Along a river, halfway between picturesque Cadaqués on the sea and Barcelona, is a charming, historic town called Girona, complete with medieval architecture, gardens, and watchtowers.
This time Laura and Alex’s room is located right over shops and restaurants.
They can relax on their balcony and still feel like they’re out experiencing Spain. It’s loud at night though!
Turns out Girona is a cycling mecca, so now Alex wants to move there! Too bad they can’t do their remote work from Spain!
All too soon it is time to head home. Although it was a good thing, Laura says, because on their last morning there, workers started doing construction on their building and it was very loud!
There was a train strike so they had to take the bus to Barcelona.
Laura says “We caught a bus bound for Barcelona airport, and figured we’d take it to the end since our hotel is near the airport. But then as soon as we hit Barcelona the traffic was horrible, so we got off at the first bus station on the far side of town. Then we took the subway to the center of town and left our bags at a storage place, and got some lunch about two hours later than usual. We got in some last minute shopping, ate vegan ice cream, and picked up empanadas for dinner. Then we picked up our bags and took the subway to the hotel. Just got here, tired and hungry.”
Early the next morning the headed to the airport to take their rapid covid test. The kind, she says, where they “stick the swab aaaaaall the way up”. It only takes 20 minutes for the results, and then they’re allowed to check in.
Here they are hanging out in the airport lounge, getting breakfast.
The breakfast that was provided consisted of soft pretzels, grilled chicken, and sauerkraut. And candy mice, lol. She says they look and feel like marshmallows, but are more like gummy candies when you eat them.
I’ve always found breakfast to be strange in other countries. Often what is eaten for breakfast is the same types of foods as is eaten for lunch and dinner. Spicy shrimp soup with lots of garlic in Thailand, salmon and seaweed with raw egg in Japan, etc. So hey, gummy marshmallow mice isn’t actually all that bad!
Laura and Alex arrived home safely late Saturday night. Now I’ll go back to blogging about our new puppy, who has grown immensely in the past week!
Next on the itinerary, after the festival in Barcelona with Alex’s cousins, is a visit to the quaint seaside Spanish town of Cadaqués. Laura says, “No adventure is complete without a bus ride on a twisty narrow road.”
Then she says, “All worth it, I brought my dream vacation to life!”
On the morning they planned to leave, google told them the bus was at 10:30 when it really was at 10:00. Oops, they missed the bus! The next bus wasn’t until 3:00. So, the took more excellent pictures of Cadaqu´es while they waited.
By this point in the trip Laura’s stomach was upset, so she did not enjoy the bus ride out. But they made it! Next stop…Girona.
Laura is in Spain! They have a fun itinerary, starting in the Barcelona area and then moving on to some smaller towns by the sea.
On Wednesday she sent me these photos, wow!
Laura gets tired when they do too much, so in addition to sightseeing, they try to spend plenty of time relaxing at cafés.
One of the planned highlights of the Barcelona section of their trip is the La Mercè festival. Laura and Alex planned to go to the festival with Alex’s cousin, Julia, and her partner Dave. Julia and Dave live in Germany, and the plan was to meet in Spain and go to the festival together.
But on Thursday Laura texted me with the extremely disappointing news – “Because of covid they’re closing off all the streets where festival activities are happening and requiring tickets. Tickets are free, but sold out. So no La Mercé for us.“
What a disappointment! All the way to Spain and then not able to get into the festival! I didn’t hear from her again on Thursday, or all day Friday.
On Saturday morning I woke up to this amazing picture of Laura, Alex and Julia, all looking very happy:
And the explanation from Laura, “We found the part of the festival that didn’t require tickets“
Yay!!! They got to go to the festival after all!
Here is Laura, Alex, and Dave.
Here’s more Barcelona pictures:
Later Alex went back to the festival but Laura was too tired. She stayed behind at the hotel, and had to find dinner on her own. At first she was a little daunted by the prospect, but was delighted to find gluten-free empanadas just two blocks from the hotel!
Everybody’s first question is, “What’s her name?” Everybody’s second question is, “What kind of dog is she?”
Answers: we don’t know, and we don’t know.
The rescue group is calling her “Blondie”. That’s her official name until she gets spayed and we can officially adopt her. Right now we’re just fostering.
My first idea for her new name was Día (Day) because she is the color of a sunrise. But John was meh on that idea. He wanted to call her Snickerdoodle because poodle mixes are called doodles and she’s an unknown poodle mix. I thought that was dorky and vetoed that idea. What would her nickname be, Snickers? Uh-uh, nope.
Snickerdoodle made us think of Biscochito, the New Mexican state cookie (also spelled Bizcochito). Yeah, the “state cookie” lol! I don’t know if all states have state cookies or if it’s just a weird New Mexico thing.
Anyway a biscochito is a butter cookie, flavored with cinnamon and anise. John gave me a packet of biscochitos on our first date, to welcome me to New Mexico. I had only moved to New Mexico about a month before meeting him. Since then we’ve often made or bought them at Christmas time. Here’s John with biscochitos last Christmas – our first Christmas in our new house in Tucson.
The only problem is, Biscochito is quite a mouthful (no pun intended, haha). It’s too long to be a practical name, so John’s been calling her “Biska” or “Biski” for short. We also thought of Bisque – she’s about that color.
Remember a few posts back when I was ranting about how developers make up Spanish-sounding words that aren’t actually real Spanish words for street names? I said, “For awhile some years ago I worked as a city planner in southern California, and misspellings of Spanish street names is a pet peeve of mine! Pretend Spanish is also in that same category.” Yeah, well, the joke is on me, because that’s exactly what I just did. Influenced by John calling her Biska, I started calling her Biskachita instead of Biscochito! Well, Biskachita is not a word!
My neighbor calls her Biscuit, which is fine. I’m pretty sure whenever John says “Biska”, English speakers are going to hear “Biscuit”, which is probably from the same root as Biscochito, so that’s all fine. I only have one request – don’t call her Cheetos! Cheetah is ok, which is the English translation for Chita, but it may be a bit pretentious for this little one, lol.
She’s a crazy little wiggle-butt in the morning and evening, and a sleepyhead during the day, so I think “Siesta” would be a good name. But John seems to be set on Biska.
I believe she was born on July 19, although I’ve seen conflicting dates. We are working with a very disorganized and imprecise rescue group. I’m sure their heart is in the right place but their communication and organizational skills are poor. Allegedly this is her mom, an 11-pound poodle named Ginger:
I can almost believe it. She has her mom’s coloring. But she certainly doesn’t have her poodle fur! She looks like a tiny yellow lab/collie mix to me!
I mean seriously, does this look like a poodle to you?
Which leads us to wonder – if she’s part poodle, does that mean she’s not going to shed? She’s only half poodle (at the most) so it could go either way. She still has her puppy coat, and it could grow in differently when she gets her adult coat in a few more months. But given that she currently has a flat coat rather than a curly coat, I think she’s going to be a shedder. Hopefully the poodle in her will calm that down a bit, and she won’t shed as much as a golden retriever, or whatever her dad is. But I’m fully expecting shedding.
I think she looks like a yellow Labrador retriever or golden retriever puppy except her face is narrower. Which makes sense because poodles have narrow faces. So I’m guessing her dad is a retriever mix of some sort.
We sent off one of those DNA kits to see what breed her dad is. I called her Biscochito when I made the online account, so I guess Biscochito she will be. And I’ll let you know when we get the DNA kit back!
Any guesses as to her breed and ultimate size? My guess is half poodle and part retriever. She also looks a bit like a collie mix, but those aren’t as common nowadays so that’s less likely. Most mutts around here contain at least some pit bull and some chihuahua. So I wouldn’t be surprised to find either one or both of those in her, even though she doesn’t look like either one of those.
Apparently her mom’s sister came to the rescue group as the same time as her mom, both pregnant. Two young poodles coming in at the same time who are both pregnant suggests that they may have come from a raid on a puppy mill rather than a simple owner surrender. If so, the puppy mill may have been trying for a goldendoodle or labradoodle litter (poodle/golden retriever, or poodle/labrador retriever). Those designer breed puppies cost $2,500 or more from a breeder, sometimes twice that from a good breeder. So she might be a designer breed, although without the genetic screening of a more reputable breeder.
I’m guessing she’ll be 20-25 pounds when she’s full grown, but I really don’t know. We’ll know more in another couple of weeks when we have enough data to chart her growth rate. She could be larger, even with such a small mom.
Here’s a few puppy videos. She was very calm the first couple of days as she got accustomed to her surroundings.
We definitely plan to keep her, as long as the rescue agency lets us have her. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t, except I don’t trust them. They’ve been difficult to work with and disorganized. They refuse to even tell me which puppy shots she’s had and when, and they get defensive when I ask questions. So I’m just keeping my head down and waiting. I will breathe easier once we’ve completed the adoption process and don’t have to deal with them anymore. They won’t let us adopt her until she’s spayed and the timing of that is completely up to them. We have no say in it at all; we’re just told when and where to show up. They’ve changed her spay appointment date twice now. If all goes well and they don’t change the date yet again, she’ll be spayed Oct. 4, and then we can adopt her that afternoon.
Here’s the first couple of pictures Laura texted me:
Wow! Are those taken from a hike? No, they were taken from her room window!
Their first location is Montserrat, outside of Barcelona. That’s quite a view from their hotel room!
They booked a family sized room with bunk beds for kids in order to get their own bathroom, because it was actually a hostel rather than a hotel.
They weren’t hungry the first day, until suddenly at 6pm Laura was starving. Turns out 6 pm in Spain is 9:30 am in California – Laura’s breakfast time!
Unfortunately, 6 pm is not dinner time in Spain.
Restaurants are open in the afternoon from about 1:30 – 4:00, and then don’t open back up again until about 9:00 at night. “Some restaurants are open earlier in the evening, but arriving before 9:30pm or 10pm generally means you’ll be dining along or in the company of other foreigners.”
Sure enough, their hotel restaurant opened early at 7:30 pm for the sake of their overseas guests, and Laura and Alex were the only ones there. That schedule would take some getting used to!
Apparently in Montserrat they are very proud of their slightly-phallic rock.
What a view!
Dinner is always good.
Sightseeing:
Great view of the city but those clouds are building…
The clouds kept getting darker until whoops, welcome to the rain in Spain!
Alex wanted to go out again but Laura was tired, so they compromised and hung out at the hotel bar.
This is the view from their next hotel in Barcelona.
Apparently the proprietor wanted to make sure the guests realized that towels were provided, lol.
In case you couldn’t figure it out, they’re labeled for you. Or is that supposed to be cool, the way some people put up plaques that say “EAT” or “KITCHEN” in the kitchen? Or do they think that tourists are so disoriented that they can’t recognize a towel when they see one? I don’t know what that was about.
More amazing photos of Spain!
Laura says she enjoys the sightseeing but she gets tired, and wants to do more relaxing at the cafés.
What a fun trip! And it’s only just begun. Coming up – adventures at La Mercè.
I was on my way to see a hematologist about my low white blood cell count. I am still unfamiliar with Tucson, and found myself in a right hand turn lane when I didn’t plan to turn right. I signaled left to change lanes and a car politely let me in. We were at a stop light, and I didn’t quite manage to squeeze fully into the lane before we came to a full stop. There was plenty of room for the right hand turners to go by behind me, so all was good.
We waited at the stop light. Suddenly, the car behind me, the one who had kindly let me in, hit my car! Smack, right into the driver’s side door!
I was stunned. Why would he hit me after we were already stopped at a stop light? The light was still red. Was it deliberate? Was he frustrated with me for shoving in front of him? But I was sure he had let me in. Didn’t he? Or did I totally misread the situation?
I was so shocked at being suddenly hit on the door, right at my elbow, that I couldn’t immediately remember how to roll down my window. (It’s weird in a Mini, the window controls are on the dash, down and center where you’d typically control your air conditioning and heater).
Finally I got my window open and I was like, “Why did you hit me? Why did you hit me?” He replied, “I didn’t mean to! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! My foot slipped!”
Oh. By that time the light had turned green, so I pulled over and he followed me and we stopped to discuss what to do next. He was very apologetic. He told me his name was Angel and he didn’t have car insurance.
He was young, and he had a beat-up old car. I don’t think people should be driving without insurance, but at the same time, it’s more important to eat and pay rent.
He readily admitted it was his fault. Although I knew that if I hadn’t been at such an angle, due to changing lanes at the last moment, he would have just tapped my back bumper when his foot slipped – which would probably not have caused any damage.
The damage to my Mini was obvious, but just cosmetic.
I like my Mini Cooper but it’s getting old, a 2007. I didn’t want to call the police, and either (of course) did Angel. I just didn’t want to deal with any of it. I didn’t want to be late to my doctor’s appointment.
So I called John, who called Angel, and I left them talking on the phone and went on to my doctor’s appointment. Which turned out to be a rather nothing appointment, by the way. The hematologist said, yep, my white blood cell count is a bit low again. Nope, we don’t know why. Not much we can do at this stage. Have a primary care provider check it every so often and let me know if it drops further.
I only went because my oncologist referred me there, and I’m pretty sure the only reason he sent me was because I had been sent to a hematologist by my primary care doctor in Albuquerque at the end of 2019. That was immediately before my cancer diagnosis. My low white blood cell issue was forgotten when we found the cancer, because obviously the cancer was more serious. So I guess we were just going back and picking up that dropped thread. But it seemed like mostly a check-the-box exercise.
I had my appointment and went back home to our new puppy and lots going on. Three days later John had to leave for a 2-week trip to Albuquerque. I mostly forgot about the accident. I don’t even know if we ever filed an accident report. I guess not. I really didn’t want to mess with insurance claims and uninsured drivers and deductibles and appointments for car body work. I think we can just rub the red paint out and call it good. I don’t care that much.
Sometimes there are too many hassles in life to deal with all of them. Angel got lucky that time.
A bit over a year ago, I posted a quiz that went something like this…
Scenario: Kristina emerges from a few months of chemo-fog and has a freak-out about the high mortality rate for her type of cancer…and starts obsessing about bucket list items. Which bucket list item do you think Kristina chose?
Booked a trip to Costa Rica
Enrolled in a holistic wellness retreat in California
Adopted a puppy
Bought a house
And as most of you know, we bought a house and we’ve been bouncing back and forth between Tucson and Albuquerque ever since.
And for those of you who guessed a puppy a year ago, I wrote this:
“What is holding me back is my uncertainty about my future. I don’t want John to have to deal with two aging dogs, a new puppy, and a sick wife if my cancer comes back. That’s too much. Of course I would like a new puppy – maybe that can be my celebratory gift to myself when I pass my 7-year mark (after which, it’s much less likely that the cancer would come back).
Now you’re all going, “Kristina, you are not going to wait 7 years before you get another dog. We know you better than that.” Ok, you’re right. Probably not. But maybe I should at least wait a couple of years.”
Seven years, lol, I didn’t even make it two years. I barely made it one year! Part of what happened is I unexpectedly ended up with no dogs at all! And I’m definitely not a no-dog person!
To briefly recap – At the start of the pandemic, Callan, worried about my cancer and stressed by their new transition to non-binary gender identity, and working from home due to the pandemic, came to live with John and I for a couple months. Callan wanted a dog, and I had previously promised to go up to Boise to help train a puppy that summer – before my cancer diagnosis, before the pandemic, before all hell broke loose in our lives. Unable to help Callan train a puppy, I decided to give them one of my own dogs, the youngest, Kira.
Then as my health continued to decline, I became less and less able to care for my remaining two dogs, and my friend Sandy started taking them on a regular basis. When our oldest dog, Rosie, started showing serious health issues we took her back and she stayed with us until she passed away, in middle of the summer, in middle of the first round of covid, in middle of my chemo treatments. It was sad, but we estimated her age at 17, so she had a good long run for a dog.
Meanwhile, Sandy kept Kai through the winter of 2020-2021. We thought she wanted to adopt him, but then she got a new job and was going to have to move out of state, and she decided it was too much to try to take him with her. Meanwhile, Kai’s behavior continued to decline and by February, when John and I were in Florida, we got word from Sandy that Kai’s behavior was in a total free-fall.
For several years Kai had been untrustworthy with children, growling and nipping them for no reason. He also bullied the two smaller dogs. And when I got sick he started bulling me too!
In addition to bullying the weaker members of the household, his behavior in general was declining rapidly, probably due to the onset of dementia, coupled with living in too many houses. He was starting to bite people (unprovoked and unexpectedly), and I didn’t have the stamina to deal with an aggressive dog while I was so sick. Since he was already very old (15 years) I was inclined to put him down. But Callan’s roommates volunteered to take him, so now both Kai and Kira are happy with Callan and their roommates. (I hear that Kai still bullies Kira, but she mostly avoids him and it’s working out ok.)
That left me with no dogs at all! From three dogs to none. Then at the beginning of this month I got another clear CT scan. We’re still not seeing any cancer – I can almost start to imagine that it could be gone and not coming back. The truth is, I am by no means out of the woods, but each clear scan is one step closer. And my health has been improving since the low point around this time last year. I think what’s increasing my optimism is the fact that I am slowly gaining energy. I’m feeling much better.
So…puppy? When we first started talking about it, John was understandably hesitant. Dogs take up a lot of time, and make travel more challenging. But I’ve been lost without my dogs!
So we’re fostering a puppy – no commitment yet – but yeah, we love her already. I thought John might continue to be hesitant or reluctant, but no, the moment he met her, he was done for, lol. He thinks she’s great! I mean, who wouldn’t? Have you ever seen a cuter puppy?
I hope you like puppy pictures because I’m guessing you’re going to be seeing a lot more of them for awhile!
I recently published a post that basically says, hey, look, some people who have a serious illness with a fairly high likelihood of dying relatively soon will actually want to talk about it. Or even do a little planning around the possibility of dying, prior to being certain they’re actually terminal. And that’s not abnormal, depressive, or harmful. And it will in NO way increase their likelihood of dying soon.
I included some rather startling data about my life expectancy in that post, and I’ve had some of you express surprise that my doctors are actually giving me such clear and blunt information about my cancer. The answer is a resounding no, my doctors are not providing useful information at all. My doctors have not been candid. All the data and cancer information in my blog is the result of careful research that John and I have done. I believe the data I’m publishing is accurate, based on the reputations of the science journals where it was originally published.
Only once did I have an actual meaningfully candid conversation with a doctor. The only doctor who was remotely straightforward with me was the guy who did my first colonoscopy screening and discovered the cancer. He told me as soon as I was coming out of anesthesia that I had cancer. He didn’t wait for the pathology report and he didn’t add any caveats. He said quite directly that it definitely was cancer and that I would need surgery. He also, surprisingly, agreed that I would be better off getting my surgery in a larger city, rather than Albuquerque, when I mentioned I had the ability to get it done in the Bay Area, or Houston, or Boston. He recommended Boston.
Since then, I’ve had almost zero guidance. I was completely unprepared for the severity of the surgery, the months and months of recovery, and the permanent damage (I am lucky not to have a colostomy bag, but I will never be the same again).
Not only was I not remotely prepared for the difficulty of the surgery, I was also entirely, pathetically – almost laughably – unprepared for the effects of the chemo. It was vastly worse than I had been led to believe. Not only was I far sicker than I expected, I also was not warned of the permanent damage it would cause. I have permanent nerve damage in my hands and feet which causes pain, tingling and poor coordination. I also seem to have developed something like ADHD. I get distracted and lose track of my tasks. I drop a lot of balls, and I never used to be that way.
I don’t know why doctors are so cagy, and unwilling to give it to you straight. I gather it’s better than it used to be. I’ve heard that patients didn’t used to even be told that they had cancer. Patients didn’t want their families to know, families didn’t want the patient to know. Everybody knew and everybody pretended it wasn’t so. In my opinion, that’s nuts. It’s still that way in some places.
I can guess that one reason doctors don’t want to level with patients about the severity of treatment is they don’t want their patients to give up and refuse treatment. And for some people, that’s probably valid. However, I would have done better with my chemo treatments, and probably been able to stick with it longer, had I been more aware of what to expect.
Another reason, I’m guessing, is no one wants to give bad news, especially when it’s not for sure. It’s one thing to say, “yes, you have cancer” or “you are terminal.” But my odds are 50-50. What does that even mean? It’s almost meaningless. I might die, I might not. 50% – cancer free in 5 years. 50% – looks like I’m probably gonna die. It’s a complete toss up. It’s a complete unknown. How do you give that news? If you’re going to say, “I don’t know”, I guess you might as well not say anything at all, right?
I also get vague, sugar-coated answers from doctors – sugar coated to the extent of almost being not true. I’m not sure why I’ve had a couple of doctors give me generalized, overly optimistic odds. They’ll cheerfully name vague numbers better than 50-50, which might be true for an average of all colon cancers, but is definitely not true for those of us with lymph node involvement. Do the doctors not actually realize the devil in the details? Or are they just choosing to not mention that? I don’t know.
Advocates say you have to manage your own care, and it’s really true. It’s hard too, because a there’s a big learning curve. I knew next to nothing about cancer when I was diagnosed. There are several things I would have done differently during treatment if I had known then what I know now. But I just keep learning as much as I can as fast as I can, so I can make better decisions going forward.
Secondly, I want to thank you all for your supportive comments. You’ve sent me a couple of good, relevant articles that I’m going to pass along.
The first, sent by Laura, is a podcast about the 5 stages of grief.
We’ve all heard of the 5 stages of grief, right? Turns out it was originally the 5 stages of dying, not the 5 stages of grief. The original author of that theory was studying what people who were in the process of dying had to say about dying. The study found that people who are dying often really want to talk about dying, but the people around them, who aren’t dying, don’t tend to be comfortable with that. I guess there’s not really any big surprise there!
The second article is by Caitlin Flanagan and it made me both laugh and cry.
Her first paragraph reads, “Are you someone who enjoys the unsolicited opinions of strangers and acquaintances? If so, I can’t recommend cancer highly enough. You won’t even have the first pathology report in your hands before the advice comes pouring in. Laugh and the world laughs with you; get cancer and the world can’t shut its trap.”
Of particular concern to her was everybody’s insistence that she stay positive when she was going through a horrendous time in her life. The mandate to stay positive (and her failing attempts to do so) added enormously to her overall burden during that hugely challenging time.
Her main point is this:
“There isn’t a single bit of evidence that having a positive attitude helps heal cancer…I didn’t cause my cancer by having a bad attitude, and I wasn’t going to cure it by having a good one.“
Flanagan ends her article with a huge and transforming insight from her therapist.
“…over the years, many wonderful and generous women had come to her clinic, and some of them had died very quickly. Yikes. I had to come clean: Not only was I un-wonderful. I was also kind of a bitch.
God love her, she came through with exactly what I needed to hear: “I’ve seen some of the biggest bitches come in, and they’re still alive.”
And that, my friends, was when I had my very first positive thought. I imagined all those bitches getting healthy, and I said to myself, I think I’m going to beat this thing.“
Here’s the full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/caitlin-flanagan-secret-of-surviving-cancer/619844/ (If you want to read the article but encounter a paywall, let me know, I can send a “gift” article to you.)
So here’s the thing – I will not increase the likelihood that my cancer will come back by thinking or talking about the possibility of death. Nor will I increase my survival chances by trying to stay positive. I don’t have that power. And I don’t have that responsibility. And I don’t have that obligation.
I think our culture’s mandate that we all stay positive at all times, especially when we’re seriously ill, is one of the biggest roadblocks to our ability to talk about death and prepare for death. How does one think about and talk about death and simultaneously be positive? And how does one prepare for something without thinking about it and talking about it?
Since this is a heavy post with no pictures, I’m going to end by sharing a beautiful photo of Albuquerque at night, recently sent to me by an old friend of mine. I had to reduce the resolution for this blog, but hopefully it still shows up crystal clear. It’s a fantastic photo. (photo credit, Robert Hohlfelder, thank you).
The desert during record monsoons! Those who are glass-mostly-full people are raving about the butterflies. The rest of us are calling upon heaven to release us from the plague of mosquitos such as we have never seen in our many decades on this earth.
The mosquito swarms are downright terrifying. First of all, I’ve never even seen mosquitos in the desert at all. That’s the entire point of living in the desert, right? No mosquitos. Gnats sometimes, but not mosquitos.
Not only are there suddenly mosquitos in the desert, but I’ve rarely seen so many mosquitos anywhere in my life. I’ve certainly never seen this many in my own yard. This is worse than when the last of the snow patches have melted in the mountains. This is far worse than anything I’ve encountered in all my decades in the Pacific Northwest. Not impressed yet? This is the Florida Everglades!
You think I’m exaggerating? Apparently Tucson is #10 in the country for mosquitos. Tucson! We’re suppose to be a desert!
Yep, we’re right up there with Birmingham, Alabama or Houston, Texas, except in our case, the city isn’t spraying for mosquitos. Pima County and Tucson City mosquito abatement programs are nearly non-existent because, well, it’s like when Houston didn’t have any snow plows when they needed them last winter. You don’t want to have to pay for government programs that aren’t typically needed, right?
It’s probably just as well, because some of those sprays kill bees, which we have to stop doing. I’m looking forward to planting bee-habitat plants in my yard, hopefully soon.
The Tucson mosquitos are actually small little guys, but if anything, that makes them worse. You can’t hear them unless they’re right in your ears. And they zip in and out so fast you can hardly see them. Millions of stealth mosquitos!
If, at any time in my past, you had asked me, “Would you rather an infestation of small mosquitos or big mosquitos?”, I would have looked at you funny and said, “Small?”. Well, no longer! Give me a big sucker any time. At least you have a sporting chance of hearing or seeing them!
My whole point of moving to Tucson was to live outside. I wanted to be comfortable outside most of the day, every day. That had been mostly working, until now. Now we just cower indoors, watching the nearly-invisible mosquitos bash their faces against the window glass.
Except I had to weed the yard. My rock garden, generously dotted with cactus and palm trees, had become a green carpet of weeds.
I didn’t think to take a photo of my yard before I weeded, so to give you an idea, here’s my neighbor’s yard.
I’m not making fun of them! Because here’s my other neighbor’s yard.
This is pretty much everyone’s yard. A crazy green carpet of weeds. No, it’s not always like that! I’ve never seen it like that. It’s usually dirt and gravel.
Well, darn it, as briefly nice as it looks (from a distance), I didn’t want my rock garden overtaken by various kinds of burr producing opportunists. I wanted to pull the weeds, and Labor Day Weekend was the weekend to do it.
On Day 1, I pulled weeds and John took the weed eater to the amazing, suddenly appearing, never knew we had it, brilliantly green lawn.
We also picked up our two trees that I ordered as part of Tucson Electric Power’s “Trees for You” program. Customers can get up to 3 trees per year for only $5 each, for a 5-gallon tree! I choose these two, a pomegranate and a chitalpa!
We have a chitalpa in Albuquerque and it’s doing well. It has large leaves and looks more like a wet climate tree than a desert tree, but it is actually a type of desert willow. We first bought one in 2019 and it is thriving in Albuquerque. So hopefully this one will do well in Tucson too.
In addition to being hardy in the desert and growing quickly, chitalpa also have nice blooms. (Picture from the internet)
The next day John decided to help me weed. Big mistake! I should have told him not to, because he has better things to do. He has a long list of fix-it things that I’m totally incapable of doing. Not only that – it turns out John is terrible at weeding! He left little weed stalks and bits of shredded leaves everywhere. Imagine if a 3-year-old cut all the hair off the family’s golden retriever with the kitchen scissors. No, it was worse than that. It was so sad and sorry looking!
I had to pry all those stumps of weed stalks out of the hard-packed dirt and gravel without the full weed to hold onto. What a disaster. John was so fired, lol. And no, he didn’t mess up on purpose just to get out of the task. He was genuinely trying to be helpful. He’s just spent too many years in the desert and doesn’t know how to weed properly.
I, on the other hand, still retain skills developed during the first half of my life in the Pacific Northwest. I am a lean, mean, weeding machine. I take the weed in my gloved left hand, and spear the ground at the base of the roots with a purpose-specific weeding tool with my right hand, and get it out roots and all. One, two, bam, done, onto the next. Over and over.
No, I am not going to come weed your yard for you! I did enough weeding for this year. Enough for several years. But our yard looks great!
These yellow flowers are probably weeds but I liked them, so I decided to leave them to see what happens.
A month or two ago I had mentioned having a gardener, but our gardener is awol. We don’t know where he is. He isn’t answering text messages. We hope he’s ok. We’re hoping he just said to himself, “Fuck this rain, fuck these mosquitos, I’m going back to Mexico until it’s nicer in Tucson. This is ridiculous.”
Because the weather has been ridiculous! And I wouldn’t blame him. But I’m also worried about him. It seems like he could at least let us know he’s ok and happily sipping a beer in Sonora somewhere. I just hope he doesn’t have covid.
Anyway, we’re doing our own gardening now. We actually enjoy it, it’s just hard to find time with being gone so often.
In addition to weeding and planting, John is experimenting with brining olives. Turns out olives aren’t edible straight from the tree. They need brined or fermented. This year we didn’t get very many olives. Last year our two trees made thousands of olives, but we were just moving in and didn’t have time to deal with them so they rotted on the ground. I’m sure we’ll have another prolific year soon. Maybe next year.
At the end of the weekend we finally had time to jump into the pool. Or wait, is that thunder? Darn. We didn’t quite make it. Almost. Instead, we pulled our lounge chairs under the porch roof and sat in our swimsuits and watched it rain. At least the rain kept the mosquitoes down for a few minutes.
Is my honeymoon with Tucson over? I’m definitely less thrilled with the weather lately. I know a lot of people leave in the summer. I thought that was because of the heat, and I was fine during the searing heat of June. Before the rain and mosquitos. Ironically, it’s not the heat of Tucson that bugs me, it’s the rain!
Originally I had thought that if the heat of the late summer was too much for us, we could spend some time with the kids at the end of each summer. Late summer has generally been a good to be in Boise and the California Bay Area – warm and dry. But the wildfire smoke in California was so bad in August and September of last year, we decided to visit the kids a bit earlier in the season this year.
By going in July, we avoided the worst of the smoke, although smoke still impacted the trip. And now I am bummed out about missing fig season! Laura is inundated with figs this year.
Her tree is always prolific, although some years it’s prolific to the extreme. Figs, figs and more figs. There’s even plenty extra for the occasional bright green fig-eating beetle. Rather pretty, isn’t it? It’s much more photogenic than a mosquito!
If we have another wringing wet monsoon season in Tucson next year, I’ll visit the kids in late August or early September – smoke or no smoke! Because these mosquitos aren’t my thing! I’ll take smoke and figs over mosquitos any day.
Oh and for those of you who have plans to visit me this winter – the locals say the mosquitos will be gone by the end of October.
Time to head home! It had been 24 hours since the storm, and the sandy roads out of Las Conchas were finally passible. Whew! We stopped in Puerto Peñasco to get gas. Many of the roads were flooded, and we had to work our way through town turning whenever we encountered impassible roads.
While John pumped gas, I took a video of everyone driving through a flooded intersection. The video is complete with Mexican music, coming from somewhere nearby.
Eventually, of course, one of the cars didn’t make it and got stuck in the water.
At that point, people started driving down the left hand side of the road instead. So that’s what we did too.
It was only a block before we could get back to the right side of the road!
The talking you hear in this video is our navigation system. Our cheerful navigation narrator did not realize we were on the wrong side of the road, or maybe she would have had something to say about that, lol.
Whew, we made it out of town. Next hurdle – we had to make it across the border.
We got as far as Sonoyta before things got interesting. Sonoyta is right along the border on the Mexican side. We were almost to the crossing when – John got pulled over by a police car.
I really, really wanted to take a picture for this blog, but I figured that might irritate them, so I refrained.
The policeman walked up to the van and told us he had pulled us over for speeding. Believe me, we weren’t speeding. Yes, we know the difference between mph and kph. John’s a scientist for pete’s sake. John even takes into account the fact that our extra large tires make our speedometer read slightly lower than our actual speed. We had it handled. We weren’t speeding.
Nonetheless, there we were, along the side of the road, being accused of being over the speed limit by 21 kph. The policeman wanted 3,000 pesos, which is about $160 US, and threatened us with writing up a ticket. He told us we would then have to take the ticket somewhere (it was a little unclear where), and pay in cash. It had to be paid in cash. Well, we didn’t have that much cash. We wondered what would happen if we took the ticket, ignored it, and just drove home?
John told the policeman that we didn’t have that much cash. The policeman then asked how much we had. John emptied his wallet. $75 in US dollars. The policeman took that, and then wanted to know how much I had. Usually I keep $10 in my phone case, along with my driver’s license and a credit card. I searched my phone case, but couldn’t locate the $10. I was quite surprised I couldn’t find it and kept looking and looking. I searched and searched with increasing puzzlement and frenzy – I think it must have looked like I was a bad actor, comically overdoing my search! But honestly I don’t know what happened to that $10 I thought I had.
I also had $100 or so in a piece of luggage somewhere else in the van, but I didn’t mention that. How would they know? Unless they had a cash-sniffing dog.
In the end, he took John’s $75 and let us go without a ticket. Now we can add “bribed a Mexican policeman” to our bucket list of crazy things we’ve been doing lately. That’s even worse than driving on the wrong side of the road in Mexico!
Lessons learned: don’t carry very much cash in your wallet while in Mexico. Carry any additionally needed cash hidden somewhere else.
Also we plan to research what would happen if we were to totally blow off a ticket and try to drive home without paying for it. We don’t want to end up in Mexican jail, lol. Because, yeah, of course we’re going back. It was a great trip!
The actual border crossing back into the US only took a moment. The border guard looked at our passports and waved us through. They didn’t even glance into the van. We could have been bringing anything and everything back into the US with us! Everything except cash in John’s wallet, lol.
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