Moving from Seattle to Phoenix 1st Post!
Hello!
Okay, so God knows if anyone will actually read this. Perhaps. I'm starting this Blog to document my moving from Seattle to somewhere else. Phoenix is looking like a nice to place to live, so it might be there. I've been doing some research on Phoenix and Arizona, and the jury is still out, but I have to say that that area is looking like a good candidate.
A little background on myself:
I've been living in Seattle Washington since Nov 1998 when I moved here for a computer contracting job that was supposed to last 7 months. I was 25 at the time. That 7 month contract turned into over 4 years. I moved away for a short time to Salt Lake City Utah at the end of 2002 (more about that some other time), but moved back here after 6 months to become an employee of my former contracting employer, and have been here ever since.
Right up front I gotta say, I love Seattle for many reasons, it has been good to me. The people here are top notch, really great. BUT the weather FREAKING SUCKS. There is moss growing on the sidewalks and walkways around my house because we've been having particularly below average weather (more rain, more clouds, less sunshine) than normal FOR A YEAR. I looked up some stats yesterday and found them to be quite interesting. They just backed up what I already know. In June 2010 we had ONE sunny day, July 2010 we had 8 sunny days, August had 12 days of sun, and September also had just One day of Sunshine. SO, in a 4 month summertime period, supposedly our best months, we got 22 days of Sunshine???!! YOU HAVE TO BE FREAKING KIDDING ME. So that's a big part of the WHY for why I'm moving.
Other reasons for me leaving Seattle are (in no particular order):
- Super High Cost Of Living: Most everything here is outrageously expensive. And I make decent money, but C'mon.. When visiting the rest of country (except maybe NYC, L.A., San Fran or Chicago) everything looks On Sale - and I like that! It's about $3.20 for a gallon of gas right now for the cheap stuff, and in AZ I think it was recently around $2.80. That's pretty nice, and just an example of something that is more expensive here than elsewhere.
- Horrible traffic. I work from home thank Goodness, but might not be for much longer (more on this later also). I would have moved years ago if I had to deal with our freeway traffic on I-5. The bus system in Seattle though, I gotta say, is great. But that's no reason for me to stay!
- Parking downtown Sucks. Plain and simple. Its expensive and extremely hard to find parking on the street. And to make matters worse, our new Mayor just raised the rates to $4 an hour. Thanks dude! I love to bike ride, and used to bike to work when I worked downtown and rode over 2000 miles in 2007. Before that I would take the bus in, and liked it. BUT, even I know the importance of having decent parking in a downtown core area. You can't take kids and packages on a bike, and outside of normal commute times, the buses can get sketchy and there aren't any express routes.
- Did I mention the weather here? Check out this 10 day forecast. Doesn't matter when I posted this, or when you click it. It will suck.
HERE--> http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/98101
And don't let the weather channel or weather.com or the weather guys fool you. They lie. Their idea of partly cloudy here is clouds 23.5 hours a day and maybe one little 'sun break'. If I never hear the term 'sun break' again I will be a better man. When they say 'showers', it means rain. Pure and simple. In other places of the country showers and partly cloudy mean what they mean, not here.
- I'm from the east coast originally, born and raised in Buffalo NY and moved away when I was 23. I travel back there often as I have family and good friends still there. I love Buffalo. Always a good time, but my liver usually suffers a bit from too much 'celebrating', and I regularly gain about 3-6 lbs after a week long trip from eating all the delicious pizza, chicken wings and Mighty Taco. Bocce's on Bailey, Mmmm so good. Why is this a reason why I want to leave Seattle..? Because the Flights are LONG and pricey-er than coming from most other places. There are no direct flights, always at least one layover from Seattle to Buffalo. So its about 8 hours each way, give or take.
From Phoenix to Buffalo, for example, there are direct flights on Southwest Airlines that are DIRECT. DIRECT!! Awesome! It might still take 4-5 hours, but it would be so nice to cut 3 hours off, and take off from one city and land in the other while not changing planes.
Here’s a couple more thoughts on things I'm not too fond of about Seattle:
- Our roads, very bad! lots of potholes and patches. Also they are narrow, and of course clogged with lots of drivers. I will say though, that the Seattle and/or Pacific Northwest drivers are some of the best. They will wave you in, and are very polite. There are very few accidents for the amount of cars on the road here. I will miss Seattle drivers. Other cities, I know the drivers are much more aggressive.
- The housing. Very expensive and I consider myself lucky to be a home owner in a decent/nice neighborhood. But OMG, my mortgage payment isn't low and right now I'm 1 year into a 5 year ARM. I could trade my house in here, so to speak, for something WAY nicer and newer in a different city. For example in Phoenix, you can get a pool home, perhaps on one of those nice man made lakes, with a little boat out back, for way less than the price of my place here in Seattle. I could drop down to a 15 year fixed and keep my payment the same, AND probably pull $$ out.
Also, my house is very inefficient due to the 1956 construction and having no insulation in the walls. Which kind of sucks. In summertime I don't really need AC, which is nice, because I don't have it.
- My Neighbors here are not very friendly. With the exception of this very year, most my neighbors have not decorated for Halloween or Christmas. For some reason this year they have. They are not very social, so I just gave up and have now become not very social either. The rental house next to mine I'm convinced is a pot Grow House. They fit all the signs; unkempt yard, hardly ever home, mid 20's male 'student' living by himself in a 3 bedroom house. All the windows blocked out. Every 3 months lots of cars show up for about a day with all the doors and windows shut- like they are having a party, but there is no music or talking that can be heard. That must be harvest time. Also, you used to be able to smell the weed, but I think they installed a vent and filter. There is some new mechanism they run at night out of the back window furthest from me. It was so bad you could smell the pot from the sidewalk out front.
Back to the not decorating thing. I have one neighbor that has kids who would come around Trick or Treating for Halloween, but had NOT ONE decoration or pumpkin out at their place, ever. Never. So you take other peoples candy but you in no way participate in Halloween otherwise? It's odd because they have a beautiful house and seem very well off.
- Things to do. Sure there is lots to do here, but there is lots to do anywhere (reasonable) if you put your mind to it. I've been fortunate enough to make some good friends here, which took some time (years) and some trial and error, but I'm happy with the people I know. I will miss them, but damn, I can visit. Some things I will not miss to do - some of the same things people for some reason tout as being awesome and that I've tried, I did not like at all. Here is one for instance.
The yearly Tulip festival. Every year people on TV talk about the tulip festival and how great it is. So one year my (now ex) girlfriend and I tried it. It was freaking awful. First of all, I am mid 30 something straight male. I like flowers about as much as the next guy. I mean sure they are great and all. But a whole supposed festival around tulips? It was a two hour, traffic clogged, drive on I-5 north from Seattle (should be 1 hour), and we were breathing nothing but exhaust fumes the whole way there and back. Once there, it sucked. Yep, there are the tulips. Now what? No actual festival. No town with tulip parades or maybe something fun that has to do with tulips. Is there such a thing? Just rows and rows of tulips. I could have downloaded a photo from the internet and saved my lungs the hassle. So we looked at the tulips for 15 minutes and left. Could have been worse. My buddy Simon went the next year and got a parking ticket for parking too near the tulips. He stayed a bit longer than us. If I remember he thought it sucked too.
Another thing I don't care for; The Pike Place Market. Everyone seems to love it. Sure, its Okay. But love it? It could fall of the face of the planet and I wouldn't blink and eye. I don't consider it 'something to do'. More like something 'I've done'.
- Poor quality of service: Since things are very expensive in Seattle, they have to keep costs down by not paying so much for regular service jobs. If you work at Home Depot, you might make $10 an hour. You cannot live on that in Seattle. Not any kind of decent life anyway. So you get poor quality service workers. I have found a few small exceptions to this rule- and I am always thankful for people that do their jobs well. Another exception might be bar tenders and in some cases servers. They get tipped well in Seattle and attract higher quality people. But if you are shopping and go to a store, good luck to you on getting decent help.
Anyway, enough ranting for today.. More to come on my actual move and some interesting things I've found on Phoenix and Arizona. Also more about me, and Buffalo, and my girlfriend, and my job situation.
peace out! Leave a comment!?
Okay, so God knows if anyone will actually read this. Perhaps. I'm starting this Blog to document my moving from Seattle to somewhere else. Phoenix is looking like a nice to place to live, so it might be there. I've been doing some research on Phoenix and Arizona, and the jury is still out, but I have to say that that area is looking like a good candidate.
A little background on myself:
I've been living in Seattle Washington since Nov 1998 when I moved here for a computer contracting job that was supposed to last 7 months. I was 25 at the time. That 7 month contract turned into over 4 years. I moved away for a short time to Salt Lake City Utah at the end of 2002 (more about that some other time), but moved back here after 6 months to become an employee of my former contracting employer, and have been here ever since.
Right up front I gotta say, I love Seattle for many reasons, it has been good to me. The people here are top notch, really great. BUT the weather FREAKING SUCKS. There is moss growing on the sidewalks and walkways around my house because we've been having particularly below average weather (more rain, more clouds, less sunshine) than normal FOR A YEAR. I looked up some stats yesterday and found them to be quite interesting. They just backed up what I already know. In June 2010 we had ONE sunny day, July 2010 we had 8 sunny days, August had 12 days of sun, and September also had just One day of Sunshine. SO, in a 4 month summertime period, supposedly our best months, we got 22 days of Sunshine???!! YOU HAVE TO BE FREAKING KIDDING ME. So that's a big part of the WHY for why I'm moving.
Other reasons for me leaving Seattle are (in no particular order):
- Super High Cost Of Living: Most everything here is outrageously expensive. And I make decent money, but C'mon.. When visiting the rest of country (except maybe NYC, L.A., San Fran or Chicago) everything looks On Sale - and I like that! It's about $3.20 for a gallon of gas right now for the cheap stuff, and in AZ I think it was recently around $2.80. That's pretty nice, and just an example of something that is more expensive here than elsewhere.
- Horrible traffic. I work from home thank Goodness, but might not be for much longer (more on this later also). I would have moved years ago if I had to deal with our freeway traffic on I-5. The bus system in Seattle though, I gotta say, is great. But that's no reason for me to stay!
- Parking downtown Sucks. Plain and simple. Its expensive and extremely hard to find parking on the street. And to make matters worse, our new Mayor just raised the rates to $4 an hour. Thanks dude! I love to bike ride, and used to bike to work when I worked downtown and rode over 2000 miles in 2007. Before that I would take the bus in, and liked it. BUT, even I know the importance of having decent parking in a downtown core area. You can't take kids and packages on a bike, and outside of normal commute times, the buses can get sketchy and there aren't any express routes.
- Did I mention the weather here? Check out this 10 day forecast. Doesn't matter when I posted this, or when you click it. It will suck.
HERE--> http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/98101
And don't let the weather channel or weather.com or the weather guys fool you. They lie. Their idea of partly cloudy here is clouds 23.5 hours a day and maybe one little 'sun break'. If I never hear the term 'sun break' again I will be a better man. When they say 'showers', it means rain. Pure and simple. In other places of the country showers and partly cloudy mean what they mean, not here.
- I'm from the east coast originally, born and raised in Buffalo NY and moved away when I was 23. I travel back there often as I have family and good friends still there. I love Buffalo. Always a good time, but my liver usually suffers a bit from too much 'celebrating', and I regularly gain about 3-6 lbs after a week long trip from eating all the delicious pizza, chicken wings and Mighty Taco. Bocce's on Bailey, Mmmm so good. Why is this a reason why I want to leave Seattle..? Because the Flights are LONG and pricey-er than coming from most other places. There are no direct flights, always at least one layover from Seattle to Buffalo. So its about 8 hours each way, give or take.
From Phoenix to Buffalo, for example, there are direct flights on Southwest Airlines that are DIRECT. DIRECT!! Awesome! It might still take 4-5 hours, but it would be so nice to cut 3 hours off, and take off from one city and land in the other while not changing planes.
Here’s a couple more thoughts on things I'm not too fond of about Seattle:
- Our roads, very bad! lots of potholes and patches. Also they are narrow, and of course clogged with lots of drivers. I will say though, that the Seattle and/or Pacific Northwest drivers are some of the best. They will wave you in, and are very polite. There are very few accidents for the amount of cars on the road here. I will miss Seattle drivers. Other cities, I know the drivers are much more aggressive.
- The housing. Very expensive and I consider myself lucky to be a home owner in a decent/nice neighborhood. But OMG, my mortgage payment isn't low and right now I'm 1 year into a 5 year ARM. I could trade my house in here, so to speak, for something WAY nicer and newer in a different city. For example in Phoenix, you can get a pool home, perhaps on one of those nice man made lakes, with a little boat out back, for way less than the price of my place here in Seattle. I could drop down to a 15 year fixed and keep my payment the same, AND probably pull $$ out.
Also, my house is very inefficient due to the 1956 construction and having no insulation in the walls. Which kind of sucks. In summertime I don't really need AC, which is nice, because I don't have it.
- My Neighbors here are not very friendly. With the exception of this very year, most my neighbors have not decorated for Halloween or Christmas. For some reason this year they have. They are not very social, so I just gave up and have now become not very social either. The rental house next to mine I'm convinced is a pot Grow House. They fit all the signs; unkempt yard, hardly ever home, mid 20's male 'student' living by himself in a 3 bedroom house. All the windows blocked out. Every 3 months lots of cars show up for about a day with all the doors and windows shut- like they are having a party, but there is no music or talking that can be heard. That must be harvest time. Also, you used to be able to smell the weed, but I think they installed a vent and filter. There is some new mechanism they run at night out of the back window furthest from me. It was so bad you could smell the pot from the sidewalk out front.
Back to the not decorating thing. I have one neighbor that has kids who would come around Trick or Treating for Halloween, but had NOT ONE decoration or pumpkin out at their place, ever. Never. So you take other peoples candy but you in no way participate in Halloween otherwise? It's odd because they have a beautiful house and seem very well off.
- Things to do. Sure there is lots to do here, but there is lots to do anywhere (reasonable) if you put your mind to it. I've been fortunate enough to make some good friends here, which took some time (years) and some trial and error, but I'm happy with the people I know. I will miss them, but damn, I can visit. Some things I will not miss to do - some of the same things people for some reason tout as being awesome and that I've tried, I did not like at all. Here is one for instance.
The yearly Tulip festival. Every year people on TV talk about the tulip festival and how great it is. So one year my (now ex) girlfriend and I tried it. It was freaking awful. First of all, I am mid 30 something straight male. I like flowers about as much as the next guy. I mean sure they are great and all. But a whole supposed festival around tulips? It was a two hour, traffic clogged, drive on I-5 north from Seattle (should be 1 hour), and we were breathing nothing but exhaust fumes the whole way there and back. Once there, it sucked. Yep, there are the tulips. Now what? No actual festival. No town with tulip parades or maybe something fun that has to do with tulips. Is there such a thing? Just rows and rows of tulips. I could have downloaded a photo from the internet and saved my lungs the hassle. So we looked at the tulips for 15 minutes and left. Could have been worse. My buddy Simon went the next year and got a parking ticket for parking too near the tulips. He stayed a bit longer than us. If I remember he thought it sucked too.
Another thing I don't care for; The Pike Place Market. Everyone seems to love it. Sure, its Okay. But love it? It could fall of the face of the planet and I wouldn't blink and eye. I don't consider it 'something to do'. More like something 'I've done'.
- Poor quality of service: Since things are very expensive in Seattle, they have to keep costs down by not paying so much for regular service jobs. If you work at Home Depot, you might make $10 an hour. You cannot live on that in Seattle. Not any kind of decent life anyway. So you get poor quality service workers. I have found a few small exceptions to this rule- and I am always thankful for people that do their jobs well. Another exception might be bar tenders and in some cases servers. They get tipped well in Seattle and attract higher quality people. But if you are shopping and go to a store, good luck to you on getting decent help.
Anyway, enough ranting for today.. More to come on my actual move and some interesting things I've found on Phoenix and Arizona. Also more about me, and Buffalo, and my girlfriend, and my job situation.
peace out! Leave a comment!?
Total Comments 4
Comments
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No one kills himself on the golf course. I hope you heard the call and moved Phoenix.Posted 05-19-2011 at 10:54 AM by goldfishcam
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dont come this dump. i live in phoenix and can tell you honestly that seattle is a much nicer place. the people here suck and have huge attitude problems. when you walk down the street and pass someone they would just as soon stab you as say hi. most people here are uneducated and believe me it shows. the people here in arizona are extremly rude. dont plan on making any friends here, most people here have the "ME, MYSELF, AND I" ATTITUDE, You will see that as soon as you get here if you do come to phoenix, or anywhere in arizona. also, there is nothing to do here, entertainment wise unless you are into cocaine and heroine, which im note. the heat is horrible, we have atleast eight months of extreme heat over 110 and of that atleast four months are 115-122 degrees. believe me, seattle might not be perfect but in many ways the people in seattle are more intelligent than arizonans, it might rain alot up there but its better than this extreme heat in arizona, the air is much cleaner in seattle than here in arizona also. also, arizona is one of the highest ranked states for cuicide, dont believe the comment the previous person made. my wife and i are moving to seattle and will never look back, arizona just isnt worth it.Posted 08-06-2012 at 10:08 AM by seattle4us
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Hope you made it to Arizona!
Hi! Hope your life is going well wherever
you landed! (Just read your 2010 post.)
I had to write and disagree with the nay-
sayer about Arizona. I didn't live in the zipcode of Phoenix, but in Chandler, a near by
city. I loved the place! Worked in Scottsdale,
and also Gilbert. The people were awesome.
After being gone 3.5 years (back to Ca.) I still
keep in touch with a lot of people.
The economy was good, prices better than
California, and the places to visit and outdoor
activities were great.
I didn't like the heat though. That's the only bummer.
I decided to go back to Ca. to retire because my family, sons are here. But, I really don't like a lot about Ca. Take care.Posted 09-20-2016 at 08:50 PM by CJgeo1751
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Hope you made it to Arizona!
[quote=CJgeo1751;bt63529]Hi! Hope your life is going well wherever
you landed! (Just read your 2010 post.)
Hello! I just went back and read some of my of my old blogs, years later here in 2020. Wow, thanks for replying. Here is an update. It;'s like living in future, and jumping ahead 8-10 years. What would my life be like living in Arizona?! Well here is what's good:
After having lived in Seattle for 12 years, and now having lived in AZ for about 9, I can honestly say I really like Arizona. I love the sunshine. Absolutely never complain about it. I was a little worried I would get sick of the same daily routine involving sun, sun and more sun, and very little rain. But I love it. I really like the heat also, so I can tell I'm in the right place. I continued biking into work here in AZ (something I did in Seattle regularly), and I have biked in (18 miles RT) in as high as 113. It's great, no problems. Now, we do have a pool - and I think it would be harder to live in AZ if we didn't have access to one. So instead of a nice city view of downtown Seattle from our house, we have the pool. If I could do one thing differently it would have been to hold onto my house in Seattle and rent it out, as it was a gold mine and did nothing but shoot up in price since I sold. Like really? I had it 7 years and it barely budged, then over the next 7 years I didn't own it, it doubled. Man. And I even fixed it up real nice for the next owner. Double Man. But oh well, you win some you lose some. I try to look forward, not back. I'm still in skiing, Flagstaff is only a little over 2 hours and away and their ski resort (Snow Bowl) is pretty great (even though the name kind of blows IMO). I hike very regularly since since the Covid hit - South Mountain almost nightly and Camelback somewhat frequently also. Keeping in shape as I am getting older. Love the hiking, almost as much as I love skiing. I do miss some parts of Seattle. I made good friends up there. The people are pretty Chill. I sort of like the live and let live mentality. I miss the water and beach of West Seattle. but I wouldn't go back to move, only to visit. Anyway, Cheers and good vibes to you.Posted 08-03-2020 at 11:41 AM by CraigBlogClog
