Foreign Life

The name of our sprawling detached hotel
development is lit up in the hours of darkness,

I feel like we moved to a foreign land and that we are camping in a nice hotel.

We lived on a secluded little acre for almost seventeen years, longer than either of us had lived any other one place. The Sonoran Desert, the Catalina Foothills, and Finger Rock wash became the home that we identified with and San Simeon reflected our identity for friends and family. The house itself with its sunken living room and huge window looking at Finger Rock, its walled backyard with a tower that viewed mountains in all directions, secluded swimming pool, and goldfish pond, its long driveway, eucalyptus trees, sixty saguaro cacti and similar number of palo verde trees, private gully and paths, its raised beds, shade covered garden protected from javalina, rabbit and serpent are all unique, unlike any other property, and all remodeled and fashioned with our own hands. Our two furry children are buried there. It's an acre like no other.

We knew our few neighbors, their properties similarly sprinkled an acre at a time by the Finger Rock wash. From our house, we could hardly see any of theirs. Standing at the south point of our own acre, even our own house was not visible. Of the ten neighbors on San Simeon, only two had lived there longer than we carpetbaggers from Puget Sound. Many were retired, or retired over the time we lived there — like us. I don't think any of us play golf and there are no snowbirds. It's a neighborhood established some fifty years ago. Families had been raised there, but over our years only one home had children.

We had lived in a very unique place so, of course, any other place would be different by definition. We moved only 25 miles away, but it is a completely different world; a foreign country. True, our new home is definitely within the Sonoran Desert and is situated about the same elevation as San Simeon, Dove Mountain folk speak the same languages as those in the Foothills, and the Tortolita Mountains are similarly spectacular with familiar pale Catalina granite and caliche, views, and majestic saguaro cacti, palo verde, mesquite, acacia, ironwood, barrel cacti, cholla, prickly pear opuntia, and desert wildflowers. But Dove Mountain is also very different.

Typical street scene in Dove Mountain: a line of garages with attached living quarters.

Everywhere it's a new development with many unoccupied houses and new areas under construction. Small lots. Huge houses packed next to each other in strips separated by common areas. Intentional builder and covenant-restricted uniformity in appearance, whether colors, fixtures, layouts and landscaping. In our development, Blue Agave II, every house number is uniform and advertises the builder whose name I will not mention. (Say, whose house is this anyway?) Properties look like lines of garages with attached dwellings. Boundary walls (two types: sloped rip-rap over concrete block base and thin red-brown concrete blocks). Flimsy iron gates and fencing. Backyards are left stripped down to the hard soil, barren, dusty, muddy when it rains, and generously sprinkled with half-buried construction debris.

We have lots of neighbors. It's been twenty-three years since I made my home in a small lot neighborhood. All kinds of people: lots of retired couples both permanent and snow birds, young families with kids, professional and military retired. Some folk have dark skin but most with white. Children accompanied by a parent walk past our house to the corner where school buses promptly arrive.

But all folk have something in common: enough money to buy a large, expensive and newly built house, able to spend even more money to finish fixturing it so it's livable, and — in about one in four properties — spend another hundred thousand having a large hole dug in their small backyard to accommodate a swimming pool, ramada and outdoor kitchen.

Our detached hotel on Chaparral Sage will become our home. Like San Simeon, the desert setting is gorgeous and the views stunning. We have discovered walks in the Tortolita Preserve that we can take without having to get inside a car and drive somewhere. And, to be honest, it's interesting to walk the manicured lines of garages with attached living spaces. But right now, I still have feelings like we are camping in a large hotel complex

Tortolita Preserve. A quiet, private walk past a hole in the barbed wire perimeter.
That's Baboquivari in the middle distance just to the left of the solitary saguaro.

These feelings will be forgotten as Dove Mountain becomes all too familiar and the thrill of something foreign fades.

The House at the End of the Universe

Dove Mountain Boulevard runs about seven miles from Tangerine Road up into the foothills of the Tortolita Mountains past innumerable residential, golf club, and resort developments. The road is landscaped and maintained, lined with hiking and biking trails through saguaro forests and thickets (maraña) of cholla and bushes, and graced with views of the Tortolitas, the Tuscon and Santa Cruz River lowlands, the Pusch Ridge side of in the Santa Catalina Mountains, and the successive ridges and peaks of the Rillito, Tucson, Santa Rita, Silver Bell, Baboquivari Mountains and beyond to the south and west.

The slopes of the Tortolitas and the ridges above the road are densely dotted with huge saguaro cacti. Pusch Ridge and the Tucson Mountains are in sharp relief. The ridges of the more distant mountain ranges are arranged in sharply distinct layers of increasingly blue-grey and vague outlines. These patterns of variegated mountain formations extend three, four, five deep into the horizon. One feels as if gazing over the roof of the world.

The boulevard reaches a dead end at Dove Mountain West Park and the Tortolita Preserve.

Our new home is almost at the end of the boulevard, and when we drive up and down through the Sonoran Desert landscaped terrain and savor the views to the basin below and mountains afar until we finally reach the end, we feel like we live in the house at the end of the universe.

P.S.  Credit to Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second in the series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Monsoon Windstorms . . . No Power for Four Days (Climate Change)

The first pole north of Alvernon.
The one behind on the other side of River Road
is metal and gives a sense of scale.

As if moving wasn't stressful enough, we had two particularly powerful monsoon storms with gusts stronger than we had ever seen.

Weather is always big news. After the polite "How are you?" — which never intends or elicits a real answer — the most common subject of polite conversation has to be the weather. "Lovely weather, isn't it?" When the weather gets a bit extreme, some of us reflect upon climate.

We are only in our seventeenth year in the Old Pueblo. Witnesses who have spent a lifetime here tell us how monsoon season used to be regular afternoon downpour. Nowadays, the afternoon clouds still gather but only occasionally do we actually get rain. Rain here is typically preceded by a vanguard of strong winds. The two monsoon windstorms we experienced last month are beyond anything we have seen. We are getting less rain overall, but more extreme weather.

A utility pole torn into toothpicks.

We were driving back home to San Simeon on the afternoon of July 17th when the first one hit. There was a big traffic jam on eastbound Skyline Drive. The traffic lights at Campbell Avenue were dark. Power outage. An extremely busy intersection had become a four-way stop. After about a half an hour we got through to Sunrise Drive and saw a half mile of devastation: scores of huge palo verde and mesquite trees broken, some completely uprooted, even saguaros, bus stop benches and commercial pylon signs blown away, and standing street signs twisted and deformed.

The only way to get to our house is via Alvernon Way.* The Finger Rock Wash cuts across Alvernon just north and just south of our street. We tried crossing from the north, turned around, tried crossing from the south, and turned around. The wash was dangerously flooded. So we had dinner at the Tucson Racquet Club and a couple of hours later the flood had receded to become a shallow, debris laden stream. We drove across.

There were ten huge and old wooden poles along this part of Alvernon.
Only part of one was left standing.

We were relieved to find our house still had power, but trees were broken and uprotted all along the way. Not just scores along Sunrise, but hundreds in the Foothills neighborhoods.

Two weeks later, Friday the 28th, the second storm hit. Rain always gets us outside to stare and marvel, but the wind gusts and hail we saw that afternoon were something we had never seen before. At six that evening, the power went out.

Saguaros were broken in two.

The next morning, we drove around. Alvernon by San Simeon used to be lined by ten huge wooden utility poles with wires and cables that ran up the hill from River Road to supply electricity and internet to thousands of residences. The eleventh is a huge metal pole. It remained standing. The ten old wooden poles had all snapped like toothpicks.

We had four days without power. By the first and second day Tucson Electric had restored power to all but thirty-one customers, the thirty-one clustered around our San Simeon Drive where we live at the dead end. We were in the dark until Tuesday afternoon.

At the top of the hill,
the metal utility pole stood its ground.

Inconvenient? People in the neighborhood fled to hotels, stayed with friends, and borrowed generators to keep refrigerators operating. Inconvenient? We are trying to move to our new house as quickly as reasonably possible so we can sell the old. Hell yes, inconvenient. We took a couple of pads and our small television to Dove Mountain and camped on the floor. Thank goodness we already had internet installed.

I read that this year is the hottest in recorded history, courtesy of modern life and our addiction to burning things for fuel. Regardless of the impact on climate, we as a society are unwilling to make changes. We are propelled by "freedom," the profit motive, and vested interests that buy politicians. We are a ship of fools.

Four days later, ten new metal poles.
The cable lines left dangling with a piece of the old wooden pole.

 

 

——————————

* Alvernon sounds very Spanish, but it isn't. No one really knows the origin but there was an Al Vernon working for the developer of these parts.

Rain Was Not in the Forecast

On Thursday the 10-day forecast was for little chance of rain, a sad forecast because we get three-quarters of our annual rainfall this time of year. Monsoon season.

But Mother Nature had different plans. She dumped some inch and a half of rain within an hour. Some places not that far away got over two inches. Over that one-hour period, the temperature dropped from 103° to 73°.

We had never seen so much rain falling over the edge of the roof.

Walls, Roofs & Flower Beds

A parapet is a wall that extends above the roof line.
Our living room has six walls. All six extend to parapets,
as do all exterior bedroom walls.
That's a scupper in the middle.

Of the three — walls, roofs and flower beds — the most damaging was the flower bed. The culprit is water, which by itself is pretty odd given that we live in a desert, albeit one of the earth's wetter deserts.

Walls and roofs are supposed to keep water outside of a house. Well, apparently rainfall in the Sonoran Desert is sufficiently unusual that architects and builders need not bother themselves too much about it. Take our concrete paved backyard and swimming pool apron, for example. They slope towards the house. Come heavy monsoon rains — an annual affair most monsoon seasons — water flooded under the two back doors into the house.

Flat roofs are common here: flatter than your sewer pipe which by code has to slope at least a quarter inch to the foot.

The living room wall where the insulation and framing
were littered with ancient rodent droppings. After
demolition and chlorine, nice and clean.

Our roof is typical. It is so flat that water puddles with dew even on a clear morning. But hey, coat the flat roof with that white elastomeric polymer stuff. It's very good stuff, actually. But if you read the teeny tiny print on the container, in both English and Spanish, it's not recommended for flat roofs that puddle.

From my observation, my explanation is because it ever so slowly but surely dissolves and erodes the coating. You need a new coat every couple of years, if not more often.

Stucco walls are common here. Stucco covers the stick built frame. Stucco is also good stuff but, like the roof, it needs maintenance to remain water tight. Like many houses here, ours has parapets: walls that extend above the roof. The tops of those walls are stuccoed and they are boundaries between what roofers roof and what painters paint. They are directly exposed to sunshine and weather.

Parapets also have scuppers in them, metal channels to drain rainwater. Stucco (basically, cement and sand), metal (the scuppers themselves) and polymer elastomeric all expand and contract differently. Plus, having reached in myself with a brush generously dipped in elastomeric it's almost impossible to get a good coat inside the six-by-four opening that is twelve inches deep. So you get cracks and gaps.

Parapets, scuppers, and stucco are architecturally pretty. They also can be maintenance nightmares. 

The north wall which was covered with
cat claw vine. Yours truly broke up the
solid line of masonry that held the
flower bed planter against the stucco
wall. It was this area where Vinny replaced
wall board in the bedroom on the inside.

Then we have flower beds. If you put them next to the stucco walls — I mean the soil rests against the bottom foot or two of the stucco, even above the concrete foundation — you are asking for trouble. That's what the previous owners did, Auggie and Karen, and who knows how many other previous owners in the five decade history of this house. Yes, there is a tar paper lining between the soil and the stucco, but if you do a lot of watering, which Auggie and Karen did, the sprinklers throw water on the walls.

All we knew when we bought the place was there was so much damage to the north side that Auggie and Karen's broker, Vinny "Cover & Conceal" Yackanin, had his slap and dash crew tear out and replace wall board inside the north bedrooms, dig out all the house-hugging flower beds, and replace the soil with cheap one-inch crushed rock.

Vinny also had his crew put a coat of elastomeric on the roof to hide decades of neglect, leaks, and rotten plywood.

Cover & Conceal worked. Our building inspector — a curse on that profession which has never disclosed anything significant to me buying a house — never noticed a thing and pronounced the roof in good shape..

A fascinating footnote. We noticed the stucco outside the guest bedroom (where Vinny had to repair water & mold damage) and the adjacent cement block chimney had been covered with creepers. Remnants of the cat claw vine still hung to the stucco all the way to the roof like ivy on a ruined English castle. That flower bed, like the others, was irrigated by electronic sprinkler system. (When Shari set up our account at Tucson Water, she was told the property had been labeled high use.) Well, that creeper served as a freeway for the rodents to get on the roof and gnaw their way inside the living room walls.

Not a pretty sight even in a photo. The insulation and
the studs on this corner of the bedroom were covered
with black mold. Major wood rot around and under the
window. The corner on the other end of this same
wall has a corner stud three-quarters eaten out by
termites attracted by the moisture. (We had the termites
eradicated some years back.)

That was all covered up by Vinny's roof coat.

We don't know what was planted and watered by the flower bed on the east side outside the master bedroom. Cover & Conceal also had that dug out, but he never bothered to repair the damage to the window and inside the walls.

The good news is the heavy monsoon rains this year caused leaks in the living room, my office, and the master bedroom. That prompted us to work on the scuppers, parapets and roof. More importantly, we had the insides inspected by mold specialists who confirmed the problems. Even more importantly, the mold specialist was so long getting us his estimate, we hired Bear Down Builders (of tower remodel fame) to do the work.

Then we got the mold specialist's seven-page quote, complete with Biblical verse (Corinthians 12:9-10). Admittedly an upside bid, it was $12,000. Bear Downs' estimate was $2,000, although we expect we will go over. We are paying time and materials and we know and like the folks at Bear Down Builders. We want the work done.

The bedroom wall exposed. Nice and clean.

I cleaned up after the Bear Down Builders work pulling drywall nails and bits and pieces of wretched insulation. That would save them some time when the new drywall is installed and it gave Shari and me opportunity to get a close look. Shari donned lab coat, industrial face mask, and thick gloves to scrub mold and spray chlorine bleach over all exposed areas. We have had the rooms breathing and drying with fresh air.

I must say, having the walls exposed and cleaned, we are overwhelmingly grateful to have the work done.

Caesalpinia

 Or, The Effect of Monsoon Rain on Life. 

In this case, on Caesalpinia pulcherrima. In the Sonoran Desert, we call the legume plant with spectacular flowers, Mexican bird of paradise. Its common names include peacock flower and in Bermuda, where it is the national flower, the pride of Bermuda.

Anyway, our winter and spring rainfall having been almost non-existent, our Caesalpinia was sparse and struggling. Then came July, then August, and we are not done with September. Tucson's rainfall already this year has exceeded its annual average.

Nature responded. Our Caesalpinia is a flowering jungle, and the unusually plentiful butterflies and moths are feasting upon the flowers.

The River Flows

Weather is in the news all around the world. Much of it is pretty dire.

It's been a while, but so far the monsoon season this year has brought us rain pretty much every day this July, and the forecast is more of the same.

We had a trace all through June. Here in the Foothills for July, we are at around three to four inches.

The monsoon bust last year, coupled with a wildfire in the Catalinas, make us appreciate the rain. We could not be more ecstatic.

These days remind us why it's called the Rillito River. Can you hear the Colorado River toads croaking?

The Creek Flows

When we get rain in the Sonoran Desert, we get excited. When we get monsoon rain, I grab my video camera.

The first monsoon deluge is always a welcome relief after weeks and weeks of dry summer weather with daily three-digit high temperatures (38+C.).

This deluge was particularly welcome. Some months ago I uncovered and opened up four culverts under the driveway. They had been blocked for as long as we have lived here. When we had heavy rains, a large lake formed on the north side of the driveway. My plan was to restore the creek flowing from the roof of the house down into the gully on the south side of the driveway, into Coat Hanger Valley.

The plan worked.

Purple Finch

 Saguaros are handy places for nests, but the chicks have to keep really still.

Cooper's Hawk

We see hawks often enough, but not hanging around our swimming pool. We wondered whether this Cooper's hawk was thinking about taking a dip. (It didn't.)

A Closer Look at Our Little Acre

We got many compliments on the previous edit, and I am learning to slow down and focus in with my video camera. This edit reflects more detail.

The Sonoran Desert has shapes, colors, and textures large and small. On our own little acre where we have cleared and planted, each plant has become a familiar friend.

The soundtrack is Brahim Fribgane playing the oud. Born and raised in Morocco, Brahim Fribgane brings to his music the rich and varied musical styles he grew up with - North African, Gnawa, Berber, Arabic and Andulusian music. His oud style ranges from the clear, "singable" melodies of folkloric Berber songs to beautifully complex and soulful Arabic music.

Smoke in the House

Water heater burn-out.

It happened once before, an unusually acrid smell and smoke wafting out the door that leads to our small, centrally located utility room; the one that holds the heat exchange system, water heater, alarm system, door bell, vacuum cleaner, and IKEA shelves holding boxes and piles of shoes, boots, winter hats, sewing machine and notions, light bulbs, extension cords, spare cushions, fabric ….

Just outside the door to the utility room is the security system smoke alarm. It makes a phone call to a light bulb in Central Alarm headquarters and someone there calls the house (Are you okay? What is your security code?), or the person calls the fire department and they also call us, or all of them call us.

The alarm went off. We ran towards the noise and immediately noticed the smoke coming out from the utility room. We ventured inside fearful of flames. There was just acrid smoke coming from an electronic control box of the heat exchange system. The unit was fried.

A heat exchange system has two parts. A large unit inside and another large unit outside and plumbing in between that circulates a heat-cold retaining fluid. If it runs one way, it takes heat out of the house. If it runs the other way, it brings heat into the house. It was an old system that probably dated back to when the house was built, 1978.

We replaced the entire system. We even paid for the rental of a crane to hoist the outdoor unit over the concrete block wall that serves as its enclosure. The gate was too narrow.

In the nine some years since, we have enjoyed our new system. It is much quieter than the old. It's still pretty noisy, but that old system, each time it turned on, made an exploding noise like someone hit the metal ducts with a sledge hammer.

Friday a week ago: déjà vu. Acrid smoke smelling like burnt rubber poured out from the utility room. Disturbingly enough it did not trigger any smoke alarm. Fortunately, it was early morning when Shari and I are most active. Shari noticed it and grabbed me as I returned from walking Nazar the Wonder Dog. We were frantic. The water heater was smoking.

I rushed outside to the circuit breaker box, realized I needed reading glasses to decipher the electrician's handwritten labels, rushed back, couldn't identify the water heater circuit, and started guessing. I never did find it, but the smoke did stop. The stench lingered for days, but it stopped smoking.

I unscrewed the panels that cover the two heating elements, the one above with sensors and controls and the one below. It was the one above. It fried. The tank itself had failed. Probably the slight alkalinity of our Tucson water had eaten through the sheet metal and water had leaked into the surrounding insulating layer and filled it up all the way to the control box electronics which shorted and smoked and fizzled until it fried itself out. (And, thank God, tripped the circuit breaker. I just hadn't noticed.)

The good news was that July means summer in the Old Pueblo. This time of year, cold tap water isn't. It's quite tepid. So cold water showers are actually quite pleasant and refreshing.

The water heater replacement took place four days later. It took Jeff and Tracy six hours.

See, we have a solar panel on the roof that heats another circulating, heat absorbing fluid that is piped down into the utility room through a heat-exchange manifold that heats water circulating out from the water heater tank. When the sun is out, the water heater doesn't need to fire its electric heating elements. The solar system takes over.

A Borg. "Resistance is futile."

New water heater. "Vacation mode is futile."

What the solar-assist system means from an installation perspective is a lot of copper tubing. Our water heater doesn't look just like a water heater. It looks like a water heater that has been absorbed into the Borg collective. It has copper pipes all over the top — water out and back into the tank, gel from and back to the solar panel on the roof — the copper-clad heat exchange manifold itself, and the small pump and control panel that governs the solar gel circulation.

We kept the front door open so Jeff and Tracy could do their work and gather tools more easily. The indoor thermometer read ninety degrees.

They fabricated new copper piping to replace the old. The soldering produced enough smoke to trigger the smoke alarm. We got calls from both the fire department and Central Alarm. Well, at least we knew the alarm system worked.

After six hours of installation, Jeff showed us how the touch screen worked on the solar control box. To put it in vacation mode, tap up here, see the icon appear there, then tap down there three times (I kid you not) and the vacation mode icon appears here and you touch there to confirm. To turn off vacation mode, you do the same in reverse. His fingers seemingly raced over the panel like a teenager's two thumbs texting on a smart phone. After six hours of increasing owners' heat exhaustion, we didn't really need to know vacation mode.

We were more interested at looking at Tracy's and Jeff's smart phones. While Jeff was writing up the bill, Shari showed Tracy her paintings in the living room.  Turned out Tracy was an artist by training and avocation and a plumber only by necessity. He pulled out his smart phone. Turned out Jeff also painted. He pulled out his smart phone. Both showed us photos of their paintings. They were not only good, their styles were very original.

Fire in the Catalinas

Mother Nature has her moods.

Lightning strikes started the fire on Friday,
June 5, on the west side of the Santa Catalina Mountains. It jumped over the ridge and into Pima Canyon on Monday. Last night, Wednesday night, Finger Rock was on fire. Ribbons of fire burned eastwards. By morning, smoke obscured the mountains and drifted down the washes past our house and into the city.

The local newspaper reports that this fire, together with a fire in Alaska, are the highest priority for fire-fighters nation-wide. Bighorn was only 10% contained on Thursday night. Warnings are being issued for some evacuations.

All video taken from our backyard. The updated video (as of Friday morning) shows the fires pretty much extinguished, but the media is still reporting that it's only 10% contained.

Postscript: The video caught the eye of a Eurovision reporter in Switzerland. He may use some shots.

Sonoran Winter 24 Hours

I like to joke that if you don't like the weather in Tucson, wait a few hours. Last Friday's weather offers a great example.

I thought snow on the Santa Catalina Mountains a few days earlier was pretty neat. It inspired Finger Rock Wash Winter Morning. But the big storm was last Friday, and it offered lots of video opportunities.

We were living in a storm cloud most of Friday. There were no Catalinas, only a white-out, and a dark one at that. Only by evening did the dense clouds begin to lift. By dawn, the sky was clear. Hoping for a nice sunrise on the Catalinas, I mounted my camera on a tripod and left it running there for about three-quarters of an hour while I had my breakfast.

Less than twenty-four hours after it began snowing, the sky was sunny and clear. Baboquivari, the sacred mountain some forty-fifty miles distant, was clearly visible.

Finger Rock Wash Winter Morning

Some winter mornings are especially beautiful. After rain in lower elevations and snow in the higher, and as the sun rises, backlit raindrops glisten on creosote bushes and palo verde trees. Clouds slowly lift revealing the snow-dusted pale granite peaks of the Santa Catalina Mountains. Like they do each morning, phainopepla birds survey their mistletoe berry domains.

Wildflowers

I am so proud I could spit. A year or two ago I bought a packet of Southwest wildflower seeds. After weeks of indecision, I sprinkled them in various bare places along the gully hillside. Over months, I forgot exactly where I had planted the seeds. Then a season or two passed and I figured the seeds were duds.

It's winter and with all the winter rains we have been having, the grass and weed season is in full swing. There are thick patches of invasive grasses in many places, and the sticky and seed-spitting varieties of weeds are coming up all over. What makes a weed a weed? Grasses in this part of the world because they don't belong here. Plants that stick and hitch a ride on socks and dogs. Plants that when you touch them, they spit seeds a foot or more. (Watch out for your eyes.) Plants that I do not like so I am constantly pulling them up in the hope they will not go to seed in any unmanageable number.

There are some plants that in my first Sonoran years I considered weeds, but no more. I need to find the name of the one plant that has small fleshy leaves and, as the plant dries out with our dry spring seasons, its delicate, small bushy, lacey, umbrella frame turns reddish, sharing its hue with the bare tan and pink ground. I now classify it as a wildflower, along with brittle bush, seaside petunia, and desert senna. I recognize these plants as they sprout and never pull them.

So I am pulling weeds from various bare places along the gully hillside. I notice there are some oddly configured sprouts coming up. They seem different. There are plenty of identifiable weeds, so I ignore the unfamiliar ones. Thank goodness. As their brilliant green foliage matures, pretty yellow and orange flowers bloom. I realize that at least two species of wildflowers have sprouted from my packet. One of them I recognize. They are the orange flowers: Mexican or California poppies. I have seen entire hillsides and roadsides draped with their beautiful apricot color.

I hope my few flowers go to seed and multipy, but I think I should buy several more packets of Southwest wildflower seeds.

Winter Sunset Coyotes

Making Tamales

'Tis year-end winter. 'Tis the season for making tamales. Mix your masa harina, squash it with savory fillings, then roll and tie your corn husks!

(To fully appreciate, see the Julia Child favorites at YouTube.)

It's Happened Before

It's happened before, something you don't expect.

For weeks and weeks of three digit highs (Fahrenheit), we have lived in our underwear like trailer trash. By eight or nine in the morning it's time to take shelter inside the shuttered house. It's time for lizards, ground squirrels and chipmunks to do their thing, and much of that is digging holes in the ground for refuge. It's the time of year when folks dream about going to Hawaii to escape the heat.

The odd thing is shade. It's the direct sunshine that is fierce. Even in three-digit temperature, I can sit in the shade and marvel at all the life in the Sonoran Desert, life that thrives in a bit of shade. I sit in the shade of the house and think to myself, "Gotta make more shade in the yard." We are fortunate to have plenty of trees in the gully whose shelter encourages all sorts of plants to thrive, even in the heat. I could erect pandals, trellises, follies, gazebos and other open covered areas. Meanwhile, I am grateful I work for a living inside the house and we have cooling.

Did anyone catch sight of the full moon, now two weeks ago?

By evening, when the sun loses its power and the bugs and bats come out, it's pool time. We carefully manage the solar blanket to maintain a water temperature in the low nineties. These last few weeks have provided an amazing evening planetary show. I have been floating with my rubber noodle and gazing at the horizon-to-horizon moving arc of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the Moon as they reveal themselves in the twilight, followed by innumerable stars.

Now it's the first week of October and the first week highs are in the eighties. Lows are about sixty. Shucks. Instead of just flopping on top of the bed in my underwear, I have to cover myself with a sheet. It's actually almost cold in the mornings. The swimming pool is loosing heat.

It's a subtle but very definite change of season. It has been only a week since the end of the summer doldrums.

It's happened before. I already miss summer.

San Simeon Spring

Flowers begin with aloes and yuccas, then hanging cactus, torch cactus and prickly pear. Palo verde trees are coated yellow from flowers, and mesquite trees and catsclaw acacia trees sprout golden catkins. Sweet acacias have fuzzy round balls for flowers, and the long canes of ocotillo sprout red flames on their tips. Then the tops of the giant saguaros sprout huge buds that open into white and yellow flowers that attract a particular species of bat from Mexico.

The desert can be subtle, but when it flowers, the colors are more outrageous than anything Frida Kahlo stuck in her hair.