The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Fun Visit
One problem with being a few weeks behind on my blog is I start to forget exactly when I did what. But recently – we’ll just call it recently – my friend Tracey from California came to visit.
One morning we went to the Tucson Desert Museum. My favorite is the raptor show.
This next one swooped right over our heads. People asked me if I felt his wings. I didn’t see him get closer than this because I instinctively closed my eyes and probably ducked too. He flew right at me!
Time for a selfie!
The restaurant was closed, but we were able to get something from the cafeteria and take advantage of the beautiful outdoor seating. How’s that for a restaurant table?
The natural museum is on the west side of town, so while we were out there, we also went to the Saguaro National Park West. We had a great hike.
This cactus seems to have something wrong with it, but it was also very pretty.
Then we went to see the petroglyphs. Not to be a skeptic, but I don’t know what keeps modern day visitors from scratching on these rocks too.
This had been a great day, but a long day; it was the biggest outing of the visit. We were gone the entire day. When we got home, we were tired!
As soon as we got home, I immediately sensed something was off. The first thing I noticed was that my luminarias were all blown over. (Yes, my Christmas luminarias were still up in the front yard on January 26! I had higher priorities than worrying about them.) But they were blown over as if a storm had gone through, which was just so strange, because it seemed to be a nice, sunny day. Then I could hear water flowing and dripping. Uh-oh. I ran around the house looking for the broken pipe, but didn’t see any flooding inside. Finally I found it – water pouring off the roof in the back of the house!
My poor confused brain. Blown over luminarias in the front and water pouring off my roof in the back? Had there been a storm? No. The sky was bluer than blue.
Finally I realized there had to be a broken pipe on the roof. Yes, we have water pipes on the roof. We have everything on the roof, because there is no rafter or attic space whatsoever above the ceiling (our wood ceiling is our roof) and we also have no crawl space under the house, and our exterior walls are solid adobe brick, so there’s nowhere to run utilities in the walls either. So we have electrical conduit, gas lines, water lines, ductwork, you name it, on the roof.
John was working in Albuquerque, but luckily I was able to reach my contractor and we got the offending water line turned off. And luckily it was just for the evaporative cooler, which is redundant because we also have central A/C, and anyway it’s middle of winter and it’s been darn cold.
I never did figure out why the luminarias were blown over. There must have been a little dust devil go through. All told, it was enough excitement for one day.
The next day we took it easy and went to the Tucson Botanical Gardens, which are in central Tucson near my house. Here’s some great pictures from the butterfly enclosure. It’s amazing how well phones do with close up shots nowadays.
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