Phoenix and I are having a falling out

I hadn't gotten around to posting this yet, but I have actually quite enjoyed living here in the Valley of the Sun, far more than I ever thought possible.  The weather from December to May was so lovely that we could go outside every single day.  And the sunshine!  Oh, the sunshine!  Growing up in Portland, OR, I never thought that I was impacted by the seasons, but my one winter there as a stay-at-home mom was probably one of the more depressing times in my life.  So the contrast of the sun shining every day was very welcome.  I was beginning to think that I could live in Phoenix forever.

Now, I'm not so naive that I wasn't expecting the summer to be extremely hot, perhaps even unbearable at times.  But I had prepared myself for days exceeding 110 degrees, and I was pretty sure I could handle that for a few months, in exchange, of course, for the other 9 months of the year being lovely.  I had been warned of these high temperatures, but everyone always qualified it with "but it's a dry heat, so it's more tolerable".  Having experienced some ridiculous levels of humidity in New York, New Jersey and South Africa, I figured I could handle an extra 20-25 degrees of heat if that humidity stayed away.

Why do I Ever Make Plans?

Cyrus and I arrived in Denver yesterday for another month so that I can work 30 hours a week for my uncle.  Jason took Friday off to facilitate the laundry/packing process.  As I often do when I have a lot to accomplish, I had a basic schedule laid out in my  head of how Friday should go:

6:00am  Wake up, play downstairs, eat breakfast
8:00am  Go for a walk with Cyrus and Jager
9:00am  Get home, start laundry
11:30am In and Out for Lunch (what, I've been having a craving!)
12:00pm Home, Cyrus down for a nap, pack while he sleeps
2:30pm   Cyrus wakes up, we go do something fun, like go swimming or go to the park
5:00pm   Get home and make dinner, which we then eat together as a family
7:00pm  Cyrus to bed, Jason and I spend the rest of the evening relaxing
10:00pm  Go to bed

I should know by now that when I make plans, God laughs.  Here's how my day actually went:

A Creepy Trend

As Jason and I try to find a place to live in a city with which we are not too familiar, we have to rely on certain tools to figure out if a neighborhood is worthy to house the Wells family.  One of those tools is  crime mapper that show the different types of crimes that have occurred in that area in the past few months; the other one is a sex offender search.

Tonight, I entered the address of a place we are considering into the Arizona sex offender database.  It pops up a three-square mile map that shows where sex offenders live, as well as locations of schools and daycare centers.  Fortunately, there were no sex offenders in the exact neighborhood of the potential house.  However, I did notice an extremely disturbing trend: It appeared that there were little clusters of sex offenders living near most of the schools and daycare centers!  I was chatting with my cousin at the time, and she had me search her address, too - which is in a decidedly nicer neighborhood - and we found the same thing!  Not only is that extremely creepy, but isn't that against the rules?  If not, it should be.  In some cases, the sex offender appeared to live literally next door or within a few houses of the school or daycare.  That just sketches me out.

So, I would suggest that if you haven't already, you might want to check out your state's sex offender database.  It probably won't convince you to move, and it probably won't convince me not move somewhere (unless of course I discover that one is living right next door...that might be a little too much to handle) but at least by knowing you can be a little more aware of your surroundings - especially if you find the creepy sex offender clusters near your child's school or daycare!  I'd be curious to know if this trend occurs in other cities...Let me know what you find out.

Dinner: Impossible

One of the reasons that I am so very excited to move down to Phoenix (besides the obvious one of being with my husband) is that we finally get to have our own place again!  We've both been living with family members for the past four plus months, but even before that we didn't totally have our own place.  We lived in the basement of my dad and step-mom's house in Portland for almost a year and a half.  They had moved to California and rented out bedrooms on the top floor.  We had the responsibility of managing the renters and finding people to move in when someone moved out.  We actually had quite a bit of space downstairs, including a living room, a large bedroom for us, a decent sized bedroom for Cy and a bathroom.   Although the separation between the main floor and the basement really wasn't enough to have total privacy, we eventually got used to keeping our voices down in certain areas.

Because we excepted three people to share the upstairs kitchen, we thought it might be an easier sell if we weren't also using it.  So, we set ourselves up in the downstairs kitchen.  Take a look.

Flashback Friday: Apartment Hunting in the Bronx

I have basically spent all afternoon trying to find apartments in Phoenix, which has had me thinking about the last time we looked for apartments.  It was the fall of 2005, and Jason had just moved to New York.  I was living with a friend at the time, and things between us got kind of tense, so Jason and I needed to find a new place to live pretty quickly.

Our budget was $1,000 a month, which, almost anywhere else in the country, seems lush for a 1 bedroom apartment.  However, it was actually quite meager in NYC.  We considered Queens and Brooklyn, two far more hip and happening boroughs, but ultimately decided to limit our search to upper Manhattan and the Bronx.  I felt comfortable with these areas, as I had been living in the Bronx for the past 18 months and commuting through upper Manhattan.  Plus, we figured that we could get more for our money in both space and proximity to the train in these areas.