Rain in Arizona - it's like Christmas! It's been drizzly for the past 2 days, which never stops me because rain is the best. Water from the sky!
Today I go to my garden and plant salsa and nurture my soul. There's something about slogging around in the mud and breaking fingernails that's necessary to Band-Aid whatever mental health I have.

The only disturbing thing about gardening is the quandary of what to do when I find a tomato worm? I try to remember to be gentle and loving but I hate them with a passion AND THEY'RE KILLING MY SALSA! I wish I had chickens because then I could throw the stupid worm at the chickens and then they'd kill it and my karma would be clean. I settle for snipping off what I think is their head quickly and cleanly and sending them off to a new and better incarnation - I'm sure that they appreciate it. Who wants to be a tomato worm, right?

So today I'll go to the nursery with the intention of buying 6 Roma tomato plants and 4 jalapenos, and will come out with a Jeep full of house plants and yard flowers and some weird bright idea for the garden (Last year it was tomatillos. If you ever have a chance to grow tomatillos, one plant will be more than sufficient. Trust me on this one. I was never real sure what to do with the damn things since I don't like to eat them, but the plants sure are pretty. Neither the Mission nor the Food Bank wanted them either, so I started lurking in the Safeway parking lot watching for somebody that didn't lock their car doors so that I could fill their back seat up with tomatillos. It was a crime wave that was reported exhaustively in the newspapers.)

There are my plans for my day, and it sounds wonderful! Best wishes for yours!

I just spent a week in Washington, DC for the National Association of REALTORS conference. Wow! DC is not one of the places that I would choose to go if it had been left up to me. DC is not even one of the top 100 places that I would have ever chosen. Now, it probably is in the top, oh, say 50. The history sent shivers up my neck. I marveled at monuments and artifacts that I've been looking at pictures of all of my life.
I saw one of the copies of the Magna Charta from 1260. I saw all of the de rigeur monuments, the ACTUAL be still my heart! Declaration of Independence, the Articles of the Constitution, a real dinosaur skeleton, an abandoned graveyard, miles and miles of DC sidewalks - I was a shameless tourist and I loved it!
I had to discipline myself to remember that I wasn't there to be a tourist. I had to fit sightseeing into late nights and one day of hookey when they hadn't scheduled me for anything except a guided tour of NAR - I felt fine about bailing on the NAR building.
I was there for the REALTOR Conference and the Summit. The Conference was great (REALTORS are an odd bunch, but extremely competent, especially at this level.) The Summit was incredible. NAR brought together the biggest of the wigs to duke it out over the economy. The concept is that Congress and the Obama Administration could watch and learn what's going on out in the real world.
That's what happened. Alan Greenspan gave a speech which I enjoyed quite a bit. (I didn't expect that - to enjoy Greenspan.) Then 2 round table discussions with big-timey bankers, economists, journalists, all kinds of economic gurus, all who pretty much ended up sniping at the bankers. Well, who deserves it more? Jane Bryant Quinn moderated and she was the best sniper of all.
The upshot is that Greenspan believes that the economy took an "upswing" in November, and he expects it to continue indefinitely. He explained why but I don't do econospeak and my eyes glazed over.
It was incredible, listening to all of these great minds finally admitting what we've known all along - the economy is in trouble, the housing market is a disaster, and "trickle down" didn't work so let's try some "trickle up."
That's my new license plate to replace my current "Turets." "Triklup."

The Sound of Music

I just love this! Check it out: www.silverbearcafe.com/private/04.09/antwerp.html

No, damn it. The weather is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about appreciation.

I got a compliment this morning. It felt so good to hear something nice about me that I almost teared up. Now, I know that people think good things about me. I know that I do a really good job. I know that I'm usually a nice person and that I try to make other people feel good. I also know that it's a cold day in hell anymore when people say so.

I am a very verbal person. I need to hear it. Some people need flowers and diamonds or others need a hug to feel appreciated, I need to hear kind words.

The problem with us humans neglecting to show our regard for our friends and family is that if we don't show appreciation then the people who we love assume that it isn't there. That's sad.

So then we get to deal with someone who has this toxic, resentful miasma hanging over their head. We don't know why they're this way - they don't tell us why because appreciation that's been strong-armed means nothing. We thinks that it must be because they're unhappy with us. Then we think, "But why should they be mad at me? Don't I work hard? Don't I do my best? What in the blue blazes more do they want?"

And then the spiral begins and sometimes it ends ugly.

I think that we should all make ourselves a promise. At least once a day we'll say something nice to the people that we care about. Not a big production - just a simple, "Hey - I love it when you smile like that!" or, "Wow. What a good job you did - I can see how hard you worked!" or just, "Yay! You're home!" or "You look great in that color!"

Let's try it. Let me know how it goes, please.

And thanks for reading. I appreciate your time and attention.

Well, thank the powers that be! I just went to a social marketing class taught by Paula Monthofer of the Flagstaff Association. She said that we should just "Be yourselves! Don't concentrate on real estate!"

Thank God. I was boring even myself.

So now the big question is "Well. What do I want to talk about?"

I want to talk about the wonderful weather in central Arizona today. I go outside and am reminded of why it is that I live here in Cottonwood. (Cottonwood is about 15 minutes from the Red Rocks of Sedona and 5 minutes from the wonderful old historic mining town of Jerome. We're right smack dab in the middle of the state.)

I tried to leave Cottonwood once. I was born & raised in Prescott, Arizona, and moved over Mingus Mountain to Cottonwood when I was 17.
Years later, my husband at the time had people in Arkansas and, in an effort to finally make him happy I consented to sell everything that I owned and we moved to Mountain View, Arkansas. This was a colossal mistake on my part.

I'm not writing today to trash Arkansas. The simple fact is that Cottonwood is my home and Mountain View wasn't. Yes, I could tell you hair-raisers, but not today.

Part of the problem was the weather there. Colder than hell in the winter, hot and unrelentingly muggy in the summer, and please don't get me started on the ticks and chiggers and cottonmouths and copperheads, some of them in human form.

The beauty of having lived someplace else is that now I have a frame of reference. I know how special it is here. Our climate is great, (Yes, it does get hot, but not TOO hot. Our summers are like Back East's winters - we go from climate controlled houses to climate controlled cars to climate controlled offices for a couple of months. It cools off during the night, so windows are open. Ahhhhhh!)

What else? Our crime rate is low, people are mostly friendly, and our views will knock your socks off!

If you're interested, shoot me an email and I'll send you some pictures.
carolanne@adobegr.com.

I have something of what I call a voodoo frame of mind. I believe that what we concentrate on is what we get. If we tell ourselves a thousand times a day how horrible the world is, how awful people treat each other, even that there are SOOOOO many bad drivers out there then this is all that we will see. What we believe becomes so, at least in our little slice of the world.

So what does this have to do with real estate? Well, look around you. The real estate market reflects our economy, or vice versa - I've never been sure which comes first. People ask me "What the heck happened?"

I think that it all started with the media, which is perpetuating a self-defeating cycle. (All I know is what I see - I don't know which economic guru to listen to so I've stopped paying attention to any of them - they're all contradicting each other anyway.)

So here's my story. The media caused the real estate feeding frenzy of 2005. News stories about the scarcity of real estate and the wonderful investment of real estate sold newspapers and got hits and so they reported it more and sold more ads and so they amped it up and pretty soon people were buying every piece of property that they could get their hands on whether they could afford it or not. The lenders were throwing the money at these buyers because hey - if the borrower defaults we'll just take it back and re-sell it at a profit. Of course we can - watch the Today Show.

This couldn't continue indefinitely and so of course, it all fell apart and the frenzy slowed down and then quickly came to a screaming halt.

So now the media concentrates on what they're portraying as the poor stupid fools who bought during the frenzy. They tell horror stories of markets freezing and "flippers" stuck with houses they can't pay for and variable rate borrowers who can't make their payments and the public says, "Whoa! I'd better walk away from my house now!" Or, "Gee, I'd better not buy anything until I know what's going on!" And so they do and the economy gets worse because no money is moving.

So, tell me. How do we get the media to tell the true story? How do we make it sexy that it's a wonderful time to buy a house? How do we get them to reverse some of this damage?

I'm fully aware that my approach to what is undoubtedly an intricate economic process is going to make some people crazy. That's OK - your truth is not necessarily my truth, and I'm always open to seeing more pieces to a puzzle.

Since I'm on this Diversity kick, check out http://www.playingforchange.com/pop2.html
It blew me away! Click on "play video."