October Evening

October 10, 2014

Was putting garden clippings into the compost pile about 5pm this evening when a herd of eleven javelinas moseyed down the drainage wash and stopped to eat mesquite seeds under my large mesquite tree. I started to talk to them, as usual, and most of them came over to the garden fence to smell me, their noses wrinkling up and down, not usual.  Hackles up, but friendly. Usually only the alpha male checks me out.  Most of them were small, probably young.

About 20 minutes later I was clipping the rosemary, the cat next to me, when she looked over to the other side of the yard and jumped up a few of the spiral stairs. A bobcat was ambling past the yard on that side.

So I figured that it was time to go in.  Plus we had a full day and night of rain two days ago and the no-see-ums were out, biting my ankles.  Was surprised that we had them in Tucson.  Remembered them from New Jersey.

No-see-ums are small biting flies that appear during the summer months. These tiny biting insects are barely visible to the naked eye, but their bites can be very painful and annoying.

Literature references indicate that no-see-um species found in Arizona and the southwest are of the genus Culicoides. Adult no-see-ums are less than 1/16-inch long can easily pass through normal window screens, and resemble a smaller, more compact version of the mosquito. They are most active in early mornings and evenings of mid to late summer. Mouth parts are well developed with elongated mandibles adapted for blood sucking. Both males and females feed on flower nectar but only the female feeds on blood. She must consume blood for her eggs to mature and become viable.

No-see-um eggs are laid on moist soil. Common breeding areas include the edges of springs, streams and ponds, muddy and swampy areas, tree holes, and even water associated with air conditioning units. The eggs hatch in as little as 3 days. The wormlike larvae have short brush like breathing structures that allows them to breathe in an aquatic environment. Although larvae are not strictly aquatic or terrestrial, they cannot develop without moisture. After feeding on decomposing organic matter and pupating, adults emerge, feed, and mate.¹

And a mosquito is sneaking around, biting my hands as I type.  Almost got her when she landed on the wall.  Almost.  On the news they had mentioned that we have a large crop of mosquitoes right now due to the rain.  So there are a couple of downsides to all of the precipitation we’ve had in the past two weeks.  (Plus yesterday morning after I got to work I checked the humidity – 93%!  Practically unheard of here.)

Landscape Architecture

Continuing in the reading of books on Landscape Architecture.  I had commented on The Meaning of Gardens when I was only in the Introduction².  Now I’ve finished it.  Each essay is written by a different landscape architect.  These quotes are  not summaries, just ones that piqued my interest.

Clare Marcus, in The Garden as Metaphor, wrote that The earth began to be considered as an inertia geological object, replete with resources available for exploitation.  Since the notion of raping one’s mother was repugnant, the planet could no longer be conceived as Mother Earth.  The theme of raping the earth is repeated in a few of the essays.

Ian McHarg wrote Nature is More than A Garden, and mentions that, There is an accompanying belief that work outdoors, preferably in a garden, touching soils, plants, water, stone, confers not only physical but also mental health, a thesis that is often postulated throughout the book.

In Flowers, Power, and Sex, Robert Riley recalled …the angry reaction to Martin Krieger’s provocative, carefully reasoned question “What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?”  That response culminated in an accusation by Hugh Iltis that anyone asking that question probably got his sexual satisfaction from water-filled, lubricated, female manikins.

Tucson was noted in Kerry Dawson’s Nature in the Urban Garden: …bird density was twenty-six times as high in urban gardens as in the surrounding desert of Tucson.  Well, we do put out water and seeds for them.  Note: my yard is a Certified Wildlife Habitat® by the National Wildlife Federation.  (I filled out a form and sent them $20.)  Kerry states that The urban garden should avoid plants with no value to wildlife, and then quotes Marangio’s list of common garden plants of the United States that have no known wildlife value.  Included are the acacia, Algerian and English ivy, blue gum (eucalyptus), French broom, ice plant, pampas grass, periwinkle, and Scotch broom.  But he doesn’t mention the desert broom, bain of my garden as my neighbor allows his to grow and the “desert snow” of seeds blow into my yard³.

Christopher Grampp, in Social Meanings of Residential Gardens, quoted two homeowners. Harry remarked, “I could never see passing the rewards of a garden on to a gardener.  Why would a person ever hire a gardener, unless he didn’t like to garden?” For Paul, it represents peace of mind.  “Gardening has maintained my sanity.  It’s a real therapy.  You get out and your mind goes blank.  It’s a relief, superior to tranquilizers.”  That view again.

In Garden of the World, Randolph Hester, Jr. hit hard.

…the lush, rectangular-patterned oasis in the otherwise-arid valleys… that have been transformed into an agribusiness artwork so large it can only be appreciated from the air.  To keep this garden green, billions of gallons of water are diverted from the network of rivers and marshes that once laced the central valleys and nearby watersheds… (it costs more than $2200 per acre for irrigation alone)…
A beautiful illustration of man’s ability to dominate and control nature, it features ecological insensitivity and disregard for place (hundred of environmental modifications somewhat less visually dramatic than a near-empty Mono Lake are its by-products.  Like other great gardens, it is manicured and parterred by the powerless to enrich the powerful, with more of both than Louis XIV likely ever imagined.

Deborah Dalton wrote of Harvey Fite’s Opus 40: From Private Garden to Public Art Work.  I would love to visit it!  (Opus 40 is open Friday through Sunday, and holiday Mondays, Memorial Day weekend to Columbus Day Weekend.)

Opus 40 is a six-acre environmental sculpture created from an abandoned bluestone quarry near Woodstock, New York.  The work is a series of terraces, pedestals, pools, steps, and ramps swirling around one another and spiraling up to the central focus, a nine-ton bluestone monolith.

The title of the quarry work, Opus 40, referred to the number of years he intended to work on the project…  Harvey Fite was killed in a fall at the quarry, just three years short of his goal.

[Ironically] he commented on Henry Moore: “…the representational object has a human value; more people can relate to it, comprehend it.  Non-objective art is merely decorative abstraction, or dehumanized art.  Moore’s work is too dehumanized, it has lost the human statement.  His abstractions of the reclining nude and family groups are so distorted that you can’t see the nude or the family.”

Gray Brechin wrote about Grace Marchant and the Global Garden.  I’m surprised that I never heard about it as I’ve been often to San Francisco.  This woman was incredible, as was the garden she created.

Grace was sixty-three then, and the trash-strewn, weed-grown right-of-way outside her window bothered her.  She set about hauling the bedsprings, tires, and lumber to the cliff and dumping them over the side.  Without asking anyone at City Hall she began conditioning the sandstone outcropping.  Over the next thirty-three year, she cultivated a garden that has attained world fame and created a community of the cottage and apartments around it.

Then he goes into a different vein (back to the rape of the earth):

The environmental and economic crises that now wrack the planet – ozone depletion, dying rivers, seas, and forests, the insidious spread of radioactivity, and the rising price of nearly everything – are the accumulated interest on 5,000 years of exploitive civilization.  Yet because civilization has many valued attributes, the costs involved in raising the facade that hides exploitation are seldom recognized.  Unable to locate the problem, we are helpless to find solution.

Another garden can represent that facade.  Famous in its time as one of the most luxuriantly landscaped estates on the San Francisco Peninsula, the garden created by William Barron at Menlo Park was modeled on those of the European nobility.  Rare specimen plants were imported from around the world to embellish the oak-dotted savannah, and the lawns were flooded throughout the summer to maintain their verdue.

The money to create the Baron garden was gathered from a much larger landscape wrecked twenty miles away and from future generations who would foot the bill for its beauty.  William Barron was principal of a syndicate that controlled the production of mercury in California, an element essential for refining gold and silver ores.  Today, the blasted cinnabar tailings of New Almaden leach mercury into the reservoirs and streams of the Santa Clara Valley and the sediments of San Francisco Bay.  Cleanup of New Almaden, if possible, is estimated to cost millions, but much of the downstream contamination is simply irremediable.

The Barron estate is typical of hundreds of other lovely gardens built from strip mining, clear-cutting, slave trading, chemicals, and munitions.  Seldom are the ugly mean and lovely end closely juxtaposed so that the observer can gauge the true costs involved.  Lacking the direct involvement of their owners, such gardens are as much expressions of conspicuous display as the other purchased accoutrements of the estate.

Garrett Eckko wrote Today into Tomorrow: An Optimistic View.  Way optimistic.  He first expects all of the countries of the world to Control population growth.  Wow, would that be great.  (I do advocate ZPG – Zero Population Growth.)  Would parents allow their children to become suicide bombers if they had only two children, no spares?  Also, then parents could afford to educate both children, even if they were girls!  That would so change the world.  But the religious groups – Muslims, Catholics, Mormons, Fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, those where men only become mullas, priests, ministers, rabbis, would never go for it.  Other points, Conservation of natural resources, Ecosystem resurrection, and so on, are dwarfed by Control population growth. But I should get off my soapbox and get back to landscape architecture and the book.

Catherine Howett, in Gardens Are Good Places for Dying, mentioned Versailles (which doesn’t have anything to do with dying, but I was impressed with the statistic):

The king’s landscape genius André Le Nôtre boasted, for example, that by continually “carrying out, removing, and bringing back” more than two million potted plants, the garden surrounding the Trianon Palace was “always filled with flowers… and one never sees a dead leaf, or a shrub not in bloom.”

¹https://ag.arizona.edu/yavapai/anr/hort/byg/archive/noseeums.html
²http://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/gardening/
³https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/desert-life-and-eastern-lawns/

Peccaries and Plants

In the garden last weekend heard a rustle as a dozen javelinas (also know as peccaries) flowed past on the other side of the fence.  Had my usual chat with them.  Only one came near to listen, his nose wiggling like crazy.  (They can’t see well, so they depend on smell.)

Monday evening brought a strong windstorm, with lots of blowing sand and dust, hard on my coleus and basil (both with fragile leaves).  Also dropped the temperature quickly; I had gone outside in shorts and got a chill.  (But my daughter in Idaho said they got a dusting of snow and my friend in Denver said they got a few inches of snow, so having to put on long sleeves isn’t so bad.)

Wednesday, trash day, three javelinas had downed a neighbor’s trashcan and ignored my car as they enjoyed the bounty.  Glad it wasn’t mine – what a bother to clean up.  Yesterday a quail was in my vegetable patch – possibly looking for a safe place to nest?  It’s that time of the year.   Today a rabbit stopped outside my veggie patch, where I was working.  Not sure it froze to listen to my melodious voice – it probably just thought I wouldn’t see it if it stood still.

Scarface

My youngest grandson recently had a brief clash with a wrought-iron table, which he lost.  Rather glad my daughter, who is a nurse, and not I, was there to apply a pressure-bandage until they got him to the hospital.  He’s two.  (His forehead shown with 22 stitches.)

Remember my daughter having a bout with a 2×4 at that age that resulted in a gap in her forehead gushing blood.  Luckily one of the friends we had over was a dermatologist and he said that she didn’t need stitches as it was only an inch-long cut near the hairline.  But my mother couldn’t take all of the blood and left.

And my granddaughter, at the same age, put a few holes in her head, one when she fell backwards in Thailand, where she had to get the back of her head stitched up without anesthesia.

Latest Read

Finally finished reading Stephen King’s novel, 11/22/63, all 849 pages of it, hardcover.  Did bog down a bit after about 600 pages – one subplot too many.  The main plot follows an English teacher time-traveling back to 1963 to prevent the assassination of Kennedy.   (Mentioned that I should read the book in a previous blog.¹)  It’s what my mother would have called heavy reading, a tome that weighs too much to hold up in bed at night.  But if you have the muscle, and the perseverance, it’s a good book.  (Liked it better than his last scifi, Under the Dome.)

Lots about Lee Harvey Oswald that I didn’t previously know.  But also plenty about the late 50’s, early 60’s that I did know about.  I’ve heard white people reminiscing about that era being so great.  Or maybe that’s just white men reminiscing.  Not such a great time for women (June Cleaver vacuuming in pearls and high heels) or people of color.  King does a great job depicting the time.  Here is one section from the book:

And one more thing. In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable. I hoped the dads and moms who might have led their children down to whatever facility waited below were able to identify those troublesome bushes for what they were, because in the late fifties most children wear short pants.

There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts. A man who had to urinate could just stand on the bank, unzip, and let fly. A woman could hold onto a bush (assuming it wasn’t poison ivy or poison oak) and squat. The board was what you sat on if you had to take a shit. Maybe in the pouring rain.

If I ever gave you the idea that 1958’s all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.

¹https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/time-travel-and-the-red-shoes/

 

Snow, Javelinas, and Sequestration

February 22, 2013

Wednesday I was in class when someone announced It’s snowing!  Two-thirds of the students rushed from their computers to look.  Snow is rather a novelty in Tucson.  All of the mountain ranges around Tucson were white.  (Shown here the Rincons, east of the city.)

Thursday morning I woke to the desert dusted with white.  (See the snow tips on the saguaro arms?  And that’s my back yard.)  Guess it’s not spring yet.  Last weekend I had been outside in shorts and a T-shirt raking up dead leaves (from the weeklong freeze a month ago) thinking that spring in Tucson is more like fall.

This morning the mountains were gone.  The clouds had crept down them, perhaps readying for another attack.  Plus a light fog, the kind that has you cleaning your glasses and the windshield of your car, thinking that’s the problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Javelinas

Yesterday a troop of ten javelinas meandered through my neighbor’s yard.  The cat and I were on the deck, and when she meowed one of them looked up.  Two of the herd were young.  Notice in the group photo the second from the top has his hackles raised.

Troop?  Herd?  What do you call a group of Javelinas?  I couldn’t find it on the Net.  Just pigs, which they’re not:

A drift, drove, sounder (of swine), team, passel (of hogs)

Sequestration

Have you ever said to your children, If you don’t do your chores, you won’t get your allowance?  Why don’t we not pay Congress until they pass a budget that the President can sign?  And that’s not holding back their salary so that they get it later.

Boehner said the House will move forward on its No Budget No Pay act, which directs both chambers of Congress to adopt a budget resolution for FY 2014 by April 15.

If either body fails to pass a budget, members of that body would have their paychecks put into an escrow account starting on April 16 until that body adopts a budget. But, because of the 27th Amendment, any pay that is withheld would eventually be released at the end of the current Congress, even if a budget doesn’t ever pass.¹

We’re cutting the budget here.  Forget the escrow account.  If it takes them a month, then that $14,500 goes back to the government.  (Senators and Representative make $174,000 a year, except for the Speaker of the House – $223,500, House and Senate majority and minority leaders and President pro tempore of the Senate – $193,400 – and only have to pay $30 a month for their health insurance, which is better than mine, and I’ll bet better than yours.) With 100 Senators and 435 Representatives, after a month $7,757,500 would be saved.

I decided to write to my Senators.  Perhaps you should too.

We shouldn’t let the sequester hit in two weeks.  But if you let it, as the nondefense programs cuts will be 5.8%, take the same off the salaries of all Senators and Representatives (a cut of over $10K from you).  The $5.4M saved should keep almost 750 kids in Head Start.

The other choice is no pay at all, suggested by John Boehner: “Over the last four years, House Republicans have offered plans, our budget plans. We’ve done our budgets but it’s been nearly four years since the Senate has done a budget,” Boehner said. “Most Americans believe you don’t do your job you shouldn’t get paid. That’s the basis for No Budget, No Pay. It’s time for the Senate to act.”

Some of the sequester cuts don’t bother me as much as that to Head Start and schools:

About 70,000 children will lose access to Head Start, and 14,000 teachers and workers will be laid off, because of a $424 million cut. Parents of about 30,000 low-income children will lose child-care assistance. ²

I’m thinking of all of the parents of the 70,000 kids who won’t be going to Head Start.  What will the parents do?  They can’t afford day care.  Will a parent quit his or her job (no doubt her) to stay home with the child, further impoverishing the family?

¹http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/debt-ceiling-vote-boehner/2013/01/22/id/472512
²http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/the-real-cost-of-shrinking-government.html?pagewanted=all

Seen This Week

Javelinas

Wednesday was trash day.  Down the street a dozen javelinas had toppled a large trash container into the road and, ignoring the passing cars (one of which stopped, probably to take a phone photo), were gobbling as quickly as possible, nuzzling around each other like a swarm of bees.  A couple of hours later, when I drove by, the owner was sweeping up the mess, obviously disgruntled.

Bobcats

Wednesday afternoon I was on my deck cutting back some vines that had died from the frost when there was a terrible hullabaloo in the yard.  At first I thought it had to be javelinas, because of the racket, but they wouldn’t be in the yard.  Then I saw them – two bobcats fighting.  I ran for my camera and dashed outside.  The fight had ended but I discovered three bobcats!  One was in the tree, one was on the top of my wall, and the third decided to move farther away, strolling up to the front of the house.  But all of them posed when I asked them to.  (Look at the size of those paws!)  A guy I work with thought that two were males fighting over the one female.

Thursday

A woman was in a sleeveless top, walking her dog.  The weather had changed.

Record Cold

Last week when I was in Virginia, Tucson had a spate of record cold temps.  Saturday’s official low was 26°; the high was only 46°.  Sunday 24°, 48°.  Monday 22°, 43°.   I got back home on Monday morning to a note from my house-sitter that the drip system had exploded, as well as that of my next-door-neighbors (visiting grandkids in California); she shut both down.  A guy fixed mine today – three parts broken, $$$.

Tuesday morning I had no water.  The temperature had dropped to 18°, breaking the old record low for the date, the high only 47°.  Tucson Water received more than 100 calls from customers with frozen pipes.  I checked their web site and found that I should have insulated the pipes and left one faucet dripping.  The pipes thawed by quarter to eleven, and then I wrapped them with towels and duct tape, like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.  And Tuesday night I left a faucet dripping in the kitchen, into a bucket so I could water my potted plants.

The weather service issued another hard-freeze warning for Wednesday.  (Its low and high were 25°, 60°.  For five days running the average temp was only 37°; I’ll bet the tourists around the pool weren’t happy!)  At least the chill in the air has kept the air-conditioner off in my car and my mileage now tops 29 mpg.

But I guess our winter is over.  Today’s high was 73^°!

Entitlements

During the entire fiscal cliff debacle Republicans said they wanted deep cuts to entitlement spending.  They’re talking about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and so on.  When I think of entitlements, I think not of the government benefits that 49% of Americans receive (including me, with Medicare and Social Security), but of all of the entitlements that rich people, and people with power acquire.  For example, Harvard, Yale and other Ivy schools have a preference for “legacy” students.  (This from Wikipedia.)

Legacy preferences or legacy admission is a type of preference given by educational institutions to certain applicants on the basis of their familial relationship to alumni of that institution.  Derek Bok, former Harvard University president, found “the overall admission rate for legacies was almost twice that for all other candidates.”

This is how George W. Bush got into Yale, even with his SAT scores of 1206, 200 points below Yale’s average freshman in 1970.  Possibly his father and grandfather having been Yale graduates helped?  (As a student, W studied in the Yale library’s Prescott Walker Bush Memorial Wing.)  He only graduated Yale in 1968 with a 2.35 GPA but managed to get into Harvard Business School after having been rejected from admission at University of Texas Law School.  (Today’s Harvard students average a GPA of 3.5 – no students are accepted with a GPA lower than 2.6.)¹

Anyway, those are entitlements.  Not having to take your shoes off at an airport and have your toothpaste taken away ‘cause the tube’s too big is not a problem if you have your own jet.  That’s an entitlement.  Some people just inherit wealth.  (On her 18th birthday, Allegra Versace came into an inheritance valued at over $700 million.²)  That’s an entitlement.  Wonder how many of the rich entitled are Republicans…

¹http://prospect.org/article/presidential-legacy
²http://www.inheritancefunding.com/Inheritance-Funding-Blog/bid/20410/Heirs-to-Today-s-Largest-Fortunes

Monday, August 20, 2012, 6pm

The clouds are rumbley.   Yesterday evening we got a lot of wind (I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in) and a scant amount of rain.  More predicted.

“My” hawk flew by when I was filling the birdbath, and from underneath the edges of its wings looked white, but then it landed in the mesquite and jumped from limb to limb, so I couldn’t get a good photo, but from his tail stripes I’d say that he’s a Cooper’s hawk.  (Click on the photo to enlarge and see the stripes.)  Can’t really tell from google images, are a Cooper’s hawk wings edged in white?

Yesterday evening at this time the young coyote walked through my fence as though it wasn’t there, and continued through to the next yard.  (Look at his lovely tail!)

This morning the javelinas straggled across my drive as I was in my office on the computer, so slowly that I didn’t get a head count.

Went outside to get a closer photo and one looked up at me from the drainage swale and started up the incline right next to the house, getting so close (although on the other side of the large pot) that I backed inside.  Did he want a handout or did he just want to sniff me?  (His back hairs were not standing up.)  Then he backed up and did the usual route through the hedge.

My cat, Cami, rarely wants to go outside now, preferring to watch the coyote from the corner of the bed, or the javelinas from my office table, but when she does go out she sits on the upstairs deck and watches the activity below.  I was a little worried about the hawk, but think it prefers smaller game.  Cami’s a survivor!

 

Soft Air

Sunday, July 22, 2012

The air is soft this morning, cool and humid.  It’s only 76° at 9am, the humidity 71%.  The clouds are wispy above, but billowing and rumbling over the mountains, marshaling their forces for the afternoon’s thunderstorm.

What air is not soft?  Open a heated oven to put in the bread.  Open your car door in Tucson to that furnace blast after having driven across country in August to move to a desert you knew nothing about.  Like an unexpected punch in the stomach, the oh my god, what have I gotten myself into?

The young coyote was in the yard next door when I went out to the garden this morning.  (Having dug in my compost, seeding bush beans, cantaloupe, Japanese eggplant this month.)  Noticed a bucket on the neighbor’s back patio.  Guess they’re providing water for the coyotes.  Assume with the coyotes around, their scent has discouraged the deer and javelina who would normally be eating all of the mesquite pods under my giant tree.  Haven’t seen a javelina in ages; an occasional rabbit, the usual birds, and the mechanical thrapp thrapp sound of the roadrunner, but not much else.

Reminiscence: right after we had moved into the Bridge House (next door) my husband had left out a can of paint which wasn’t totally sealed.  A javelina stuck his nose in it and knocked it over, so not only did we have hoof prints on the patio, but snout prints on the sliding door!

My sole ocotillo has leafed out with the rain.  The rest of the year it looks dead.  Getting a few flowers from the red bird, and some wildflowers which I had seeded for last fall.  Put in a flat of gazanias last year; most of them died, but I have a few blooms now (center.)  My Lady Banksia rose has not bloomed this year.  Guess I have to fertilize.  Have a half-dozen volunteer texas rangers in the back yard.  Anyone want one?

It rained here Friday.  Yesterday the radio program that I was listening to at lunch was interrupted by loud beeping and then an announcement of a storm alert, with winds over 60mph.  People are asked to remain indoors.  Must have hit the Foothills; only got about 12 drops of rain and a lovely breeze here.  But the ground is still damp from Friday.

This is the season of two-shower days.  With the high humidity, I am soaked working in the garden.  I have to wear a headband to keep the salty sweat from dripping into my eyes.  I wear latex nurses’ gloves under my gardening gloves to keep my hands moist.  The fingers of them fill with water.  You can’t even sit on the furniture until you’ve taken a shower for lunch.  Then, of course, another shower for dinner.  A friend of mine who grew up in Tucson had summer slipcovers for all of the living room furniture, a gentile way to keep sweat stains from the upholstery on their ranch.

Centipede v. Millipede

Just as I had answered the phone this evening I saw what I thought was a very fast millipede zip across my carpet to the chair in my bedroom.  I figured that I would collect it and toss it back outside after my conversation.   The cat also saw it and played with it a bit.  When I went to look for it, it had disappeared.  I looked it up on the Web to verify that it was harmless.

Sometimes confused with centipedes, which are flat in cross-section, predacious, and fast moving, millipedes are blocky or round in cross-section, detritus feeders and slow moving.

Oops.  The insect was fast, hence a centipede.   Guess I couldn’t see all of the legs on the carpet.

Millipedes will not harm humans or anything in the home.  [However,] some species of centipede can be hazardous to humans because of their bite.  Although a bite to an adult human is usually very painful and may cause severe swelling, chills, fever, and weakness, it is unlikely to be fatal.

Great.  I’ve had a kissing bug (to which I am allergic) and a scorpion (whose sting was very painful, like someone had slugged my knee with a lead pipe) in my bed years ago (on separate occasions!)  Hope I don’t have to add a centipede to the list.

Coyote

This morning the cat was at attention but not mewing as she does when a bird is in the birdbath.  Sure enough, a very large coyote was nosing around the fence.  But it didn’t stay for a photo op, disappearing into the dense underbrush.

Finches

I finally put more nyjer thistle seed out for the finches.  The rosy finches had stuck around but now the tiny goldfinches are back.

Watershed Management

My cousin’s daughter is crashing with me for a week while she takes a session for Water Harvesting Certification through the Watershed Management Group:  http://watershedmg.org/.

She brought goat’s milk and two dozen eggs from their chickens.  (You can see my grandkids with Laura’s animals in Phoenix in my blog https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/goats-and-chicks/.)

Her husband drove down Saturday evening for their fundraiser, the Second Annual Local Foods Iron Chef, celebrating local foods and Tucson’s culinary creativity.  Six chef teams prepared gourmet dishes featuring local ingredients from partnering local farms and markets — including a special secret ingredient that was revealed to teams the week before the event.  Those who attended sampled each dish – and voted on their favorite to crown the winner of 2012 Local Foods Iron Chef – and quaffed a selection of locally crafted beer and Arizona wine.  In the spirit of Cinco de Mayo, the food and live entertainment (the local band Hey Buckos) had a Mexican flair.

Laura had opened a garage door for her husband that evening, but after parking he went to the front door and rang the bell.  When she opened that door she saw the javelina herd – thirteen, by my neighbor’s count – flowing down the driveway from the front yard, and one curious one going into the garage.  I was not home at that time and she didn’t want to report to me that there were javelinas in the garage, so she frantically shooed it out.

I had hoped to have Laura’s husband cut a large limb off one of my palo verdes, but he had gotten stung by a scorpion on his right hand the previous day, and wasn’t up for sawing.  However, when Laura returned after a short day (ended at three on Sunday), she said she’d do it.

(I’m cutting back limbs that are brushing the house, so that they don’t crash into what is fairly insubstantial stucco during a storm.)  Couldn’t let all of those palo verde blossoms go to waste, however, so made arrangement in three of my largest vases.

One of the women in Laura’s class, hearing that she was staying on the west side of town, asked if she’d seen any bobcats.  No…  Then on her way back through Starr Pass this evening a bobcat crossed the road in front of her, as if for a command performance.

Diluted

Saturday evening went to the Tucson Chamber Artists Christmas Around the World at St Phils of the Hills.  (The last concert was Jewish Music Comes Alive at Temple Emanu-El.)  A third of the carols were sing-along, and as my dreadful singing voice was diluted by a few hundred in the audience and the professionals scattered down the aisles, I could sing.

Reminded me of my trip down the Grand Canyon on a raft.  Colorado means “red” in Spanish, and the river is colored from the red dirt of the area.  A thick red, so that if you stuck your arm in the frigid water, you couldn’t see your hand.  Anyway, that is the water we drank.  We also brushed our teeth in it, bathed in it (more like a sponge bath as the water out of Glen Canyon Dam is cold year round, about 52° – yes, Fahrenheit), and peed in it.  I asked how it was that we could then drink the water.  Our boatman said that the volume of water is so huge (normal water levels on the Canyon range from 10,000 to 40,000 cfs – that’s cubic feet per second) that the water is diluted.  Like my singing among hundreds of others.

A true desert

Sitting here at my desk about 15 javelinas walked across my driveway from the drainage ditch.  One baby and two other little ones.  Lost track of the count when I dashed for my camera, but missed them.  Then a roadrunner emerged from the hedge.  Not a good day for photos however, as it is still overcast.    Seems we got a lot of rain yesterday, but NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) says only 1/8” yesterday and ¼” today.  According to our weatherman, we have gotten 12.18″ for the year to date.  According to Wikipedia,

True deserts receive less than 10 in. of average annual precipitation, and semideserts or steppes receive between 10 in and 16 to 20 in… [But] measurement of rainfall alone cannot provide an accurate definition of what a desert is because being arid also depends on evaporation, which depends in part on temperature. For example, Phoenix receives less than 10 in. of precipitation per year, and is immediately recognized as being located in a desert due to its arid adapted plants.  Tucson receives about 12 in of rain per year, however about 100 in. of water could evaporate over the course of a year! 

To contrast, when I was in the Peace Corps in Jamaica on the north coast we got almost six feet a year!

5 Best Toys

My daughter sent me this web site:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/01/the-5-best-toys-of-all-time/all/1 which says that the 5 Best Toys of All Time are a Stick, a Box, String, a Cardboard Tube, and Dirt.  Click on the site, it’s hilarious, and is illustrated.
So I answered, “Can you imagine the look on Finn’s face when he unwraps a stick?  Or on Brie’s when she unwraps an empty box?”
And she replied, “I think you should totally wrap a good stick for Finley.  And maybe some paper towel rolls for Brie.”
So I have (along with other presents).  Will see how Christmas morning goes…

Rain

A couple of javelinas in the next-door yard today with their little one.  The baby was nursing half of the time, head hidden.  When it appeared, I didn’t want to get too close as Daddy’s hackles were up, so photo has a desert broom in front.  But then they exited along my fence, the baby running, so I got a few blurred photos.

The winds that caused widespread damage in southern California whipped through Arizona the other day, although no trees down or power outs here.  From today’s LA Times:

More than 200,000 California residents were without power early Friday and numerous school districts remained closed as crews worked to clean up broken windows, downed trees and scattered debris.

Clouds followed behind the winds, and we’ve had two days of overcast skies and drizzle, not so great for any tourists here, but we desert dwellers covet every drop.

My arugula is doing great since I discovered a rabbit easing through my wire fence with 2”x4” openings, eating last season’s veggies, and installed chicken wire around the garden.  Unfortunately, a frost is predicted for Monday night.  Believe I’ll lose my cilantro; not sure what else.  But my lettuce has already bolted.  Must remember to bring my coleus (pictured) inside.  The rosemary is blooming and buzzing with bees.

San Diego

I just spent a long weekend with friends in San Diego.  Unfortunately, I missed San Diego’s Craft Revolution from Post-War Modern to California Design at the Mingei International Museum.  My cousin’s friend, Mona Trunkfield, was one of the featured artists with her jewelry.  Here are the two in the show I most liked.  See the rest here: http://www.alliedcraftsmen.org/member_dtl.php?memID=62  I have a necklace and earrings that Mona made from paper mache years ago.

Tucson Sights

Have had newly retired cousins visiting from Texas this past week.  They asked that I “order up all the javelinas and other wildlife that you write about to appear”.  So their first morning a family of javelina was munching seeds under the mesquite tree. 

A few days later a young bobcat had been resting in the shade in front of my house when we pulled in.   They also got to see lots of rabbits and birds up close and personal. 

(But they had missed the young coyote that had been in the yard on Monday.)  

Biosphere 2

Sent them off to the Biosphere 2 (now administered by the University of Arizona) on Tuesday as I had to have my radiation treatment, but was sorry that I hadn’t joined them.  It’s probably been 20 years since I’d been there and I hadn’t heard the latest on why they ran out of oxygen, and why the ocean died.  This from the internet:

What Went Wrong?

As an attempt to create a balanced and self-sustaining replica of Earth’s ecosystems, Biosphere II was a miserable (and expensive) failure.  Numerous problems plagued the crew almost from the very beginning.  Of these, a mysterious loss of oxygen and widespread extinction were the most notable.

Catching Their Breath

Starting when the crew members were first sealed in, Biosphere II experienced a constant and puzzling decline in the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. It was initially hoped that the system was merely stabilizing itself, but as time passed it became increasingly clear the something was amiss. Not quite 18 months into the experiment, when oxygen levels dropped to the point where the crew could barely function, the outside managers decided to pump oxygen into the system so they could complete the full two years as planned.

Obviously, Biosphere II was not self-sustaining if outside oxygen had to be added in order for the crew to survive. The reasons behind this flaw in the project were not fully understood until some time later. As it turned out, the problem had more to do with carbon dioxide than with oxygen. Biosphere II’s soil, especially in the rain forest and savanna areas, is unusually rich in organic material. Microbes were metabolizing this material at an abnormally high rate, in the process of which they used up a lot of oxygen and produced a lot of carbon dioxide. The plants in Biosphere II should have been able to use this excess carbon dioxide to replace the oxygen through photosynthesis, except that another chemical reaction was also taking place.

A vast majority of Biosphere II was built out of concrete, which contains calcium hydroxide. Instead of being consumed by the plants to produce more oxygen, the excess carbon dioxide was reacting with calcium hydroxide in the concrete walls to form calcium carbonate and water.

Ca(OH)2 + CO2 –> CaCO3 + H2O

This hypothesis was confirmed when scientists tested the walls and found that they contained about ten times the amount of calcium carbonate on the inner surfaces as they did on the outer surfaces. All of the walls in Biosphere II are now coated with a protective layer, but oxygen levels continue to be somewhat problematic.

Walking a Tightrope

The designers of Biosphere II included a carefully chosen variety of plant, animal, and insect species. They anticipated that some species would not survive, but the eventual extinction rate was much higher than expected. Of the 25 small vertebrates with which the project began, only 6 did not die out by the mission’s end. Almost all of the insect species went extinct, including those which had been included for the purpose of pollinating plants. This caused its own problems, since the plants could no longer propagate themselves.

At the same time, some species absolutely thrived in this man-made environment. Crazy ants, cockroaches, and katydids ran rampant, while certain vines (like morning glories) threatened to choke out every other kind of plant. The crew members were forced to put vast amounts of energy into simply maintaining their food crops. Biosphere II could not sustain a balanced ecosystem, and therefore failed to fulfill its goals.

Other Problems

Biosphere II’s water systems became polluted with too many nutrients. The crew had to clean their water by running it over mats of algae, which they later dried and stored.  Also, as a symptom of further atmospheric imbalances, the level of dinitrogen oxide became dangerously high. At these levels, there was a risk of brain damage due to a reduction in the synthesis of vitamin B12.  And of course, there were inevitable disputes among the crew, as well as among those running the project from the outside.
http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/bio3/2000projects/carroll_d_walker_e/whatwentwrong.html

Desert Museum

The next day I changed my appointment to late afternoon and went to the Desert Museum with them.  Was disappointed to learn that the Ironwood Terrace Restaurant was closed for the summer and the raptor flights (see
https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/visitors/) don’t start until October.  Of course, tourism is cut back during our five months of summer.  (Actually, the Desert Museum noted that we have five seasons,  including two summers: spring, dry summer, monsoon summer, fall, winter.)  My best photo was this butterfly in the butterfly garden.

Titan II Missile Museum & Asarco Copper Museum Open Pit and Mill tours

Then, as my radiation treatments are in Green Valley, on Friday they took me and afterwards we did the sights there, the Titan II Missile Museum:

… the site of one of the Cold-War-Era Titan ballistic missiles that, for over twenty years, formed a ring around the Tucson basin. On your underground tour, you can see the immense 740-ton roll-back silo door, sit in a launch-control operator s seat at the control panel, and watch demonstrations of monitoring and countdown procedures. Outside, see the real rocket engines that powered these massive devices.
http://www.greenvalley123.com/attractions.html

and Asarco Copper Museum Open Pit and Mill tour:

neither of which I had seen before, and both of which were way more interesting than I had anticipated.

Wrapped up their visit with dinner at Primo, an excellent Italian restaurant at the JW Marriott Starr Pass Tucson Resort & Spa which is walking distance from my house.  Primo!