Cold Wet Hummingbirds

About 0400 hours local time, a front moved through.  There was gusty, booming rattling wind for quite some time.  When we woke up it was much colder than it has been, and it was raining.  The desert needs the rain.  The prickly pear cactus have been looking desiccated since we arrived in November. With any luck, it all won’t run off and the cactus will get some benefit from this.

Since there was to be no hiking, we went shopping.  Jim’s new boots were slightly too big, so they went back to REI.  He went down half a size and they are much better.  I purchased yet another pair of ugly electric blue trail running shoes.  I figure I’m good for 3 to 4 years with what I have hoarded.  Eventually they’ll discontinue that shoe and then things will be bad.  La Sportiva is now making a green running shoe, but the tongue is really long and it annoys my ankle.  It is always something.  Truthfully, I’m not sure which is more unattractive.

       

So, it was cold this morning.  An aggressive hummingbird parked himself on the feeder for hours.  All other birds were denied.  There was another male who would buzz him and hover, but the guy on the feeder just shrugged.  Before we went out I refilled the feeder and he buzzed me as well, as if to say I was taking too long.



Notice how puffed up he is.  He was cold.



After the mall we drove north to Oro Valley.  There are a couple of neighborhoods up there that look mildly promising.  Many of them are gated, so we’re going to have to break down and find a real estate agent so that we can go in and look.  It’s annoying to not be able to cruise through on our own.  Those are the Catalinas, which are always lovely.



It’s raining again.  It was supposed to stop, so we thought it would be safe to grill dinner, but apparently we were mistaken.  Something else may be done with the hamburgers in the kitchen, rather than outside. 

Other than this paltry offer, maties, there is nothing much to report.

Even More Hike and Hummingbirds

Who knows what this is?  It’s at the Sarasota Trailhead.  Our guess would be a camera, but we have no idea.

We set out through the bowl of Tucson Mountain Park, retracing our steps from two days ago.  Here we are at the site of the bushwhacking up to the new trail whose terminus we wanted to find.

We continued on the current trail for not very long.  The trail makers have done a really nice job of connecting three trails so that people have more ways to move about the Tucson Mountain Park.  This trail takes you back to the Sarasota trail head.  We had not seen much of that trail segment before as it is long.

This is the continuation of the route we had taken up to the intersection of the three trails.  Notice how I never actually name these trails?  That’s because no one knows what the names are.  They’re not signed and there’s really no way to refer to them.  This trail heads towards the Evil Wash, which is a long stretch of deep gravel with large flat rocks buried in it.  It’s extremely unpleasant.

This is the new trail that goes up towards the five way intersection at the top of Rock Wren.  When we were just starting the hike, we met two mountain bikers who wanted to go back to the five way, but wanted to avoid the terrible climb on the loop trail.  We gave them directions to go here, but we saw them later, far from here.  They either did not follow the directions, or figured out where they were and chose a different route home.  It’s hard giving directions because no trail names and it all looks the same.

It’s not as pretty as Utah, but parts of it are Utah-ish.

This is a part of the trail we had not seen before.  We felt kind of bad about sending the two women this way, because one of them was not a really good mountain biker.  There are some gnarly bits along the way.  There would be much hike a bike for me.

We came back via the obnoxious climb and descent on the loop back to the truck. 

Yesterday we went hiking boot shopping.  Jim got a new pair of Lowas that are the follow on pair to his original pair.  They can not be resoled because they’re glued and not sewn.  This seems to be the new world order in the hiking boot industry.  Me, and my pronating ankles and bony, low volume, surgically scarred wretched feet from hell bought nothing.  I guess it’s time to go out to Zappos and order one of everything.  It’s better than the exasperated looks I get from the shoe sellers.  I’m really not being a pain in the patoot.  People with bony feet feel everything and it’s hard to find a shoe/boot that doesn’t hurt.  That explains why I’ve been wearing La Sportiva trail runners in electric blue for years, that’s what my feet will accept.  That’s it.  I’m really tired of blue shoes.

More hummingbird cuteness is here.

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It was again very windy today, and partly cloudy.  The clouds are ok, but the wind is messing with my contact lenses.

Another Hike and Some Hummingbirds

We are whooped.  We’ve been wondering where on earth the recently observed Yetman segment of trail ends up.  The trail maps and Google are worthless.  To discover the trail, one must hike towards the trail.  We parked out at Sarasota again and hiked out into the bowl that is surrounded by the Tucson Mountains.  Our original intent was to walk up to the four way intersection at the top of the hill and see what we would see.



See the rock formation that looks like a Tiki God?  He’s our navigational aid for the area.  All trails look alike out there.  Anyway, look at the horizontal line at the bottom of the photo.  We know this elevation after hiking out here for years, and we did not recognize that trail.  So we walked towards it, got near it and eventually decided to bushwhack up to it.  We don’t recognize the trail because it was not here last year.  It’s a great MTB trail.  It’s single track and side hill, but for the most part there are not large frightening rocks on it.  It’s also fairly long.  We were the only people walking it.



This is the old four way intersection at the end of Rock Wren trail.  It’s now a five way intersection.  The new trail comes in behind that sign to the left.  It ended up being a longer hike than we had planned, about three hours.  We both need better shoes to deal with all of the pointy rocks in the area.  Next time we’ll go back to the bushwhack and go the other way and see where that ends up.



I finally put up the hummingbird feeder.  We’ve gotten quite a few hummers on it.  I really love watching them.



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So that was today.  It was day two of being windy.  I would like for that to stop soon.

Weird Food and Miscellaneous Stuff

Have you ever walked through a grocery store and seen something so weird and strange looking that you just had to buy one, because WTH?  We saw this at Safeway last week.  It was in with the Bob Evans pre-packaged sodium fests.  The numbers don't look too bad, but for 320 calories, $7 seems a bit much.  It was on sale, so it's ok.

Check out the packaging.  It's vacuum sealed. The plastic is tight up against the food.  It has really long shelf life if refrigerated.

As seen from the top.

It microwaves in 1.5 minutes.  While it's cooking the plastic cover sort of bubbles off.   When it's done it's like a tent over the tray.  It was predictably awful.  See, I show you these things so you don't have to buy them yourselves.

This was taken in Christopher Columbus park.  Notice the water bird on the right.  The guy in the float tube caught a trout which he was reeling in.  We've seen that bird on multiple occasions, watching the fisher people.  They walk by him and he doesn't budge.

Here is a random shot of one of the prettiest churches in Tucson.

The hummingbird, as seen from inside the RV.  The tint on the windows makes it difficult to get a good shot.

Yesterday we did a short ride before the winds came up, knowing that today would suck, which it did.  On the way back the front started moving in.  There were some fairly impressive lenticulars.  We were lucky, as soon as we made it through the back gate, the wind was up.

We went out to lunch today, and saw this young coyote sleeping in the sun.  He didn't look so good.  As we approached him, he got up and walked behind the bush.  When we got in the truck, he came back out and returned to his nap.  

Did you seen this on Facebook?  I screen scraped it from there, it's not clear who did the graphic.  I thought it was a nice job of showing where various publications fall on the bias scale.

Have you read the Vanity Fair review of Trump Grille?  It's hysterical.  Trump's tweeting about it has driven their new subscription numbers through the roof.  On Facebook, VF is on sale for $5 a year for print and digital.   I think the New York Times is also on sale.
Other than this paltry mashup of food and wild life, I have zippity doo dah all to report.

News of the Administration and Hummingbirds

An excellent article from the New Yorker was referenced in Steve Reed's blog this morning, and I thank him for bringing it to our attention. The article addresses the impact of Trump's victory on Mr. Obama's legacy.  It's extremely well written.  Below is a small excerpt.

Still, his triumph, or the idea of it, was not beyond prediction. The fissures and frustrations in the American electorate were nothing new, and some commentators were notably alert to them. Before and after the election, a passage from Richard Rorty’s 1998 book, “Achieving Our Country,” circulated on social media. Rorty, a left-leaning philosopher, who died in 2007, predicted that the neglected working class would not tolerate its marginalization for long.

“Something will crack,” he wrote:  The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

So, I get why Trump carried non-college educated white males, but I still am at a loss as to why so many women voted for him.

In other news of the administration, Rick Perry (former Texas governor and Dancing With the Stars contestant)  has been named director of the Department of Energy.  As you no doubt recall, the DOE was one of the three departments Perry promised to get rid of if elected.  It was also the department whose name he could not remember during the debates.  The two directors of the DOE under Mr. Obama were both physicists.  One has a Nobel prize, and the other taught at MIT.  Perry has a bachelor's in animal science.  DOE is responsible for many very technical and complicated things, not the least of which is the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal.  They also develop technologies to detect and deter nuclear testing and smuggling, and to support international nonproliferation treaties.  One wonders how on earth the people reporting to Perry will be able to communicate with him.  He doesn't have the vocabulary or the knowledge to follow the technical details.  This appointment is just astonishing to me.

In weather news, tomorrow is the last good climate day for awhile in Tucson.  Tomorrow will bring record breaking warm temperatures, followed by rain on Friday and then highs in the 60s.   Pity us as we suffer through the colder temperatures.  Kidding, just kidding.  I am so happy not to be in the northern tier states right now!

We'll end with hummingbirds because they still make me happy.

Biking, Birds, Drug Prices

On Tuesday it was, once again, very windy.  We thought about riding, but since Jim was still suffering from the virus that will not leave his body, we decided we'd hike.  We drove up to Pima Canyon, which is a hike I reviewed in 2013.  It's a really pretty hike, but I would not call it fun.  It's arduous.

This is a bouldery section of the trail.  None of it is flat, and none of it is without rocks of some size or shape.  On the way back, you'll be walking down the sides of giant rocks.  None of it is not doable, but it's arduous.

A view of one canyon wall.

An attractive dead tree.

There are a lot of chollas with much fruit attached to them.

Wednesday dawned with calm winds and cold temperatures. One key learning for the day was to believe the temperature provided by the phone, and not to believe what our outdoor air temperature probe was telling us.  It gets heat from the sun and the bus and was too enthusiastic about the climate.  Here is Jim at the ball fields wearing arm and knee warmers and a vest.  I had glove liners, as well.

The other key learning is to be cautious around the park just north of Speedway.  Some idiot came zooming on to the bike trail on a motorized bicycle towing a bugger.  Instead of slowing and looking in both directions before entering the trail, he came out very fast and dove between Jim and me.  I was able to move left in a hurry and not be hit.  If he had hit me, it would have been bad given his speed and the weight of the bike and trailer.  I am still pissed about the level of stupidity involved with that move.  This is the second time we've been menaced there by someone with bad trail manners.

This morning was again calm, and cold.  We sat outside for a bit waiting for it to warm up  before riding, and so that I would quit reading Huffington Post.  Jim has entered a news blackout and I am trying not to tell him about the most recent affronts to the nation.  We were visited by hummingbirds.  Who's tired of hummingbirds?  I do want you all to know that I ruthlessly pared down the number of pictures.

This is the male, gleaming in the morning sun.

I believe both of these are females.  The one on the feeder is a girl for sure.

The second hummer came up and had a seat, and they eyed each other for a bit.

There was detente and a spirit of cooperation.

Then the newcomer menaced the girl.

The girl stood her ground.

And that was the end of peace at the feeder.

Have you found yourself wondering as to why prescription drugs cost so much?  This is an interesting article about who is driving up drug prices.  Honestly, I do not know why this is legal.  It is just infuriating.

Hiking and Up Close With the Birds and the Bees

Saturday Jim came down with something.  Somewhere, someone breathed on him.  So Saturday was spent primarily on the couch, reassuring Jim that he would not perish.
Sunday we walked out into the Tucson Mountains, out towards the Camino del Oeste trailhead.  We started on the Bowen Trail.  It was just a gorgeous day, but very windy.

The saguaros out there are very happy.  There are a lot of them.

Today we went back out the Bowen trail, but turned left at the Y and went to the old Bowen Homestead.  This is the view from one of their doors.  A kiosk has been installed in front of the house, with a request that people stop vandalizing it.  Good luck with that.

The chollas want to reach out and touch someone.

This morning we spent some time sitting on the patio waiting for it to warm up some.  This is the aggressive male hummingbird that drives off all of the other hummingbirds.  He is watching that bee.

Still watching.  Apparently hummers do not like the bees.

He's leaning back.

At this point the hummer is flying backwards as the bee approaches him.

Eventually the bee departed, and he got a drink.

Now he's off to terrorize the other hummingbirds.

Recently, there has been much discussion about bringing the jobs back.  This is a very interesting article about how the jobs are changing in aerospace.  Robots are doing more and more of the work.  It used to be that a high school graduate could sign on at Boeing and earn a living wage.  Those days are close to over.

Then later, there was this.