Roses and reverie

I'm sorry.

I just can't stop photographing SWMBO's roses.

The Dollmaker

We had a wonderful visit this afternoon from a very talented lady: The Princess.

Well, she's not really a princess but she does have an amazing talent. Mary Ellen Frank, living in Juneau, Alaska, has become a highly acclaimed dollmaker. She takes as her inspiration the Native Americans who live in her state. The doll's faces are carved from wood and animal fur is used to make the clothing.

By the way, that's the BRD holding one of Mary Ellen's creations and ME sits in the background.

This is another amazing creation by Mary Ellen.

She had just attended and demonstrated her art of making leather faces and hands at the annual conference of the National Institute of American Doll Artists in Las Vegas, Nevada.

She had come to Prescott to visit a mutual friend and took a few hours to visit us today.

It was a pleasure, Princess!

Rain, rain, rain

The monsoon hit our town today. This is taken from the front of our house at the height of the rainfall.

The pictures are larger and more effective if you click on them.


Heavy rain in a short time in the desert does not just soak into the earth.

Through the front gateway you can see our front yard flooding.

This is the drainage ditch in front of the house.

Too much water for the culverts under our driveway.

Our home is lucky. It sits up at street level. Our neighbor's house is lower and we worried that they might have water inside.

Additional run-off ran down one side of our house where it was blocked by leaf debris from exiting under our back fence.

The run-off was diverted alongside our back fence.

Until I got out there in the rain with a fork hoe and cleared the debris so the water could exit.

We love it when it rains here. SWMBO pretended to be worried but I loved it.

It was fun!

Oh, relax, willya?

Yes, my blog was blocked last night also. As were many others. But it was not . . . as some of my friends have written . . . a monstrous, evil plot against bloggers. It was just one of those damnable technical glitches that happen from time to time.

To make things worse, this morning my Internet Service Provider was defunct. So I couldn't receive e-mail, bring up the Internet(s), or even get the ISP offices on the telephone. Busy, busy, busy.

So I went to the grocery store and spent some money. When I returned, I had the Internet and e-mail again. The Internet was very slow all day but seems to be getting back to normal now.

BUT IT'S NOT A CONSPIRACY!!!

It's just technical stuff.

As I said on a comment to one of my blogger friends a few minutes ago, it is bizarre how dependent we have all become on something that didn't exist ten years ago.

So I say "relax". Read a book. Watch an old movie on t.v. Take a nap. (I think I did all three today.) It will all be o.k. eventually. And even more than eventually, pretty darned quickly.

Reminds me of when I lived in Mexico. When a storm would blow up, the power would go off. We learned to live with candles and quiet. And it took a lot longer down there to restore our "normal" life than it does up here in the U.S. of A.

Busting into Bloom

One of our hibiscus plants on the front patio got a taste of water the other day and it responded gratefully and exhuberantly this morning. Normally we get one to three blooms a day, if any. This morning, there were nine fresh blooms on the plant! (Not all visible here.)

On closer examination, the flowers have a strange other-worldly appearance. But I've loved hibiscus blossoms ever since I first saw them in Mazatlan, Mexico, many years ago.

Baseball . . . and family

Doug Davis is a pitcher for my Arizona Diamondbacks. Earlier this season, he was taken out of the lineup when it was discovered that he had thyroid cancer. After a relatively short period of treatment following successful surgery, he came back to the team. Tonight, he came close to pitching a perfect game. That's a game where no one from the other team ever reaches base, whether by a hit or a walk. Davis was perfect almost through the 7th inning. He had two outs and two strikes on a third batter when it came apart. But he eventually won the game after a miraculous catch in the deep outfield by a rookie, Alex Romero, on a hit that would have tied or won the game. A great night of baseball.

My brother turns 75 tomorrow. I talked to him on the telephone this evening. He says he doesn't think much about this milestone but I think he will spend some sleepless hours tonight. I think it's a pretty big landmark date to have reached. As I told him this evening, only 25 more and you get the big 100. He just chuckled.

A cousin of mine, who is the same advanced age as I am (68), has just learned the name of her true father. Neither her mother, the man who raised her as his daughter, nor her grandmother would ever tell her the man's name. Finally, the husband of a half-sister came to her and revealed the identity. She has now met the half-sister and learned of a now-deceased half-brother. She is very happy to finally learn the identity of her father and of her true family identity. I am happy for her. My brother is not. He thinks she should not have pursued it when she first heard of it. Needless to say, the rest of the family, from what I know, disagree with him. But what can I say. He's always been a strange man. He's my only sibling and I haven't seen him for 20 years. We have very, very little in common.

Strange . . . the patterns life has of working itself out.

Here kitty, kitty, kitty!

Ah the tide is changing.

Mike has a new cat!

Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!