Star-of-Bethlehem Flower

And you know spring has come when these little lilies start to bloom. These are called Star-of-Bethlehem and grow about six inches tall.

They are actually native to southern Europe and northern Africa and were imported back in the 1800's. They are now considered an invasive by the National Park Service, although in my small garden they've never really expanded past the three or four plants that have naturalized around my Stella del Oro daylilies.

Lady Banks Rose with an IPhone

No, not a scan of an old picture.

I've gone over to the dark side and bought an IPhone (it's a 3GS, not the 4) and proceeded to download three camera apps for it. This was taken with the Hipstamatic app which replicates the photos from the old Kodak Instamatic camera.  I've also downloaded the Instagram and Camera+ apps and will pass along my Panasonic FP8 to my mother who was looking for a small point and shoot that she could keep in her purse.

Using the IPhone as a pocket point and shoot seems to be the way a lot of people are going these days. I just got this month's National Geographic Magazine and they had statistics on how many photos we are taking annually - and people are taking more and more photos with their cell phones than they are with digital cameras.

I can see taking photos with my IPhone just for fun using these apps, but I still want to carry my camera with me to take the really good snapshots.

Carolina Chickadee in a River Birch

My favorite little bird sitting in my most unfavorite tree.

Here's one of a nesting pair of Carolina Chickadees up in the river birch in front of my house. I have two birdhouses hanging off limbs of this tree just as decoration, but this pair tried them out before deciding there was just too much foot traffic around to make it a good nesting spot.

I think they may be nesting in one of the cypresses that my next door neighbor planted out back several years ago.

Striking Sunday Skies

Since Friday night through this morning, we've had wave after wave of strong thunderstorms  come through the area. I looked at the rainfall amounts recorded just down the street at the Lake Brandt city water facility and we've had a total of 3.25 inches in less than two days.

I stood in the parking lot of my townhouse community to take this photo of the storm building to the west. This particular storm was the strongest and scariest of the bunch as we not only got strong winds, rain and lightening, but also marble-sized hail.

More thunderstorms this afternoon. Obviously no daytrips this weekend.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

What you can find if you just look up. Monday is garbage day and I generally am looking down when I take the garbage can to the curb as my neighbors with dogs ignore the pleas of the homeowners association to pick up after their pets. But yesterday I heard something unusual and so I looked up.

Up in the maple was a yellow-bellied sapsucker, one of our larger woodpeckers. Here's an interesting bit of trivia - ruby-throated hummingbirds also use the holes drilled by these woodpeckers while the weather is still cold and few flowers have bloomed to get to the sap and use it as food, too.

Birds at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

Diane over at Desert Colors posted some of her photos that she took at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum which spurred me to post some of my bird photos that I took the day we went to ASDM while I was in Tucson in February. It is a wonderful combination museum and zoo which would take several days to see all of it, time we didn't have.

So, a trip through the aviary and the hummingbird aviary took precedent this trip. Here are some of the birds:

A cactus wren, the largest of all the wrens in the United States. Actually he was out in the bushes, not in the aviary.

An Inca dove, a small cousin to my mourning dove. Its territory has moved up from Central America to include the Southwest US.

A not-so-good picture of a Black-chinned Hummingbird. The little point and shoot camera is not so good at taking bird pictures with its macro setting like my bridge super-zoom is.

A Curved-bill Trasher. A large songbird found in the southern most of the Southwest United States, similar in size to my Northern Mockingbird which frequents my bird feeder here in the small garden.

I'm trying to think of some good excuses to get back to Arizona and the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum sooner than a ten years span like this past trip.

Gates Pass Road, Tucson, Arizona

Our last day of our three-day mini-trip was spent in Tucson. Our plan was to go to Arizona Sonora Desert Museum and Zoo for the day. Not knowing Tucson as well as I did 30-years ago, I reserved a room at a motel on the far east side of Tucson near the Tucson Country Club. It meant the next day we would have to drive Speedway Boulevard all the way from the far east side of Tuscon through Gates Pass Road.

Gates Pass Road takes  you through Tucson Mountain Park where the landscape is that of what most people think of when they think about the Southwest's desert areas - full of saguaro and prickly pear cactus, cholla, rocks and dirt. It is also considered one of the most dangerous roads in Arizona due to its hairpin curves and lack of guardrails. Those who are familiar with the area know that Kinney Road is the best way to get to the museum. I guess I like to live dangerously . . .

Looking Back Towards the East and Tucson

Cholla, Prickly Pear Cactus and Saguaro

Somewhere in the Middle of the Picture is a Hiking Trail 

Saguaro Cactus and Prickly Pear at its Feet

It takes a saguaro cactus 75 years to grow an arm and most saguaros can live to 150 years or longer.

Stunning Sunday Skies, Santa Cruz County, Arizona

Since I can't decide whether it is Sunset Sunday or Stunning Skies Sunday, I thought I'd let you all admire the sky I caught at a rest stop on Interstate 19 just south of Tubac, Arizona.

For the majority of the week, the skies over Arizona were a brilliant blue with nary a cloud in the sky. This day brought a storm system from southern California and a grand total of three drops of rain which is why Arizona is in a years-long drought. And with the clouds came the wind which made the clouds so interesting but made my allergies to the dust unbearable.

Gyazru*

After we spent the night in Patagonia (Arizona, not Argentina) at a hotel that used to host John Wayne when he was in the area to film movies, we went on to Tubac and their annual Festival of Arts.

I had gone with the hope of finding lots and lots of Native American and Southwestern crafts on display. However, as this was a juried show it was a mixture of crafts from all over the US. In fact, one of the first booths that we visited was a man from New York who had also displayed his marquetry designs at the Craftsmens' Classic in Greensboro at Christmas.

I was a little disheartened because I was looking for something that specifically was Southwestern or Native American, not an item that I could pick up back home. And few of the booths had what I was searching for. So I started to wander in the shops there in the village in search of that one piece of jewelry to take back home.

Tubac may tout itself as an artisans center, but frankly most of the shops are tourist traps. Yes, they had Native American jewelry, but I was of the suspicion that the pieces were actually made in the Phillippines where a lot of so-called Indian jewelry comes from.

I finally went into a newish store that didn't seem quite so touristy and the shop owner seemed quite knowledgeable about his wares. I browsed through the collections of various Hopi, Navajo and Zuni pieces (most of which were quite out of my price range) until this ring caught my eye:

Sorry about the quality of the photo. I took it on the windowsill in the kitchen with overhead lighting. Yucky.

The ring is a silver overlay of the symbol for the Hopi Parrot Clan. It is actually made in two pieces - the bottom oxidized silver with the top a cut-out design. It is then soldered together to create this type of jewelry.

I then met up with my mother and aunt to eat lunch at Elvira's, a famous restaurant which used to be in Nogales, Mexico until the crime and drug gangs forced it to move north. Over lunch, they admired the ring while I told them the story of how I found it. Towards the end of the lunch, my aunt pulled out a business card that a friend in Scottsdale had given her so that she could visit a friend of his' brand new shop there in Tubac. Seems that the friend of her friend was a very famous Native American jewelry store owner in Wyoming who decided to move his operations to Tubac. When she showed me the card, I reached into my purse to pull out . . . the very same card but with the Tubac address as that was the man who sold me my ring.

*Gyazru is the name for the Parrot Clan in Hopi.

Lavender Pit, Bisbee, Arizona

And while the Copper Queen was the largest underground copper mine, this is the Lavender Pit, the world's largest open copper pit. It was opened in the 1950's when the copper veins underground started to diminish. It is not named for the color of the ground, but for the mine supervisor at the time, Harrison Lavender.

It, too, was abandoned in 1975 when the Copper Queen mine was closed. The pit cover 351 acres, is 900 feet deep (which would be equivalent to a 90 story skyscraper) which is a result of more than 350 million tons of material being removed. Today it is fenced in with observation areas so that you can take snapshots.

One of the byproducts of copper mining at the Lavender Pit was that of some of the finest turquoise in the world, known as Bisbee (what else?) Turquoise. At the beginning of excavation of the pit, the remnants of copper with huge veins of turquoise were loaded in dump trucks and taken to the company dump. Employees started to take it home in lunchboxes and backpacks and by the end of the mining operations more than a ton of this type of turquoise had been removed. Since the mine is closed and no more turquoise is being extracted, Bisbee Turquoise goes for some eye popping prices on eBay and other sites.

Bisbee, Arizona

After we finished touring Kartchner Caverns, it was back in the car for a quick trip to one of my favorite little towns, Bisbee, which was a good 45 minutes away. When I first moved to Sierra Vista, I spent my free time either here in Bisbee or 90 minutes away in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.

By the time I had moved to Sierra Vista, Bisbee was on its last legs. Started as a mining town by the Phelps-Dodge Mining Corporation in 1877, by 1975 when I was there the company had shut down the Copper Queen mine, the world's largest underground copper mine. Copper prices at that point had dropped dramatically and most of the veins had been played out at the Copper Queen to make it a losing proposition for Phelps-Dodge. The town was expected to slowly die, leaving just a few diehards living there in the Mule Mountains. Indeed, P-D starting selling the company houses for $1 for anyone who wanted to have one. Most locals felt it wasn't even worth the dollar to stay as there now was no industry to support the town.

I would drive up there with friends on Friday and Saturday nights to go to the bar at the Copper Queen Hotel - a real cowboy bar if there ever was one. Meanwhile, a few artists and craftspeople started to buy those dollar houses and opened a couple of galleries to show off their works.

By the time that I moved back to Sierra Vista for the second time in 1980, the town was coming alive as a place for those who wanted to live a different lifestyle, be it artistic, anarchistic, countercultural, gay, whatever you wanted to be, with dozens of art galleries were not only opening up in Brewery Gulch, where those first two were when I was here in the early '70's, but up both sides of Main Street. The JC Penney store, which was the second one opened in the US by John Cash Penney and had gone out of business in 1976, had been converted to artists galleries and studios on the second floor with a farmer's market on the first.

Today, Bisbee is one of the few places in Arizona where the housing prices have stayed steady or climbed (yes, they are much more than a dollar today) and is probably as full of life today as it was at the height of the mining operations at the Copper Queen mine.

Stunning Mountain Skies for Sunday

I am so off schedule for my Sunset Sundays and Stunning Sky Sundays that I don't which Sunday today is. So I'm posting a snapshot that I took from a rest stop on Interstate 19 on our way to Tubac, Arizona. My best guess (since I don't know Santa Cruz County as well as I know Cochise County where I used to live) is that these are the Tumacacori Mountains.

You can see snow on the farthest mountain while we had 60 degree weather at the rest stop. Even though Arizona is in a 12-year drought, they will get occasional rain coming from California.

Kartchner Caverns, Cochise County, Arizona

And on Tuesday after my brother had flown back to Los Angeles and work, my mother, aunt and I set off to southeastern Arizona for our three-day mini trip in the middle of our vacation.

This was taken at the parking lot of Kartchner Caverns looking west at the Whetstone Mountains. If you remember the first picture I posted of our trip was of the Dragoon Mountains, those would be directly behind me to the east (but 20 miles away).  The leafless trees are mesquite and the green spiky plant is some type of agave. People are always surprised that the desert isn't just sand and tumbleweeds, but full of all sorts of interesting plants and grasses. Also, this part of Arizona is almost 7,000 feet above sea level which creates an entirely different ecosystem than that of Phoenix or Tucson or even around the Grand Canyon.

I wish I could have taken pictures inside Kartchner Caverns (click on the link to read all about the cave's history), but it is a living cave (unlike Mammoth and Carlsbad, our two biggest and dead caverns) and they are very cautious about bringing anything inside that could damage the environment. They limit the number of people who can tour, have airlocks protecting the interior and lecture you about not touching anything other than the hand railing.

Here is a photo from the park's website of the Big Room where we toured:

© Arizona State Parks

The cave was discovered by two college students the same year I first came to Sierra Vista to live (Sierra Vista is about 20 miles south). I must have driven by them while they were exploring this cave numerous times since Arizona Highway 90 where the park is located is the only way to Interstate 10.  At that time AZ 90 was just a two-lane highway with just a gas station at the interchange. Today it is four-lane with motels, campgrounds and other touristy stuff.

When I would come back from being in Tucson or Phoenix for a weekend, I would crank up the 8-track (yes, it was that long ago) and head back to the wide open spaces of Cochise County, keeping an eye out for the police speed trap in Huachuca City, a couple miles before home. I forgot once and ended up with a speeding ticket, my contribution to Huachuca City's coffers.

Sunday in Sedona, Arizona

My mother and I flew to Arizona to spend a week with her sister and her husband. I had lived in southeastern Arizona some thirty-plus years ago for almost two years and had only been back once some 10 years ago. I planned a three-day mini-trip in the middle of the week to go over old stomping grounds.


My brother, who lives in Los Angeles, flew in and met us in Phoenix on Saturday to spend a long weekend seeing some of the sights with us.


Sunday was the trip to Sedona, land of the Red Rocks and New Age vortices. A two-hour trip from Scottsdale, we got into town just in time for lunch which we had at a deli in Tlaquepaque, an arts and crafts village featuring some really expensive arts and crafts. The lunch was probably the longest one I've had - the New Age attitude filtered down to our wait staff making our lunch more than two hours long (excellent food, but we were on a fairly rigid schedule).


Some pictures around Sedona:

Church of the Holy Cross designed by a Frank Lloyd Wright acolyte (look down in the far right corner):

Bell Mountain outside of Oak Creek Canyon:

Supposedly this is one of the places where you can experience those New Age harmonics. If you look closely, you'll see people at the base and halfway up the mountain as it is also a very popular hiking area.

Dragoon Mountains, Cochise County, Arizona

Looking at the Dragoon Mountains more than twenty miles away from the Kartchner Caverns parking lot outside of Benson, Arizona. My most favorite mountain range in the US.

I took this with my very first Panasonic camera, the TZ1, a five megapixel camera. I didn't want to drag the super-zoom with me cross the continent.

I'm having a hard time getting back into the swing of things after my most wonderful trip to Arizona. I have tons of pictures and stories to tell, but - I just find myself blocked. Perhaps if I post this one picture that will get it started. I have a trip to take you on from Sedona to Kartchner Caverns to Bisbee to Tubac to Tucson and back to Scottsdale.

Sedona's red rocks tomorrow.

Back in a Week

Between dealing with my Internet provider's customer service in India and the death of the modems, I need a vacation. So, I'm taking one.

Off to Arizona today to see family. Will be back next Saturday with hopefully a modem that works and lots and lots of snapshots.

Martha Denny Martin Douglas

If you have been paying attention to the Republican primaries, you may have heard Newt Gingrich state that he would follow President Obama around challenging him to debates patterned after the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. For those who don't remember their American history and for my overseas blogger friends who weren't aware of these debates, Wikipedia has a good article about these seven debates and their raising of Lincoln's national profile, culminating in his election to the Presidency in 1860.

But there is a strong North Carolina connection to the Illinois senator they called the "Little Giant" that I just found out about recently. While looking through a digital copy of a 1936 Federal Writers Project guide book on North Carolina for ideas of places to visit, I came across a snippet about Stephen Douglas' wife, Martha Martin Douglas, dying in childbirth in Washington, DC in 1853 and the senator and his family bringing her back to Reidsville (which is just 25 miles north of here) to bury her in the family cemetery.

Wondering how a senator in Illinois would meet a woman from the Piedmont of North Carolina, I found out that Douglas had sat next to her cousin, David Settle Reid, in the US House of Representatives who then introduced Douglas to Martha. They married at her father's plantation on the Dan River in Rockingham County (where Reidsville is located) and she returned to Illinois with him. A year after they married, her father died and left her the largest plantation in Mississippi along with 150 slaves. Some historians feel that this event colored Douglas' attitude about slavery and his vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

After Martha's death, Douglas went on to marry Adele Cutts, a great-niece of Dolley Payne Madison, James Madison's wife and another local connection as Dolley Madison was born here in Guilford County.

Anyway, I was fascinated by all these connections and decided to find the Settle family cemetery where Martha Douglas was buried. I figured that it would be really imposing with all sorts of expensive statuary and the like. After all, she was the daughter of one of the wealthiest plantation owners of the period, wife of a famous Illinois senator and the mother of a North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice, Robert Douglas and the great-granddaughter of Alexander Martin, one of the first governors of North Carolina after the Revolutionary War.

And this is what I found:

An abandoned cemetery. Martha Martin Douglas' tomb is that one to the immediate right of the picture. Doing a little more research, I found that the Settle family members (including the former ambassador to Peru in 1855) and been disinterred and removed to Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville years ago.

But here Martha remains, abandoned and forgotten even though her descendants live just 25 miles away here in Greensboro. Stephen Douglas, on the other hand, has a memorial city park and a ten-foot spire marking his tomb in Chicago.

Back Tomorrow

The modem died, so I'm working on getting a new one. Hopefully (fingers crossed) I will be up and running tomorrow.

And I have an interesting tale to tell - God willing and the creeks don't rise.

A Short Interlude (Hopefully)

I'm having some problems with my Internet provider . . . again. So while I'm struggling dealing with their customer service and my on again, off again connections, I'll leave you with one of my mourning doves taking a nap on  a stepping stone in the small garden.

I think I will be ready for Xanax once this is over.

White-Breasted Nuthatch

While other blogs are showing woodpeckers (both here in the States and overseas) in birch trees, I had a white-breasted nuthatch in the river birch in front of my house.

I went out to put something in my car which is parked in front of my townhouse when I heard the call of a nuthatch in the birch tree. I stood under the tree and saw two nuthatches searching for bugs in the exfoliating bark of the tree. I decided to go in the house and get my camera and see if I could get a half decent shot before they flew off.

Much to my surprise, they continued to forage in the tree ignoring me as I circled around the base of the tree taking as many shots of them as I could. Generally any bird in the birch will fly off as soon as they spot me, so this was a real treat.