity, and a place to drain your tanks. An RV can’t negotiate (for example) a gully or a riverbed, which hugely limits the places you can go. So you end up “camping” in crowded instant slums by the side of the road.
We found car camping was far preferable. But you can’t live indefinitely out of the back of your car.
SDXB is amazingly well! He recovered from the hip and shoulder surgery to an extent that can only be described as astonishing. After having spent months in terrible pain, practically crippled, now he’s almost pain-free. He and New Girlfriend dance a couple of times a week and bucket all over the world. They’re planning another cruise in the near future. After we had hiked four miles over loose rock through hilly terrain, we remarked that if he’d been born 30 years earlier, he would never have recovered from the deteriorated hip and injured shoulder — and probably wouldn’t have survived the heart thing, either.
As broken as our present medical system is, doctors can perform something like miracles…if you can ever get access to them.
Couple of things…..The prices for homes in your area may surprise you….A CMA would provide a good “snap-shot” of what’s going on in your “hood”. The important thing IMHO is that YOU make the call. If you enjoy your place then so be it. But understand there are options. A sale would net a large amount of cash tax free to do with what you wish. Unfortunately I have witnessed too many times folks waiting too long. My own parents have done just that….and own a large older home with quite a bit of acreage. There is a reverse mortgage on the place and it requires repairs constantly. They no longer can perform the work around the place and were it not for their sons would be up the creek. It is fair to say the place “owns” them. I encouraged them to down size some time back with no luck.
Sadly there is no escaping closing costs but is one of the costs of doing business. I am trying to get DW to consider selling our homestead. My plan would be to sell our place and the adjoining lots and pocket the cash…. I’m fairly capable and have always had a good eye….Then with the proceeds I’d purchase something on the “cheap”, improve it a bit…and send the “leftovers” over to the fine folks at TIAA-CREF. Wait 5 years and head to a townhouse, condo OR maybe purchase a duplex …. live in one-half and rent the other half out…The point being the decision would be ours and we would not be forced to make a decision.
It IS truly remarkable what today’s medicine can accomplish….Glad to hear SDXB is up and about….
No question that a free-standing home can get to be a burden when you hit your dotage. That is a worry: when you get to the point where you’re not up for the maintenance chores and costs, you’re also at the point where MOVING would also be an impossibly difficult job. The longer you live in a place, the more junk you have to get rid of or (heaven forfend) move. And the physically weaker you are: moving is not for the faint of heart or the infirm.
Because of the desert landscaping, my house is nearly maintenance-free, except for an occasional handyman job. Nothing has to be mowed, little has to be trimmed, weeds are few and far between. The place could use a new paint job, though I think I could probably delay that by having Bila just come and paint the eaves and trim around the dormer-like things, which take the worst of the sun. The only maintenance PITA is the pool, which is fine if you keep up with it. And if you really just CAN’T cope with it, there are outfits here who will come and build a deck over the thing. You then have a small pump in the bottom to be sure no rainwater accumulates (though I believe my drains can be opened fully, which would also drain the water), and VOILA! A new entertainment area. This allows you to get rid of the pool without QUITE getting rid of it: when you go to sell the house, you can refurbish the thing or leave it for the new owner to deal with.
In theory, too, it could be converted into a pond. Some people actually have done that: you still keep a small pump going, but you rebuild the pool to have a dark surface, rocks, a little waterfall-like arrangement (this prevents stagnation), jackhammer out the KoolDeck and replace it with gardens right up to the edge, and toss in some mosquito eating fish. And…hmmm…possibly a few bass, eh?
And hey: when we were kids, we used to swim in real ponds. If you had a backyard pond, there’d be no reason you couldn’t take a dip with the bass now and again.