Holeee maquerel! WHAT a day!!!
Trudged from pillar to post and back to pillar. Metaphorically, of course: most of the trudging was done in cars.
My excellent son, Ian the Great, drove me way to Hell and Gone, from one fine Valley Center (the Mayo Clinic in North Phoenix) and through one fine commercial district to another to another (shopping center after shopping center).
And…well…I’ll tellya: I could come to hate living in this place.
Seriously: the honored Valley of the Sun gets more and more like Southern California as each day passes. And yes, I sure as Hell did hate living in Southern California.
Well…at least we racked up the miles on his car, not mine. The Dog Chariot is still at his house, kiped from me a few weeks ago. No: I haven’t gotten around to buying another car, and I haven’t gotten around to leasing one.
And frankly…hang onto your hats, folks…I may not replace the Chariot, not with either a rental or a new purchase.
BECAUSE….hevvin help us!… I’m finding it’s bizarrely true that you may not need to own a car to get around in this city.
No kidding.
First off, I live in a concentrated, highly commercialized area. Within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm, we have…
* 3 major grocery stores (Albertson’s, Fry’s, Sprouts)
* 1 full-service computer retailing and repair store
* 1 large, major bookstore
* A car rental business
* 1 veterinarian
* 1 clinic, open for emergencies as well as routine care
* several clothing stores
* a Walgreen’s
* a Basha’s supermarket
* an El Rancho market
* a discount store
* a shoe store
One could no doubt go on and on…that’s as many as I can remember, but there are others.
Next off…the ‘Hood exists at the nexus of public transit in this part of town. Not one, not two, but THREE main drags pass right by my house. I can walk to a bus or train that will take me anywhere from the ASU West campus in Glendale to the ASU main campus in far-away Tempe. Within six square blocks of my house, I can pick up a bus or train at over half-a-dozen stops! And if I walk another three blocks to the city’s central main drag, I can get on a bus that will take me all the way into the central business district — downtown — and from there into commercial and residential points south.
Which, I suppose, is a way of saying we’re in the middle of everything.