Summer in Tucson part 2: more rain, more sunsets, more bats

Monsoon season is in full swing down here in Satan’s Anus. We’ve had rain almost every night this week, including a wall shaker of a thunderstorm Monday night. The mountains are greening up, the weeds are taking over, and we even have mosquitoes and humidity. It’s like Georgia down in here–but with cactus. I love it (well, except for the weeds and mosquitoes).

Look at all that green! The Santa Catalinas don’t look like Mount Doom anymore! And there’s even grass! Water truly is life.

And then there are the sunsets. These were taken last night in the Catalina foothills. It was a little too dark for my iPhone camera, but you get the idea.

Also, there are flowers:

And in case you didn’t get enough of the bats last week, we visited them again this week, and I decided to make them YouTube stars.

Aside from the weather, there’s not a lot to report this week. I’m taking a 4-day weekend to get some house projects done, including installing some new bookcases in my home office. Yes, kids, Middle-Aged Librarian is getting excited about… bookcases. I suppose that’s marginally better than two weeks ago, when I was excited about a new freezer. It’s a thrill a minute around here, I tell ya.

But before we get to all the non-excitement… Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer! Grab a treat, have a seat, and let’s get to it.

Writing update

I submitted a short story at the end of July for the Arizona Mystery Writers contest, and now I’m finally back to working on Delta Dawn, my suspense novel that’s been in progress since 2019 (*sigh*). I keep getting diverted–look, a writing contest! Ooh, another contest! Hey-yo, an anthology call! But now I’m not only back on track, I’m having more fun with my writing than I have all year. I’m working through Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel course, and I’ve reached the part where all the work I’ve done to this point–which mostly felt like busywork–is now paying off. I’m starting to see the shape of what my novel can be, and it’s so freakin’ exciting!

Meanwhile, I’m waiting to hear about three pieces I have on submission:

  • A poem submitted for the Arizona Authors Association annual literary contest. I should hear about that one either this month or early next month.
  • A short story, “Adam Carmona and the Saguaro Ripper,” submitted for the Left Coast Crime 2023 anthology. They said they would make a decision in late July or early August, so I’m back to refreshing my Gmail every 1.3 seconds.
  • Another short story, “Walk Me Home,” submitted for the aforementioned Arizona Mystery Writers contest. They expect to announce winners in the fall.

Video of the Week

As much as I try to avoid falling into internet rabbit holes, I fail miserably, as my weekly meme collections can attest. This week someone on the wonderful Ask a Manager blog mentioned a series of videos from a law firm in Texas with musical legal advice. Seriously, who wouldn’t bite at that hook? So off I went to the (apparently no longer updated) YouTube channel for Hutson & Harris, where I learned more than I wanted to know about Texas marijuana laws while laughing my ass off. Here’s the best of the batch (IMHO). Consider it an early Christmas gift.

And if you’re road tripping to Texas, leave your pot brownies at home.

Meme Me Baby, One More Time

Let’s get an early start on Halloween (after we just got an early start on Christmas):

I can’t stop laughing at that poor squirrel!

And since we’re celebrating Halloween a little early:

“Also, terrible Wi-Fi”–blahahahaha.

Pretty sure I know who’s going to win this round of Family Feud.

As long as we’re keepin’ it classy here at Camp WTF:

You don’t want to know how long I giggled at that one. Apparently I have all the emotional maturity of a middle-school boy, which is why I also giggled at this one:

It’s not often you get such a perfect combination of adolescent sexual humor and a dad joke.

Let’s switch gears for a little nerd humor. Anyone remember those O’Reilly books from the early oughts?

I could teach doctoral-level seminars on Googling the Error Message and Forgetting How My Own Code Works.

I don’t care about George; I want Rosie the robot maid!

Speaking of whom:

I will gladly feed a machine Cheetos if it will clean my house. I for one welcome our new robot cleaning overlords.

And finally, for no reason other than it made me smile:

There’s no topping Fridge Cat, so I’m signing off. Have an awesome week! Drop a comment and tell me about summer in your neck of the woods.

24 Comments

    • Janet Alcorn

      They really are, and they fly fairly close to people, probably because they’re used to so many of us standing around gawking at them.

  • Gary A Wilson

    I’ve been a long timer with using the O’Rielly books and have often marveled at how compelling their book covers were. I even queued up and did some pre-work for what became their SED & AWK book in the earlier days of UNIX, but a couple of folks beat me to it. Because they’re so close to where we live, I even interviewed to work for them, got an offer but that’s when I learned that the way to learn how to live while broke is to work for a book publisher – preferring a life style that included actual food, I moved on. . . But, this title still nags at me sometimes.
    https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sed-awk/1565922255/

    So – I so enjoyed the O’Rielly spoofs – brilliant but how many folks here are going to get these shots?
    I laughed so I guess I’m of the nerd class.

    Great stuff yet again. Now the bats alone could draw me back to Tucson – just so I could tan some by standing outside IN THE SHADE FOR GOD’s SAKE. . .

    • Janet Alcorn

      Yeah, if you want food and shelter, don’t work in publishing. Not sure where all the publishers’ revenue goes, but it sure isn’t for salaries or advances.

      I remember the Sed and Awk title, but I never owned it b/c I didn’t work with either. I reviewed their Unix for MacOS book many years ago, and at one time the library I worked in had a subscription to Safari Books Online, which included the entire O’Reilly catalog. By that time I was in management though, so I wasn’t doing much tech work and therefore didn’t need to use them often.

      • Gary A Wilson

        I don’t know the details but O’Rielly essentially gave up being a publisher and turned themselves into a technical education company. Too late for me to be a part (because we might have been able to make that work) but interesting that they had to make a big change or likely close their doors and call it a day. Good folks for sure, but what a hard industry publishing must be

  • trent

    I loved those old O’Reilly books and had quite a few back in the day. I think I wrote most of those you posted… And, yeah, Have Yourself an Unindicted Christmas. Works for me. So just don’t go milking other people’s cows during the holidays! Oh well, that poor squirrel. But I am sure he now laughs when he looks back on the incident. Have a great week. Hope you get more life-giving rain, just not all day every day.

    • Janet Alcorn

      Oh, that squirrel! I kind of want to put out some Halloween props this year with lettuce in them to see if I can get some of our huge rabbit population to wear them. Can you imagine a cottontail hopping around the neighborhood while wearing a zombie head?

  • Kathleen Howell

    Seriously LOL’d at the Samuel Jackson meme. Thanks for the giggle! I LURVE bats! Haven’t seen too many in SE Michigan this year, but I love to sit out at night and watch them flutter by.

    • Janet Alcorn

      We see bats in our neighborhood every night from spring to fall. We watch them when we take evening walks. Pretty cool considering we live in the middle of a city.

    • Janet Alcorn

      Thanks! Not sure about that particular bat colony, but one of the others in town includes about 20,000 bats and eats about 2 tons of insects every season (April-Oct). I don’t want to think about how buggy this place would be without our resident bats.

  • Bobbiem91

    I love the rain. It makes things pretty for a month, then it’s back to brown and harsh. About those bats–had an up close an personal encounter by removing one from the loft of the house where I work. Cute little critter. Then there was a second one. They were on towels and hung around for a while before flying off. Got some good close up of them. They were quite interesting. then again, I like tame rats—so I’m a bit on the weird side.

    • Janet Alcorn

      Lucky! I kind of want pet bats, but I doubt they’d do well in captivity. And I like (tame) rats too, as well as spiders and snakes, so I’m weird too.

    • Janet Alcorn

      Thanks! I’ve had to scale the memes back a little to save time (need to get my writing done!) but I seem to find a steady supply of good ones.

    • Janet Alcorn

      It really is a relief. We’ve had about 3 weeks now of bearable temperatures (not more than 101, mostly mid and upper 90s), and the rain cools things down even more.

    • Janet Alcorn

      Re: George Jetson, it’s weird living in what seemed like a sci-fi future when I was a kid. “The year 2000” seemed so far off and so exotic, like we’d all be flying around in spacecraft capable of traveling at warp speed and teleporting to exotic places in the universe. And now we’re 22 years past that–and still no teleportation, dang it.

    • Janet Alcorn

      Thanks! Maybe once the weather cools down, I’ll have pretty pictures to post like you do 🙂 Your trip must have been amazing.

    • Janet Alcorn

      Thanks! One of the reasons I like writing short stories is that I can actually finish something. Working on my novel hardly feels like progress, just slogging through an endless swamp filled with quicksand.