Celestial Core Dump...

In my closet.

Seriously. It rained in my closet this afternoon.

The day before I head to a conference at the crack of doom.

Four days before I leave the Old Pueblo for over a month.

It freakin' rained in my closet.

But, I have to give a shout out to my leasing company; the rain ended for the day around five, and by six the roofer was here. He did a quick fix, and will be back in the morning to fix it for real.

Makes me awfully glad I've already arranged with a friend to check in on my place when it storms....

Celestial Core Dumps

After posting around the issue of water conservation yesterday, I think it's appropriate to acknowledge that last night we had our first desert storm of the season here in Tucson. The monsoon season hasn't "officially" started here in Tucson--because I believe you need to have three days in a row with the dew point at a certain level for that to be the case (and the local weather guys haven't gone all meteorological on us yet with those definitions, so I'm sure we haven't hit it yet. But hey, you have to give them what little weather reporting they get out here. How many times can you say "sunny and hot today" without getting bored???), but if you want to know more about the North American Monsoons (which are very different from the monsoons my friend the world traveller will be experiencing whilst in the Peace Corps in the Phillippines), you can check out this handy wikipedia entry. Oh, and I linked the above photo to the photographer's website, because he has some gorgeous pictures of last year's monsoon season on it.

Okay, so now that the weather lesson is over with...

I love desert thunderstorms. Last night's didn't feature a lot of rain, and had enough lightning in it that brush fires are an issue throughout Southern Arizona, which is always a concern, but it was soft and wild and beautiful. Desert thunderstorms always make me feel a little bit more alive.

You notice I qualify that--it's the desert ones that I love so. As I was telling my friend Dr. Wutang just a bit ago (she gave me her sister's term for monsoons, which I borrowed to title this entry), you mix a thunderstorm and large trees, and I still get a little squeamy.

When I was maybe six or so, and still living in the wilds of Maine, we used to spend a fair amount of our summers hanging out at my mom's cousin's camp on Ossippee Lake (the one in Waterboro, Maine--not the one in New Hampshire. And actually, "mom's cousin" is actually my grandfather's cousin--but I digress). The camp was called Cedarlog, and we'd swim there all the time. Cedarlog is one of the reasons I never went to summer camp as a kid--never had to, as all the necessities were right there.

Anyway, storms could come up pretty quickly in the afternoons, and we all had our duties when the wind picked up and the thunder started growling. We'd pull all the lawn chairs up to the house, secure everything--and then the whole gang would hang out on the screened in porch and watch the storm race over the lake. It was usually quite a fun event, and very multi-generational.

However, this one storm came up particularly swiftly, and as we all gathered on the porch to watch, my mother noticed a life jacket that had not been secured, and that was now floating in the water right next to the dock. New Englanders are known to be thrifty folk, and it just wouldn't be sensible (in my mother's view) to risk losing a lifejacket in the storm. So she popped off the porch, ran down to the waters edge and, leaning on a convenient century old pine tree, plucked the preserver out of the water.

The next moment, I have no image for--it is entirely a sound memory. The next moment, I heard to sharp sounds: one the slapping of the porch door as it closed behind my mother, and the other the sound of the clash lightning and wood. Nearly everyone on the porch was thrown to the ground. When we gathered ourselves off the floor, we had an entirely different view of the world: the pine tree that my mother had leaned on simply wasn't there anymore. There was a stump about three feet high--and that's pretty much it. Luckily, the debris had mostly headed for the water; if the lightning had hit in a way to make the tree fall landward, it most likely would've taken out the porch.

So give me a great lightning show over a vast expanse of sky, and I'm a happy girl. But stick me in a forest with that kind of thunderclap that you feel more than hear, and...well...be prepared for sightings of my inner six-year-old.

Okay, this one is long enough....Cheers.

Desert Flora

My little backyard is narrowest outside my bedroom window; it is maybe four feet from window to fence. On the other side of the fence is an alley; on the other side of the alley is a horticulturally-minded neighbor, who has planted a little garden along my fence. I believe it is part of the work of my neighborhood association--and I entirely support it.

Okay, I support it with a couple of caveats. First, the neighbor that tends this little garden likes to water in the morning. At about dawn, actually. And today, according to scientific calculations, the sun rose in Tucson at 5:19 am. Now, those of you that know me well, know that I'm a morning person--that I do, in fact, rise early. And that I rarely wake to any kind of alarm, except in the dead of winter when I'm getting up before the sun. However, being woken at 5:20 am or so by what sounds like a full-force spray hose hitting my fence is frankly, a little much.

Which leads to my second caveat. Um, hi. This is the desert. And yes, it's hot. But by golly, there are plenty of heat-tolerant plants that are indigenous to the area that don't require daily watering. (The state's Department of Water Resources has several useful publications on their web about low-water usage plantlife.) If I could be assured that my neighbor was using only reclaimed water to keep her plants alive, I probably wouldn't be so bothered by the water use. Yet...the desert ecosystem has been profoundly impacted by the introduction of non-native plants. And the allergens that are introduced--the very ones so many people sought to escape from other climes by relocating here--have profoundly impacted the people in the area.

Truthfully, my own backyard is pretty much a wasteland at the moment: when I moved in, it was pretty weedy...and it took me a while to get those cleared out. There's but a single globe mallow growing in the corner, and a couple of potted plants. In the fall, that will change--in part because I won't be traveling, but also because the growing season is pretty wacky here. But it's wacky in a way I can take advantage of: I plan on growing my own tomatoes this winter, and probably some peppers, too. And of course, I'll add some desert plants to the landscaping--most likely in large pots, so that they will be portable when I eventually buy a home, and so that I can do concentrated watering without excess use.

And really, there are some gorgeous flowering (and non-flowering!) desert plants. Ultimately, I think it's about embracing where you are.

A Walk in the Woods

Years ago, I guess around 1990, my brother's best friend thru-hiked the Appalachian Trial. Georgie to Maine--ostensibly, to decide where he was going to graduate school. He's a geologist now in Oregon, helping that state decide the most geologically sound places to put or expand roadways. Highway 101, which extends up the entire Pacific Coast, gives him fits--and rightly so in some places.

Of course, I'm pretty sure he had decided where he was going to grad school by the time he hit North Carolina--which meant he still had about three months of hiking ahead of him. But he is one of the hardy few, some would say the crazy few, who have hiked the entirety of the AT in one season. Heck, he trained for it, even. I remember my mother laughing when the intrepid hiker came to visit the family in Tucson, and would take off up the wash that ran behind mom's house with his pack on his back, loaded with the economy-size Tide laundry detergent to add a semblance of the necessary weight to his training.

The AT has been on my mind this week, in part because the wedding I went to in Maryland last weekend was fairly adjacent to where the trail snakes through that state--and because I swear the lovely lady GPS system (really, a very nice female British voice, calmly taking us to perilous parts unknown) had us driving on the trail to get to the morning-after brunch.

It sounds like exaggeration, doesn't it? But when the GPS has you traveling a road that becomes less road-like by the inch, until you are skidding over loose shale and rock and the way narrows so barely one car can pass, until the road climbs precipitously so that the driver has to maintain the perfect speed, else he'll either not have enough oomph to crest the peak or he'll lose control on the gravel and go careening over the edge, until the folks in the car following your lead call you to double check that we're on the correct route, and meet the assurance that the British lady has yet to say "recalculating" in her dulcet tones to gently acknowledge you've left the route any sensible driver would take with the phrase, "Okay, but you are aware we just passed a bathtub" that as entirely unassociated with the road...

The view, when we reached the height of this precarious road, was stellar. And when we finally saw a real, civilized road (with freshly painted double lines authoritatively stretching down the middle of the road), and embraced its smooth terrain, the first sign we saw said, in large white letters, "Appalachian Trail". And suddenly, the route we had taken made a great deal of sense.

I was still chuckling about the adventure on the way home, when I was stuck in the Houston airport, delayed by thunderstorms. I had finished my book en route, and had wandered fruitlessly through the fiction section of the airport bookstore. Trailing through the nonfiction, I saw a book that had long caught my eye, and finally decided this was the perfect opportunity to pick it up.



I'm most of the way through Bill Bryson's A Walk in The Woods, which is a very amusing blend of travel writing, memoir, and anthropological history of the Appalachian Trail. I laughed out loud at his description of reading about bear attacks before he left on his adventure, and several more times at the antics of his erstwhile hiking partner. But I've also learned a great deal about the AT, its keepers, and the environment that surrounds it. And I have a great deal more respect for my brother's best friend, and the journey he took from Georgia to Mt. Washington.

I have to confess, I lost my train of thought a bit in this post. In the middle of writing, my sister-in-law called, and we went for a walk. Walking along the Rillito River (which only runs when it rains heavily) is not at all like Bryson's description of walking the AT.

But sometimes, it just feels good to walk.

Summer Solstice

Summer is here....

Normally, that wouldn't mean much in the desert; normally, the heat has already settled in, and one hundred degree temperatures are already the norm, and Tucsonans gird their loins in preparation for another three months of heat.

But I think we've had a mild spring this year, and it's just been this week that the heat has reached that oppressive level wherein every movement is bound by a lethargy unmatched in winter months.

Somehow, I don't mind at the moment, and that's probably for two reasons. One, I just returned from a very mild weekend in the DC area, where I went to the wedding of dear friends. Two, I am headed to San Diego for a conference next weekend, where my biggest worry is how much of the conference I'll be willing to attend when the beach beckons.

But perhaps the biggest reason the heat hasn't soured my mood is that I know I'll be spending most of my summer away from it.

July 1, I hit the road, bound east for Hollis.

I have a lot to do between now and then, and what I thought seemed like a long time (an entire month!) away now seems unnervingly short. But I'm truly looking forward to both the journey and the destination.

And now, I have the journey back to Tucson to look forward to in an entirely different way. I had talked with my father a while back about road-tripping with me to Florida--my grandfather turns 90 (90!) at the beginning of August, and I thought it was a good excuse to get my dad traveling. He's never been a big traveller, and now that he has to do so without Barbara, my stepmother, I worry that he won't take advantage of visiting us out here in Tucson--especially in the winter months, when he has a tendency to get the blues anyway.

But on Father's Day, he surprised me. Not only has he decided that would be a good idea, but he thinks he should come all the way back to Tucson with me. My first reaction was, "well, that will completely change the nature of my trip!" And then, I realized what a great gift that would be. My father and I have had a chance to get closer in the last few years--while I was living in Maryland, I would get up to visit several times a year--and I count myself so lucky in the nature of our relationship. I know him as a father, and as a human being--foibles and all.

But to travel alone with him, across the country--what a gift! I haven't quite decided how I'll record the event, but I have a strong sense that it does need to be kept elsewhere beyond the vault of memory.

Don't be surprised if some of it shows up here.

But for now, I should get back to planning...

Oh, and the summer solstice? Also Dad's birthday. Happy birthday, dad....