This is where I live

Last Thursday and Friday were vacation days from school for the girls, and since I always check the school calendar before scheduling myself for my second job, I mostly had the days off as well. On Thursday I was looking through the newspaper and saw the national park on the east side of town was offering a ranger-led hike with the theme of Cowboys of the R** Valley. Since C & E have been learning all about cowboys, I knew it was the perfect activity. Friday morning we met at the visitors' center/ranger station at 9:00, then drove to the starting point about 7 miles farther along the perimeter of the park toward the south, then into the park from the south side. [GWP, when we went there, we stayed in the vicinity of the ranger station on the west side of the park.] I thought since most schools were out that day the group would be a bunch of mothers and children, but it wasn't. We were the only family with children and most of the other six hikers were older adults.

Here was our first awesome vista:

Kind of full of cacti, huh? Those cacti are called saguaro and it's not pronounced as you'd think, it's pronounced /suh hwah roh/. Just so you don't feel stupid by pronouncing it /suh gwar oh/. ;-)

The ranger pointed out lots of interesting nature things as well as told the history of the area. This picture shows a nurse tree:

Baby saguaros grow best when they are beneath an overhanging tree such as this mesquite. Usually by the time the cactus is big, the tree has died, but sometimes you can still see the relationship.

Our hike was about 1.3 miles along a pretty good trail. Our turnaround point was this old windmill:

It was put up more than a hundred years ago and it drew water and put it into the two large tanks for a long time. It was kind of jarring to see it there because the old homesteads are long, long gone, and really, the only sign that people once lived there are the fact that the saguaros are mostly about 80-110 years old in that area (taken down by the homesteaders desperate to meet their quota of livestock to prove up their 160, then 640 acres, and then trampled underfoot by said livestock), naturally regrown since the homesteaders left, and a very few remaining stream bed changes made by the settlers trying to change the rain runoff.

My girls were real troupers and had a great time out on the trail. Me too.

A visitor

Ds1 came yesterday. That might not seem too exciting, but it is! I haven't seen him since April 2009. He's here for a week to look for a job and check out the local commumity college as he is kind of planning to move here next month. I hope he does. He's nice to have around. Dh is sure hoping he moves in because dh is very outnumbered in our household. One guy, five gals. At least then it would be two guys, five gals. :-)

A lot has changed since I last saw ds. We moved from one state to another. The girls are two years older which means a lot of changes in them over that time. There have been serious health and family changes during that time. It's one of those situation where if you could have looked forward two years in April 2009 you would have been sure the crystal ball was showing you someone else's future, not yours. I'll look at the positive side and just say there has been a lot of personal growth on the part of almost everyone in the family.

So all that aside, this week ds is going to put in applications and already has four leads. He's going to contact the community college to see if they have regularly-scheduled tours, private tours, or self-guided tours of the campus. He's going to get his tax information so he can file his taxes and at the same time fill out the Federal Application for tuition aid (you need tax information to fill it out). We're going to visit the zoo, a cactus national park, a natural zoo, and who knows what else. There are a number of things to do in our city. I hope he likes it here.

Evening walk around the neighborhood

The girls and I walked around the neighborhood after dinner tonight and I realized the houses and landscaping are completely different from any other place I've lived and I ought to take pictures of them. Even though I live in the southwest United States, when I think of "southwest-style houses" I think of Santa Fe-style houses.

Santa Fe-style tract house

I don't really know what the style here is called but I call it Arizona style. So here are some sights in my neighborhood:

This is a car parked at the side of a house that you see when you come into the subdivision from one side. It's an interesting car but I'm sure tired of being greeted by it.Here are S and E in front of typical landscaping. Lots of cacti, huh?
This is looking down the street. There are a LOT of cacti around here as well as Mesquite trees. The Mesquite trees are attractive but they drop stuff on the ground year 'round. Well, at least June, July, August, September, and October, the months we've been here. I'm kinda guessing it continues all year.These two houses have lots of native landscaping. I especially like the second one.

Dh and I both love all the palm trees, (or "pom pom trees," if you ask the girls) and although this variety isn't a towering kind, we think it has the prettiest canopy:Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home (note to self: MUST get to those weeds):