Getting Active Again

I'll blame it on El Niño. Late 2014 through the "Holiday Season" and into January of 2015, I was pretty active with various outdoor projects. This late autumn and winter, of 2015-6 we've had more rain and grey days. Not so active.

Now we've had a stretch of warmer weather with clear skies, and I feel as if I have emerged from quasi-hibernation. This kind of weather begs a person to go outside and be active.

Stepping stones seem insignificant,
until your back strains trying to lift one.

In the garden, Shari is cultivating, planting, tending and watering kai-lan (a type of Chinese broccoli or kale), garlic and herbs while I weed grass and Nazar the Wonder Dog watches.

There are a couple of crossings of the dry watercourse that's at the bottom of Coat Hanger Valley.  I have been thinking of a bridge, or maybe stepping stones. Scrounging around our acre, I found enough large flat rocks suitable for my back to embed as stepping stones.

The trail to the south point.

I have been mining more rocks to support the bench I dug into the east side of the Valley that serves as a trail to the south. The trail has been expanded to the southern most boundary marker of our Sonoran acre, and a small area cleared and flattened there on the hillside. The site is hidden from neighbors and offers an interesting view south looking over lower San Simeon Drive, parts of Tucson, and the Santa Rita Mountains.

The west side.

Then there is the west side which slopes down into another little wash. Only a few weeks ago my neighbor showed me the actual location of our northern most boundary marker. Of course, I had to clear that area of our Sonoran acre and a path down to get to it.  The last few days I have been working on a new cinderblock wall that will help define the path down the slope to that north boundary marker.

Four Asian solar lanterns
("Made in China") by five steps.

I am also stuccoing and painting other cinderblock retaining walls on the west side that I had constructed from material salvaged from the former backyard garden. (See 500 Bricks & 600 lbs of Sand.) Stuccoed and painted with the neutral house color, the grey concrete blocks disappear.

Tiny cactus flowers remind us of spring.
Eucalyptus leaves offer a sense of scale.

Which is what I did with the four grey plastic solar light lanterns I found at Home Depot: make them blend in with earth tones. I spend a delightful couple of hours at the garage work bench, garage door open and sunlight pouring in, wearing my bib-overalls and carefully painting the grey lanterns with the beige-colored house paint. The little LED's help define the steps when they light up in the dark like small stars.

Yep, it's the time of year when I can wear bib-overalls and work outside all day. It's a great season for outdoor work.

Winter

The subtitle to this blog is Life in the Sonoran Desert. This is an update.

We're not used to the cold. We were spoiled last winter because it froze only once, maybe twice, and that was in late November. This winter we've been covering sensitive plants with white sheets so often the garden looks like a Ku Klux Klan hang-out. We watch 10-day forecasts regularly, subtracting a few degrees from the predicted downtown lows to account for our elevation and location near a major wash. 

At least El Niño has brought lots of snow in the Catalinas and ground-soaking rain below. We got enough rain by the 7th to account for the January average and the Rillito River flowed for almost two weeks. We even have had several overcast days.

The blood thins as you get used to the Sonoran Desert. After weeks of monsoon heat and sleeping without covers, we now have a thick duvet on our bed, usually supplemented with a blanket. A space heater is on low in the bathroom to take the edge off the cold tiles. We wear fuzzy mukluk boots, hiking pullovers and throw blankets as we sip our morning coffee. Our closets are bulging with long sleeves, polypropylene, heavy pajamas, overcoats and wool.

I like to joke that if you don't like the weather here, wait a few hours. It also works for our five seasons. A few weeks, a couple of months, and it's a different climate. I'm ready for spring.

Young Americans

David Bowie's passing makes me reflect because he is associated with some very significant events in my life. I suspect this is not the case for my siblings and I don't know how true this may be for later generations, but let me explain.

We were raised on a diet of classical music, complete with music lessons. Mine was the violin. We inherited my father's disdain for all things modern-popular and he considered the Beatles to be no better than monkeys. My older siblings listened to Bill Haley, Buddy Holley and Beach Boys genres, but the British Invasion didn't really register with our Hungarian family in Sydney.

Even in high school in Seattle, my musical diet was playing classical music records on the family turntable while I lay on the couch imagining I was conducting or playing the solo.

By the time I started university, my living situation changed. It was the same house, but my house-mates had become rowdy friends. I had a car, I fed myself, we figured out how to get beer underage, and I had less reason to get haircuts. It was a very different environment, but I still clung to my father's deprecation of monkey-music.

That first year in college, l was driving my two-tone Chevy Nova home, south on 15th NE, left onto NE 55th, and an immediate right into the alley behind our house on 5224 15th NE. For some reason I don't remember, I had the car radio on a rock station. Sufragette City (1972) was playing. I was mesmerized. I couldn't believe how great it was. I had never heard anything like it. I pulled into my parking spot behind the house and kept the engine running. I had to hear the entire song and find out what it was. The DJ said David Bowie, Sufragette City.

From that experience, I got into Rock music. It was only a matter of time before I would succumb to cultural influences, but still, it all began that first time listening to Bowie.

His Space Oddity (1969) became a bit of anthem for my four to five year career as a pizza truck driver. My name is Tom. Bowie sings about Major Tom. It was a good fit made perfect because the drivers communicated with the dispatcher using CB radios. "Ground control to Major Tom."

Rebel, Rebel (1974) was played on record often enough, and under less than sober circumstances, that we anticipated every cracking sound scratched into the vinyl grooves. The musical climax for a 5224 kegger often was Jean Jeannie (1973).

When I broke up with Carla, I was devastated. Although I instigated the breakup, I became desperately depressed. Pulling myself out of that was another major watershed in my life, but during the process Young Americans (1975) and especially Sorrow (1973) gave me opportunity to express my grief. Young Americans also expressed my acceptance of being American, something I'd resisted through high school. Odd, a young American identity acceptance coming from a Britisher.

Time passed and I made friends with a gay former priest. Shelly's Leg was the place for gay guys to go dancing and it was the disco era. (If you don't know what Shelly's Leg was, look it up on the internet. There is a Wikipedia article on it.) By God those men could move. I associate Bowie's Fame (1975) with that wonderful, if superficial exposure to the gay world.

Time passes and I take my main squeeze to my most extravagantly favorite date: dinner at the Oyster Bar on Chuckanut Drive. As Shari and I drive through the Skagit flats towards home on Whidbey, intoxicated with lamb, sorbet, chocolate, and port, I remember playing Rebel Rebel, the sultry version by Ricky Lee Jones.

Time continues to pass and my music taste favors stuff you find in the Ethnic or World Music bins of a CD store, if there is any such shop still around. My iPod still has what's left of my six or seven Bowie vinyl collection, but there are few boisterous occasions when I dial up a youthful, rebellious rock song. As for current popular music, I checked out when New Wave turned to Grunge. I suppose I'm of an older generation and I like to complain that they don't make music like they used to.

Three days ago, for some reason that not even Shari knows, she decided to read the Wikipedia article on David Bowie. She was fascinated by the description of his education at Bromley Technical High School. David Bowie never meant much to her, but she urged me to read it. Two days later, yesterday, we woke up to the news that he had died.

BBC America, the news half-hour that shames every other American news or quasi-news program, put on a wonderful fifteen minute tribute to David Bowie last night. Afterwards, I put on my head phones and watched several You Tube videos of Bowie, then played some of those old vinyl tracks on my iPod. The man was amazing, and his exit from life pure artistic class.

It's a pity we wait for obituaries to celebrate someone's achievements. The accolades from people who know popular culture better than I consistently praise Bowie's genius, creativity, originality, and performance. They say his work influenced all who followed. If David Bowie is new to you, do yourself a favor. Become a Young American, if only for a senior moment.

A New Year

I don't know about others', but my New Year's Day was a lot like my Old Year's Day. True, from one day to the next, it became a holiday, the weather got milder, and there were even more gridiron games on the television. But the sun still came up, just like it did the year before, and I still took the dog for a walk in the wash.

In the last days of the Old Year I found myself web-surfing for Roman quotes. They fascinate me. Cicero particularly is a great source, not just because he may be the greatest statesman and orator of the Roman world, but also because so much of his writing has survived. The thoughts of two millennia ago inspire even today. No wonder the literate, Mediterranean ancients were the foundation and pleasure of Western education for most of twenty centuries.

The one Stoic thought that spun in my mind is that the goal is not a long life, but a deep one. That's a nice contemplation for New Year's, one that gave me permission to walk a little slower with the dog and take more time to marvel at my surroundings.

To Cicero is attributed the quote, "A room without books is like a body without a soul." Very likely, Cicero didn't write that, but he did write, "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

Which, on a New Year's Day as I slowed down to move rocks and trim brush in our little acre of the Sonoran Desert, reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from Star Trek. In a flash forward in time (there's that time thing again), an aging Jean Luc wearing a broad rimmed straw hat is tending a small vineyard.

So in addition to wishing everyone much happiness for Twenty-Sixteen, I also wish all the great depth and the sense of belonging that attend happiness.

Post script: There's another Cicero quote which surely is not his, but it made me laugh loudly all the same. "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book."