The Wandering Minstrel

Click on the image to view the changes to our Arizona property between about October 2010 and June 2011. The 2010 image source is the Maricopa County Assessor’s website. The 2011 image is taken from Google Maps.

We officially moved in to our new house on January 8th of this year so this will be our first Christmas and New Year’s Celebrations here. We were in Wickenburg last Christmas, but staying in the Super 8 about a mile from here.

We also stayed overnight on Christmas Eve at an RV park southeast of town three years ago. That’s when we started having designs about moving to Arizona at that time. We are very glad that we are here now.

After a short, but eventful, trip to the Kalifornistan house, we’re back home. The drive back took about 5 and a half hours and was uneventful, which is a good thing - and was a good transit time, as well - it can take up to six hours or more, weather and traffic dependent.

Clickable image - Welcome sign courtesy The Better Half

After crossing the bridge spanning the Colorado River from Blythe, CA to Ehrenberg, AZ, we are always greeted by this welcome sign. When we see this, we know that it’s only 115 miles and another two hours before we get home. It puts us in a really good mood.

When we returned to our California house yesterday, I was greeted with several drooping fronds on the two queen palm trees out front. I never know what to expect when we get here, but there’s always several things to do.

So, after The Better Half’s annual eye exam today, I got the eighteen foot tree tool out of the garage and commenced sawing off the drooping fronds. I think there were about six fronds between the two trees that needed removal. The job took me over two hours including clean up.

The second chore I did was to go through all the junk mail our neighbor collected and shred anything with personally identifiable information and recycle the rest. We always request the USPS to hold all mail for this address, but given they are a government entity, you probably know how well that worked out. ?@&*%$! USPS.

The Better Half caught this (clickable) image of the state line between Ehrenberg, AZ and Blythe, CA, directly over the Colorado River. I’m not saying that there is NO graffiti in rural Arizona, but once you cross the border into Kalifornistan, there are orders of magnitude more instances.

I snapped this today while walking the dogs on the road in front of the new house. The temperature was a brisk 42° so the dogs and I finished our business and went back inside the cozy house seen in the (clickable) photo.

Our landscape contractor finally found a suitable ocotillo to add to our desert xeriscape in front of the house. This ocotillo is about 10 feet high and has lots of canes. Canes refers to the stalks on the desert plant.

Our giant saguaro had root rot and we lost it a while back. The landscape guys located a replacement but logistics will delay its arrival. We’ll post when it gets here. Clickable image courtesy TBH.

Here are some interesting facts about this desert accent plant (from Univ. of Arizona):

• during drought it sheds its leaves to conserve moisture
• after spring/summer rains it responds by leafing out, sometimes up to six or more times in a year
• clusters of tubular flowers are 1 inch long
• within 48 hours of a rain, will sprout leaves
• Stems covered with a thick water resistant cuticle
• most abundant on stony slopes above 3,300 ft on the upper edges of the deserts and adjacent hills.
• Boojum tree is in the Fouquieria genus - Boojum is named after The Hunting of the Snark, a story by Lewis Carroll.
• the ocotillo is one of the oddest and most conspicuous Arizona plants
• named after Pierra Fouquier, a French professor of medicine

Now that the weather is starting to cool off, we’re going to be using our spa again. High temperatures in August and early September ranged from 102° to 112°. Today, it was only 92°, so we decided to crank up the spa and take a dip.

Unfortunately, the water temperature was a little too cool for comfortable dipping. We decided to postpone until tomorrow when the heater will have the water up to temperature.

I turned on the air control valve and shot the short video above to demonstrate the spa in full jet and bubbles mode. Click > to play video. If you don’t want the audio, click the speaker button on the right end of the control bar to mute.

. . . and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is the spectacle that greeted us as we pulled into our driveway after our trip out to California. Clickable image courtesy TBH.