So some things I have noticed in the first 24 hours here:
1.) Unlike in West Virginia, where my beard serves as camo, I stand out like a sore thumb. Everyone has a beard around me- in my parts if you don’t have a beard it’s kinda just assumed you are female or you can’t grow one because you need to wear a mask for work. I mean, as a fat guy with a beard and overalls in WV, no one even notices me. I could basically murder someone in cold blood in broad daylight and they would never catch me because the description would be “fat guy with a beard” and the cops would basically say “so half the population, basically?”
2.) People move slow around here. They do not move at a city pace at all. They move slower than in WV. It’s really jarring, as if they are on island time.
3.) All the stop lights are these big metal arms:
I’m assuming this is because the wind gets so bad the dangling kinds we have in WV and elsewhere would blow all over the place and be hard to read.
4.) Dust and dirt buildup in my nostrils. Haven’t experienced this since Kuwait and King Khalid Military City in Saudi Arabia.
5.) You literally have to work and put in an effort to get lost here. It’s a grid. If you can can to 50 and understand cardinal and ordinal directions (and yes, I am aware these are big if’s in today’s day and age so…), you can not get lost. I mean you can, but if you tell me you got lost in Phoenix or Tempe, I’m gonna judge you.
6.) Almost no two story residential homes.
7.) There seem to be a lot of Pittsburgh expats here. Seeing “YINZ” shirtz and Steelers logos a lot.
8.) One of my weird quirks as a person is that where ever I go, I always research where the tap water comes from and read the reports. I think plumbing and tap water in your house basically anywhere you want in the country is really a modern marvel that rivals all others. It’s literally one of the few things you need to survive, lack of clean drinking water has killed who knows how many trillions of animals and people, and here we have it in every home in the country for basically nothing.
AND SO MANY PEOPLE REFUSE TO DRINK IT! So I always read the reports and it’s nice to know where it comes from and how it is treated and the dissolved solids and what not, because I will be drinking a lot of it. I also have to say that the Tempe government resource to find this information is really one of the best I have come across.
9.) I am going to thrive in this amount of light every day.
10.) People do not use enough color. Because wood deteriorates so quickly, most of the fencing is brick, cinderblock, stone, etc, and very few people paint them. One of my first bigger projects here is going to be painting the fence to give it a splash of color and to use it as a picture frame when I paint the exterior of the house.
I’ll post more as they occur to me.
Alison Rose
If you ever tasted the tap water in this dump of mine, you wouldn’t drink it either. Pretty sure the ultimate source is a well in the middle of a swamp in the middle of Satan’s backyard.
Are you gonna keep the beard?
Anoniminous
Before buying paint make sure there’s no color restrictions. Arizona is ……….. weird.
Timill
Some things don’t change…
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!
Xavier
Don’t try the water in San Diego.
Old School
John Cole Presents: “How To Improve Arizona”
piratedan
@Anoniminous: aye, depending upon the neighborhood, HOA’s could be in play but I assume Joelle would have all of that intel.
Have fun finding all of your local farmers markets and craft fairs.
and make sure you get a chance to eat the local mana from the deities above, the Filiberto’s Carne Asada burrito (red sauce or green sauce on the side). I get mine sans guacamole because I adore the grilled steak flavor, but ymmv.
danielx
Beards in hot weather…..ugh.
Anne Laurie
When we first bought our house, here in our 400-year-old industrial town, we mentioned at a gathering of friends that we were now living on a *double* Superfund site. The civil engineer in the group said, “Congratulations — unlike most people, you know exactly what’s contaminating your property.”
(City water is piped in from the next town over… and heavily monitored. The federal government sends us regular updates about it! )
(On the other hand, we couldn’t get an FDA mortgage until we signed a form promising not to put a well on our property… as if.)
Almost Retired
And another thing….Arizona drivers and stop lights. I’m used to Los Angeles, where everyone kind of anticipates when the light is going to turn green – and tries to get a bit of a head start. This is not a good thing for cyclists and pedestrians.
In Phoenix (and especially Tucson), the light turns green. And the drivers seem to take a moment to marvel at the magical change in color of the bright objects suspended over the road (as you note) before proceeding forward – often prompted by a reminder honk or helpful raised inter-motorist communicative finger from the driver in the car behind them (me).
RSA
Thanks for the entertaining review, John.
For Christmas I gave my brother a magnetic sticker of the sports mascot for the high school we both attended. He put it on the back of his truck and asked, “How long before someone recognizes it and says something to me?” Even though he’s in the next state over, I give it about a month. It’s not a big school, but it was founded in the 1800s, so there are a lot of alumni.
Tony Jay
You sound happy, Cole.
I can’t help worrying that there’s some proto-Nordic runes carved into an ancient yew tree outside Uppsala that just started glowing electric blue while from beneath the blood-black earth a low-pitched chanting begins to grow louder and louder.
Bobby Thomson
I’m sure there are plenty of snowbirds
SpaceUnit
As someone who grew up in Pittsburgh I was dumbstruck by the street grid when I moved to Denver. So easy!
In Pittsburgh it was common for people to get so lost that they never got back home. They basically had to start a new life wherever they ended up
ETA: Denver also has the mountains to the west that make it a snap to orient.
SoupCatcher
@Almost Retired: A recent tactic from the traffic engineers here in California is to turn the crosswalk light green before the traffic light so that pedestrians are already in the crosswalk when the cars start up.
Anoniminous
@piratedan:
I have in the back of mind there’s some towns in AZ that have ordinances regarding house color.
Almost Retired
@SoupCatcher: I’ve noticed that recently. Good move.
zhena gogolia
Go see the Frank Lloyd Wright theater, the Grady Gammage Auditorium. It’s wild! (I’ve never been to Arizona, but I’ve seen lots of pictures.)
eclare
I have said for years the mark of civilization is being able to turn on the tap and drink the water. We have great water in Memphis, from an underground aquifer. It’s a precious resource and tastes so good.
Interesting observations…are you going to keep the beard?
piratedan
@Anoniminous: we have them here in Pima County, there is a color code that dictates that you can only use colors that you find naturally in the desert on your house. so you can go from off-white to dark brown, with some greys, greens and blues allowed but only in pastel shades for the most part. I had a neighbor construct a new home close to mine and someone up the street had them repaint their house because the shade of white used was too white (almost moon reflection albedo white) and they had to go with a softer shade.
Jay
SWMBO’s best friend, lives in a HOA in AZ.
Cinderblock fence walls, every house painted and fence painted some shade of adobe.
They don’t really have a back yard, more of a courtyard.
She hired a local artist to airbrush the local desert and mountains on to the back wall.
Made the space seem much larger.
raven
Go to the El Bravo on 7th St. Between Dunlap and Northern, Just South of Butler on the West Side of the Street.
https://elbravoaz.wordpress.com/locations/
rikyrah
Glad you made it safe, Cole 😊
eclare
@SpaceUnit:
Memphis is also on a grid with the river to the west, so it’s easy to navigate. I moved here from Atlanta, where you could easily get lost as most roads were situated over Native American paths. In a neighborhood near me, two streets, Briarcrest and LaVista, intersected in two different locations about five miles apart, winding away then back. I routinely got lost in that neighborhood, trying to find the movie theater or restaurant.
marklar
Watch out for the cameras on traffic lights. They’ll get you for both running yellows/reds, and for the speed as you try to clear the intersection. There are also roads in the area with cameras that will automatically ticket you if you get more than 10 mph above the speed limit.
2liberal
I live about a mile northeast of that sign.
jame
John, people in the South generally don’t move fast because it’s so hot you could die. And where you are now, a lot of people are OLD, which is nonconducive to speed.
persistentillusion
@SpaceUnit: Try Albuquerque some time. As a Front Ranger, they do it wrong. Their mountains aren’t to the West, they are to the East. So disorienting!
RaflW
@Almost Retired: Good friends moved to metro Phoenix and they said (and I saw some evidence of this when visiting), the hesitation on green is so that someone else can get t-boned by the inevitable red-light runner. Or, more charitably, so that the red-light runner can clear the intersection and not kill anyone.
eta: If there are red-light camera-robocops, it’s seemingly insufficient to curb bad behavior?
John Cole
@eclare: I am keeping the beard until I lose the amount of weight I want.
billcinsd
@SpaceUnit: Try Salt Lake City. It’s on a grid and mostly numbered as such. Thus, if someone tells you there address it is easy to find
mrmoshpotato
@Alison Rose:
@Xavier: Sounds like your tap water laughs at a Brita filter.
bbleh
Some of this may be due to arriving in the cold(er) weather. The summer/fall heat slows people’s pace measurably — assuming they’re outside at all. And the summer sun fades colors fast.
As to traffic lights, having lived and driven in many US cities and towns, there are different conventions, and moving from one to another can be jarring and even dangerous. One notable example: in some cities, there is an all-red pause before one direction turns green, but in others there is not, and pedestrians depending on the first can be caught out by the second. Another recent one: in Hawaii, people just assume you’ll slow down if they pull out onto the arterial in front of you, which can be an eeeek! moment if you’re not used to it. Learn your local traffic conventions!
eclare
@jame:
It’s hot, we mosey.
Marcus
“Well the water tastes funny when you’re far from your home, but it’s only the thirsty who hunger to roam.” — John Prine
hitchhiker
Thank you. This is exactly the sort of thing that interests me about different locations. I (from Seattle) remember clearly the first time I visited Boston, asking myself how I’d know — at street level — that I wasn’t in Seattle, aside from the obvious naming of everything being Atlantic this and that instead of Pacific this and that.
The first answer was color, specifically clothing color. PNW colors then were like teal blue and purple and yellow, and it seemed to me that almost everybody in Boston was wearing black.
Then there were all those Italian restaurants.
And then I noticed this funny way that couples would navigate the sidewalks, with the guy’s arm not around the woman’s shoulders but around her neck — which I hadn’t seen before. It looked uncomfortable for the women.
Finally, Seattle is kinda short on US history sites, which seemed to be just about everywhere.
Anyway, thanks. Enjoy the light!
eclare
@bbleh:
When I was in LA years ago, the people on motorcycles doing the lane splitting freaked me out. Luckily the friend I was staying with had warned me about them.
RaflW
OT, but whichever Jackal recommended The Diplomat on netflix, thank you. I was a bit nonplussed by some cheesy production values in the first half of the first episode, but the plot and dialog has me hooked on this very, very lazy NYE.
hitchhiker
@billcinsd:
Yes, with the Temple as the origin, SLC is basically a Cartesian plane. Handy to have the Wasatch Front for cardinal orientation, too.
Alison Rose
@mrmoshpotato: I have a Brita, but I only use that water for making tea. After going through the Brita, getting boiled, and brewed, it’s okay. But I tried drinking it plain from the pitcher and blech. It just has this…earthy taste to it that is gross. I don’t even like using it to rinse after brushing my teeth.
MazeDancer
In New Mexico, there is much color on doors, trim, shutters, and other accents.
.The sun is so relentless, that those need to be repainted early and often.
To paint an entire fence could be signing up for the Golden Gate Bridge theory of painting -you will never be done.
.The desert is a ferocious power. Nothing in excess. You might consider listening to the desert before doing anything too excessive.
Manyakitty
Sounds like you’re ready for a great time 😀
Stopped by here to wish everyone a safe and happy New Year 🎊 Here’s hoping 2024 sucks as little as possible for all of us. 🍾💞
KrackenJack
@SpaceUnit:
Lived in the ‘Burgh for a decade. Great town, but yeah, the most common directions are “You can’t get there from here.”
zhena gogolia
@RaflW: it’s lots of fun
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Dan B
@Timill: When we visited Pittsburgh it was hot and muggy. The hotel had a huge tub which we filled. A couple seconds after we lathered up the water turned into a facsimile of skim milk. It then got gritty like fine sand. And the soap didn’t seem to remove any of the sticky sweat. Hardest water ever. This was before bottled water outside of Europe.
trollhattan
@Alison Rose: @danielx:
Yeah, maybe it survives the first 105 day but that sucker is gone by the third consecutive 110-degree day.
“But, it’s a dry heat.”
“Not inside there it ain’t.”
Waiting for the pronouncement of the top carnitas joint.
sab
@hitchhiker: Las Vegas NV has no logic whatever to its street layout, but they have four distinctly different mountain ranges at the edge of the valley, so you can always tell which way you are facing.
Hoppie
Back when I drove in Italy we said the speed of light was the amount of time it took the driver behind you to honk after the light had changed.
Alison Rose
I know this isn’t tagged as an open thread, but it’s a holiday, all rules go out the window. Since not everyone is able to catch the Ukraine posts when they go up, here is Zelenskyy’s New Year’s address, which is as always beautiful and poignant. Also too, this lovely photo of him and Olena.
SpaceUnit
@KrackenJack:
The place is crazy, all up and down. There’s no line of sight and very few roads that go straight for more than hundred feet.
Okay that last part is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
Redshift
@hitchhiker: Not justa Cartesian plane, but lots of addresses are literally pairs of coordinates. Most places that have a grid have a numbered address that translates to coordinates, but don’t have them directly.
satby
@RaflW: It may have been me. Glad you liked it.
Chief Oshkosh
Fight the good fight, Cole! If more AZers would color-up, they’d finally graduate to the splendifery of NMers and the world would be that much more beautiful.
SteveinPHX
@eclare:
I have kept my beard here (since 2000). But my missus has never seen me w/o a beard. She did see an old photo of me once w/o a beard and her only comment was, “Keep the beard!”
That was over 30 years ago. It’s not a problem in AZ heat.
If Cole keeps the beard, he’ll survive.
HNY!
mrmoshpotato
@Alison Rose: I see.
trollhattan
@Chief Oshkosh: HOA gives us two choices: sandy beige and beigy sand.
Dan B
@SpaceUnit: My brother drove a cab in Cincinnati. There were a quarter million people in Cincy in 1850. Roads radiated from the downtown and each new building was numbered as they were built. So a new house several blocks from the house closer to downtown might be ten numbers higher, or it might be one hundred higher. My brother would drive the main highway until he got to the right number and then go to the parallel street. He rarely found the correct address.
Alison Rose
@SteveinPHX: My dad had a mustache when he and my mom first met, and while beards came and went, he always kept the mustache. (He was one of those lucky men who can have only a mustache and not look creepy.) Then once when I was in high school, he was having some skin irritation and decided to shave off the mustache. He didn’t say anything beforehand, and when he came back out to the living room, we all just stared at him for like a solid 30 seconds. It’s amazing what a different a bit of facial hair can make!
Dan B
@SoupCatcher: That’s happening on problematic streets in Seattle.
geg6
@KrackenJack:
So much truth.
satby
I’m used to a grid system city, so it is confusing when I’m in a city that’s not. But my sense of direction usually saves me from getting lost for long.
And I mostly drink tap water or coffee and tea made with it. I think bottled water (often just tap water from somewhere else) is an abomination of waste and pollution. Filtered well water if that’s what’s on tap, but I prefer Pur filter systems, they take out more contaminants.
geg6
@SpaceUnit:
Not to mention all the one-way streets that, unless you know the city, will have you driving in circles for hours. And the ones that are two-way until suddenly they are one-way.
eclare
@SteveinPHX:
Sounds like you and John should have a meetup once he gets settled, it will be easy for you to spot each other.
SpaceUnit
@Dan B:
That’s pretty nuts.
Pittsburgh’s streets aren’t the result of bad planning. It’s just the topography.
eclare
Dammit, boomers from fireworks starting already.
Tony Jay
Happy New Year from Darkest Britain, everyone. May 2024 see some truly spectacular victories for the good guys and the saggy worm sacks of the bad kicked straight into orbit.
Suzanne
There are lots of two-story residential homes once you get further out into the suburbs, once the houses are circa 1985 and newer.
The facial hair? Yeah. The kind of unkempt big beard thing is not really an AZ thing.
Suzanne
@Anoniminous:
LMAO yes.
I did a building in Scottsdale once, and the city planner made us get Design Review approval on the color. I asked what colors they would approve, and he said, “Beige. Or tan.”
Ohio Mom
@Dan B: Cincinnati is hilly like Pittsburgh. That is a big reason life before GPS was a challenge. Streets curve as they go up and down the hills, in places the main streets are not perpendicular.
(Cincinnati is not actually hilly, it’s a plateau with canyon-type indentations, if that makes sense. It feels like hills).
Suzanne
@SpaceUnit: Yeah, living here in PGH, and coming from Phoenix’s one-mile supergrid, I can tell the street weirdness is just about the landscape. My neighborhood (Brookline) is mostly gridded, but the arterial streets curve.
John hasn’t gotten to the areas around the mountains yet, where the street grid gets a bit distorted.
trollhattan
@eclare: Really glad our current dog does not GAF about fireworks, thunder, other things that go bang, because both of our Dalmatians were utterly terrified, which is something the hooman can’t really fix or explain. Makes every New Years and 4th a trial.
Huntin’ dog might explain it, but what a relief. Weather is meh and I’m not anticipating a fuss in the neighborhood, but one never knows.
NWO Joe
@Alison Rose: If you’re getting odd tasting water out of a Brita it could be because it isn’t kept in the fridge. They recommend that on the direction booklet. I had the same problem until I did.
Dan B
@SpaceUnit: Zinzinati also has hills like Pittsburgh- same river as western Pittsburgh but it’s fairly level once you reach the top of the hill. That’s where the street numbers get nuts. The farther from downtown the greater the mismatch
And hillsides mean bats by the boatload.
jackmac
Chicago’s grid and numbering system makes it easy to navigate (although there are some angled streets that can baffle the newcomer — like Archer, Ogden, Lincoln, Clark, Milwaukee, Clybourn, Elston and Grand).
One other constant for the navigationally challenged is that the lake is ALWAYS east.
SteveinPHX
@eclare: As long as he keeps the beard!
SpaceUnit
@Suzanne:
I can’t imagine how anyone drove a cab in the Burgh before GPS.
Hell, it’d be a challenge even with GPS.
Dan B
@Ohio Mom: I was at the University of Cincinnati for a couple years. I moved to Chicago which had more gays but zero hills. I like hills, except in snow and ice. Cincinnati got slush but little snow, like Seattle.
Yutsano
@Dan B: Almost every light downtown works like that, although I wonder sometimes if the pause is long enough, especially as the light changes are mostly quaint suggestions most of the time.
SteveinPHX
@Alison Rose: Can be a game changer!
HNY!
Almost Retired
@Suzanne: The simplicity and continuity of the Phoenix street grid (at least in the city itself) is wonderful. I had a snobby great aunt who lived near the Biltmore and always complained about having to visit my grandparents and aunt and uncle in “the Avenues” – basically rendering the western half of the city a no go zone in her mind.
Suzanne
@Almost Retired: Um, my friends and I always joked that I-17 is like the Hudson River and everything west of it was Phoenix’s equivalent of New Jersey. (I-17 runs at approx 21st Avenue.)
frosty
@Xavier: I lived in Pt Loma with college friends one summer. I tried an experiment and put a glassful of water on the counter. Within a couple hours you could see a bunch of sediment on the bottom.
Colorado River water. I’m sure they do their best at the water treatment plants, but they didn’t get it all.
Lawrence A Schuman
Welcome to town. Four months nice outside. Four months warm. Four months Arrakis. You will need a reflective sun shield for your car window in the Arrakis period. Skip it and your car’s interior will be too hot to touch. Leather seats will burn your balls. It can be 100 degrees at night in this time. Sunscreen. You will need it. Just like Kuwait, except the ocean is much farther away. Your dogs will need foot protection to go on a walk, also.
The Spanish style architecture with the high block walls, the fact that you drive everywhere, and she size of the metro area means that you can live among four million people and know no one. Not a bad deal for introverts. Tempe and Scottsdale actually have the most irregular street configurations and naming. The rest has an occasional hill they they decided not to go through or over, but otherwise all grid. Scottsdale and Paradise Valley are the rich burbs. Speed cameras are thick there. Arizona has been an open carry state since forever. I’ve lived here most of my life and it is still relatively uncommon to see guys (always) wearing a gun. Nice to have you in the neighborhood.
EmanG
I’m deeply excited to read your first post on discovering the Ice and Water stores. Seriously, get a dispenser, buy your water. Also, never not have a glass, cup, bottle of water at hand. Drink way more than you think you should. In the desert, if you feel thirsty it’s too late…
Hoppie
@eclare: I thought most of us boomers were from the candlelight dinner the night before….
Betty Cracker
Just make sure you stay hydrated. I spent a week or so in the desert SW once and molted like a goddamn lizard. I felt like a raisin until I crossed some mountain range in CA and turned into a grape again. You don’t appreciate the humidity until it’s gone.
Glidwrith
@satby: Thank you, and seconded!
I’ve lived in enough different cities to learn that every place has tap water that tastes different. Just drink it. Within a month or so, it just becomes water. It doesn’t ‘taste’ like anything but water.
OldDave
@Betty Cracker: Ditto. Moved to Florida, got acclimated to the high humidity, and then business would send me to high desert places like Palmdale/Edwards, Albuquerque, etc for a week or two. Learned that my first stop after leaving the airport was to buy water and keep drinking.
Suzanne
@Lawrence A Schuman: Sunscreen?! Not enough. Cole needs to coat himself in that stuff they paint on the orange tree trunks.
karl
El Bravo is fine, but pretty much any of the old AzMex places will be fine.
karl
@Suzanne: I live in Maryvale and you people aren’t funny.
Suzanne
@karl: Hey, I’m from the East Valley, which is Long Island in this metaphor. That’s….. not praise. LOL.
Paul in KY
@Almost Retired: Old people reflexes, or lack thereof.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: Hope you and your family are having a great New Year, Tony!
Paul in KY
@Ohio Mom: To me it’s more the old city by the river (flattish) and then all the rest run up the canyons/hills to the plateau on top.
Paul in KY
@jackmac: Too many streets named ‘Wacker’ :-) Good to have the lake as a directional guide, though.
Paul in KY
@Suzanne: I was thinking zinc oxide. Maybe he’d look like The Grinch.