Some desert flowers… and a sunset…

Posted on March 17, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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Okay, we are back to that little adventure I took last weekend to visit my daughter in Arizona… and to that park I was taking a walk in while she recuperated from our trip to the renaissance fair…

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The sun was going down as I walked around that little park. This was my only full day there, so of course I tried to do as many things as I could, so I would have pictures to share.

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When the flowers are blooming in Arizona… especially when it isn’t too hot to even go outside… it really can be a magical place.

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And I am glad I found some blooming flowers that weren’t yellow…

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Okay, I know I have shown you pictures of this from other desert adventures, but the inside of those huge saguaro cacti are not what you might expect… They aren’t like watermelons, with a hard rind and a soft, juicy interior. They have a skeletal structure that is sort of like long, wooden struts, that keep the cactus rigid like the frame of a dirigible. That, up there, is the skeleton of a saguaro cactus.

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And that saguaro is doing a fairly reasonable impersonation of Mickey Mouse.

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I love the color purple… and I love plants that have color even when they are not bearing flowers.

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So, I stopped one more time on the way back to Jessica’s house, to get photos of the sunset.

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This wasn’t the most incredible sunset ever… sometimes, the sunsets in the desert are crazy cool…

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But I walked out on a pedestrian overpass to take these pictures anyway…

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Because I share my whole life with you… because I love you, man!

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Mocking the mocking bird… (or): Making a mockery of mockery…

Posted on March 17, 2016 by pouringmyartout

I have developed a strange… even for me… habit. Every morning, there are mocking birds in the backyard. They all seem to be engaging in a contest to see who has the best whistles and sounds. Now, for those of you who do not have these fascinating birds where you live…

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… let me tell you about them. They, like most birds, use sound to communicate. They carry it a little farther than most birds, because, like a few species, they can mimic sounds, and this is where they get their name. No, they can’t actually mimic human voices like some birds, but they can imitate hawk calls and even car alarms.

Well, every morning, there they are, trying to outdo one another, and one day, I thought it would be fun to join in. Now, I do it every day. I whistle parts of classical music and operas, or TV theme songs, or bits of rock music. I am still waiting for the day when one of them copies me.

The thing is… and I feel bad about this thing… but I might have a propensity for mockery. I did that post earlier this week where my daughter and I were mocking cacti in the Arizona desert. But I don’t view my morning ritual as mockery… because mocking a mocking bird would, indeed, be making a mockery of mockery. I like to think of it as adding to their repertoire.

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I saw another rattlesnake…

Posted on March 16, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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As some of you who have been here for a while might remember, I have something of a history with rattlesnakes… One came in the front door of our house a few years ago, and I caught it and gave it to animal control… still alive… which was freekin’ scary. Then, there was the time we were visiting my daughter, Jessica, and were walking in the desert and Mollie, my other daughter, and I almost stepped on one. There are other stories, but I will leave that for now.

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Well, there I was, last weekend, once again visiting Jessica in Arizona, and, after our renaissance fair adventure, she took a nap, so I went to a park near her house that I hadn’t gotten around to visiting on any of our trips there.

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Even a fake rattlesnake is scary… especially if it is made of cement and metal and is like 50 feet long.

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This park was sort of awesome… it had lots of art, like these metal sculptures…

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I loved the bat and flowers one.

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And the hummingbird and flowers one was nice…

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And so was the butterfly and flowers one…

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There were also some metal lizards scattered around…

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I suppose that is a horn toad… (also known as a horny toad)…which is a spikey lizard…

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There were two of those, and they looked like little dinosaurs…

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Which, when you think about it, is kind of what lizards actually are.

Once again, I am, for a change, posting the photos of this adventure in order, rather than building to a climax or grouping things in weird ways… so later we are going to see some flowers and the sunset, because that is what I saw next… see ya later, I hope.

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The braidey bunch…

Posted on March 16, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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My daughter, Jessica, decided that the way to get in the mood for the renaissance fair was to get her hair braided…

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Because… you know… wearing a cloak and walking around with a guy dressed as a monk wasn’t enough…

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You gotta do what you gotta do…

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It was quite a process…

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It did turn out to be pretty cool…

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There are real flowers in her hair… and if you look really close, you can see the cyborg/hearing implant that is drilled into her skull. She lost the hearing bones in one ear when she was little, due to repeated ear infections and surgeries. Now she is a freekin’ Borg!

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While she was having her hair done, I wandered off…

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I may have had a few beers…

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Which may explain why Jessica was later able to take these photos of me, engaged in a religious argument… (involving, as I recall, the moral inconstancies inherent in a monk carrying a sword)… with a stump.

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We even saw a wedding party walking by… a real-life wedding party… because these people got dressed up to get married old-school style.

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So, that’s about it for our adventure at the ren fair…

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It really was a fun thing to do together… and yes, I do see that I look like a young emperor Palpatine in that picture…

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I really wish I had tried the axe throwing, but we had had a long day…

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I mean, I was really only there for one full day… and a couple of half-days… but we did a lot. I hope you join me for the rest of the story of my weekend adventure later.

 

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I really did become a monk… for a day… part 2…

Posted on March 15, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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So, yeah, my daughter and I had a great time at the Renaissance Fair outside Scottsdale, Arizona when I went to visit her… because she supposedly wasn’t ‘feeling well’…

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I think maybe my praying made her better… that’s my story and I’m sticking to it… It was sort of fun being a monk for a day. I ran around holding my cross out and yelling “PESTILENCE!!!” I may even have blessed a few people… but I don’t know how much weight that carries…

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I toyed with the idea of buying some armor and a sword, and reverting to my usual role as a sword-wielding soldier of fortune… but that stuff is expensive.

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It was really cool to spend some quality time with Jess… and worth the long drive… the really long drive…

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Also, even if you don’t have your own cloak like I do, you should rent or borrow one and wear it for a day… cloaks are cool… wear it to work… with the hood up… that ought to make people curious…

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They even had what might be the world’s biggest rocking horse… that rocks… (Ha! See what I did there?)…

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Yeah, go to a Ren Fair, if you haven’t yet.

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Immerse yourself in history…

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Let yourself get sucked into the past.

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Okay, people, once again, pirates who dressed like extras in the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies did not exist during the renaissance period… although… for some reason… this didn’t bother me too much, anachronism or not.

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I really did become a monk… for a day… part 1…

Posted on March 15, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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That is because my daughter surprised me by telling me we were going to the Renaissance Fair! If she had told me ahead of time, I could have brought my own cloak… (yes, I have a cloak, with a hood, black, with a red lining… what… don’t judge me… I mostly only wear it on Halloween now… mostly)… And, I could have brought my own sword… (what, you don’t have a sword either???)…

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But, since she didn’t tell me in advance, we decided to rent costumes… oh, yeah!

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Now the thing is… and this is a thing you might as well know about me… back in the day, I used to go to the Ren Fair… (as the cool kids call it)… but I was always a soldier, a mercenary, somebody who carried a sword. It is weird, but it feels natural to me… like maybe I carried a sword in past lives… just sayin’…

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Okay… seriously, people… pirates are an historical anomaly in the Renaissance period…

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This was actually a much bigger Ren Fair than the ones back in the Bay Area when I was young.

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They had permanent buildings, for one thing. They even had a full-sized jousting field with bleachers and pennants and real horses… which I couldn’t go see because Jessica is allergic to horses… and hay… and grass… and stuff…

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Man, we had a great time… I have like 3 or 4 posts worth of pictures of this coming up, just so you know.

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It was an awesome daddy/daughter day! And it was a real surprise for me. Jessica had never even been to one before.

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But seriously… people… take a freekin’ history class…

 

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What the heck is that?

Posted on March 15, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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On the way back to my daughter’s house, we stopped to get some food… I seriously suggest you try a calzone filled with spaghetti, meat balls, and a white cream vodka sauce, by the way… and while I was outside pacing the stiffness out of my legs from my long drive through the desert, I spotted something way up in the top of that decretive planter with a metal plant in it…

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At first, I thought it was a cat…

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But it wasn’t…

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It was a big old owl… I should have put my big zoom lens on the camera, but I’m lazy…

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A nice old lady walking by said this owl comes here to nest every year. I wish I had gotten some pictures of the babies.

Dang it… I just remembered that I was going to call this post: Who are you, who who, who who…

Also, on the way through the desert in my car, I spotted a red tailed hawk carrying a snake in its talons… how cool is that? I wish I had gotten a picture.

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Mockin’ the cacti…

Posted on March 14, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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Yes, in Arizona, cacti mocking is a thing…

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You know, like cow tipping is a thing… somewhere…

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No… it isn’t really a thing… the thing is… (and I mean as in one of my patented blog ‘things’ that is)… that this is a thing only in so far as this is a thing that my daughter and I do when we walk in the desert in Arizona…

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Because, believe me, cacti do not like to be mocked…

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And you do not want a bunch of angry saguaro cacti chasing you around the desert…

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Okay, they can’t really chase you… unless you are on peyote… but they have ways of expressing their displeasure…

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Jessica is particularly good at cacti mocking…

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But she does it quickly, and then leaves the area…

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But, as you can plainly see from the expression on that cacti’s face, they were not amused.

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Next, you will be telling me the tooth fairy isn’t real…

Posted on March 14, 2016 by pouringmyartout

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So yeah, Jessica and I went for a walk in the desert after I got to Scottsdale… just so you know, that isn’t a place where they wash lost dogs… a wash, in Arizona, is one of those dry river beds where you can be killed by flash floods, and this one just has a cool name.

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Yes, I know, you can get sick of looking at pictures of the desert pretty quickly… but look at all the pretty yellow flowers…

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Jessica thought it would be fun if we did one of those ‘jumping-in-the-air-and-clicking-your-heels-together’ pictures…

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And it was fun… for me… because I kept getting the timing wrong…

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But we did manage it… after I made her hop around like a frog on a hot skillet for a while… HA!

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I did find one cactus with some awesome purple flowers…

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And some tiny little red flowers…

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But mostly…

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… it was the yellow ones.

Okay, I swear, these are the last pictures of the desert.

(Not really, it’s freekin’ Arizona, all there is is desert… but I swear, we are getting to the cool stuff soon.)

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Well, I been through the desert in a car with no name…

Posted on March 14, 2016 by pouringmyartout

First off, let me just say that I hate that song… you are riding a horse through the desert… I think you have time to name your freekin’ horse… (Also, my car [which is only mine because my wife drives the new car] does have a name, it’s Honda… Technically, it’s Honda CRV… I did come up with a clever nickname based on the letters ‘crv’… but my wife wouldn’t keep letting me refer to the car as ‘Cervix’)… (oh, and guess what I call those Toyota TRD trucks… ha!!!)…

So by now, you have probably figured out that I didn’t go away this weekend to become a monk and join a monastery… (even though, technically, I did become a monk for a few hours, so the joke is on you, but I, for a change am going to do the pictures of this adventure in order, so you have to wait for that part)…

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I drove 6 hours… each way… to go visit Jessica in Scottsdale, Arizona, because her fiancé was out  of town, and she wasn’t feeling well… and that is what dad’s do… even when their kid is now 26… (Oh, and Mollie is turning 17, dang it)… So I saw a lot of desert… where the tumbleweeds grow…

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And I saw some desert where almost nothing grows… and that means you can dang well spend a few seconds looking at desert too…

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The desert was much more yellow than usual. That is because all the wildflowers were blooming… at least the yellow ones…

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Also, it turns out that those ‘black helicopters’ that conspiracy nuts always talk about actually do exist.

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When I got to her house on Friday afternoon, we decided to go for a walk in the desert… because I hadn’t seen enough freekin’ desert yet…

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That let me get some good close-ups of the yellow flowers…

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Even some of the rare desert trees had them…

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I hope you join me later for some more pictures of this particular walk… and see some other flowers… and Jessica mocking some cacti…

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Dude… no photobombing… we talked about this…

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