WHAT a gorgeous day! It’s cool and clear and quiet and lovely. Already took the dog for a mile-plus walk. We may go out again, whenever I get off my duff. If I do.
Last night was ridiculously fun. Hallowe’en is my favorite holiday! So much fun, ogling the kids’ cute costumes and the grown-ups’ silly costumes, handing out candy and admiring the show.
The Wonder-Accountants, who live across the street, set up camp in their driveway. I brought a bag or three of candy and joined them.
The central part of Lovely Uptown Phoenix has several middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhoods that are surrounded by…uhm, lower-income districts (not to say “blight and poverty”). Residents of these garden spots dress up the kiddies for Hallowe’en and bring them into the fancier areas, there to collect much richer trick-or-treat pickin’s.
This makes for LOADS of fun — pickup-loads, as a matter of fact — because
a) they have LOTS of kids; and
b) those kids are beyond cute and adorable.
<3
So we locals got to spend several hours socializing and watching the Legions of Cuteness marching around the’Hood. Ruby the Corgi, speaking of Cuteness with a Capital C, came along.
Ruby is particularly useful at this time of year because she’s highly seductive. Kids and teenagers just dote on her. And she returns the favor. So the whole evening out on the driveway is a nonstop love-fest.
The little kids are beyond cute. The teenagers are invariably hilarious. And truth to tell, it’s one of the few times you can spend several hours hanging out in the front yard after dark and feel safe about it.
***
…and now it’s the middle of the afternoon. I do need to get off my duff and do SOMETHING constructive. So far, I’ve diddled away most of the day.
Got it into my little pea brain to look up our old house in the beautiful Encanto district of central Phoenix. Where I live now is sometimes termed “the new Encanto”: aging homes of the type favored by the young and the upwardly mobile, places that buyers love to fix up, live in for awhile, and then sell for a handsome profit.
So I googled our house, a place that was just beautiful when we bought it from some ambitious fixer-uppers. It’s still there. And apparently later fixer-uppers have had at it.
IMHO, it’s a gawdawful mess. They’ve screwed up the office and kid’s bedroom we added on. Enclosed and effed up the lovely front patio that made such a spectacular entry. Dorked up the kitchen by removing the wall between it and the laundry room, installed stupidly designed (but no doubt stylish) kitchen cabinets of questionable utility, laid down THE most bizarre tile on the kitchen floor; turned the TV room into what appears to be a sitting room or guest room; installed a large set of French doors in the second bedroom; installed a wall along the east side of the building (an improvement over the neighbor’s gawdawful oleander jungle!); installed a mysterious new bathroom, very elegant; apparently moved the laundry into a new closet or room; paved most or all of the backyard (another improvement, to tell the truth); run an iron gate across the driveway into the carport (major improvement); fancified the front yard; on and on.
Some of the stuff IS very nice. Some of it is questionable. But gosh I miss that house. It was so beautiful!
Wonder what became of our neighbor Fran… She must be dead by now. She was an old lady when we lived there; she’d be a post-centenarian today.
Same would be true of the two ladies who babysat our son, neighbors who lived a street to the south of us. And of the big Catholic family across the street — mom and dad were into middle age by the time we lived there, and some of the kids were grown adults or nearly so. And of the low-income family at the end of the block, who must have lived there forever by the time we showed up.
My former best friend in the old neighborhood seems to have fallen off the edge of the earth. Her (ex-, I believe) husband is still practicing law…at the age of 87! LOL! She must have cleaned out his bank account!
This exploration was inspired by the present Worry: Should I try to stay here in my house through my dotage? Or should I move into a handsome high-rise apartment on North Central? If so, when? How? Why? Am I indeed going to be forced to move into a “life-care” horror…uhm, “community” within the next five to ten years? Or will I be able to find ways to hire help to keep me in my own home and out of the clutches of any such “providers”? And is suicide painless?
Seriously: the question of where and how to spend the last couple decades (give or take) of my life is beginning to loom. Sometime in the not-so-far future, I’m going to have to decide when and where to relocate…if I must.
Ohhh well. Later!