DadTalk

Back Yard Blooming

While we might live in the Arizona desert, our back yard is quite verdant. The top picture shows white-flowered, thorny vines growing on top of our neighbor’s Ficus. I am told it’s the only Ficus in the neighborhood that survived a frost from last year.

The bright yellow tree is a sweet acacia that produces yellow puffballs in spring. The flowers emit a perfume-like fragrance vaguely reminiscent of Channel No. 5. Or was that Picasso? Been too many years.

The pink flowers come from a bougainvillea just before a wind storm pulled the plant away from a wall. I had to cut it back to the trunk, but it’ll grow back in no time.

 

Weather in Arizona

I shot this photo more than a week ago from our street. While our house isn’t pictured, you can get a good idea of our view – when outside – and the cookie cutter home neighborhood we’re living in.

Our Pretty Good View

Okay, so the view out our new windows are not as cool as in Chicago. We can see the mountains from a few windows if we stand on a milk crate and crane our necks to the left. (Photo coming on the mountains, not our necking craning, soon.)

Most of the other windows reveal other houses. Whoopee.

One thing we have, though is a front and back yard. I should have taken a picture of the bougainvillea in back before I hacked it down, but large chunks of it were dying from lack of watering. (The house we’re in was unoccupied for months and the landscape wasn’t getting properly watered.)

Just after we arrived, though, a heavy monsoon rain encouraged one of our numerous desert sages to bloom. Soon after, bees arrived in force.

Adieu Great View

Our old view of Chicago is now just a pixel memory for us. I took these pictures  the last two days I was in the apartment moving stuff out and cleaning up.

Our Great View

Our New Year began with snow. This is the view toward Montrose Harbor.

Our Great View

I took these shots as a storm approached earlier this week. My wife came inside from a walk just before I took the pictures on our newly-painted patio.  (Turns out the note from our landlord was a bit alarmist.) Our kids thought the storm was cool.

Double Rainbow

It’s not every day you see a double rainbow this distinctive. While I’m afraid I don’t know enough photographic tricks to make these two really pop, I think you get the idea.

What you also can’t see, because I couldn’t zoom far enough out with my lens, is that we could see both ends of both rainbows. I’ve seen quite a few rainbows in my life, but nothing like these two.

Seth loved them and made up three stories about rainbows as big as Chicago, the world and space for the rest of the evening. I like to think of the dou ble rainbows as a portent of good things to come.

My Family Is Being Terrorized by HGTV

I made the mistake recently of hooking up cable TV in our bedroom. My wife and I essentially have been living free of that monstrosity for almost nine years.

After being given a second TV as a gift, I figured I would put it in our bedroom so that my wife and I could occasionally watch something relaxing at night. It seemed “reasonable.” (For some reason, the cable works in that room, but not our living room.)

Almost by magic, the remote was permanently affixed to HGTV. After all, the commercials are rarely about food or pharmaceuticals. And I suppose it’s better than FOX News.

When I mentioned this to another parent, she said, “Oh yeah, we always keep the TV on HGTV. That way, if my kids walk into the room, I don’t have to worry about them watching a Lucky Charms commercial. Or a violent cartoon. Or …” By the way, did I mention they’re house hunting?

Sadly, there is a HUGE downside to watching this network. While Lael could care less, Seth is mesmerized by the handsome men and women tearing out walls and creating an “open, airy space.” Seth, who wants to be an architect and a truck driver and an engineer and a doctor and an astronaut and a train engineer and a musician and a construction worker when he grows up, probably knows more about curb appeal than half of Chicago’s homeowners.

Great view of Lake Michigan notwithstanding, Anne’s obsession with the show might have something to do with being crammed like sardines into our 750-square-feet apartment. That and the fact that the kids have trashed everything we own simply because there is no place to hide our stuff. Oh, and I think Anne is tired of drinking wine out of mason jars instead of our wine glasses, which are still in California storage.

Because we think housing prices are not done collapsing, we figure our best plan of action is to rent a house even though I will really, really miss the great view. It might not be enough to dispose of the post-ownership blues, but at least the family would have room to breathe.

So yesterday we yet again loaded the kids into the minivan and resumed exploring the communities in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago. The benefits of Evanston are obvious to us. A large number of Seth’s classmates live in the diverse community. It’s not too far from work because of train access. And there’s a lot to do.

The problem has to do with the housing stock. Homes are either so big that they are rarely rented out – except by students near Northwestern University – or we’re stuck in another expensive apartment building … without the view.

But we really need more space. The kids have nowhere to play when they’re stuck indoors. Our current building lacks a pool and play area. The elevators are always having a problem. Plus, we would like to stop paying for storage in California, money we could use instead for rent.

Watching HGTV exacerbates the situation: here are all these happy Americans buying and remodeling beautiful houses. Where are they getting all this money?

HGTV is something of a false utopia, though. After all, we haven’t seen many shows – zero to be exact – talking about surviving foreclosure or folks struggling with housing payments they can’t afford.

There haven’t been any shows about how new home prices near where we USED TO LIVE have been slashed by nearly 50 percent. That’s right, new homes in Rancho Cucamonga that used to go for $1.2 million are now being offered for $695,000.

To piss us off even more, despite what is happening in Rancho, banks are stingily holding onto properties. They fear flooding the market and refuse to let prices fall naturally as they should. If you look at this chart on bank-owned properties, the first question to ask yourself: Why haven’t home prices fallen more?

And yet, HGTV’s hosts continue to chirp happily about how wonderful it is to buy a 1-½ bath, 3-bedroom house in Alexandria, Virginia, for $750,000 house. Did I mention that in one bedroom, the dad could reach both walls by holding his hands out?

So I curse HGTV every time Anne watches it. Then I sit down and watch it too.

Have a Safe Memorial Day

Despite inclement weather, bikers cruise down Lake Shore Drive Sunday morning for the Bank of America Bike the Drive. The disappearance of road noise was a pleasant bonus.

Our Very Own Sky Garden

Although I’ve been lusting to start a balcony garden all winter, I’ve had to wait for it to warm up. Our trip out of town further delayed the project.

So I read with great jealousy about Philip’s gorgeous sky garden (Part I and Part II), which he already has off the ground.

But this weekend, Seth and Lael helped me plant our seeds (despite ongoing pain). I am amazed how excited the kids were about the whole thing. Even though Seth didn’t like getting his hands dirty – sigh, I’m raising neurotic city kids – he loved moving the soil around with a shovel, watering the pots and adding the seeds.

I chose seeds over seedlings for two reasons:

1. I want my kids to see how plants grow from start to finish.
2. Because we’re facing the lake and on the 15th floor, we get a lot of strong wind. Mix bouts of cold, harsh weather, and hardening seedlings would seem likely to fail.

Our little garden is pretty much an experiment in several other ways: We over-seeded the planters, mixing complementary big and small plants in one container. And we are growing things that simply may not like being in pots.

Here’s what we’re trying:

• Ornamental sunflowers
• Mescaline salad greens
• Carrots
• Tomatoes
• Cucumbers
• Basil
• Purple beans
• Zinnias
• Peppers – we harvested the seeds from real peppers at Seth’s request a few months ago
• Dill
• Spinach

Sadly, we have a lot of leftover seeds because we have so little space and so few planters.

Even if we don’t get substantial food, it’ll be worth it to see what happens. At least we’re so high up that we don’t have to worry much about too many bugs – other than spiders. I think.

And while our garden is smaller and our conditions more harsh than Philip’s, at least I can say that at 15 stories high, we have the official “sky garden.”