Movin’ on up

Every town or area was their ‘good’ part of town and their ‘bring your mace and lock the doors’ part of town. Whether this is a misconception of the naive or very real it doesn’t matter, it’s there. I grew up in a part of the Salt Lake valley where anything passed State Street was ‘way out west’ and not somewhere we’d go unless forced to. And Redwood Rd was just beyond BFE! Why would I go all the way out there?? Well, now Redwood Rd is a well travelled road for me and I live West of it *gasp*. I have come to realize the stigma of the west side was mostly a misconception. Yes, there are more homes out here with 3 or 4 cars parked on or around their property and 2 of them don’t work or are missing tires, one of them being parked on the grass and I have learned to never go to my local Wal-Mart at 11 o’clock on a Friday night because this is when many people in this area decide to take all 5 small kids for a fun filled trip to the happiest place on earth and too many tramp stamps on women who go by the name ‘Grandma’. But there are also beautiful parks, shopping areas, wonderful schools and great people and neighbors that go along with all that.

The funny thing about my neighborhood is that it is the opposite. It’s two subdivisions divided by a semi-major cross street. The West side of it is the nicer, newer area while the East side (our side) is the older, smaller and quirkier side. The West side has more homes where the lawn is mowed on a  regular basis, cars are actually parked in garages or at least driveways with enough actual parking spaces for the amount of cars the family owns and children actually play in yards, not the street. My beloved East side area has cars, and the occasional freaking RV, parked on the narrow street with men actually working on their car IN THE STREET, that only one car can drive down at a time, with the dillhole skateboarders taking up the middle of the road with their sport, small children wandering the neighborhood aimlessly without a parent in sight and graffiti painted across someone’s fence.

Don’t get me wrong, I have great neighbors! Some of the best in the world! I wouldn’t still be here if it weren’t for the economic downturn if I was truly worried for my family’s safety. It just so happens there is apparently a few buttwipes in the neighborhood that want to taint our little area. There are times when I wish I could just pick up and leave, buy some real land and build my dream home. I may not be able to do that for my family at this point but I can do it for this part of my family:

If you are relatively new to this blog, you may not know about these lovely ladies and our adventures of adding them to our backyard. It started here, here, here and here.

Well, these lucky ladies are moving on up to the Upper East side…of our backyard… They had a lovely home that ElRey built but in our attempts at making their space wider, drier and stop feeding millions of birds within a 10 mile radius, it slowly turned into this mess:

This happened after they moved but it wasn’t looking good over there. Which is why ElRey transplanted their coop over here:

We have that old shed that we don’t use so he attached the coop he made from scratch to it and turned it into some high end real estate for our egg laying sweeties. They seem very content in their new area and it looks better, too!

So while I may have to put up with the occasional graffiti, hoodlums and tramp stamps, I know I can handle it because I have some of the greatest neighbors on earth AND my chickens are the luckiest birds on the block!

Now, as long as they don’t go and get some crazy tramp stamps we’ll be great neighbors for a long time!