Day by Day

I've been living life here on the desert day by day... Nothing unusual to report... But I have started digging and replacing the winter kill bushes in my back yard... The desert digs hard!

But, where there was a bush before, and the irrigation system spills a few drips of water each day it is better.... So I just dig up the old dead bush, dumping the earth out onto a tarp with a small shovel... The heat of the summer seems to be quite harsh on some of these so called sun bushes....

And then it seems to go below freezing around Christmas or after the first of January for a few nights.... That freezes the leaves and outer part of the branches of the tender bushes... I have Hyacinth along the East wall of the house and until coming here, I thought they were just house plants.......!

Anyway there are a few new bushes around here now... I haven't had any luck with bougainvillea... The stuff grows like a weed along the highways here, but let me go purchase some and put it in the ground, and its 100 percent favorite that it will be dead by fall....

So I put a couple of Privet bushes in their place.... It is shaded by the block wall fence for part of the day and only gets a few minutes of water, so we will see if they do any better... The other bushes are rosemary.. I wonder if they are the same as the spice we grow back home... They look the same, but I'm sure they are a different variety..

In other news, Shadowmoss and her neighbor invited me to go with them for a Valentines supper... We did Chinese in a small oil cloth diner on the South end of Chandler... Again I had never been there, so it was a new experience for me... But the restaurant had Kung Bao Chicken with peanuts and the hot peppers.. So I just had to order it...

I sorted out the big chili peppers, because you never want to bite into one of those, but the cook also had ground the peppers and added a liberal dose of those to the Wok as well... It took two Tsing Tao beers to wash it all down..... I was somewhat red in the face.... LOL Thank's girls for taking me along....  I don't think I got two obnoxious after the two beers, but maybe I'm not the best judge...

Oh, and as a wrap up on the Quartzsite get together, Sandie and Jim Dixon had a postmortem Happy Hour with some of the folks that had been in the BLM desert campground.... That was this past Tuesday and I managed to convince Shadowmoss to come with me... That two hours seemed to go by faster than possible... We all talked and talked.... I wonder who was listening........  Anyway thanks folks for inviting us...  It was fun......

And in a rare turn of events, the Goldwing folks were heading out to a Casino up in the White mountains East of Showlow, Az this morning...  And I chickened out...  It was 170 miles each way, and I have a conference later tonight, and I worried that I wouldn't get back in time...  Or that after 7 hours of bike riding that I wouldn't have the energy to go, once I got back....

So there will be no descriptions of long tiring rides or oodles of desert highway pictures...  Well, this week anyway....

Retired Rod