DARKLY CURIOUS

Just to take some of the mystery out of it, I adjusted the photo and got this.

The Master of Darkness

  

My best pal

  Blackwell

BABY COLORS

As seen in a couple of random sky shots from the other night.

I'M NOT ITALIAN BUT . . .

If you want to get my attention, just fill a saute pan with some Italian sausage, peppers and onions.

Once the heat has gotten to them, shake on a little freshly ground pepper.

Gently saute them until the onions are translucent and the peppers are glistening.

Dish it up on a plate with a little pasta and some red sauce and a nice glass of red wine alongside.

And I'm in heaven.

How about you?

TO THE SKY, CAPTAIN

When I was a kid, many many many many years ago, I loved to climb trees.  I had one favorite one which was easy to climb and had several spots where a young boy could lean back and rest among the leaves, spying on others walking by down on the ground without being detected.  I called it "The Big Tree" and it was my private, special playground.  I was reminded of it recently when I was watching a television program about the popularity of tree houses.  They have become luxury items for some people. One of them had twin beds, electricity, a bathroom, a completely functioning kitchen and a fireplace.  Imagine that!  A fireplace in a tree house!  Amazing.

One of my other favorite trees sat only about 20 feet from the front door of my home and I used a rope swing in it to sit and read.  

Later on I got interested in short wave and ham radio.  That meant stringing wire aerials so I spent a lot of time on roofs.  That became a sort of hobby for me, much to the dismay of my wife.  But she knew about it before she married me.  She took this picture of me in our "courting days."

There's something special about being up high and looking down that appeals to me.  Still I remember once I was hired to help a man paint our church.  But when I  got up to the scaffold, only about ten feet from the ground I was scared to death and couldn't do it.

Another memory comes of a time when SWMBO and I had been out with a couple of friends and we probably had too much to drink.  There was a lightning storm flaring in the sky to the south of us so I immediately climbed up on the roof to get a better view.  The other three refused to join me and kept telling me to come down.  But I didn't until I felt the need for a cigarette (this was in my smoking days) and no one would toss one up to me.

I've never fallen from a tree or a roof, never hurt myself but I'm afraid my climbing days are over.  There is a tree in our back yard that I have eyed a couple of times but it doesn't look like a good "climber".

If I could even get up to those cross branches I'm afraid they're too fragile and would break off, tossing me to the ground.  At my age that would not be pleasant.

Recently we hired a yard man and he asked me if I wanted the palm tree in the yard trimmed.  It had been awhile and there were a lot of dead fronds high up in the air.  At first I declined but he seemed to want to do it.  I asked him if he had a way to get up there and he said he did so I told him to go ahead.  Later I saw that he had strapped some kind of barbs around his ankles, tossed a loop of rope around the tree and up he had gone.  I wish I'd taken a photo but I didn't think of it at the time.  I just watched him, with a bit of nervousness, as he worked high up in the palm tree.

I also kind of envied him.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES

This is something I love about living in Phoenix.  I woke this morning to skies that looked like this.

Yesterday at this time (10:30 a.m.) it was already 99 degrees outside. Today it's 79 and there are a few light sprinkles falling.  It feels wonderful after days and days of dryness and temperatures above 100.

The backyard flowers even seem to be smiling at the change in the weather.  Not that it will last.  A day or two from now the forecast calls for a high of 106 again.

I'm sure the guys loading this truck are happy about the change in temperature.  One of my neighbors, Jake Harrington, is loading up for a move to Arkansas.  Jake has been the outstanding golf coach at South Mountain Community College for several years.  His team just repeated as the national champions and one of his players, Jake Argento, was the junior college player of the year.

(Yes, they're both named Jake.)

Coach Harrington just landed an NCAA job coaching golf at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock.  It's a big step for him but with his record I'm sure he'll do well.  I was talking to him last evening and he said he's lived in Phoenix since he was 3 and his wife since she was 12.  So they're leaving a lot behind.

- - - - - - - -

I'm still living in the glow of the concert we attended Sunday night by Madeleine Peyroux.  But we've got another great night to look forward to - a concert by Lyle Lovett and His Large Band in a little over a week.  He's long been a favorite of ours and I'm overjoyed that we'll finally get to see him in person.  Stand by for my review.

MADELEINE PEYROUX

She has been referred to as the 90's Billy Holiday.  This 39 year old jazz singer and Parisian busker performed at the Musical Instrument Museum last night and SWMBO and I were lucky enough to have tickets to her show.

Peyroux was born in Athens, Georgia but soon moved to Hollywood, New York and, at the age of 13, Paris.  A couple of years later she was singing on the streets of the Latin Quarter and passing the hat.  A year later she was singing jazz standards and touring Europe as part of The Wandering Blues and Jazz Band.

She is an accomplished singer, songwriter and guitarist.  At last night's performance she was backed by 8 musicians, three of them on loan from the Phoenix Philharmonic Orchestra.  With the strings for romantic songs and her piano-bass-drums-guitar backing for jazz, country and gentle rock-and-roll numbers it was a stellar concert.

She started off with covers of several songs by Ray Charles and moved on to some of her own as well as others by Serge Gainsbourg, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman and Warren Zevon.  All in all it was wonderful.

Peyroux sings equally well in French and English and boasts a fine vocal range.  If you get a chance to see and hear her, don't pass it up.

FUTURE CROP

I showed you our lemon tree before on this blog.  Here's the new crop.

I wonder what a green lemon would taste like.  Never fear, I'm going to leave that discovery to my imagination.

Right next to the lemon tree, an orange tree is bearing fruit.

I'm not sure when the fruit will ripen although that one orange on the right appears to be starting to change color.  I can wait.

SUMMER BLOOMS

Bougainvillea

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Who is that invader in my yard?

Can't see him, you say?  Look closer

Freezing in position does NOT make you invisible, bunny.  Within seconds of this he took off and went scampering away, faster than light.  

He's one of many who live in this golf course community.  Within a few weeks he will have tripled in size, mainly in his ears and rear legs and he won't be nearly as cute as this.

STREET LAMP AND CLOUDY SKIES

Judy's post today gave me an idea for my blog today.  She's part of an international combine of bloggers who post a daily picture from each of their areas.  From time to time they are given a subject suggestion for the day.  Today it was street lamps.

Since there is such a lamp directly in front of my residence, I decided to follow along and take a photograph of it.  But when I went out, I noticed the monsoon-cloudy-skies so I got two subjects for the price of one.  And two photographs.

The clouds in that second photograph really seem to be telegraphing some rain showers, don't they?  (He said with his fingers firmly crossed!)

CHECKING THE STATS

This post, I frankly admit, was prompted by this post today by The Chubby Chatterbox.  Go ahead, click the link, read his post, then come back for the rest of mine.

I discovered that I began this blogging adventure on Halloween in 2008 with this post.  Fortunately that scary pirate did NOT succeed in becoming president.

This, I learned by checking my stats, is my 1,418th blog post.  But there were more, now lost to history.  I had blogged before, grew disenchanted and dumped all I had written.  They may be recoverable somewhere but right now I don't have the patience to search for them.  I find it amazing that I have written 1,417 posts prior to this.  What on earth can a person find to babble on about that much?  Of course, some posts contain only a video or a cartoon but most of them have some words flowing like a muddy river from my brain and fingertips.

As for this mutation of my blog, I discovered today that it has had 81,646 page views.  More than 50,000 of them came from readers in the United States.  Next was Germany followed by Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, Australia and the Ukraine. Since I write only sparingly (a few words at a time) in other languages I must assume that those readers are English speakers.  (Given, of course, the old saw about the U.S. and the U.K. being two countries separated by a common language.)

Well, now, what interests these people, I wondered.  I learned that my most popular post was one called simply "LBJ", about the late President Lyndon Johnson, in June of last year.  It was a fairly short post with nothing really pithy in it but to date it has had 325 page views.  The second-most popular was titled "JACKIE", and I can suspect that many of the viewers of it may have been drawn thinking it was about Jacqueline Kennedy, given my occasional penchant for political punditry.  (The three P's.)  But in fact it was about Jackie Robinson and was not political at all.

So perhaps some people come by mistake.  Some stay, some leave never to return.  While I was researching this post I noticed several names in the comments section that have disappeared.  I've lost track of many of them. One, the legendary Granny J, passed from our midst in May of 2010, leaving a great hole in this world of blogdom, or bloggery, or whatever.

Of so many others I guess their disappearances are just the way of the Internet.  Some have gone on to other universes . . Twitter, Facebook, et al.  Somehow I miss them all.

A STORY ABOUT FORTITUDE

The BRD is making a change in her life.  For 30-some years she has been making dental crowns of porcelain and gold and palladium.  Like her mother she has an artist's talent and designing new "mouthworks" for dentists was a perfect career for her.  But she has grown tired of the work and the industry has changed and she was ready for the second stage of her working life.

Her Beau Jack is a realtor of some 40 years standing and he convinced her to study for and test for her real estate license.  Not to sell homes, though that is something she could do, but to handle the endless paperwork that other realtors hate to do.  After some persuasion, she agreed to give it a try.

So she signed up for a series of classes that were conducted over 90 hours of long and intensive three-day weekends for several weeks.  After the first day she was despairing a bit.  The room was too small for all the students, the breaks were minimal and short, the bathrooms were too few and didn't always work.  But she continued on.  At the end of the grueling schedule came a test.  She aced it.

But that was only the beginning.  Now she had to take the state sanctioned tests to gain her license.  They are divided into one test for national rules and regulations and one for the Arizona state equivalent.  She studied and studied the massive amounts of paper she had already studied during the course.

Finally came the day for the tests.  She felt confident and, indeed, passed the national test with flying colors.  But not the state exam.  Her tester told her he had never had someone come as close without passing.  He said she was one percent below passing.  ONE PERCENT!

She came to our house that night.  (The test was conducted in Phoenix.) While disappointed, she was still confident.  She studied some more that night and again the next morning.  Then she went off confidently to take the state exam again.

When the phone call came, she told us she had failed once again, missing one more question than she had the first time.

But she said she would come back in two days, after more study, and try again.

This time Beau Jack came with her.  But he was not allowed to stay in the classroom or even the building.  He had to wait outside in a courtyard while she took the test.

Some time later, the BRD came out with a disappointed face.  She told Beau Jack "That's it.  I'm through.  I am never going to take that damned test again."

Beau Jack was consoling and saying "Now, now, don't say that.  You'll just have to study harder and put your mind in the right place.  You'll pass it next time."

She responded, "No, I'm never going to do that again."  Then she grinned and shouted at him "BECAUSE I PASSED IT!"

I would imagine there was laughter, a hug and probably a kiss and then Beau Jack said "wait a minute."  He went to the back of his car and came back with a chilled bottle of champagne and a stuffed teddy bear wearing a realtor's jacket.

She said "What would you have done with this if I hadn't passed?"

Beau Jack said "Hell, I've been carrying it around with me for three weeks!"

More laughter, probably more hugs and kisses, and on to a celebratory dinner before heading up the hill to home.

Congratulations, girl.  A job well done.

BLUE SKY, WHITE CLOUDS, WHAT MORE D'YA WANT?

The sky over Phoenix.  This afternoon.  Late.

DARCY & CHERYL

Darcy and Cheryl, our Canadian neighbors, are in town and came over for happy hour tonight.  They arrived bearing gifts.  For SWMBO . . .

That brought a smile to her face (and lips).

For me . . .

. . . WOW!  An official cap.  Darcy is a fire captain with the Edmonton Fire Department.  And now I'm an honorary.  Well, I got the cap anyway.

BTW, you will notice the temperature on the device on my desk.  At 8:30 p.m.  95.5 degrees Fahrenheit!  It's still hot in Arizona.

And lastly but definitely not leastly . . .

. . . Cheryl's maple-bacon wrapped jalapeno poppers!

OH!

So good.

What's better than good neighbors?  I can't imagine.

BASEBALL FUN

Thanks to my friend, Steve, I went to a baseball game tonight at Chase Field and watched my beloved Diamondbacks beat the Chicago Cubs 3 to 1 to split a four game series with them.

This is my view of the field from what I kiddingly tell Steve are the "nosebleed seats" in the third deck.  But the view, nearly right behind home plate gives a good look at the stadium action.

Here are my seat-mates.  Steve on the right appropriately attired.  His friend Frank on the left is, for some unknown reason, wearing an Oakland A's cap.  (And it is not for the benefit of that other A's fan who reads this blog and comments on it from far-off Germany, even though his name, too, is Steve!  ☺)

As I arrived at the stadium tonight I encountered these two guys from the Legends race held at some time during each game.

They represent a couple of Diamondbacks legends, Mark Grace and Matt Williams.  They are joined by legends Luis Gonzales and Randy Johnson in the evening races.  It's part of the joke that of all of them, Matt Grace is the only one never to win a race.

All part of what happens at Chase Field on what President and CEO Derrick Hall refers to as "an entertainment stage."  There's nothing quite like an evening or an afternoon at the ball park.

KITTY UPDATE

It's been awhile since I've posted pictures of our family.  So here are a couple I took just the other day.

Muggles the magnificent, posing near a pot which SWMBO says sort of shares her colors.  I think she kind of disappears into the floor.

And the beautiful but bored Blackwell, perched on the back of the couch.  He seems somewhat suspicious of having his picture taken.

Say what you will about cats.  They are our friends, our children, our much loved family.

MEAT LOAF

Sure, that's the "singer" known as Meat Loaf.

But that's not the one I had in mind to write about today.

This is the one.

This is the before picture of SWMBO's meat loaf that she made yesterday.  Couple pounds of ground beef, a pound of breakfast sausage, 3 eggs, sauteed onions-leeks-carrots-celery, some bread crumbs, some Mrs. Dash, some Worchestershire sauce, some salt, and some Ketchup.  Mix it all up, shape it into a loaf, then (for Low and Slow's benefit) top it with bacon and finish with a sprinkling of smoked paprika.

Here's the finished picture.

The cook gets the heel.

And I get a healthy slice.

Oh, and there's some roasted potatoes and onions and peppers, too.

Pretty doggoned good!

AND THEN . . .

Finally . . .

A cell came over the mountain just south and moved directly over us at mid-morning today, dropping heavy and cooling rain for perhaps 10 minutes.  It was glorious.

PROMISES, PROMISES

We had clouds and lightning and wind and the temperature dropped to near 80 degrees and we got a few drops of rain.  But that was all.  Watching the weather radar, the storm moved in mightily from the east, then split and went south of us by a few blocks or miles or whatever.  But here was our promise before all that.

Pretty.  But like a flirtatious but fickle young lovely, ultimately disappointing.

SOME FUN

It may be in Italian but it has English subtitles. Auctioning off a one million euro Ming vase in 45 seconds.