Skywatch Friday = Monument Fire In Arizona

Skywatch Friday = Monument Fire In Arizona

These photos were taken by our former neighbors in Pueblo del Sol in Sierra Vista, AZ. The fires burning in the canyons are just five miles from their home. If the fires travel further north, they may need to evacuate their home. Already 40 homes and 10 structures in the canyons have burned. This photo shows the fire after dark. Sierra Vista is near historic Fort Hauchuca.

Friday Morning Update: Our friends have both cars packed with valuables and financial papers and needed medicines because the fires are now just two miles from their home. Arizona is pulling firefighters off the Springerville fire up north to head to Sierra Vista because Sierra Vista has thousands of homes in danger while the Springerville fire is mainly in Arizona's remote wilderness regions. Please pray for the folks in Sierra Vista!

This is highway #92 heading south to Mexico which is just 35 miles from Sierra Vista.

Another view of the mountain canyons burning at night.

This is the burnt out Catholic chapel that a millionaire built and maintained for the public.

This is another view of the burnt chapel.

The Monument Fire has now burnt over 10,000 acres.

My friends say that it was set by someone. It was not caused by lightening.

You can learn more by doing a search for the local newspaper, The Sierra Vista Times.

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Friday A.M. Update: The fire has now burned over 17,000 acres!

Monday Noon: The fire has claimed three restaurants and 27,000 acres!

And our friends have evacuated the home that they have lived in since 1976 since the fire is getting closer. Our former home that we had built in 1977 is in this neighborhood too and the owners have also evacuated.

All the horses on Fort Huachuca have been sent off post---many to Davis Monthan Air Base near Tucson.

Spring In The Desert: Ajo, Arizona

Spring In The Desert: Ajo, Arizona

This photo from the seventies was taken during a spring vacation. Jack, Jennifer and I were on our way to San Diego to see the San Diego tourist sites when we came upon all these wild flowers blooming in the Arizona desert. We had to pull over and snap a photo. The low growing trees are desert mesquite trees. They had not gotten their new leaves yet.

Two Pics From The Past

Two Pics From The Past

Our first gardening adventures were in the Arizona desert. Here's Jack with our first two pets: Tough Cat and Shiloh. Shiloh, the dog in Jack's arms, now reminds me of Barney, Jeanine's black lab. We named Shiloh "Shiloh" because he was shy and low to the ground. I think this little dog that we rescued from an Arizona dog pound was a black lab and dachshund mix.

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We called the yellow tabby Tough Cat because he lived outside with the rattlesnakes. He was a great cat.

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Now look at my husband. I can hardly remember my husband sporting a mustache and having that much thick dark hair!

Who Spent A Night In This Building?

Who Spent a Night In This Building?

If you look closely, you will notice iron coverings on the window of this building. The reason for this is that this building was a jail in eastern Arizona in the small town of Bowie, AZ. According to local historians the Chiricahua Apache Indian chief, Geronimo, spent a night in this small jail after he was finally captured by U.S. army personnel. Then he was shipped back east to prison and never again returned to his native Arizona. Today this building stands empty and forlorn and there is no sign indicating that this is an historic site worth preserving.

The Apache Indians roamed freely across the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico as well into Mexico. The ghost town pictured here is in Stein, New Mexico which is not far from the Arizona border. Jack and I toured it in 2005 and learned that is had become a little tourist site with its own shop and bar. On the ceiling of the bar are lots of dollar bills that have been put there by customers. This seems to be a western tradition---to hand things on the ceiling. In Tucson there is a famous restaurant where if you come wearing a tie they will cut if off and hang it on the ceiling.

Another Uploaded Picture Or Two......

Another Uploaded Picture Or Two....

I'm working like a wild woman to get all my albums uploaded to my Twiter account. And I seem to be in an Arizona frame of mind when choosing some pics to upload to my blog. Here's Jack in the Arizona desert outside Tucson in January 2005. I love those blue skies over the mountains. This setting is in Old Tucson where many cowboy movies and TV shows were filmed in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Sometime in the '90s the studio location had a big fire but what burned has been restored and Old Tucson is still open to tourists like Jack and I.

Remember High Chaparral? This is where it was filmed.

Below is a tiny mud building in eastern Arizona. Tomorrow I'll tell you who spent the night here.

Have a good day. I'm back to uploading pics.

Another Uploaded Picture

Another Uploaded Picture From The Past

This is my little Arizona cowgirl. Jennifer Mary is wearing a German dirndle outfit that her father brought back from Germany in the summer of 1978.

Another Uploaded Picture

Another Uploaded Picture

This picture is of our former home in Sierra Vista, AZ. We had the home built in 1977 and had landscaped the yard with native cacti that we got permits to move from a ranch to our lot. The day we went back to look at our former home we could definitely tell that the cactus had thrived on our former lot. A later owner planted the palm tree behind the territorial design house.

In the background are the Huachuca Mts which includes Ramsey Canyon, a world famous hummingbird scanctuary. There are 35 different species of hummingbirds that winter in Ramsey Canyon. Bird folks from around the world come to Ramsey Canyon to go birding.

What Is It?

What is it? Here is some background info to help you figure it out. We found something in eastern Arizona on a ranch that was homesteaded by a man who claimed ownership of over 660 sections of land. Just one section of land is 660 acres.
So that is a lot of land! We got to meet and know the daughter of this Arizona rancher when we were searching for cactus to landscape our home in Sierra Vista, Arizona. This woman who was then in her lat 60's told us that she would ride a horse around the ranch and find these Native American artifacts. She had over 150 of these lining the fence around her ranch house. These were probably used by the Apache Indians. Women would have used these artifacts for cooking. Now can you guess what it is?

Correct Answer: Abraham Lincoln's wife, Patty, guessed correctly. It is Native American grinding stone for grinding corn into corn meal.

The reason we had to go to this homestead for cactus is that Arizona has very stringent laws on moving cactus. No native Arizona cactus can by moved without applying to the state for permission slips that states that someone who has cactus is allowing you to transport them to your home. If you are found moving cactus without these permits you get fined big time for each and every cactus, so we followed the rules and got the permits. The day we got this grinding stone we had an encounter with a rattlesnake on the homesteaded ranch. Let me rephrase that. Jack had an encounter with a rattlesnake. Joann was down the hill tying on the permit slips to the cactus. Anyway Jack was climbing up this cliff where he had parked a couple of barrel cactus when a rattlesnake came slithering to the edge of this very same cliff. Jack and the rattlesnake met eyeball to eyeball. At that point Jack left out a bloodcurdling scream and started falling backwards down the cliff. Joann looked up and watched him fall and wondered what had happened. Did he have a heart attack? When Jack explained the situation they decided to wait a bit to go back for the remaining cactus to allow the rattlesnake time to retreat from that area. Later they very very carefully approached the barrel cactus and claimed the barrel cactus. End of story.

Later this week I will share another snake story.

What To Do When It Is So Hot

The heat this week in Northern Virginia is oppressive to say the least. Thank goodness we have a nice home with air conditioning. I just hope we don't have a power black out this week. When it is this hot I start to remember other times that I have been hot, hot, hot!!!!!!!! When I was little and living on a farm in Ohio we had to keep the windows open and pray for a breeze because we didn't have any air conditioning back in the '50s and '60s. When we couldn't fall asleep upstairs we would go down to the cool and damp basement and sleep on an old couch. One of the hottest farm jobs to do in the summer was unloading a wagon load of hay with the help of an elevator. The one on the wagon had it the easiest. The ones in the hay mow really sweated through the undertaking. My Dad always insisted that everyone have a nice cold glass of homemade sweet lemonade before heading back out to the hayfield. I still remember the lemonade recipe:
4 lemons rolled then cut and squeezed
1 and half cups of sugar
and enough water to fill the pitcher to the very top

I also can remember two extremely hot days in Arizona. The first occurred in the '70s but let me tell you first about the one that occurred in July of 1989. My husband and I had taken our two daughters to Arizona for a long visit with friends and relatives. While in Phoenix we wanted to show our girls the campus of Arizona State in Tempe. Wow, was it hot in Tempe in July of 1989. Temps each day were approaching 116 degrees. Now that is hot, hot, hot! My husband always likes to say when people gasp at that number that it isn't so bad because it is a dry heat not a humid heat like back in the southeast. Well, let me tell you how you too can experience a dry heat----set your oven on 116 degrees and after the oven warms up put your hand in the oven to see how it feels. Now try to imagine how your whole body would feel in the oven. That's Arizona in the summer. Here are some more heat experiences in Arizona in July:

Use oven mitts or gloves to touch your car handles after a day of work or sightseeing.
You can burn your hands on the car doors. Erma Bombeck wrote about that.

Don't ever open a car sitting in the sun and just hop in to drive. Open all the doors and let
the built up heat escape first.

Don't sit down in a hot car that has leather or vinyl seats while wearing shorts. You will grill
your legs and buttocks to a crisp.

Don't ship your pet by air to or from Phoenix's Sky Harbor in July heat. If the plane sits
on the runway the poor pet will be baked to death in the cargo hold.

Try not to fly in the heat. Heat can stress the metal of the plane and lead to an accident.

Well, I think you get the picture. Arizona in July is hot, hot, hot! So here we are in Tempe on the campus of ASU and we are showing an amazed nine year old and a stupefied thirteen year old the sights. How hot was it? It was so hot that all of us decided then and there that if we managed to get to our car and to get the car cooled enough for entering and driving, we would never ever in a million years consider sending our daughters to school in Arizona. The problem was reaching the car without passing out in the heat since many of the campus buildings in the summer were locked so we couldn't rely on walking through buildings to get to the car. We used our campus map to plan strategic moves across campus: walk along the overhang of this building till you get here, then walk quickly as you can in this heat to reach those palm trees for shade, then walk by the trees next to that building over there, etc. We finally were able to do a retreat by car from ASU and our two daughters promised themselves and us that they would not apply to any Arizona universities. Suddenly the University of Virginia and James Madison University started looking pretty good. And that folks is how we avoided paying out of state college tuition. It just took one trip to Arizona in July to do the trick.

My other story about Arizona summer heat occurred one August day in 1975 after I returned from summer school at the University of Kentucky. Jack's mom mentioned that there used to be an old marble mine in the mountain range near Bowie and the Cochise Stronghold. Well, before we had thoroughly thought through this plan, we jumped in the truck and set out to find the marble mine and our fortunes. Mom directed my husband on where she thought that marble mine might be. Soon we had left the paved highway and were on dirt roads and then we were bouncing and banging around over no roads---just rocks and cactus. Then Jack's mom announced that this was just the beginning of the trail and that we were all going to have to get out and hike the rest of the way on foot. On foot! Well, my flip flops were not exactly hiking boots. Mom had on sensible mom shoes and Jack had on his sneakers so they were in better foot gear than me. So we walked and walked and walked and climbed and climbed and climbed but we didn't see anything that looked like a cave opening with a marble mine inside. We did run into some billy goats and some aggressive female geese that were intent on blocking our path by biting our legs and butts. This last experience led to a hasty decision to give up on making our fortunes by finding that marble mine. In the meantime the hot sun was bearing down on us. In the shade it must have been at least 100 degrees and remember that we didn't have shade. We just had rocks and cactus and heat. Why we had left in such a rush of enthusiasm that we didn't even have hats, water or sunscreen for protection. If I am ever in a presidential debate and someone asks me to give a past mistake I won't pull a Gulliani. I will answer immediately that my big mistake was making that trip with my husband and mother-in-law to find that marble mine near Bowie, Arizona. What a stupid thing to do. We did finally make it on foot back to the truck and we did a reverse trek over no roads, then dirt roads to interstate #10 and Mom's house trailer in Bowie. Jack and I both agree that the best shower we ever had in our entire married life was after that little adventure in the desert.

So what to do now that it is so hot outside? Stay inside and don't get any bright ideas. Just chill out like your house pets. They know better than to go out in this heat except for a quick trip to the outdoor potty.