Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Field trip photos, just as bad as the old slide shows, except I won't know if you get up and leave

As promised, or threatened, depending how you look at it, here are the photos from yesterday's field trip to Jasper Forest. Here's an article about the road on the park's website.

Near the entrance to the trail we took, which used to be a loop road people could drive on into the forest. Its use was discontinued in the 1960s, but not until someone took a picture of Albert Einstein and his wife standing outside their car alongside the road. What is so exceptional about Jasper Forest is the amount of petrified wood lying around. It's easy to see the big log sections, but nearly everywhere you step there are stone-sized pieces in a literal rainbow of colors.
Paleontologist Bill told us tons of information that my brain couldn't absorb, but basically it is now known what time period each of these bands of color belong to. This was a major feat, requiring a team to walk the park for two years. This is knowledge they didn't have five years ago.


Bill used his rock hammer to chop steps in this butte so he could pose next to the stump of rock on the right side of the top. It fell over I don't know how many years ago, one of the facts not retained. It's much steeper and higher than it looks as I've cropped off several meters at the bottom.

Here he is, king of the hill, mimicking the pose.


Common fleabane, but extraordinary in its ability to grow in this environment.




All the chunks you see lying around are petrified wood. This is sparse for this part of the park.

Typical formation showing irregular erosion patterns. The horizontal rough band about half way up is sandstone and indicates there was water there, at that level, at one point.

A beautiful day, a beautiful sky, and chunks of petrified wood. This trail, like many others, is available for visitors to walk. I'd like to see them marked at the trailhead but I'm not in charge. I have the advantage of going to Bill and asking him where I should walk next.



A portion of a pronghorn deer antler we found resting next to a petrified wood section. Pronghorn deer are the fastest animal on this continent.


OK, that's it for now. You can go home now if you haven't already.

Field trip!!!

Yesterday, as part of seasonal training given to new employees and volunteers, the staff paleontologist took us on a vastly interesting and wow! factor tour of the park. I can't possibly begin to tell you everything he said, not only because of the volume of information he passed along but also because I don't remember it. Oh, to have my buddy Melvin's memory. Fortunately, there were handouts that I'll have to refer to a lot.

The walking part of the tour was to Jasper Forest, a favorite of his (let's just call him Bill because that's his name). Of course it's not a forest; there are a scarcity of trees here, but what is does have is an abundance of petrified wood in a rainbow of colors in sizes from pebbles to large boulders.

In a few brief, shining moments a couple of nights ago, I was able to get the holy grail: a wifi connection while I was sitting in Grace. For once I didn't have to sit outside the post office on a folding chair, wrapped in fleece. It lasted one evening and into the next morning but since then it's been as elusive as warmth in a landlord's heart. I have 15 good photos from the field trip that I will post tonight, whether I have to take a mini field trip to the post office or lounge in the luxury of Grace's upholstery.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Sugar high

When I was in Show Low last week to pay $90 plus gas to have a switch flipped, I also stopped to have my propane tank filled. All I use it for, now that heating season is over, is cooking, a relative rarity, but I still wanted it filled.

When I went to the office to pay there was a box of World's Finest Chocolates candy bars on the counter. I love those things. I've been eating very well lately, no junk food at all, but I had to have one. Just one, caramel and milk chocolate, a combination that is the food of the gods. It was as good as I remembered and worth every single calorie.

I have a story about World's Finest Chocolates and I may be the only one who remembers, or chooses to remember. When the kids were little they played soccer and baseball and one season they were given boxes of WFC to sell. I took a box to work, others got sold here and there, and the surplus was put on top of the kitchen cabinets. At the end of the selling time, we toted up the money and retrieved the boxes from on high to return what wasn't sold.

Well, well, well. There was nothing to return because the boxes were empty. Oh, yes. I knew immediately which kid had eaten his way through, oh, I don't know, several dozen candy bars. I'm not naming names but it's the second-born and his first name rhymes with 'blames.' It's apt, isn't it? He'll probably still deny it.

=======

Thought of the day:

I can resist everything but temptation. (Oscar Wilde and the kid whose name rhymes with blames.)

Sunday, May 19, 2013

The color purple (or green or gray or blue)

People have asked me how hot it is here. I would ask the same thing. It's Arizona, it's the desert, and it's close enough to summer to touch. But it's not hot at all, yet. From what I hear, it's going to be blistering but we're not there yet.

What we are is windy. We're so windy I have to close the vent over the fan in the roof or it would be ripped from its hinges. There's enough wind to push me a foot or so over on the road when I'm out walking, to make me tie my hat on or have to take it off. Enough to whip branches on trees as though they were string and not wood, whistle through open windows, and rock the van. I've never lived in a place so consistently windy in the afternoon. It wasn't like this when I got here but as we've progressed toward summer and the desert heats during the day, the wind awakens.

What often accompanies the wind is a dramatic sky. One evening last week the neighbors and I were sitting around, watching a storm over the desert. As the clouds blackened and grew, they pushed powerful gusts of air toward us. Great dark clouds moved eastward, sometimes filling the sky, other times allowing blue to come through. We watched until a light rain compelled us inside. Yesterday afternoon a flat plane of threatening clouds hung over the Painted Desert, pushing gust after gust. They morphed to ragged strips of varying gray but the wind persisted.

A small portion of the Painted Desert taken from the historic Painted Desert Inn.

 

















Rarely has it rained, maybe a smattering, enough to speckle Grace right after I washed her, but a couple of weeks ago I woke to heavy rain in the night. Within a day or two, what an amazing sight to see that the floor of the Painted Desert was a green haze.

The sky here is sometimes the purest Southwest blue, sometimes leaden with unfulfilled promises of rain, and sometimes cluttered with flat-bottomed white puffs, but it's always wider than wide, from horizon to horizon. This part of Arizona, at least, has a 180 degree bowl arced over it, changing by the minute and always eye-catching, enough to make you pause to look. It's as much the Big Sky state as Montana.

I'm waiting for the impressive, theatrical thunderstorms that come with summer. I can't wait. When I was a girl our father always called thunder, whether deep rolling rumbles or the whip-crack that accompanied lightning, sky booms, and I was never afraid of storms. How could anyone be afraid of sky booms? I wonder if they sound the same in Big Sky Arizona. I'll keep you posted.

=======
Thought of the day:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. (Alice Walker)



Friday, May 17, 2013

That's what friends are for

The volunteer community here at the park is an amazing source of support. I've already written about how they stepped right in when I had the electrical problem with Grace. The neighbor who spent a hour with me trying to find the inverter is also the one who picked up the GFCI from the store when he was going to town for something else. I didn't have to ask; he volunteered and wouldn't take any money until he came back with it. Someone else returned the GFCI to the store for me to save a trip. Another one lent me a volt meter to test the circuit. (Melvin told me to get one and I hadn't. When I called him with my problem he asked if I'd ever gotten one as he said to do and I had to I hang my head in shame, but Amazon is sending me my very own even as we speak.)

On my first night here I heard a knock on my door. It was another neighbor telling me to come over; there was a get-together outside someone's motorhome, BYOB. This happened two or three nights in a row until the weather turned cold but when it warmed up again we're again sitting around in the evening. I have an invitation to come over any time, for any reason, from all of them. My next-door neighbors issued an invitation to come watch TV. I have another open invitation to ride into town when they go to church on Sunday. They don't expect me to attend with them; it's just an invitation for a ride. I meet another one for a walk nearly every night. They pick up groceries for me to save me a 20-mile drive to town. As seasoned volunteers they offer their wisdom on other good places to go and where to avoid. In the beginning I wasn't sure how I'd be received as the only single person here but I've never been made to feel as the odd woman out.

I've been kind of conditioned over the years to not ask for help and to keep to myself. It's outside my comfort zone and I don't like to feel beholden, but these people, these wonderful folks, have told me, "This is what we do. We take care of each other."

Today the first couple left. They weren't due to go until mid-June but the wife suddenly became ill and they're going home to Texas to her own doctors. When they came back from the hospital yesterday we all gathered to see how she was doing, and once again our little community came together to help with anything they needed done to be ready to go. Next week my walking buddy and her husband leave, and in a couple of weeks the last of the ones who were here when I arrived will head out. But a new family came in the other day and someone else arrives soon - an ever-changing community of more or less like-minded people, if we leave Obama out of it, who take care of each other. My life is richer for having known all of them and I look forward to paying their kindness forward and forward.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

I get by with a little help from my friends

Grace blew a circuit the other day. The overhead fan quit for a second and the microwave beeped and then everything seemed ok. It wasn't until the middle of the night, when I got up to plug in the heater, that I found a dead outlet. I don't have an abundance of outlets and losing not just one, but two, was an inconvenience to say the least. So at 3 a.m. I was awake with the owner's manual and a flashlight and was able to figure out that the two were on the same circuit. I tested all the breakers and pulled the fuses and everything was all right. Now what? Go to the neighbors.

Within 10 minutes, tops, of asking one neighbor his opinion, everyone else up and down the volunteer line knew of my problem. I still don't know how it happened. Everyone pretty much suggested the things I'd already done. Now what?

I called Melvin, my all-around brilliant person. In the short time I've actually known him in person he's astounded me with the breadth and depth of his knowledge, to the point if I ask him something and he doesn't know the answer, I take it as a sign the apocalypse is upon us. The man knows ev-er-y-thing. He had me running in and out of Grace, plugging and unplugging, starting and stopping the generator, turning lights and fans on and off, turning the air conditioner on and off, running the engine, stopping the engine, and doing the hokey-pokey. He concluded several things, boiling it down to the inverter. The inverter changes 110 volts to 12 volts and vice versa, so if I'm plugged in, the AC power will charge the battery; likewise if I'm running the generator to charge the battery it will convert the battery power to 110. I had orders to call him if I got to a repair shop and they started getting shifty.

One of my great neighbors came over last night and crawled around on the floor with me, trying to find the thing. He must have spent an hour and we think we found it but it would have been behind a panel in a cabinet and I wasn't about to start tearing things out myself. I did try replacing the ground fault switch and that didn't solve the problem.

I juggled my work schedule so I could take Grace to a repair place in Show Low today. Melvin nailed it. It was the inverter and if I could have found it, which was under the bench/bed I sleep on, and could only be accessed by lifting the platform, I might have figured it out. Or my neighbor might have. Or Melvin would have for sure. All it needed was a little nudge of the switch from one position to another, and for this I paid $90 plus gas. Resetting the inverter also took care of the GFCI switch, so I can take its $16 replacement back to the store.

Now I know. And now I have a super duper deluxe whole-house surge protector on its way from Amazon. I ain't going through this again.

Within 15 minutes of my return from Show Low and talking to the first neighbor who spied me and came to ask, everyone knew, including park staff in a building down the road.  If only I could harness this speed to the Internet here. I'd have no complaints at all. 

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Moon watch

Last night I sat outside and watched the moonset.



Such a lovely evening tonight,
the sky a darkening cobalt.
The air is mild,
the breeze - gone soft.
Hanging low in the sky
is a sliver of a moon ~
the merest golden light cupped upward,
waiting for the evening star,
poised above it, 
to fall.




=======
Thought of the day:

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator. (Mahatma Ghandi)