Sharon Lin

Entertaining article. Thanks. So true.

Thank you, Jac, for your story. It reminded me of my childhood. I was the first to go to graduate school too.

We took out our lawn and established a wildlife habitat by putting in native plants, water features, feeders offering different foods, and our wildlife has exploded with birds and butterflies-both in varieties and numbers. Foxes too.We live on the east coast, so when temps reach the 90's in July and August, I can water without impunity for hours because water here is plentiful and cheap.
That's why I don't want to live in Phoenix. Growing grass and watering it is not environmentally responsible. We've been looking for acreage in the Sonoran desert. The house is not important, it can always be renovated. It's the native flora and fauna that count. We want to encourage wildlife.

Up until recently, we were looking for a home in either the Vail, Tanque Verde, and Foothills areas. They have the best school scores. We have no dependents, but here on the east coast, people look for homes that have the best schools. Unfortunately the news coming out of the Tucson area is discouraging even to Democrats like us from the blue state of MD. I read recently in the AZ Daily Star that Foothills is losing population. I'm not surprised. Thanks to national TV and the newspapers, we are well aware of the problems that Tucson and Pima County have. We feel that we have had a lucky escape. What if we had bought a home on one of our last trips to Pima County. We'd be stuck. We have friends who bought a home at Dove Mtn. Let's see how long they live there before throwing in the towel. When we visited them last fall, they were already complaining about the problems that they were encountering. It really pays to read the local paper before you buy a house in the area.

People will also remember the Baja AZ news. We got a big laugh out of that article in the Wall Street Journal. Interesting how the news that is on national TV and in the newspapers concerns southern AZ.

This what people who follow the news on national TV remember about AZ:
*the shooting
*Sheriff Dupnick
*students at the TUSD meeting
*elected AZ official Grijalva calling for a boycott of his own state over SB1070

I think we'll skip southern AZ when we come out this year as snowbirds.

The comment about people avoiding AZ is true. We live on the east coast and have taken yearly, sometimes twice yearly, vacations in AZ since 1985. We still have great memories of wonderful trips taken throughout the state, and being avid birders and hikers, we have been everywhere. We've been looking at AZ real estate for several years on the Internet and have made several trips to southern AZ to look at properties. The national news stations portray Tucson as a crazy place that visitors and woud-be retirees should avoid. Our friends have been questioning us for a while about why we would want to visit, and actually consider buying a property there. We've decided that we're better off just visiting the area for a few weeks at a time, and not commit ourselves to buying a property.