Holy crap, were in the middle of the largest shopping area I’ve ever seen. We ventured out for an hour to find my bank and get a check cut for the movers tomorrow, and couldn’t believe all the stuff around here. In the map above, our place is the green arrow on the left, at the corner of N 16th & E Highland Ave, and if you look above us on E Camelback Rd, there’s at least 6 malls all within the next 8 blocks, or 0.3 miles. And they are all pretty up-market malls with Crate & Barrel, Kenneth Cole, etc in them. Send more cash!!!
We’ve got a Trader Joes and an Albertsons within a couple of blocks, and Costco, Safeway & Target within a mile. This is like having downtown Portland, Janzen Beach, Bridgeport Village, and Washington Square all within walking distance. The weird thing though is how quiet our place is, even out in the pool last night we couldn’t hear any noise at all. And don’t even get me started on the amount of restaurants around here, I’m going to have to spend 4 hours swimming laps in the pool every day just to counteract all the good food!
So basically yes traffic sucks but it’s not such a big deal when you don’t have to drive anywhere. Lets hope I can find a job somewhere around here when the telecommuting dries up...
Where are we at move-wise? Well we’re here obviously but our furniture doesn’t arrive till tomorrow (friday) so we basically have an inflatable bed and our 2 Macs. Our cable TV seems to be working today (did I mention there’s a small TV built into the kitchen? And a computer table too?), but no modem has arrived yet so no real internet connectivity. I got the very helpful “We’ll be there sometime between 9 am ~ 5 pm” treatment. There is a wifi hotspot by the pool that I can intermittently get but not with a lot of strength - definitely a sign that I need that new Mac laptop - if only Reno at work had let me “borrow” his :-)
Weather status: Its a balmy 113 today and 115 is forecast for tomorrow. I feel so sorry for our movers, hopefully they’ll get here in the morning when its cooler. Weirdly though it doesn’t feel too terrible out, you definitely don’t want to stay out in it for long, and you definitely don’t want to do anything vaguely physical (like breathing or moving) but it’s not as unpleasant as it sounds. This guy Zach that I was chatting to in the pool last night said its really only this hot here for 2 months - July & August, then cools down again pretty quickly in September. Our place has full on climate control across every floor and you can program it to change the temperature at different times of the day, like a little cooler at night-time for sleeping kinda thing.
Evening update: We went out again for a drive around 8 pm, just to check out the local area. Ended up stopping at one of the smaller malls, it was all open air which was nice as the temperature had dropped to around 100º by that point. They had all my favorite stores right next to each other - California Pizza Kitchen, Apple Store, Borders, Pottery Barn and a ton of other things we didn’t bother exploring. We did find the Phoenix equivalent of Portland’s “Willamette Week” though, there’s actually two of them - the ”Phoenix New Times” (
www.PhoenixNewTimes.com) and “Get Out” (
www.GetOutAZ.com). Now we now what is going on.
Speaking of which, it looks like everything is off an hour here from what we are used to in Portland. Stores open & close an hour earlier, TV programs are an hour earlier (we switched the mini kitchen TV on last night for CSI, just in time to catch the end of it because it started at 8 pm instead of 9 pm). I guess with it getting dark so early, people are on a different schedule. I’ve been waking up around 5 am every morning ‘cause it’s so bright outside by that point - now you know how I’m getting all this blogging done, it’s in the 3 hours before Sally wakes up ;-)
