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.

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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.