This is How it Starts

When we bought the house, we knew it would need new HVAC and a water heater because of its age.  What we did not know was that the driveway would become a basket case.  I took this last October, things still looked pretty good.

However, this started happening.  The end of the driveway is breaking up.

Cracks are forming, running across the width and length of the driveway.  They're actually much worse than this picture, but it's too cold and too windy to go out and take better photos.  Here's a better look at the cracks. 

Anyway, in May we're having pavers installed over the driveway.  The concrete forms a very good base for the pavers.  It is the nature of house projects that they snowball.  Since they're doing the driveway, we thought maybe it would be good to have the garage floor epoxied first, since they run the pavers up to the garage floor.  Then we thought, well maybe we should paint before the garage floor guys get here.   So we did that.

A previous owner painted this floor with an inappropriate paint.  It's coming up.  

It's an epoxy coating - which smells terrible.  They did the first coat Monday, after they ground off all of the old paint.  That was really noisy.  The hummingbird did not stick around for any of that process.  I am happy to report that even though the floor guys were three hours late and left after dark, she did return to the nest.  Here is where much of my cling wrap is residing.  We had to seal that door to keep the epoxy odor out.

Tuesday it rained and they could not do any work.  Allegedly they're returning at noon today for the sealer coat.  In 48 hours we'll be able to see how much paint dust is stuck to everything and how much washing of the garage will be required. Meanwhile the contents of the garage are distributed through out the house and on the patio.

Knowing what I know now, I would have done this before we moved in to the house, when we were still living in the RV.  Masking the floor before painting would have been the lesser of the pains in the butt.

Despite the bone chilling temperatures and the high winds, the new lemon tree we planted is flowering.   It started the blooming process back when nights were going below freezing, so the tenting with flannel was a success.  Next year we may need more flannel.  Before leaving for the summer, we're going to have to put up a deer fence to keep the tree from being eaten.

I read a really interesting article about how the western diet has derailed our modern gut biome.  There is actually science involved in determining the effects of diet on what's happening in the gut.  It has implications for auto-immune diseases, diabetes, and other ills of the western world.  Here is a teaser from the beginning of the article.

For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.

Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.

 It's a lot of words, but it's an interesting read.

Sunset

Sunsets have been less impressive lately because of the sun's movement from the back of the house toward the front of the house.  Last night was pretty good, though. 

More Hike and Hummer Plus Painting

ARGH!  The weather is driving me nuts.  We had high winds today, the palm trees are swaying like crazy, I'm surprised the hummingbird on the nest is not vomiting from motion sickness.  And it's not warm.  Wednesday is predicted to go down to 36 35.  What the heck?  It's March!

Anyway, yesterday was cloudy but warm enough to hike in shorts and tee shirts.  We went back up onto Ringtail Ridge.  Some of the ocotillos are leafing out.  It seems like they're late this year, probably because it's been so steeeenking cold.

We went left for a bit on the ridge trail.  This is what you see.  We've been told there is a trail that loops around Bren peak, and we think we spotted it, but it's a long walk and we should have started earlier if we were going to do that.

Then we went right on the trail for a bit.  It was really windy.  After getting bashed about by the wind, we decided to go back down where it might be calmer.  Our neighbors have done the entire length of the ridge, apparently there is no trail to get off it, one has to bush whack down a steep face to get back into the valley and the Yetman trail.  I doubt if we'll do that, either.  My feet start yelping after about four or five miles, and it's longer than that.

Here is Jim coming down the trail off the ridge.

Cactus are really survivors.  Here he is, growing out of a rubble pile.

Today we got up and prepped food for the crock pot.  That was a really good idea.  Then we masked and painted two walls in the garage.  I can't believe how many places required blue tape.  It took for ever to get it done.  Tomorrow we have to do it again because it needs two coats.  We're not doing the wall that has shelves on it, it's pretty much covered up, and getting those shelves down would take monumental effort.

Here I am cutting in the walls.

Jim is painting around our new water heater.  Despite our best efforts and getting every single off-white paint chip in the area, we did not get a perfect match on the paint.  The off-white we bought has more of a pink tone than was suggested by the paint chip.  However, I do not believe I care.  It's a garage!

The hummer spent a lot of time on the nest today.  It's not warm and it's windy, so I guess she had to keep heat on the eggs.  If you look dead center you can see her hovering in front of the agave.  The new palm we bought is still in the plastic bucket from Home Depot and the wind blew it over today.  My going out to pick it up disturbed her.  She frequently goes to the agave when she's disturbed.

Here she is on the nest.  I'm taking pictures from the house so they're not that good.

I assume since she is on the nest that the eggs are still intact.  I didn't look today, we're trying to stay out of her line of sight.  Of course all that will be undone Monday and Tuesday when the people come to epoxy the dismal looking garage floor.  Hopefully there will be sun on the nest if she's off of it.

Hummingbird in the Front Yard

We have two eggs.  Well, actually, she has two eggs.  The internet tells us they are the size of jelly beans.

I still wish she had done this somewhere else.  Every time the garage door goes up, or we walk out the front door, she flies away.  Maybe it will be ok, the males don't help, so the female has to leave anyway to find something to eat.  We put the feeder up on the front window, but so far she is spurning our offerings of food.
That's it, other than trips to Home Depot, the grocery store and like that, there is zippity doo-dah all to report.

Hike and Prune

There has been yard work and hiking in the Old Pueblo, as well as cartography.  I recently discovered that one can make their own topographical maps in Google.  Google "Google My maps" and it will take you there.  When creating the map, you can choose the topo style.  My original map of the John Krein trail was created by a blogger who winters in Tucson Estates and via e-mail he was kind enough to tell me how he'd made his maps.  I found this map which shows an alternate route for returning to the Sarasota trail head after doing the John Krein trail.  We decided to walk it backwards  yesterday before crossing the top of the ridge and then having commit to the new route home.  We got a good feel for the distances involved, and I'm not sure this route is much of an improvement over the way we usually go; although it is a much nicer trail.  So, maybe we'll try it.

It's taken me awhile to be able to overlay the above map with this map in my head.  The way they draw the lines  on the maps posted on the trails is counter intuitive to me.  Plus, they keep renaming things.  My map of John Krein refers to it as being across First Ridge.  This map is calling it Bobtail Ridge.  That took awhile to work its way into my consciousness.  Anyway the John Krein trail stretches between the two arrows.

Yesterday's route is a pretty hike, fairly flat with stuff to look at.  Notice the arms the saguaro has put out at his base from what looks like damaged tissue.  We have not seen that before.

It was windy, note the lenticular clouds.

Rocks.

This was our turn around point.  We're at the intersection of Little Cat trail and the David Yetman trail.  Our standing joke is "Yetman, he's everywhere."  He has a lot of trail, and trail off shoots named for him.  That's Bren Peak in the distance.




The Google My maps is cool because now I can get a sense of where all the mountains and ridges are.

We spent two days hacking back the bougainvillea and then we started in on the lemon tree.  The big lemon tree (as opposed to the one we just planted) is a graft.  When one grafts bud stock onto a root stock, one must exercise eternal vigilance to keep the root stock from suckering at the base.  This was not done with our lemon tree.  The one we took out was completely over run by suckering growth.  Apparently the root stock is not chosen for its taste, but rather disease resistance and fast growth.  The big lemon was producing two types of lemons.  One tasted good and the other was just awful.  So, we're removing the suckers, which are the size of saplings.  An interesting article about grafting can be found here.

I took this last November.  The tall growth is the suckering growth, and those lemons are inedible.  They're just terrible.

This is what the tree had become.  The wide part at the bottom is good tree, the tall part is bad tree.

Here is Jim, deploying the pruning saw.  The suckers come up from the base of the tree.

If you ever wanted an impenetrable hedge, lemon trees with spines would be just the ticket.  Some of the spines are two inches long, and they are sharp.  We both were scratched several times (bleeding!) just moving around the branches.  Tucson does not have yard waste pickup, it goes in to the garbage trucks.  If you have dangerous items such as cactus and branches with thorns, they must be boxed.

We spent a lot of time cutting this up into small pieces so it could be boxed.  It's interesting how dense and heavy the wood is.  I would not have predicted that.

 

The hopseed hedge is starting to bloom.  Are they not lovely?  The flowers and leaves are coated with a waxy layer that slows down the amount of water they lose in the summer. 

Cartography and pruning!  That's all I've got!

Odds and Ends

Greetings Gentle Readers!  It's the first day of a new month, and apparently it's opening day of allergy season for me.  The steeenking yellow bushes are in full bloom.  When riding one's bike down the Santa Cruz River Trail, the scent is almost over powering.

There is a large paving project on Starr Pass and La Cholla.  Here you can see La Cholla (taken from a moving vehicle).  Notice that the lane on the left has been taken down to dirt.  These roads needed paving in the worst way.  There are giant pot holes, and the road is littered with lumps of asphalt.  It's a good thing, but it's forcing all of the traffic on to Ajo.  Many people would bail off Ajo and use La Cholla.  Now they're all on Ajo and Mission and the backups literally go for miles.  To avoid this, we've been taking the scenic route over Gates Pass.

Isn't this lovely?  The low sun really lights up the desert.

Yesterday we rode the bikes up the Santa Cruz River trail.  The Round Tailed ground squirrels were out and feisty.  Some members of the tribe were standing in the middle of the trail, we'd approach them and they'd run off at the last minute.  They remind me of meerkats.

This is the new Caterpillar mining division headquarters.  They are due to open any day now.

This is our gate.  We had Alfred Jr. of Chavez Wrought Iron come out to see what it would take to raise it three inches to accommodate driveway work.  He identified this as an old gate made by a man named Muscat.  He was an accomplished blacksmith, one of those guys who could make anything.  I feel kind of bad about doing this, it's like cutting down a piece of art work so it fits over your mantle.

To the right of the gate which makes a tremendous mount of noise when it's opened and closed is a Queen Palm.  Notice the black arrow which is pointing at a blob.

It's a hummingbird nest.  She came by today with a piece of bird down in her beak, but she wouldn't put it in the nest because we were there.

One of their building materials is spider webs.  They use them to stick things together.  It's a tiny little nest.  I wish she had not built it there, it's not a good location, too many people and too much noise.

Speaking of noise.  There have been several occurrences of a weird, unexplained noise in the area.  It makes the front door rattle, there is a pretty good over pressure.  It goes on for seconds.  We had one today at 11:24 am.  It's not known what's causing them.  I find it amazing, with all of the technology at the University of Arizona that this is not known.  What is known is what it is not:  a sonic boom, earthquake, or mine blasting operations.  I've linked to an article from one of the local news stations, it includes a video that caught the sound.  Hopefully it will play for you, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

The weather here finally improved, it was almost 80 today.