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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #4: Christmas Truck
Rudolph the red-nosed pickup Had a very shiny hood And if you ever saw it You might even call it good And this, folks, is why I’m not a poet.
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#CBWC: Early morning at the Camp Magruder Boat House
This week’s entry for Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge (CBWC) includes photos depicting in or on water. As the pandemic wears on, I find myself looking back at old photos and reliving old memories of times when we could travel and gather. Better days are coming, but in the meantime, I find joy in remembering some of my favorite places. Every fall we would take our son to our church’s annual family camp at Camp Magruder. Magruder sits on a strip of sand, with a lake (shown in the pic) on the east side and the Pacific Ocean on the west. For 2 days, our son could play with other kids…
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#FOTD: Spring crocus
When I lived in wintery places like Portland and Flagstaff, I loved crocuses, because they bloomed so early and brought a little color to the drab late winter landscape. Hang on a little longer, they seemed to say. Sunshine and light are coming. That seems an apt message for this time of year and these times we live in. Hang on, y’all. Sunshine and light are coming.
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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #3: red tails in the trees
We’re still getting used to being city dwellers after spending the last 6 1/2 years in rural Flagstaff. One of our biggest surprises has been the number of birds in our midtown Tucson neighborhood. We have tons of doves, flocks of them in the trees and foraging in our front yard, along with a few pigeons and some other birds I haven’t identified yet. The coolest of the avian life forms, though, are the red-tailed hawks and cooper’s hawks. The red tails have a nest in a huge eucalyptus tree down the road from us, and they hang out in the dead tree in front of my neighbor’s house. My…
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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #2: Holiday Creosote
Continuing my attempt to notice the beautiful and/or quirky in my everyday surroundings. Tucson is a quirky and beautiful city, so I should have no shortage of material. I love this little neighborhood experiment–communal decorating of a creosote bush. It says so much about the kind of attitude that helps us get through tough times and lead a happy life: making due with what you have (because Christmas trees don’t really grow in the desert) and inviting others to share what they have to create something beautiful and joyful.
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#FOTD: Coke can flower
For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge. We live only a mile or so from the Tucson Botanical Garden, and we decided to check it out during Winter Break. We had to cancel our Winter Break travel plans due to the Microbe that Must not be Named, so we are exploring our new city instead (outside only, masked and socially distanced). According to the audio tour: This shady barrio (neighborhood) garden came to life with the help of local Mexican-American gardeners and honors the distinctive gardens and yards found in Tucson’s Mexican-American neighborhoods… the distinctive decorative style featur[es] ‘found objects,’ family mementos and whimsical use of recycled materials. https://tucsonbotanical.org/tours/nuestro-jardin-audio-tour/…
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New Year’s Eve time travel
Husband: “So, what are we doing for New Year’s Eve?” Me: “Well, I hear the living room is nice this time of year.” To be fair, I’m trying to remember the last time I was up at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and… well… hmm… OK, I got nuthin’. But sometimes we do travel this time of year or do, you know, *something* that involves leaving the house, even if we are home and asleep by 10 PM. This year? Well, I hear the living room is nice this time of year. So what’s a bored blogger to do? Dig through the archives of years past, of course. Let’s climb…
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#FOTD: Frozen mums
For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge. When I lived in Flagstaff, I left plants and flowers standing after frost kill, because they provided wildlife habitat and protection for the crown of the plant (and because I was lazy). I’m not a winter person, but I learned to look closely to appreciate the textures of flower heads and stalks in the snow.
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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #1: desert Christmas
One of my goals for the new year is to post more consistently on here. Another one of my goals is to notice the beautiful and/or quirky in my everyday surroundings. Last April, I wrote a post, N is for Now, about how our worlds had shrunk to the size of our houses and neighborhoods and about looking at our surroundings through a macro lens, noticing the beauty in the often-overlooked details of our everyday lives. I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot as I’ve moved to a new city, and many of us, at least here in the USA, are back on lockdown (or should be–stay home, ya…
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#SoCS: Our choices make our lives (with bonus pics from Saguaro National Park)
This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; this week’s prompt is: “opt.” Use it as a word or find a word with “opt” in it and base your post on that. Yesterday my husband and I opted out of unpacking, organizing, and cleaning. Instead of doing those responsible adult things, we opted to explore the western unit of Saguaro National Park, about a half-hour’s drive from our new home in Tucson. I read a lot of self-help books, because I want to be the best version of me than I can, and I have a lot of dreams I want…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
