Gee, Why Didn't We Think of That?

Shade in the parking lots, that is; it does seem intuitive, after all. There is a front page article in today's AZ Republic that gives praise to Basha's for starting to put more shade in its parking lots:

Now, in one of those "why didn't they do this earlier" situations, the Chandler-based Bashas' chain has begun adding shade canopies at some of its store parking lots and plans to offer more.

That's a great idea. I wonder why grocers might have resisted the idea in the past.

The reason the Valley doesn't have more store parking lot shades is not only the expense but because they are considered unattractive and detract from the fronts of buildings. Some cities, shopping center owners and homeowners associations balk at them, and others are more parking-shade friendly, store representatives said.

In our experience, "unattractive and detract from the fronts of buildings" is code for "you might not be able to see our 8-foot tall signage from the road."

I actually have visited this topic before, way back in 2005:

We should also come to grips with the critical need for shade in parking lots, not just to shade our vehicles but to reduce the buildup of heat.

I think I can safely say that I have come to grips with the critical need for shade in parking lots.

This quest for shade is actually one of the hallmarks of our planning in Morrison Ranch. It is one reason we plant so many trees - along with the desire to be a reminder of our agricultural roots - that will shade the sidewalks and eventually the streets of our residential communities. It's one reason we've asked the home builders to include front porches in their designs for our communities. It's one reason that the sidewalk and overhang are so large at Lakeview Village, along with the row of trees planted in front; even though the shopping center faces the west, which is the toughest situation to shade in Arizona, there is shade in the morning from the overhang, and when the trees grow there will be shade in the afternoon as well. And, most important to all of us parking lot wanderers as gas prices are rising, it's the reason we fill our commercial parking lots with trees. I was stunned to hear that the reason shopping centers don't install trees in the parking lots was because their name signs would be obscured from the road. I assured The Mister that every person I know who shops for groceries would memorize the stores that had some shade in which to park! I guess he passed that on, because I am starting to see more trees that actually shade something in more parking lots, even outside of Morrison Ranch. There are still some that plant Mesquite trees and then chop them to death so that they provide hope but no relief from the sun, but more often I am seeing honest to goodness shade trees. I welcome it, and look forward to the day when this becomes the norm rather than the exception.

So this is a topic near and dear to our hearts, and Basha's is to be commended. We are looking forward to having a new grocer in Lakeview Village, and soon, we hope. Maybe we can find a grocer that's interested in shade.

That's why we live in Arizona!

Wasn't the weather great this past weekend? Sunshine. People playing in the park. Perfect weather in February. It is something to be grateful for. OK, I didn't take this very picture this weekend, it was about two weeks ago, but the weather was perfect for an outdoor birthday party both times. See you outside soon!

Fences make good neighbors

Big League Dreams (BLD) is coming along. The Ashton Wood homes closest to the park are coming along. Pretty soon we will be able to see what kind of neighbors they make. That outfield wall is one big fence. The BLD site has been slated for a regional park for years. That means ballfields and night lights for sure. We pointed out to the Town how close that wall is to houses, and asked for an upgrade to what was proposed. We will soon know how the finished product looks.

Remember, the site is still a park, and will be open to the public during the day. BLD will have exclusive use of the ballfields for their league play in the evenings.

Isn't that amazing?!

The Fan-Tex Ash are about to leaf out in Morrison Ranch. I think these buds are just beautiful - miraculous, really. It seems like just last week the temperature were freezing, and now we have all these buds. They are not leaves yet, but that is just around the corner. And then we will have green on those tree lined streets once again.

By the way, the Evergreen Elms aren't quite ever - green, but they won't be far behind.

Rain in the Ranch

The Water Expert gives us the rain totals along with a reminder to conserve:

Our rainfall total for the last 24 hours is .36 of an inch. It was a nice slow rain. Please turn off all of your irrigation controllers until the end of the week.

Thank you

What is Wrong with this Picture?

This is the sidewalk at Cullumber and Recker that could not be installed due to the location of power boxes. It is not easy, inexpensive, or quick to move those things, but the builders of Highland Groves stepped up and we got them moved. Then the sidewalk was installed...... Somehow it is not that handy when the fence blocks it off! And the post is actually IN the sidewalk. But the paint on the sidewalk is an indication that all will be made right soon.

Why does it have to be so hard??!!

Out with the old, in with the new

"What (you may ask) is that?" "That" is the trench across the corner of Recker and Elliot. The folks at Cano are replacing an old RWCD irrigation line with a new one. I stopped to take the picture, because the engineer in me just had to see the trench. I have seen that intersection below ground once before. The Gateway Church was being built, and they had to trench across that intersection then. I am here to tell you, below ground, it is a MESS. There are old, unused things like irrigation drains, and state-0f-the-art new things like fiber optic cable, and everything in between.
















This is the new pipe, in all its beauty. They will be out of there in a few days.

It's a Bad One...

Those are my words to describe the accident at Higley and Elliot yesterday to The Mister; at one point I counted 4 helicopters, 4 fire trucks, and innumerable police cars. It was indeed a bad one. The short blurb in the East Valley Tribune agrees:

Twenty-one people were injured Monday in a four-vehicle collision in Gilbert, police said. Fourteen people, most of them adults, were sent immediately to the hospital.

Five of them were transported by helicopter. Another Seven people were reported to have minor injuries.

Sgt. Andrew Duncan, Gilbert police spokesman, said the collisions occurred at 1 p.m. when one vehicle failed to yield at Higley and Elliot roads. At least two vehicles overturned.

We have heard a lot of accidents over the years in that intersection; and before we began using Grandma's House as an office, The First Cousin heard and saw many more. I used to think the problem was the lack of a traffic light, but unfortunately I think the problem is folks going through the intersection without heeding the other cars. Patently obvious, isn't it?

We are very sorry for all the folks hurt and for the family of the person that was killed.

Drive careful.

Makeovers, Extreme and Otherwise

Two years ago, as the paint on The Front Porch was still drying, I got hooked on the Extreme Makeover project that was happening not far from our house. Those who were hooked with me will remember that winter as a very very wet one, and the folks watching from behind the barricades were drenched every day while watching the crew slosh around in the mud. I supposed that once the hoopla was over and Ty and his gang had moved on to the next worthy cause, that we would not hear anything again. But anniversaries have a tendency to make us look back, and the AZ Republic did a little update on the Okvath family last week:

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition introduced the nation to Gilbert's Kassandra Okvath, building her family a palatial house and touching many hearts with her battle against cancer.

Two years later, the house is doing just fine. But the real story is Kassandra, now a 10-year-old cancer survivor who has been off heavy medication for about a year and is doing well.

Family members even avoid watching tapes of the television show because she was so sick.

"It's really hard for us to see how Kassandra used to be," mother Nichol Okvath said.

Kassandra has to return to the University Medical Center in Tucson about every three months for scans. But she is being homeschooled and is healthy enough to return to gymnastics. She plans to compete this fall.

You can read the rest of the article here; it sounds like young Kassandra has maintained her sweet spirit and is getting on with the business of growing up. And her dad is figuring out how to maintain the house (a concern that The Mister and I shared):

While the family was given the new house, they also inherited big expenses. Their new house is 5,300 square feet, about triple their former house.

Electric bills have run as high as $623 in summer months and the family is now on a managed payment plan, Okvath said. Taylor Woodrow Homes covered utility costs and property taxes for the first year. First American Title Co. is covering homeowners insurance for the first three years.

"We're keeping up pretty good," Bryan said. "You have to learn how to budget a lot more for the house."

We wish them well.

Another makeover that we recently checked out is The Grain Belt in downtown Gilbert, across the street from Joe's Real BBQ. Most people call it the old Gonzo's Place, or maybe the old Mahogany Run; it's had a few other occupants since then, and we have tried them all with the highest hopes. Those hopes were severely dampened, usually on our first visit, but we wanted to give them time to settle, and usually when they settled, they closed. Not so with this new owner.

The newspaper article describing the restaurant before opening was intriguing. The owners sounded so confident. I think it was well-placed. We found the food to be very tasty, the service very eager (sometimes a bit too eager; perhaps you will remember when Safeway re-opened its newly remodeled store on Val Vista and Elliot and the employees were annoyingly helpful; but they have figured out how to be helpful without overbearing and I think this staff will as well; besides, I'd rather be offered too much iced tea than languish forgotten with an empty glass.), and the prices reasonable.

Check it out.

Celebration, with tears

Today is my Dad's funeral. Thank you to all of you who have poured out support to our family. It means a great deal to us.

Let me direct you to the thoughts of one of his grandchildren:

http://kristam.blogspot.com/2007/02/marvin-morrison-b-july-5-1923-d.html

People are anticipating Lakeview Trails North!

There is a waiting line once again. I talked to one of the builders in Highland Groves, who is just about sold out, and they told me they have a list of 200 people interested in homes in Lakeview Trails North. I don't think we are talking "lottery" here, but the interest is certainly encouraging, for us as well as the builder. Presales for the builders in Lakeview Trails North are likely to start in the spring.

PS. Yes, life goes on, even though my Dad's funeral is tomorrow. We have lots of family around, and that is a great comfort.

Another View

Here is the AZ Republic's column on The Mister's father, with a view from outside our office:

Beloved Gilbert icon and Valley philanthropist Marvin Richard Morrison died Monday at the age of 83. Morrison's son, Howard, said his father died of heart failure at 1 a.m., after spending six weeks in hospice care.

A native Arizonan, Morrison is survived by his wife, June, of 62 years, sons Richard, Scott and Howard, and sister, Betty Seymour.

Morrison was raised in Gilbert and was committed to sharing the wealth he and his brother Kenneth accumulated from their farming businesses, his family said.

June Morrison said her husband "was the most generous man with his time, talents and finances," that she ever met.

Click on the link to go to the article and read the rest.

The East Valley Tribune's version is here.

Marvin Morrison

My Dad passed away yesterday. Those words still don't seem quite real. He has been there all of my 52 years. Now, for the first time, that won't be true. I miss him already. I have such a jumble of thoughts about him, and I can't put them into words. But I can't pass up the opportunity to say something about him.

I owe him my life. That is true in at least three senses. Of course, he is my father. If he hadn't pursued my mother, if he hadn't been a good soldier (and had God's protection), if he hadn't valued children, if he hadn't been willing to risk again after losing two kids just after birth, I would never have been born.

If he hadn't been a man of vision and a fearless risktaker, the huge chunk of land we now call Morrison Ranch would never have been accumulated, and I and my family would not even have the chance to create a community where one did not exist, nor to work together on a project that extends our parents' legacy.

And he always believed in God. That would be all the time I knew him. I hear stories of a moment in time when he was twelve when he responded in faith to the love of God. But, as I knew him, he just always believed. And he prayed. And he taught elementary Sunday School classes that just happened to have his son in them. And he set an example. So, for all the things that brought me to my own moment in time, one of them was his example that it was normal, right, to believe.

Yes, I owe him my life.

I miss him.

Places to Go, People to See, Things to Do...

That's the only explanation we have for why the signups for MorrisonRanchLife.net were a little sparse on Saturday.

You know those vaudeville acts, where the announcer has the big build-up and then he says, "Heeeeere's Johnny!" and waves his hand to the sideline while the music plays - and nobody emerges from the sideline? So he tries again, dah dah te dah, "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" And still no performer? Saturday at In The Raw felt a little bit like that. The Mister was all set with his camera to take pictures of the hordes and post them instantly on the web portal, just to show how easy it can be. But Saturdays that are beautiful, and on the weekend of the Open and the Super Bowl and Junior's Soccer Game - sometimes there just isn't enough time to do everything that you want doing.

No worries; it isn't too late. You can do it online. Go to the website and follow the directions. It will only take a moment of your busy day. The more participants we have, the better choices we'll have for groups and garage sales and everything else.

MorrisonRanchLife.net

Are we beating a drum here? Why, yes, we are! We had a little problem with the MorrisonRanchLife.net sign we put at the corner, so rather than having it dangle, we took it down. But the rollout at In the Raw on Saturday is STILL ON! So come to the oasis and get a username and password for MorrisonRanchLife.net between 10 am and 3 pm.

We have had a few residents of Higley Groves east of Higley Road ask for access to the portal. We would love to have you! We just need to connect with the HOA board and get agreement on a few points. The portal is quite inexpensive on a monthly basis, but does have to be paid for. Help us make that connection, please!

Heads Up!

Elliot Road between Higley and Recker is about to get torn up! It will stay open at all times, but sometime in the next two weeks barricades will direct all traffic onto the north side of the road, so the south side can be built out to full width, including the median with room for the pecan trees. I think this will be fairly painless, and more importantly, a quick route to a completed road. But remember, it always takes longer than you think!

Rain in the Ranch

OK, yesterday moved us out of the question mark catagory. But still, over the whole day, it was only .15 inches. I should have known. None of the basins had water in them. But when it comes down hard for a few minutes, and dribbles all day, you think it is more water than that. I must be posting a little early, because Sunrise Park Resort hasn't updated their snow report yet. But I am confident that the mountains got considerable amounts of snow yesterday. If weather.com is to be believed, we are done for a while. I guess the Open will be able to proceed. 72 degrees forcast for Sunday. I guess the viewers will once again decide to move to Phoenix. We better make a place for them!