Ketchup

Seems like it's been awhile since we merrily meandered mindlessly around the various activities and topics of our lives. So, 'tis time for some ketchup once again.

Susun is mostly packed for her Hawaii trip. It's been years since she visited daughter Stasea in Kauai. She'll be flying off Valentine's Day morning and returning early on February 25. We bought the ticket during a sale way back last summer. Believe it or not, Susun gets to fly non-stop from Phoenix to Kauai for $500. I,m sure Stasea has all sorts of incredibly fun stuff planned for her Mom.

The reality of Stasea's planning is what motivated me to get Susun's San Diego videos processed yesterday. Susun had never used a video camera before her SD trip in late January. I thought she did a great job of capturing little vignettes that make an endearing 2 minute production. Susun's challenge now is to bring back a lot of video from Hawaii. I am encouraging her to "tell a story" of the trip with here tiny camera. Susun's really good at story-telling with a still camera so I think she will be great with the video. I promise to get her Hawaii video stuff up and running not later than 3 days after her return (that would be before the end of this month).

Getting Susun's video processed and posted took much longer than anticipated--it actually took most of the day yesterday. Next time around it won't take as long (we hope).

The Goatherder parted with two of his beloved goats yesterday. It was a "herd reduction" move. They went to a good home but it still hit The Goatherder hard. He has our sympathies and we hope he's feeling much better today. GH is our official Apple Coach. Whenever we get pinned to the wrassling mat by Apple's arcane operating system, we hit the panic button and call GH and he always calmly gets us out of trouble.

Josh is up to his eyeballs in high school stuff so we can't go paddling for awhile. Hopefully next week we can wrap up the field work for the river guide project. In case you haven't checked lately, we've added a bunch more stuff to the blog for that project. Click here to see it.

Susun created her own "Spa Day" yesterday--the second of our trip so far.  She goes to a friend's house in Sedona and does all of the spa stuff that females love.

We might finally get a real desk today.  We've been using a plastic 6-foot folding table as a computer desk since late 2009.  It looks ugly and it's a clutter magnet.  Craigs List is full of desks and there's a nice old solid wood desk at the Page Springs Fish Hatchery for $50.  Hopefully, we will bring it home this afternoon.

The campfire was quite cold last night--temps dropped quickly into the 30's.  We still managed to stay out almost two hours--that's about par.  This morning's low temp here as +9 degrees. Brrrr--chilly! Even though it feels cold (and IS cold), spring is right around the corner.  You can feel it numerous ways--the shifting angle of the sun; the changing coloration of the grasses and weeds; the expanding size of the weeds; and the appearance of some of the migratory birds.  The cottonwood tree buds are beginning to swell and there's an anticipation of spring in the air.  Spring typically comes early here after a dry winter, usually in early March.  There's almost never any rainfall of consequence after April 1 here and that's basically only six weeks away.  We were talking around the campfire the other night about how spring comes to Arizona.  It's as if someone flips a switch one day and--BAM--the temps are up everything is growing, buds are popping, birds chirping,. bees buzzing, the whole shtick.   It could happen on any given day and the odds this year are that it will happen sometime in the next 2-3 weeks.

When I went out just now to open our window shutters, there were 3 whitetail does just across the Monument fence.  They stared at me like doe deer always do and then went casually on about their own little deer routine.  We're glad there are at least some deer still here.  Urbanization has reduced the herb size over the past 20+ years.  We once would often see 10-15 deer at a time.  Now we're lucky to see these three on a fairly regular basis.

Well, that's enough rambling this morning.  C-YA later.  Cheers, jp