First Day of the Rest of the Year

I heard there was some kind of low pressure front that blanketed most of the Midwest and Eastern US with some kind of white, frozen, precipitation or something this weekend?  Including collapsing the home a sports team who hired an old cajun QB who should've stayed retired 3 years ago?

That sort of thing is foreign to me, as it was 81F here yesterday, and it's going to be in the upper 70s this week.  First full day of vacation for me - lots to do around the house and in the yard.  Busy busy day ahead.

I should have most of the "need to do" stuff done by Wednesday.. so if you want to go on a
- 20 mile National & Alta trails hike on South Mountain
- a up one side, and down the other, then bike on flat land back to the car over and around Camel Back Mountain hike
- a tour of the North Phoenix mountains, some of which are in not-so-good neighborhoods (but you only live once, right?0
- a drive down to Picacho Peak (and hike up it) on a day when there's few tourists
- a hike through the Thunderbird Mountains in North Glendale

...then book your flights now!   Southwest is running lots of $59 fares.  We've got a full liquor cabinet and wine fridge, and a spare bed room.  So whatcha waiting for?  I'll come pick you up at the air port.

Afraid of Heights?

Are you afraid of heights?  If so, do not watch this: LINK.

I am not "afraid of heights" per se, but I am very afraid of falling, and the sudden impact that results when after a long fall, and you hit a very hard surface, the instantaneous deceleration tends to fracture human bones and rupture internal organs.  Back when I used to be part of the Michelin Tire Spartanburg Plant's volunteer fire & first responder team, I climbed to the top of a 200 foot hook & ladder truck ladder, that was set up at a 60 degree incline, in the plant parking lot, on a windy day, with sparse, building, cumulus clouds moving rapidly from West to East at about a 2000 feet altitude.  The climb up was fine, and we each wore a safety line that you had to "unhook" and "re-hook" every 50 feet.  The first unhook, no problem.  The 2nd, I had some hesitation.  By the third unhook, I was almost paralyzed, as the ladder swayed in the breeze.   I got over it, got to the top, looked around while maintaining a tenuous grip on the ladder, and then began my descent.

As I watched the linked video here, I kept thinking of that tiny little 200 foot volunteer climb I did 20 years ago, and how insignificant is was compared to what this video demonstrates.

Not a job I'd enjoy doing.

December Biplanes

I spotted another biplane this week, while doing poolside yoga.  This one landed on the ocotillo I've been sculpting all year, near the very tippy top.

Dragon Flies are so cool.  I don't think I can get tired of observing them, noticing them, photographing them.

My little Sony Cyber-shot has pretty good zoom for a tony little hand held 3Mega-pixel camera, don't it?  =)

Les Portes de Bordeaux

This evening's blog postings brought to you courtesy of Les Portes de Bordeaux, 2009, Grand Vin de Bordeaux, imported by Latitude Wines for Trader Joes (where is it less than $10 a bottle, mmmm).  It's a shame I bought only one bottle.  This one is almost gone...

For those of you in Phoenix or Kalifornia who are still working..  GO HOME!  It is almost 5pm on a Friday.  Let your spouses and children see you in the remaining day light.  Work will still be there Monday when you return.

(yes, I am a bad influence)

Les Portes de Bordeaux is a smooth, full bodied - but not harsh or overly-tanniny Bordeaux wine.   I THINK I got it for $6, but I don't want to dig up the receipt.  I am Sure it was less than $10, which is my cut off for wine experimentation.  Also.. the sound track of this evening's blog postings is Cake....  Never There, Satan is My Motor, Daria, Mexico, Comfort Eagle, Sheep Go To Heaven, Cool Blue Reason, etc...

Misty Mountain Hop

Walkin in the park, just the other day....

I really don't know what time it was....   so I asked them if I could stay a while?
They asked us to stay for tea, and have some fun....  oh ho ho....
They said that their friends would all drop by.

They don't mak'em like they used to.

Who Needs Fractals?

When you've got the Desert Botanical Garden to provide the natural thing, there's no need to try and fabricate a fractal image on a computer.

Sick of You

Heard this (Cake's Sick of You) in the car on the way home from a terrible meeting with some customers this afternoon. [When the waitress takes away the empty queso bowl and uneaten salsa, and then drops the salsa to SPRAY and SHOWER both of the customers sitting on the other side of the table from me, it sets a bad precedent]

It's a good thing I am now officially on vacation for the rest of the freakin year.  The bunny's are a nice touch.

Smashing!

Prince Charles' Limo is attacked.  Silvio Berlusconi's face is bloodied.  Appears the Europeans are getting pretty violent, and taking it out on their leaders.  Perhaps it's time to invest in pitchforks and torches?

Somewhere in the UK, there's a bullet proof window manufacturer whose being audited by MI5. 

Flowering Rosemary, DBG

I stumbled upon this LARGE BUSH of rosemary at the Desert Botanical Garden yesterday, after having lunch with Dr Desert Flower.

I had no idea rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) flowered, as the large bush of it we have in our front courtyard has never flowered before, but here this 5 foot high, by 8 feet wide shrub was, covered in deliciously fragrant blooms, attracting myriad honey bees and butterflies, right alongside the Native People's trail at the DBG.  I was transfixed for a good 10 minutes, watching this, drinking it in, bathed in the aroma. 

It was a wonderful respite in the middle of a +4 million person metropolis in December.  October through April are really the "tourist brochure" months here, when the temperatures stay below 100F, the humidity remains typically below 20% RH - as it does all year, except during monsoons when it shoots up to 50% or so for a few hours and everyone complains about how "sticky" it is.  Pollinating insects and birds are active all year long, and I'd say the "majority" of plant species appear to flower in the "below 100" months, when they are not fighting for their very survival to keep from being baked in the unrelenting inferno of the 115F summers.

I sure am glad there's no "limit" to the number of times one can visit the DBG after becoming a member there.  'Membership does have it's privileges' =)

Feline Dementia Onset At 18 Years

When your old cat starts to howl and yowl, randomly, as she wanders around the house, she's probably got the beginning of the onset of feline senility / dementia / kitty Alzheimer's.  I looked up several things online (here, here, and here), and consulted our cat veterinary tome that Dr Desert Flower picked up in the early 1990s.  Confused howling / vocalizations is often listed as the first sign of neurological degradation in cats.  She's not in physical pain, because "eye contact" with her, stops her howling.  Calling her name is somewhat ineffective, since she's going deaf as well.  Picking her up and petting her arrests the howling as well, but her pathetic cries sound like she's in anguish.  Right out of the litter, or walking into a room, or wandering around the dining room (where typically no one ever is) she'll start loud, intense, distressed howling.  Make eye contact with her, and POOF, she's all better.

Having our son here for 6 weeks helped to spoil her, as every time he sat down on "her couch" she was instantly upon him, demanding to be petted.  While he studied for the GRE in the guest bed room, she reliably lounged beside him.  All this extra attention helped to alleviate her symptoms for a little while, but in the last week that he's been gone, the howling has increased in frequency from 2 or 3 times a day, to about once an hour.  When I'm on an international conference call, it's quite a juggling act to MUTE the phone, try to calm her down, UNMUTE, and get back to the call, when the howling's initiation is apparently random.

From the symptoms listed, howling and confusion are usually first, followed by forgetting where the litter box is, lack of grooming, disinterest in food, and angry personality changes.  So far, it's just the howling... I'm considering graphing the frequencies and locations to see if there's a developing pattern, and extrapolate to an eventual end point.  We'll try to make her final months / years chez nous as comfortable as possible, and have pity on the poor animal.   She's been a good cat for almost 2 decades... it's sad to see her slipping.

Practice Makes Perfect, Grass Fed

Back in early November, I purchased a little more than 5 pounds of New York Strip steaks from the nice Double Check Ranch people at the Farmer's market.  In the weeks before Thanksgiving, my son and I experimented with grilling these grass fed strips of juicy steak.

The first try was "not so good".  We left them on the grill far too long, and being so very juicy, they "flamed up" substantially, charring the outer surfaces significantly.  They were "OK at best" the first round.  I also stupidly STABBED the steaks with a fork to turn them.  I won't make that mistake again - juice jetted out of the stab marks while they were cooking.  Argh!

The 2nd round, we followed a cooking method my son found online (link here).  They were better... but I think the butter sort of diluted the natural flavor.

 This time I roasted red and yellow bell peppers, as well as a 1/4 of the large red onion left over from the Thanksgiving chicken, alongside the steaks.  Proximity to flame again degraded the surface (I don't like to eat char) but the medium rare internal texture was achieved.

My third iteration - and remember, this is with steak that is $10 a pound (when you buy 5 or more pounds), so it's not a whimsical culinary experiment - turned out better. 

This time, I suspended the steaks on the "corn roasting rack" which sits higher off the flames.  I still did the "5 minutes of sear per side" recommendation, but I let the drippings fall onto the veggies.  Out of yellow and red bell peppers, I used "sweet Italian green peppers" - which are only "sweet" if you remove the seeds, and more of the onion.  Keep in mind, until November 2010, I had never grilled with onions before, or grilled and eaten my own grass fed beef.  I also sliced up two large crimini mushrooms, the kind normally used to "stuff".  This was heavenly.  See below.

I ate these delicious steaks Monday night, while watching the last episode of The Walking Dead on DVR.  Oh So Yummy!  But last Saturday, I picked up 5.5 pounds of grass fed Ribeyes.... so it was time to defrost the first one of those.

The Ribeyes are probably about 40% thicker than the NY Strips.  Alot less blood comes off them prior to cooking, and alot less "flame up" occurs on the grill as well. I defrosted just one, since the boy went back to SC last week, and Dr Desert Flower doesn't like beef.  I used up the last of the Italian sweet peppers, more sliced criminis, one organic tomato, and a handful of organic carrots.  The same suspended upper rack grilling technique was used... and this time, I believe, to perfection.

I can honestly say, that now I have eaten the tastiest steak I have ever grilled.  It rivals the pasture raised, whiskey aged steak my friend Ron grilled for me in London 9 years ago, as the previous bench-mark of awesome grillage.  Each was a heavenly meal, and the London steak melted in my mouth... but I didn't cook it myself, so there's a different sort of...  je ne sais quoi.  An Aquila d'Oro accompanied the beef, which worked just fine... but I should've opened a bottle 2 or 3 times as expensive (at the $4 / bottle of the Aquila).  

I've still got 4 more ribeyes in the freezer, and one fridge defrosting as I type this.  I can't wait to grill the next one this weekend!

Door To Door Unwelcomed

Around 9:30 am on Tuesday morning, my doorbell was wrung.  I was expecting several business package deliveries, so I walked the 30 steps from my office to the front door, only to find two, bald, African American, Evangelical Christian ministers at my door.  Both wore smiling a demeanor, and one reached for my steel barred security screen door in an effort to open it and hand me some useless pamphlet about his local church, saying "We know you must be very busy, we just want to leave you with this...".  He found the security door locked (as it always is) and before I closed the door in his face I told him "Je ne suis pas intéressé par les mensonges que vous vendez. Je m'en fous! Va te faire voir chez les Grecs."  (I am not interested in your lies, go have yourself shown at the house of the Greeks).

So it was with great amusement that I got this link from my friend Matt, just the day before::
http://www.break.com/index/door_to_door_atheists_bother_mormons.html

"Australian filmmaker John Safran is so fed up with Mormons ringing his doorbell early in the morning that he flies to Salt Lake City Utah and tries to convert Mormons to atheism. Needless to say, the locals were not pleased."

This is very very funny to listen to this Ozzie rant, and then to see him talking to SLC residents, including an LDS bishop!

Where's the Bypass Code NPR Fund Drives?

the local NPR radio station, KJZZ is holding another fund drive on the radio this week.  They just had one in September, and I donated in September... so why another one now just prior to Christmas?  I understand quality programming is not cheap, and public radio doesn't get the same level of funding the BBC gets, but I WISH there was a "Bypass Code" that one could use, that the local NPR radio station gives you after you've donated, so that you don't have to listen to them ask for more pledges every 10 minutes.

Maybe it could be a macro they email to you, so you can listen uninterrupted while streaming online... or they reveal a different FM frequency that they broadcast in parallel only during the fund drives and you cna only get the frequency if you donate... or they sell an audio descrambler that you can put in your ear that takes a encoded signal and filters out the pledge drive interruptions and lets the normal programming continue... I don't know... but something is needed.  I've taken to not listening to the radio at all during prime times alone at home or in the car when I'd automatically have it tuned to KJZZ 91.5 FM.  There's got be to better, cost effective solutions...  just no one's applied them yet.

All Those Evil Illegals Stealin Our Jobs!

Terry Greene Sterling has a nice, factual piece in this week's Phoenix New Times (link here).  It debunks the b*ll sh*t fabricated myths and gross exaggerations that oft quoted conservative lobbying groups like FAIR, NumbersUSA, and Center for Immigration Studies successfully and convincingly pass off as legitimate.  And these three Caucasian-centric lobbying groups reference each other frequently, to try and lend weight and plausibility to the smoke they're blowing up everyone's backsides - and they're all linked to John Tanton, ew, creepy.

Now be fore-warned, the piece is Very long, and somewhat long winded and dramatic in places where it doesn't need to be, but it is not a bad work.  Ms Green Sterling does have a penchant for saying in a page what could be stated in 2 or 3 sentences, but her article does shed a bright light on the discrepancies between reality and lies FAIR and their comrades propagate, and I am all about exposing hypocrisy, especially when it is funded by rich and powerful Republicans, and embraced by the throngs of Idiocracy who believe anything they're told without fact checking. 

Ms Greene Sterling talks about the Macro-economics of illegal immigration, the cost to educate undocumented workers' children and the ROI in taxes, the myth that all illegal immigrants are involved in violent or property or drug crimes, the DREAM act, and how successful the Arizona state Republicans have been at selling their fairy tale to not only Arizona voters, but many other states and cities nation-wide.

"They took our jobs!" - funny as a South Park episode, not factually true, you ignorant, smiling, smug, sign carrying protester. 

"Derr Derr Derr Derr!"  is closer to the truth these scared white protesters really want to embrace. (warning, the "Derr" link not suitable for children, or viewing in an office where your internet traffic is closely monitored).

DBG in December

I spent the better part of 3 hours walking around the Desert Botanical garden on Saturday - while Dr Desert Flower was busy aloquoting in her lab.  The cacti, succulents, wild flowers, birds, weather, sparsity of garden visitors (they were getting ready for Luminaria and I was one of the last people they let in that morning) were amazing.  I even saw a road runner t one point near the upper hill trail, though the great horned owl who rests in the cotton woods near the riparian area was hiding elsewhere.  This kind of "reset" I find quite tranquil, calming, and helps to reset the stresses that build up through the work week. 

Even without the Chihuly glass exhibit installed this year, the garden is still flourishing.  The curved bill thrashers, mocking birds, and verdins are out in full force.  Occasional hummingbirds fly sorties.  I saw dozens of butterflies as well.  And the bees...  refreshingly, on nearly every flowering plant, there were no shortage of bees. 

Bottle brush plant that was irresistible to the bees.

I did forget to take some water with me, and although the DBG has many water fountains located throughout the various trails, I've found that if it is not in my hand, or strapped to my waist or back, I typically don't partake of the water.  When you come to Phoenix, and we go visit the DBG, we'll take water with us, for the walk around the garden, and in the cooler in the car when the tour is done.

Local Natives - Wide Eyes

One of the musical groups my son introduced me to while he was visiting last month, was Local Natives.  He had seen them at SXSW in Austin where he performed earlier this year, and was rightly impressed.  They have a drum heavy back ground sound - something that happens when the key boardist keeps a floor tom next to his chair when he's not playing (eg, White Rabbits).  I really like the sound of these guys on their Gorilla Manor album, when they're not whining. The youtube line to "Wide Eyes" below illustrates this principle.   It's a combination of 1/2 a dozen 80s and 90s bands, that has a nice effect.  Tip of the hat to my son for the introduction.

Another video, to "Airplanes" is here ( link ).  Same drumming background, with a touch more discordant lyrics.

It's not heavy metal / speed metal / math metal, or prog-rock, or 80s alternative, or anything intensely difficult to play, but it is melodious, and fun to listen to when in the right mood.  One cannot live on steak and lobster every day. Sometimes you need to have a hamburger, salad, some cheese, or falafel.   =)

In Water

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
Loren Eiseley - 1907-1977

Honeysuckle in the Sun - You'll Have Bees!

The Honeysuckle we planted last Spring in the back yard has sprouted up nicely.  Now that it's taller than the wall (an East West wall, where it's planted on the north face), it can get sun throughout the day.  And now that I've figured out some of the filters on my digital camera, I can take adequate images of it.

When I told my mother that we had planted honeysuckle to further the nutritional variety to the hummingbirds who visit our back yard, she immediately and directly retorted "You'll have bees. I had some by the garage and we had a terrible bee problem."

Well, we do have Africanized bees in Arizona, and I have seen aggressive bees in the neighborhood, and at Estrella Mountain Park, and South Mountain, but the bees tend to take more interest in the lavender and the basil than they do for the honeysuckle.  And not only the hummingbirds love & covet it, but there's a family of lizards who dart about behind it.  I even saw a praying mantis last month lurking on the trellis to which the honeysuckle is secured.

Thank You Mark Bittman

And before I forget...  thank you Mark Bittman.  The rosemary herb chicken recipe (page 360) worked fantastically with the Double Check Ranch free-range, organic whole chicken and front-yard organic, hand picked rosemary.  Ahhh, the scent of rosemary on your fingers, and drying basil in the house (over-night lows were predicted to be in the 40s, and basil doesn't do well below 5C, so my son and I picked and de-stemmed a bushel-full yesterday). 

That's still one thing blogs and twitter and the internets cannot do - convey scents.  Butter and rosemary, fresh picked basil, lavender in the back yard, wet mesquite and creosote after a desert storm, a blooming gardenia, a lemon tree when it is in full bloom...  Probably, if there was a way to convey smells electronically, the guys from Jackass would figure out how to send fart and sewer smells first - so look for that bow wave in the coming years.

Thanksgiving Cooking Cleanup

There were alot of dishes.  It's good to have a well equipped kitchen.

Outside of Thanksgiving, I think it would take Dr Desert Flower and I about 2 months to generate this many dirty cooking pans.