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Tucson Botanical Gardens and a few laughs (Weekend Coffee Share #15)
Good morning! Writing and work have kept me busy this week, so I’m a little late getting the Weekend Coffee Share (hosted by Natalie the Explorer) up for this week. Today I’ll share a few pics from my visit last weekend to the Tucson Botanical Gardens as well as the usual funnies at the end. But first: This Week’s Writing Update, Brought to You By Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers The writing update for this week is that there isn’t much of an update. I’ve heard exactly nothing about any of my pending submissions, including the story I submitted for the Christmas horror anthology that was supposed to be published…
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Rock and Roll Rosebud (#FOTD)
It’s literally sunshine and roses in my garden right now. We don’t really have fall color here in Tucson. I’m a little jealous when I see other bloggers posting beautiful photos of red and yellow fall leaves, but then I remember that I won’t have to shovel snow or endure 6 months of rain, and I stop complaining. Now that the weather has cooled off here in Satan’s Anus, the garden is perking up, the tomatoes are threatening to eat the house, and the roses are blooming like crazy. For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge, meet Rock and Roll, one of our favorite striped roses (Of course we…
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Camille Pissarro Rose (#FOTD)
Cee’s Flower of the Day post today is a lovely portrait of fall leaves. We don’t really have fall leaves here in Tucson. I vaguely remember one neighbor’s tree providing a bit of fall color last year–in December. Right now, my garden is full of flowers, bigger and brighter now that the weather isn’t so hot. I think I’ve mentioned on here before that my husband and I have a thing for striped roses. We bought this one last spring at Lowe’s, and it bloomed all through a Tucson summer. Want to see more flowers? Take a look at my Flower of the Day archive and Cee’s wonderful blog.
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Bisbee pics and saying goodbye (Weekend Coffee Share #10)
Good morning and happy Friday! Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer. Grab a drink and a nibble, and let’s chat. When this post goes live, I’ll be in Flagstaff, a town in the Arizona mountains where I used to live. My husband is seeing his knee surgeon up there for a final post-operative visit, and I’m tagging along. Flagstaff is not what people think of when they think of Arizona. It’s almost 7000 feet above sea level, and it gets *cold*. I enjoyed the six years I lived there, but I so don’t miss shoveling snow. They got their first snow of the year this…
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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.