We found this old skeleton of a saguaro, which was apparently left by the previous owner on our property. (He was from Tucson; saguaros don’t grow here.)
It’s quite beautiful, and I have an idea to make something out of it, so we propped it up and started using an air compressor to blow out the stuff inside. It is full of dirt, spider webs, insects, rabbit pellets (ubiquitous here), bird feathers, and other icky stuff.
Stay tuned for how this works out.
Here are a few updates on various topics here:
This weekend, we saw another bunch of unopened cactus blooms in the front yard. They seemed just about to go, and Brad got his camera set up in time to capture it. Quite beautiful. (More photos below the movie.)
Before the bloom
Brad setting up (pre-bloom)
Brad checking the results (post-bloom)
“People out here don’t like trouble. They don’t even like people. That’s why they live out here.”
– Edward Abbey, Fire on the Mountain
People out here have a unique style of communication. It’s an incredibly slow, drawling talk that meanders along painfully while not really saying or asking anything. It strikes me as though they don’t really want to talk to you at all. A conversation (or a loose approximation of one) starts and goes nowhere; you can talk for 10 or 15 minutes with neither side even introducing themselves much less revealing anything else.
As you might imagine, it kind of drives me crazy. Brad, on the other hand, has taken to it quite well.
This afternoon, on a walk, we saw a man standing at his gate. We approached. He closed his gate. At first, I thought we might never speak. Then one of us said hello. We talked for a while….slowly. He said he’d heard we were building a house and asked if we’d be living there “full time.” (A common question, many people own land here but only visit it for a few weeks a year.) We said yes.
“Well, hopefully, you have a skill,” he said to Brad.
Long pause.
Brad replied, “Well, hopefully I do.”
Another sign of spring…
If you ever have any doubts about how utterly bureacratic and dysfunctional our government, try moving a business out of state. I may spend the rest of my life trying to straighten this all out. My only consolation is that they will probably never be able to find me out here in the middle of nowhere to haul me off to debtor’s prison. Really, I haven’t done anything wrong, but no one seems able to help me. I am looking forward to the day when our mail stops forwarding.
It has been super-windy here this week, and today was the worst. It blew so hard that glasses in the house shook. We have heard there have been gusts up to 60 mph.
I had to drive to Phoenix today, and on the way to Road Forks, I could see huge clouds of blowing dirt out in the distance. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. (By the way, if you ever decide to surprise visit us, as one of my friends did, don’t take the Portal exit off the highway. It is 50 miles on mountain dirt roads that sometimes aren’t passable without 4wd. Take the Road Forks exit in NM instead. It is pavement the whole way and a very easy, pleasant drive.)
Actually, to the east of us on the 10, there are many signs on the highway that warn of dust storms and possible “ZERO VISIBILITY CONDITIONS”. The signs actually warn you not to stop in a moving lane if this happens…good advice I think. Anyway, we’ve laughed at these signs many times, but today was the first time I could actually imagine that this might happen. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go that way. To the west, where I was going, was very windy but not dangerously so.
With all this wind and seeing the effect on areas that have been overgrazed or plowed, I can almost imagine conditions during the Dust Bowl.
This weekend (after spending hours of watching videos on YouTube — this really is the best thing that’s happened to the DIY world since Lowe’s) we did stain samples on the slab. We tried Desert Mountain and Espresso and really liked both.
One thing we learned was that we won’t have to etch the slab first. (In the event that anyone else can use this information, the issue is slab porosity. Because the stain has to permeate the concrete, the surface must be porous. You can tell the porosity by misting water onto the surface. On ours, it immediately soaked right in, indicated a porous slab.)
We have also made a decision about what to do with that odd cabana that is already on our property. We are going to make it into a greenhouse!
To prepare for that, we began digging a ditch around the perimeter (more practice for my backup career). We’ll bury screened fencing a foot r so deep to keep animals from digging in (hopefully). We’re going to plaster the corner posts, which will give us some practice on plastering for the houses. since Stay tuned for more on this project.
While we’ve been waiting for the next step on our construction (don’t ask), we’ve been doing some landscaping work. We have several trees that were fenced and had drip irrigation, but which hadn’t been weeded out in what must be years. One-by-one, we’ve been tackling them.
The thicker brush bushes have roots that can be several inches in diameter. I had no idea how useful an axe could be in landscaping.
Before:
And after:
