Booking It

This week has been… yeah.

Our trip to Mt Lemmon was curtailed by a body which said, “Oh HELL no.” We compromised and did a run to Picacho Park, less than a 20-mile drive. Still had to go to Tucson to drop off one of the cameras for servicing, but didn’t do the long haul up the mountain.

For the record, this cliff is some 200-300 feet vertically:

The highest point is around 3,374 feet, around 1800 feet above the surrounding desert. (I had to look it up – our elevation here is just a sniffle over 1500 feet – and this is in our back yard.) While the hiking trails climb higher, you can drive maybe 2/3 of the height, and get a view of the flat area toward the I-10:

Incidentally, the mountains on the other side of the highway are where we went the previous couple of weeks, also considered part of the Picacho range.

Compared to the Picacho park, Mt Lemmon is a MONSTER. Its highest elevation is 9,171 feet. The elevation of Tucson, at its base, is 2,389 feet. The difference approaches 7000 vertical feet – over a mile. That translates to a 3-hour drive from Tucson to the top of the mountain. Would’ve been beautiful – but I simply couldn’t do the drive. Thankfully G and I were on the same page about it. We both enjoy the heck out of photography, and we both contend with mobility issues. I won’t say it’s easy for either of us, but it means we’re mighty patient with each other toward our limitations.

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I won a nice fat Amazon gift card from work this week (I think it’s the third one this year.) I knew G wanted an upgraded tripod with a ball-head camera plate. The ball-head arrived today and we confirmed it works with his L-bracket. The tripod legs should come in Monday.

Any bonuses/wins from work, I usually share. As I tell G, I couldn’t work the hours I work now if he didn’t do the things at the house I can’t do. Same goes for Christmas bonus. Half always gets handed to him. He’s never asked or expected. It’s just my view on the situation. We’re a team. Yes, I spoil him rotten in a lot of ways. He’s worth it.

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I did take two vacation days. One of them was the trip to Picacho and Tucson (Tucson is only about 45 minutes from here, not counting the stop at Picacho.) The other “vacation” day, I spent setting up notebooks and templates. The notebooks from my last entry are both live. I have four more ready to fly, just waiting for the proofs to come in, plus a fifth one started. Click to embiggen and use the back button to return.

The fire one is only a cover so far, but all four of the others should be going live within a few more days, give or take. Might take a bit longer for the “Spelling” book because I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to do some major tweaks to that cover.

Each cover averages an hour or two to put together, sometimes less. The actual interior is FAST – except the quotes. Probably the most time-intensive part of these is dreaming up a dozen on-theme one-liners (or two-liners) for each of these, then finding or creating little images to go with. The images need to be non-copyrighted or I have to own the copyright, because I don’t want to have to keep track of whether I’ve exceeded my licensing allotment. I created 99% of them, making custom Photoshop brushes from our photography. Still, we’ve gotten SIX of thes things done in under two weeks, including the initial creation of all my templates.

For the record, this is one of the liners in the Fairy Tales I Tell Myself notebook:

Yeah, all the quips there are exactly what the title suggests: the promises we make ourselves, knowing full well it ain’t gonna happen. Some of the images are simple, like this one – others are more complex.

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For those of you who aren’t desert rats, the photo all the way at the top of the page is a closeup of a cholla cactus, also known as a “jumping cactus”. They don’t actually jump – but see all the tiny spines on that thing? The problem is the spines so ultra-fine you can’t see them. And they’re barbed, like tiny fish hooks. The desert isn’t for wussies.

This is what the chollas look like from a few feet back:

We took a few more shots while we were out, though not too many. This archway was in front of a rundown house. Archway is pretty – the house behind it is a blight.

I finally managed to grab a couple of shots of longhorn cattle.

Each horn on that big boy is at least 6-7 feet long. These are some big beasties.

This water tower nestles right up against railroad tracks, miles from anything. While we stopped to snap some pictures. a train flew by. I didn’t get any photos but G happily did.

This closeup of a palo verde tree shows its color and a little of its texture. Palo Verde is Spanish for “green wood”. (Can’t imagine where that came from, can you?) The leaves on this are so tiny it almost looks bare, but this is about as lush as it gets. They’re the only tree I know of that performs bark-based photosynthesis. They can live to be 400 years old, rarely getting more than 20-25 feet tall.

One last saguaro, for good measure. Sadly the saguaros are dying off. The hillsides used to be covered with them. The temperatures this summer have been about average, with highs around 115°-116°F. What’s different is we’ve barely had a rainy season for over a decade now. We’re getting the occasional sprinkle, some thunder and lightning… but no real rain. We used to get gully-washers every afternoon from the 4th of July until sometime in August, or later. I don’t recall the last time I saw it really come down here. Definitely not this year.

It’s another reason we’re hoping to move out of Arizona as soon as possible. The water situation is on the cusp of a catastrophic failure and when it fails… it’s gonna be ugly.