I forgot to post a photo for August, so here’s some desert landscape for you now!
I took this awhile ago near Black Canyon City (north of Phoenix), on a day that Phillip and I went exploring in the little towns off I-17.
August 2017 Photo: Desert
Museum Day in the Garden
Last Saturday was Smithsonian Magazine’s Museum Day. The weather was too good to be inside, but they count the Desert Botanical Garden (DBG) as a museum, so we took advantage of the free admission and spent the afternoon walking garden paths.
I guess a botanical garden is kind of like an outdoor museum with living plants and animals.
We saw a hummingbird and bees buzzing around the Garden’s flowers and a big lizard was just hanging out on a rock next to the bench where I was sitting.
Since the DBG no longer allows picnicking, we ate our lunch at a nearby picnic area in Papago Park and were entertained by ground squirrels scurrying around and birds attempting to carry off pieces of a pizza someone had left behind.
Maybe they’re the reason DBG banned picnicking. You really don’t want grackles flying through your museum and dropping half-eaten pizza slices.
July 2017 Photo: Hot
I was sitting in a sunny patio at Hotel Congress in Tucson, occasionally switching seats as the shade shifted.
Overhead was their fabulous vintage sign, which also happens to sum up summer in Arizona in its first three letters: HOT.
Spotted at the Arboretum
Today at the Arboretum we saw
4 cardinals
1 woodpecker
a couple hummingbirds
several nests
a really neat feather
a possible owl pellet that Phillip poked at with a stick
some beautiful black butterflies
2 very determined ants and 1 that could care less
2 trees full of bees
a handful of squirrels
a turtle
a snake
and 75 lizards (before we stopped counting).
I also spotted a fuzzy tail of an animal going into a thicket. I jumped out of the car while it was still running to see what it was. All I found was a fat, lumbering squirrel.
Also, if you go on a hot, humid Tuesday, you’ll practically have the place to yourself. With the exception of those mentioned above, of course.
P.S. For those of you interested in chronology, by “today,” I mean last Tuesday, when I wrote down what we’d seen earlier that day.
June 2017 Photo: Reading Room Light
I didn’t post a lot of photos in June, but I did post one from the summer solstice celebration at Burton Barr Library (the same day as my solar cookie baking experiment).
The reading room is designed with columns under sky lights. Once a year, at solar noon on the summer solstice, the reading room sky lights line up perfectly to illuminate the columns below them.
Unfortunately, this past weekend a monsoon storm caused a fire sprinkler to burst, flooding all five floors of this beautiful library. Most of its collections remain intact and clean-up crews sprang into action right away. The City of Phoenix is hoping it will be able to start reopening parts of the library soon.