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Gratitude, wins and losses, and weird Bisbee (Weekend Coffee Share #9)
*Yawn* Good morning, and welcome to the weekend coffee share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer! It’s Sunday morning, and I’m only half-caffed, so come on in, pull up a seat, and let’s finish caffeinating. I’m still scrambling to finish a Christmas horror story to submit for an anthology, so I’m going to keep things short today. Why losses seem to outweigh wins First, let’s talk about wins and losses–in writing and in life. Jenny Hansen on the wonderful Writers in the Storm blog has a great post called Writing and the Law of Loss Aversion. I’d never heard of the law of loss aversion before, but once she explained it,…
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#FOTD: Apple blossoms from my Flagstaff garden
The gorgeous pink dogwood blooms in Cee’s Flower of the Day today reminded me of this photo, which I took in the early days of the pandemic, when I was still living in Flagstaff. Part of my stay-sane-during-pandemic strategy was to spend as much time outside as I could, so I’d take breaks between Zoom meetings to walk the garden and take pictures. It was a bit surreal, watching the garden come back to life as the world shut down.
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Bisbee noir and a bit of non-news (Weekend Coffee Share #7)
Happy Friday, and welcome to the weekend coffee share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer! I’m frantically trying to finish a short story to submit to my favorite Christmas horror anthology series, Deathlehem, so this week’s post will be short. I submitted last year and got rejected, so I’m trying again this year with a new–and scarier–story. Hubster and I spent part of last weekend in Bisbee, a copper mining town about an hour and a half from Tucson. It’s a fascinating place–and more than a little bit creepy after dark. We nicknamed it Stair Land, because it’s built into a hillside and has staircases everywhere–including some that seem to go…
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Tumacácori National Historical Park (Weekend Coffee Share #5)
Happy Saturday morning! Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share! Grab your drink of choice, pull up a chair, and let’s talk. It looks like monsoon season is over here in Tucson. It’s supposed to be sunny and 103F today and triple-digits all week. But I promise I won’t spend this post complaining about the heat like I did last week. It’s hot in Arizona. We know. Instead, let’s pay a visit to a small but fascinating national park site less than an hour south of Tucson: Tumacácori National Historical Park, which includes the ruins of three missions from the Spanish colonial era. The site also does a good job of…
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Saying goodbye to summer (Weekend Coffee Share #4)
Good morning, and welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share! It’s Saturday morning here in Tucson, the start of Labor Day weekend. It’s sunny and humid, and the wet pavement by my front door tells me it rained last night. The air is cool (well, cool for Tucson) and fresh, so before it gets unbearably hot and sticky, let’s plop on the porch with a morning beverage (got my Diet Coke right here) and look back on summer. But it’s still summer, you say? Well, yeah, the equinox is over two weeks away, and it’ll feel like summer here in the Sonoran Desert till November. But to me, Labor Day weekend…
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Velvet-pod Mimosa (Mimosa dysocarpa)
I saw these gorgeous wildflowers for the first time Saturday on our way to Madera Canyon (more pix from that trip here). Learn more about them from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. See other posts for Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge here.
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A Photo Safari Through Madera Canyon, Arizona, After a Very Rainy Summer
Join me on a short photo safari in and around Madera Canyon, which, thanks to the rain, doesn’t look like it belongs in Arizona. This is my first post for Natalie’s Weekend Coffee Share blog link-up. Why yes, I am addicted to blog hops and photo challenges. Why do you ask? Blog hops like this one provide an opportunity to connect with other bloggers, so we can learn about each other’s lives and support each other. This particular blog hop should give me a great way to share the random bits and pieces of my life with the kind folks who read my blog. So, dear readers, grab a cup…
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We love our striped roses (#FOTD)
Today’s entry in Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge is a bud from our Rock & Roll rose. This poor thing has suffered through two moves and a ridiculous amount of neglect. We bought it in Southern California in about 2012. We dug it up in 2013 and stuffed it in a pot when we moved to Flagstaff, then planted it in our backyard, where it was abused by grasshoppers all summer and froze all winter. We eventually moved it to the front yard, where it would get more attention and better soil. Then when we moved to Tucson in 2020, we dug it up and stuffed it in…
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Pincushion cactus flower in Sabino Canyon outside Tucson, Arizona (#FOTD)
Sharing another photo from hubs’ and my attempt to hike in Sabino Canyon a week or so ago (see a few more pix from that aborted hike here). Note to self: do not hike at midday in Tucson in the summer. Sad that I have to leave myself notes about something that should be obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a cactus, but here we are. Before we slogged back to the car to avoid heatstroke, we snapped a few pix of the local flora, including this adorable pincushion cactus. It’s just a phone pic, and taken in the bright midday sun (see aforementioned note to self), so…
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Photos from Sabino Canyon Recreation Area (#FOTD)
Hubs and I visited Sabino Canyon for the first time yesterday. We only made it about a half mile on the trail before the heat sent us scurrying (OK, plodding) back to our air-conditioned car. I hear tell there’s a lake and running water further up the trail, but we’ll see that another time, when it isn’t in the 90s and monsoon-humid. Hot or not, it was lovely out in the desert. We’ve had tons of rain–the wettest July on record–so the desert is lush and green and smells of fresh rain and creosote. The cacti are plumped up, and we even saw tadpoles in a puddle along the trail.…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
