pointy sharp spiny poky.

That's the Sonoran desert. Everything is pointy and sharp and prickly and painful. You do not want to trip and fall here...


Stuff is starting to bud out. I think this is a Palo Verde tree.

The teddy bear cholla. The warm and fuzzy cacti. Uh huh.

Prickly pear. Wanted. Dead or Alive.

Click this one to enlarge it. It looks really much better when you can see the detail. Click it. Now. I mean it. I'm waiting...

If I were a cow, I would not eat this grass.

Little baby pointy things.

Unforgiving environment.

See all that stuff? All of it wants to scratch and poke and stab and hurt you.

It's F.P.F.O.S. time again!!!

Kim (of frogpondsrock fame) liked the photo of rocks on Mount Lemmon. So Kim, these are for you!



Gratuitous shot of the desert around Tombstone. Yeah, that Tombstone, the one with the shoot out at the Okay Corral.

This shows the various environments you encounter driving into the Santa Catalina Mountains, from 3000 to 8500 feet. It's what I was talking about a couple posts ago, how you go from Sonoran Desert to Pine-Oak Woodland to Mixed Conifer Forest...

The rocks along part of the road are very cool. Great place to take pictures.

The drive up to Mount Lemmon is a great place to take photos. The first scenic overlook is a great place to take pictures at sunrise and sunset. Not that I have firsthand experience of sunrise there, or anywhere much, but sunset, it's good.

It's a little freaky, at times, because these rocks look verrrrry precariously balanced...

Mark.

Mark, are you surprised? I included a shot of me!

My mom is not a big fan of these kinds of roads...but she thought the views were worth it.

Walking the dogs, part two...

At the end of part one, I had just removed a chunk of cholla from Mojo's paw...

So we kept walking along the wash. For you poor unfortunates who have never been here: This is a wash. A big cement ditch, to control the water when it rains.

(They are not all cement, actually, some are dirt with scrub brush, and some they call rivers. They are delusional, because these are former rivers, and are now dry river beds. Well, dry 363 days a year, anyway. 364, in leap years.)

Most of the time they are bone dry. But during monsoon season, they can have fast running water in them, and can be dangerous. Last year a man fell into one and his body was carried 15 miles in 4 hours. Kids walk in them and jump their bikes on the slopes, but when it's raining anywhere around, the kids know to stay out of them. The coyotes like them, too. Sometimes when we walk the dogs after dark we see a coyote running along one. (They are necessary because our ground is so hard water doesn't soak in, and during the monsoons the rains are heavy but brief. The yards flood, the streets flood, all that water has to go somewhere. How hard is the ground? If you are planting several trees they recommend renting a jackhammer...)

Behind the kids is the middle school Thor went to for part of a year, until we pulled him out of there because they had really bad ideas, like giving kids detention because they didn't have a pencil or they forgot their homework. Seriously. I know. Crazy. That's why we pulled him out.

The sky, the clouds, the Rincon Mountains, the stupid middle school, some lights, and a couple stunty trees. All the trees here are stunty. That's what you get for living in the desert.


Thor's hair is getting very long. It's very thick and curly too. He is completely uninterested in getting it cut, and is wanting to learn how to braid it. I like it. I wish it was mine.

Tess in the school parking lot. This parking lot is where we taught Mojo how to be off the leash. Mojo is very well behaved, except when Abe goes tearing off or barks like a mad dog. Mojo rarely barked until we got Abe, and he never ran off down the street, until he felt he must follow Abe. Abe is not allowed off the leash when he's not fenced in, because he is not all that well behaved. He's kind of flighty and insane. And annoying and loud. Good thing we love him.

We took 177 photos on Sunday. I downloaded 148 into the computer. We finally got some of the dogs where they don't look like complete gits, or insane. Abe generally looks kinda psycho in photographs, according to my sister.

Git is a new favorite word. I have been watching BBC America quite a lot lately. Plus re-reading some of the Brit Chick Lit I bought in London...

If you look at Thor's body language here you can tell that he doesn't have a lot of control over the beasties...they are pretty much pulling him along. His flip flops are slapping the pavement pretty good. They were pulling extra hard because I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of them, taking photos. They don't like me to get too far away from them. It's a little annoying sometimes, and I have stepped on their heads, their tails, and stuck my foot into Mo's mouth repeatedly because they have to lay right at my feet. They make great foot warmers, something I am sure I will appreciate much more once we move to Alaska.

The Dog Whisperer would be so disappointed in us, because our dogs are always out in front of us, which is the dominant position. Something I really need to work on...

This is a mesquite tree. Those thorns are unpleasant. I know, because Abe dragged me under one just before he stepped on a snake and then got attacked by a pit bull. Abe and I sometimes have very adventurous walks.

This is a soccer ball in a mesquite tree. It has lots of those thorns. I think ithe ball is going to be there for a long time.

This is our street. We are almost home. You can see the rear end of my red Suburban down there. Unfortunately right about the time we got to the second basketball hoop, our neighbor's dog -- a mastiff type who is a little bigger than Mojo -- came busting out of their house and ran up to us.

(The neighbor's dog is really good looking -- I am a complete sucker for muscle breeds like mastiffs and boxers and pits, and this one is that cool dark grey color.)

Did you notice the part where I said "a little bigger than Mojo?" Mojo weighs 100 pounds. He is extremely well muscled, especially in the shoulders and jaw. This dog wasn't as heavily muscled, but he was big.

So of course Mojo and the neighbor dog had to get all bristly and "get out of my yard" and "get away from my pack." Things escalated, and suddenly Mojo had a grip on the other dog's jowl and didn't want to let go.

Today I was watching the Dog Whisperer (I love Cesar!) and he said yelling when dogs are fighting only makes things worse. Uh huh. Okay. Then what am I supposed to do? I am pulling backwards on Mojo and he isn't letting go of the other dog's jowl and we are all yelling and the dogs are growling and snapping and the neighbor came running and yelling. Mojo let go, and the other dog backed off. Mojo really does have strong jaws. I would not want him yanking on my jowls...

Mojo has a couple scrapes under his chin, and I assume the neighbor's dog has a couple scrapes or bites on his face too.

Stupid dogs.

Abe I think just stood there watching the fight. He's not much for fighting -- when he was attacked by the pit bull right after he stepped on the snake (which he had a very healthy respect for -- he didn't want anything to do with it. Surprise! He does have a brain sometimes), he didn't even realize at first the pit bull wasn't playing.

(None of us thought to take any photos, because of all the yelling and barking and growling and stuff...)

Then we went home and had sloppy joes.

walking the dogs part one

We took the dogs on a walk on Sunday afternoon. It was a lovely late afternoon, temperatures in the 70's. Mostly sunny skies with enough clouds to make it interesting. Great day for a walk. Turns out it was a very eventful walk...

It started like every walk does, with Abe spiraling out of control excitement over somebody touching a leash. Mojo is very hyper too, but he doesn't leap into the air and spin around . Abe is a couple feet tall, and I am 5'7", and when he is excited, he jumps up and looks me right in the eye. Mojo, on the other hand, doesn't bother with heights. He just shreds our kneecaps with this bizarre stiff-legged pawing at us. Moj's paws are like steel encased in sandpaper, so this is really quite unpleasant. See how exciting this walk is? And we haven't even made it out the door yet...

The clouds were really great -- I love living on a plain surrounded by mountains. There's always a cool shot...

We went down to the path along the wash. Before we got to the wash, while we were walking along the street, this kid looked over his backyard wall at us...Abe noticed him and went bananas. I frankly couldn't blame Abe, because it was very strange -- this kid didn't say anything, he just stared at us. All we could see of him was his head. Mojo didn't know what Abe was barking at, but he was all hyper because he must protect the Abe. Which causes problems. More of that later...

Mojo shaking...

We looped the dogs' leashes together...that way they absorb some of the pulling and give our poor shoulders a break. I was surprised that Abe was able to yank Mojo around. Usually Moj is the one pushing Abe around. I didn't think Abe would have been strong enough to pull Mojo away from an interesting bush.

These four photos show just how
impossible it is for my dogs to look noble and non-goofy for even a few seconds...I mean, look -- the first two photos, both of them look normal and you know, of above average dog intelligence. But then their real doofus personalities shine through.

Really you should enlarge this third one. Moj looks like an idiot.
He should be embarrassed.

Shortly after this demonstration of his true self, Mojo stepped on a chunk of cholla.

(apparently he did not check out my Weekly Winners and thus missed a very important lesson --never kick a cholla! (I would like you all to know that this is my mother-in-law's shoe. I have never had a large chunk of spiny plant stuck to me. Yet. The individual spines, sure, a bunch of them, but never a chunk like this. Yet.)
Note the large chunk of cholla in Mojo's paw, Mojo's noble suffering, and the way Abe's tail is curved up over the Moj's head.

Cholla spines are a bugger. They have barbs that make it really painful to pull out. And since Mo had stepped on big chunk of it, there were lots of spines in his paw. And because we thought Mo had learned his lesson about cacti spines, we stopped bothering with taking a leatherman tool along on walks, so I got to pull all those spines out of his paw, and then I got to pull some of them out of my hand. Can I get a Woot?

Okay. So that's part one of our adventurous walk. Part two has violence and humor, amazing skies, more spiny (but less personally painful) plants. So y'all come back now, ya hear?

What Happened on Wednesday?

Yesterday, which for the purposes of this being my What Happened on Wednesday post, must have been Wednesday -- okay, I just freaked myself out a little bit there, wondering if it really is Wednesday today. Yes, I freak a little bit easily. -- I took some photos of clouds and the mountains. The Rincon Mountains, I think.

This is not a great photo. There's too much going on -- the clouds, the power lines and poles, the road and street signs. The cars over to the left...It looks like a snapshot, with potential that was not realized...Then I used "sharpen" and "black and white" and "crop" on them until it looked like this...

and this...

Did I mention that I love crop and sharpen and b&w and glow and blur and saturation and contrast and shadows and fill light and....I love playing with my photo edit programs.

Later in the evening Tess and I were driving home, and I was being only slightly unsafe taking photos with the camera on the dashboard...I really like the floating headlights in this one -- you can't see the car at all, just the headlights.



Then Tess took over the camera and got these really fun shot of the Fry's grocery store shopping center near our house...it was a 1.6 second exposure taken from the back seat of a moving vehicle.



I really really really love my new camera. I haven't figured it all out yet, and I still can't get it to take the photo every time (last night it wouldn't take some photos because it couldn't focus -- that is a definite drawback to this camera, but now that I realize that is the problem I can work around it by using the manual focus option.) I think I have taken photos pretty much every day since I got the new camera, and I take it with me a lot of the time....but how many photos of the desert and mountains around Tucson are too many? Probably about 100 fewer than I have already taken...