Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog » Off Topic

7 Things About Me

Steve Belt — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:26:38 +0000

My friend Tyler Hurst tagged me with a meme request last week. I had nearly written my response on Tuesday, but couldn’t quite finish it. Tuesday night, Microsoft decided it was a good day for patches, and the post was lost. So, it’s a bit late, but I didn’t forget you Tyler:

I graduated from Arizona State University in 1991 with a Bachelors in Science and Engineering for Computer Systems Engineering. This cross between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science was supposed to prepare me build things like printers, telephone switches, and iPods. But I never did any of that. I primarily wrote business software (warehouse systems, account management systems, and other boring stuff like that). All of that experience prepared me extremely well for my current day job as a Realtor.
You can’t know me to any degree, and not know that I love to ride bicycles. I prefer mountain biking, but in the fall I do get into roady shape and do the El Tour de Tucson on the road bike. Annually, major mountain bike events I’m likely attend are: Tour of the White Mountains, 24 hrs in the Old Pueblo, and Arizona Spring Fling. On any given weekend, I’m probably riding some patch of dirt in the greater Phoenix area. If you are interested in riding with others, you can’t go wrong reading the boards at MTBR.
I forget the exact year (2001?), but I had Lasik done and it has been a life changing (for the better) experience. It makes me wonder what my ball playing days would have been like, if I could have actually seen the ball.
Since getting serious about cycling, I haven’t played much golf, but with a little bit of practice, I can routinely break 90.
When the DBacks were announced, a buddy of mine at work asked if I wanted to split a pair as co-owners. I drew a pretty good lottery number, and we got season tickets together. He “bailed” the next year, but I held season tickets through 2002. The 2001 World Series, and particularly game 7, was the most enjoyable event I’ve ever been to. I’d love to still be a season ticket holder, but the time commitment has forced me to put that on hold, at least until my kids are out of the house.
I shaved my head 4 weeks into a 5 week cycling trip in 2003. I had been away from my family for the last 2 weeks, and it just seemed like the thing to do. I don’t ever regret doing it. It’s practical (no helmet hair) and it suits me.
18 months ago I was feeling “odd”. I went to the emergency room and they measured my blood pressure at 197 over 110. That’s nearly “put a fork in him” high. My diet was found to be fine, and I exercise, so apparently, my genetics are to blame. Regardless, that day I decided to stop drinking caffeine. Coke and Coffee went goodbye. (I do still drink decaf). I walked around like a zombie for nearly 6 months, with the combination of the high blood pressure pills and no caffeine, but I’m glad I did it.

FYI, if these 7 things weren’t enough, here are my 2 previous meme responses during 2008: Meme’d on my birthday and Two meme requests, one response.

Tyler said I’m supposed to post the rules, so here they are:

Link your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

This leaves me needing to tag some people:

Happy Thanksgiving

Steve Belt — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:25:27 +0000

From my family to your family, here’s wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving. And to the Cardinals, please don’t be turkeys this year.

Going under the drill tomorrow

Steve Belt — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:21:24 +0000

I’m deviating from the normal real estate content, to mention a significant procedure I’ll be having tomorrow morning (Wednesday). The need for it goes back 22 years, when I was involved in a bicycle car accident. FYI, in such accidents, the bicycle always loses. That accident cost me the removal of 1 of my front teeth, shattered a second tooth, and blew out the posterior cruciate ligament in my left knee. The teeth were repaired via a bridge, which 22 years later isn’t as pretty as it once was. The shattered tooth had a root canal the day following that accident, and 22 years of a dead tooth has resulted in 50% bone loss in the tooth. Thus, the support for the bridge has fallen to the one remaining healthy tooth.

So tomorrow, I will have 2/3 of the bridge removed, the dead tooth will be extracted, and 2 new titanium dental implants will be screwed into my jaw bone. Blogging tomorrow will likely be non-existent. As will really any other fun activities. I was told it will be my job to take it easy and relax.

Because the 2 implants are adjacent teeth, the oral surgeon tells me it’s likely to take 12 weeks to heal. Subsequently, I will have new individual crowns placed over each implant, a new crown placed over the still healthy tooth that’s been supporting the bridge, and the transformation will be complete.

I doubt pictures will be made public…I can still remember my pictures from the accident, and it’s just not pretty looking at a toothless smile.

iPhone is now in my possession

Steve Belt — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:20:38 +0000

Thanks to the subsidizing that AT&T decided to do for the new iPhone 3G, my friends at PropertyQube weren’t able to actually send me a physical iPhone as part of the contest I won. For the new iPhone, AT&T requires a photo ID, SSN #, credit check, and an AT&T service plan to buy one. Thus, I had the pleasure of attempting to acquire one the (some might argue) more enjoyable way: Constantly on the lookout for a new shipment, followed by standing in line.

Today was a particularly good day for the standing in line waiting part, especially at the local Apple Store at the Biltmore. For those not intimately familiar with Phoenix, the Biltmore is a pleasant outdoor mall, with many high end retailers in the Camelback Corridor of mid-town Phoenix. What made today particularly special was the combination of 110 degree heat with the 28% humidity. For some reason, my car’s normally accurate temperature gauge was actually showing 115!

But I’m not complaining, as the wait was worth it. 2 hrs and 15 minutes of waiting in line, resulted in a 15 minute purchasing experience, and I walked out of the Apple store today at 3:30pm with an activated iPhone in hand.

Upon purchase I had to rush off to a photo shoot for a rental home in Mesa, and thus I haven’t had the opportunity to spend much quality time alone with it. So far, the experience has been positive. I was able to send a tweet via Twitter; updated my location via BrightKite; read the day’s email and replied to a few messages; mapped my location with the GPS supported Google Maps; read some text messages, though haven’t sent any (thus, still a text message sending virgin); took a couple of quick pictures; viewed this blog on the iPhone’s Safari browser, prompting me to want to have an iPhone version; and managed to nearly drain the battery dead off the initial charge. Oh, and since it’s a phone I did make a couple of calls (with 2 dropped calls already…thank you AT&T).

What I haven’t done yet is send a picture to anyone, particularly to Twitter via TwitPic or BrightKite. I’ll annoy my Twitter friends with that later. And I haven’t connected to iTunes to download anything from the App Store. That will have to wait until I get home, as my home computer makes the most sense to be the iTunes connection source, with the 4500 songs I already have there.

Anyway, this post was really just to give thanks to PropertyQube for hooking me up. I’m already feeling far more connected to the world after just a few hours with the iPhone in hand, and am looking forward to finding new and creative ways to use this new tool to accomplish yet to be dreamed of things in support of real estate.

George Carlin: A comedic legend

Steve Belt — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:34:36 +0000

By now, you surely must know that George Carlin passed away last Sunday. I am remiss in not getting to post on this sooner, but there’s a George Carlin bit from Comic Relief 1986 that I frequently make reference to while showing houses. Most of my clients aren’t aware of the bit, and I’m certainly no comedian, so I butcher the thing upside and downside. That said, in honor of a legend, that I always found entertaining, here is his take on housing and “stuff”:

Another iPhone Contest

Steve Belt — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:34:22 +0000

There was such great support to help me win an iPhone, I thought I would pass along a way that you can win an iPhone. Today, via Twitter and on his Blog, Jake Marsh announced a lottery that you can enter to win an iPhone. There’s no cost, very little obligation, and as near as I can tell, Jake just wants to create some awareness for his new product TileStack.

If you are interested in entering Jake’s contest, see his post on this blog here. If you do enter, I wouldn’t mind knowing about it…maybe leave a comment here? Good luck!

Quick Weekend Trip to San Diego

Steve Belt — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:07:28 +0000

This last weekend my family and I went to San Diego for the annual Sally Ride Toy Challenge. My oldest daughter is a 6th grade student at Copper Ridge Middle School in Scottsdale. She, along with 2 other 6th grade girls, submitted their toy idea earlier this year. Their idea had enough merit to be selected to compete at the national competition in San Diego. Thus, we went to San Diego on Friday, returning on Sunday. The competition itself was Saturday.

I won’t bore you with all of the details, but I’ll boil it down to this: My daughter didn’t win, but just being selected to be there was indeed a victory in itself. Aside from not winning, the girls did an amazing job presenting their toy idea. I really thought they had impressed the judges enough to achieve some level of extra recognition, but oh well. In my eyes, they were definitely winners, and I was indeed a very, very proud dad.

Being in San Diego for the weekend, but having a fairly tight schedule, I didn’t get a chance to do much that was real estate related. I did meet a client that I had never met in person, but for whom I manage 3 of his rental homes. We’ve been doing business since the beginning of the year, so it was excellent to put a face and a handshake with a voice. Good meeting you Stephen!

Being on a tight schedule, we wanted to work in a number of quick activities for the kids whenever it was possible. That meant driving to Mission Beach, Coronado Island, and La Jolla. In my opinion, and especially since the Sally Ride Toy Challenge has an engineering focus, traffic engineers in San Diego are grossly over paid. We never sat in traffic (per se), but 5 cars waiting to get through a light seemed often too much for many intersections to handle. In comparison, it feels like Phoenix surface streets accommodate more cars, without you feeling like you are in traffic. Generally speaking, signal lights in Phoenix are well timed and are designed to get traffic moving large distances in a free flowing manner. In San Diego, it didn’t appear to me that I ever came across two lights in a row that were aware of each other. And in Coronado, I think we waited 60 seconds at one light in which no cars or pedestrians were allowed to go in any of the 4 possible directions. Just plain odd.

Traffic engineering aside, as I sat on the beach off Mission Bay, I was chatting with another parent about what we thought the homes must cost that were ocean front. I thought some of the smaller, more shack-like homes were probably 1000/sq ft (total SWAG). He thought it was probably double that. Imagine a 1000 sq ft home for $2,000,000. Yea…I can’t really imagine that either. So I’m checking prices today on Kris and Steve Berg’s website, and sure enough, there’s a 713 sq foot listing for $1.9M (over $2600/sq ft). There are also numerous 1000 sq foot homes listed for $1.9M. $1.9M seems to be the minimum price for anything that is ocean front in the Pacific Beach, Mission Bay area.

Sorta makes an 8000 square foot North Scottsdale home in Silverleaf for $10M seem like a bargain now, doesn’t it? If you are reading this in San Diego, and want such a bargain, I can help you find it. Of course, if you are reading this and you aren’t in San Diego, but a beautiful custom, truly one of a kind home in Silverleaf is what you are looking for, I can certainly help you find it.

At any rate, it was a pleasure to visit San Diego and enjoy the day time highs in the low 70′s. The beach was a dream every time we were there. On Sunday I even had a chance to get a bit wet with the girls, playing in the surf. Equally good, my 10-year-old daughter told me she’s already making plans to compete in the architectural challenge when she’s in 6th grade. What a dream life my kids have given me…

My congratulations to all of the up-and-coming engineers that competed in the Sally Ride Toy Challenge. And our thanks to San Diego for hosting a fun getaway. (PS, I haven’t checked results of the Rock-n-Roll Marathon from Sunday, but it looked like outstanding weather for a marathon, so I would expect some pretty fast times).