Botanical Gardens

This past weekend, I flew to Arizona to visit with my daughter (who was there on a business trip). The President's plane was mere yards from my departing plane, so I snapped a photo of Air Force One.

The first sculpture inside the gardens reminded me of the humongous fire cactus outside my livingroom window that grew so big I finally had to have it removed.

While in the Phoenix area, daughter and I also enjoyed an authentic Mexican dinner at an authentic barrio restaurant that featured an over-flow parking lot and at least 50 patrons sitting patiently outside the entrance, waiting for a table to become available. The food was delicious and well worth the time and effort to locate Commodore Guadalajara!

The brightness of the sun made this large red sculpture glow in the natural light. As a side note, the artist, Dale Chihuly, lives part-time in Palm Springs. His art and art installations are well-known around the world, and I've been told that small pieces of his work are available locally.

Daughter and I went to the Botanical Gardens and viewed an art installation that was breath-taking! The glass sculptures captured the indiginous plants perfectly and seemed to blend into the natural landscape--except for this one. I'm not sure of the reason behind the large Christmas balls hanging from a supporting beam.

The largest in height of the sculptures resembles an antler tree, such as is made in Wyoming (as well as other "hunting" states). It was beautiful as the sun shone through the many pieces of glass.

Ya Kin Callit Faux, But It's Still Fake

I'm gonna guess that we done run outta things ta talk 'bout 'til Tot Mom is released and we all can play "Where's Casey?"

In the desert, the big bruhaha is about faux landscaping elements designed to disguise cell phone towers. We have old-school, butt-ugly, plain metal towers, as well as faux trees of all sizes, shapes, and colors, and rocks in an assortment of sizes and shapes, but there just isn't any pleasin' the folks! The faux cell phone tower pine trees don't match the natural desert vegetation (duh!), so we planted faux cell phone palm trees -- that look just like cell phone towers disguised as FAKE palm trees. The vegetation response was to quiet the protestors about using plain ole metal cell phone towers, but this is the land of hundreds of HUGE metal windmills whirling the tourists into the Valley! Why not just hide the cell phone towers in the windmill fields and be done with it!

Now, the protests have targeted the faux rocks that just don't look ... rocky ... enough, to the point that critics are telling the cell phone companies to go out and round up some REAL desert rocks to surround the FAKE rocks so they look more "natural."

Okay, so you be the judge: is surrounding this huge faux rock with real desert rocks gonna work for you? Make the faux rock look more real? more natural? more like God placed it in the ideal desert location to generate more signal bars? Or is just about anyone who sees this gigantic FAKE rock in the middle of any natural environment gonna know that this is a FAKE rock?

Yeah, that's what I thought!

We just all have too much time on our hands to worry about far too many little things that don't warrant the time, the resources, or the expenditure of personal energy.

Snow Fotos

A friend sent me the pictures of the snowfall. This is the LAST post about the winter weather!

Mountains at Sunrise

Photo is off to the south, showing the snow at the tram.

Schools up the hill are again canceled, but will try to reopen tomorrow, as the combination of snow accumulation and icy roads makes it unsafe for anyone to be driving. Construction companies are again being requested to bring their equipment to the major roads, but I'm not sure what all the people who live off the beaten path will do as the snow is the deepest in those regions along the foothills.

Today is supposed to be clear, but we're expecting more rain and, perhaps, more snow before Christmas Day. I'm glad to see it throughout the state as we've been in severe drought conditions for at least a decade, and this week's snowfall and rain have brought what we used to see almost every winter season.