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With a lifetime devoted to art and animals, an enthusiasm for learning new things, a sometimes problematic relationship with perfectionism, and an irreverent sense of humor that can be off-putting to the traditional workspace, it took me some time to find my niche in the professional world. Growing up with undiagnosed autism, I was fortunate to be born into a family of highly adaptable and accommodating people with a wide range of skills from fine arts to mechanics to medical professionals and tech geeks. My sponge-like brain absorbed it all and my inquisitive nature serves as fuel to a continuously expanding knowledge base of random facts that may even find relevancy on occasion. All that to say: I have a variety of skills and information, both self-taught and accredited, and I'm a hyper-fixated problem solver with a strong attention to details.
I've always had a connection with animals that I often struggle to find in humans, but my skills and experience really started to develop at the beginning of high school when my feline best friend went missing and I visited the county shelters for the first time. Seeing the condition of the shelters, and the dozens of lost pet flyers hanging on the bulletin board, I felt called to take action. I attended Arizona Agribusiness and Equine Center, a charter high school with dual enrollment at South Mountain Community College, originally pursuing my childhood goal of studying veterinary medicine. I enrolled not just in the veterinary track, but in every animal and agribusiness class offered while also finding membership in 4H and FFA. Inspired buy these clubs, and with the help of some friends, I developed HazeysPets Animal Rescue, a foster home based animal rescue named for my missing cat. We specialized in lost and found (pet detectives and consulting) and foster-to-adopt for found, abandoned, or neglected animals who would otherwise likely be candidates for euthanasia at the county shelters.
HazeysPets lasted 5 years and dissolved shortly after I moved to college (and also began raising a human child). In an effort to continue my involvement in the animal rescue world , I began volunteering for other dog rescues and ultimately became a volunteer cat trapper for AzCats TNR program. These experiences helped me to develop skills in assessing animal behavior and safe handling of aggressive, reactive, or energetic animals.
After graduating SMCC with an Associates of Arts and an Associates of General Studies, I transitioned to ASU where I initially dual-majored in Animal Physiology & Behavior and Fine Art Photography. I later dropped the science major to focus solely on my Photography and fine arts. I graduated ASU in 2013 with a Bachelors of Arts in Art Studies with a focus on Fine Art Photography.
While attending university, raising children, and caring for my aging grandparents, I began taking various pet sitting jobs for a (very small) income. I would often use pets in my care as models for my photography practice and as the quality improved, I would leave the prints behind or otherwise share digital photos with the pet parents upon their return.
After graduation, I moved on to various gig work including some pet sitting, long-term daily home health style visits with a regular client (essentially a regularly scheduled human drop-in visit), regular nannying/child care, and part time independent professional photography jobs ranging from weddings and special events to headshots and family portraits and even one time single-handedly providing school photos for a 400 student grades 6-12 charter school.
I quickly learned that I do not enjoy attending large events, working directly with human subjects, or marketing and selling my art. Professional photography was not for me.
After my primary nannying kid moved on to grade school, my home health client and both grandparents had all passed on, and my daughter with her freshly obtained driver's license had taken over the school carpool responsibilities, I found myself at a crossroads in life.
I turned to my neighborhood's internet message board for answers, telling myself I would take any and all reasonably accomplishable paying offers that appeared. Move a dresser for $20, pull weeds for $15, dog waste removal, window washing, etc. Finally about two weeks into this experiment someone posted a very intriguing question. Is there anyone who does pet sitting in the neighborhood. There were, of course, a couple of very respectable options available already, but i threw my hat in the ring.
Word of mouth recommendations began to spread rapidly, with my professional quality photos, frequent communication, and obsession with leaving the house exactly as I found it (to the point where it was good the photos could prove I was there) being my top three talked-about qualities. Within months I had not only networked a somewhat profitable business, but I found myself surrounded by more new friends than the entirety of my life before, and wholly embraced by the most connected, adventurous, and often just entirely bizarre, family of a community.
I was born just outside of the Coronado neighborhood and it took my parents a little over a year to realize where I was meant to be. A resident since 1985, Coronado and I have bonded through some pretty impressive transformations together.
Growing up in this neighborhood, I learned the value of community involvement from a very young age. As a preschooler, I'd be touring the neighborhood at o-dark-thirty each morning tossing newspapers from the back of my parent's pickup truck, or dragging stacks of newspapers twice my size to the local schools each week. My sister would chat up neighbors as they sat on porches enjoying the morning air and seemingly everyone knew us by name.
My elementary school years held the peak of interconnectivity, as all 20 families on our immediate block joined in for regular cookouts and shenanigans. Every day held a new adventure among the children on our street and there was never a lack of imagination. We formed a band of vigilantes to fight dust storms with inverted umbrellas, we chased rogue peacocks, we had epic food fights that rivaled that of the Lost Boys in the movie Hook. These years showcased the pure spirit of Coronado itself. Not just a neighborhood, but a living entity all on its own.
My high school years introduced a life changing tool called the internet into my life. Where I had previously struggled greatly with oral communication, I found that expressing myself through writing, with added time for revision and reflection, and the protective barrier of technology standing between me and the intimidating world, was exactly what I needed to finally be myself. I quickly discovered the wonder of Coronado had spilled into the web through a few websites and an email listserv called Central City Discuss.
In my later teen years I grew more and more active in the online community, writing articles for our neighborhood newsletter The Dispatch, creating public service campaign materials for our BlockWatch group, and even filling in as interim Secretary for the Coronado Neighborhood Association at age 18. The community itself was an amazing resource for my efforts in animal rescue, and I found that the more involved I became in Coronado, the more involved Coronado became n me.
I stepped back from the online community for a bit when the listserv ended and neighbors scrambled to discover the next effective social media options. In this hiatus , I took the time to raise two kids, introducing them to the wonders of our neighborhood. Riding bikes and walking dogs, climbing trees and trapping feral cats, flying kites and camping out under the stars in the front yard. My kids learned that the owner of the corner store should know your name and ask how your big science project went, that a neighbor three blocks away will remember the name of the puppy you got last year and ask if he ever picked up that trick you were working on with him, and to offer the mailman a cold bottle of water whenever you see him out in the sun.
When I returned to the online neighborhood community, now located on Facebook, I discovered that the adventurous spirit had only flourished in my absence. I jumped right back in where I left off, pleasantly surprised to see many familiar faces from years before. Our black market block parties of the 90s had blossomed into a wealth of cleverly themed gatherings and activities, often involving creative costuming, hyperbolic satire, and a hint of spiteful snark.
In no time at all I had returned to old habits, providing witty banter and comic relief to strangers' conversations, reminiscing with old friends and educating new neighbors on the ways of the past, and helping to provide the most ridiculous and impractical ideas for ways to keep the neighborhood weird and fun.
Shortly into the start of my 'yes' year, in which I had vowed to take any small job offered, I was called out by one neighbor for offering my advice on how to handle crime prevention efforts in the neighborhood. This neighbor asked one simple question, "What have you done to help Block Watch recently?" She had a point, I hadn't done much more than offer unsolicited advice since since taking my leave a decade earlier.
In that moment, I altered my original goal of taking any paying job offered to instead say "yes" to any social invitation, call to action, plea for help, or vague suggestion of activity. And because I don't know how to just leave things simple, I decided to adopt what I call an "improve mindset" wherein I say "yes, and..." to all of the aforementioned prompts. Can I help you move that couch out of the alley? Yes, AND we'll balance it on my golf cart and parade around the neighborhood while you lounge in luxury. You say you have enough leftover mac and cheese to feed the entire neighborhood and want to know if I can take some? Yes, AND we're going to blast some music while driving from house to house as neighbors bring out their bowls for a scoop or two. That other neighborhood is complaining about a headless sex doll someone left by a dumpster in their alley and you think our neighborhood could have handle the situation better? Yes, AND I'm going to meet some new friends at 1:00am while we go dumpster diving in our rival neighborhood and turn this poor sex doll into a neighborhood treasure and world wide superstar whose infamy would survive for years to come. It's extraordinary how the simple act of saying yes in a community of exuberant personalities can open up endless possibility.
By the following year I had helped form the neighborhood Safety Team, a volunteer task force devoted to crime prevention and event safety, I had a weekly commitment helping neighbors access items from the community toolshed, assisted with the renovation of our community garden, became the go-to person for scanning pet microchips and assisting with lost and found resources, helped orchestrate and execute several multi-block street clean-up events, served as Secretary on the neighborhood association board, attended more events than ever in my life, and participated in some of the most amazingly elaborate tomfoolery one could imagine.
Through it all I have learned that Coronado is not just a place I live, Coronado is life itself. There is an unexplainable energy in our neighborhood that radiates and infects all those who open themselves to possibility. An undeniable magic working of its on volition. We are not Coronado, Coronado is us.
Over the last ten years, there was one emerging trend in the neighborhood which immediately caught my attention: Golf carts. From the very first time my ears caught wind of that now all too familiar electric whirr of excitement and possibility, I knew this was the missing link to my stagnant life.
I wasn't alone in this thought. Sometime during the mid 2010s, Neighborhood Electric Vehicles experienced a major burst in popularity within the neighborhood. Golf cart owners united in vibrant pride of their four wheeled friends, forming a group called the Coronado Hoodlums they would parade around the neighborhood with decorative lights and music.
Golf carts flooded the streets during events such as our neighborhood Porch Concerts series, Mural Fest, Home Tour, artist studio showcases, and the 1.6 Beer Run. Even the kids joined in with powerwheels and scooters during their Kids Crawl tour of the neighborhood parks.
With $20 to my name, I was determined to make this happen in my life. I spent a few weeks browsing classified ads and there he was... a run down shell of a golf cart, long retired from the courses and left to rot in the rocky side yard of an unremarkable tract home in Buckeye.
I called up a friend of mine who lived out of town at the time but happened to be visiting and was wholly invested in seeing my dream to fruition. She fronted the first $200 and some major elbow grease to spring our new friend and his stubbornly immobile flat tires from his suburban prison.
In a project that my mom would soon dub "Doscientos Más" because each repair seemed to cost another $200, we spent the next month learning as much as we could about golf cart diagnostics and restoration.
As is the nature of Coronado, there were plenty of neighbors who pitched in with advice or expertise. When it came time to get down to the heart of things, we towed our new friend a few blocks away to a neighbor who offered community workshop time and assistance in his yard on weekends and got a good overview on the basics of electric golf cart wiring and motors. It turned out the motor just had a few disconnected wires and loose terminals.
Once we had everything securely in place, the cart fired right up! We loaded three people onto a then two seater golf cart and took a maiden voyage around the block. Roughly five houses into our drive, the neighbor sitting on the back maintenance panel of the cart suddenly jumped up, clinging to the side bars of the golf cart and pointing out a significant amount of smoke coming from under the panel. We would have noticed soon enough anyway, as the entire cart reeked of melting plastic and burned motor windings.
I am the type of person who habitually personifies all of my belongings, finding it disrespectful to the objects who serve me when I don't treat them as part of the family. So in those first few days we had been unsuccessfully tossing around various naming options. Nothing really fit until that moment when the motor sent out its overly pungent smoke signals. Stinky was telling us his name.
With a loan from my mom I was able to purchase a new motor. Mom threw in some reupholstery and a new back seat as bonus gifts since the holidays were approaching, though I firmly believe it was more that she preferred to look at a more attractive golf cart in the driveway.
I added some paint and fun lights and Stinky and I were officially in business. There's no better wingman to instant popularity than a golf cart with personality. We were unstoppable.
More than just neighborhood events and shenanigans, as I gained more and more pet sitting jobs in the neighborhood, Stinky really got me around. I even started having dog friends start begging for rides on Stinky. They loved the waves from neighbors and wind in their ears almost as much as the parks and play dates they were heading to.
Stinky introduced new friends, new opportunities, and a whole new brand for my budding business. It didn't take much time at all to buy out my friend's initial investment and pay off the loan from my mom. As far as operating partners go, I truly couldn't ask for anyone better than a little golf cart named Stinky.
More than just a business partner, though. Without Stinky, I might have ben present for some of the same experiences over the past several years, but they would have lacked that certain level of whimsical charm and eccentric achievability only Stinky could bring to the table. Stinky has an uncanny ability to create instant friends out of strangers, he's always willing to carry more than his weight for a community in need, can lighten even the darkest of times with his vibrant personality, and is always down for a soul searching cruise through calm evening streets.
Stinky is a catalyst for the Coronado Magic.
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