Leslie’s Blog

Being a ‘Yanqui’, the first time I pronounced the word, Cholla, the name of this cactus, it sounded like Cola, similar to the word describing the famous soda pop in the red can.

After being laughed at, and corrected, I now know it is pronounced choy-a, like the the word ‘joy’, and then an ‘ah’, short vowel sound, emphasis on the first syllable. Chol-la.  Why was that not obvious to me right away?  Sort of like my trouble with the pronunciation of jalapeno.

Cholla comes in all forms and colors. Red flowers, bronze flowers, yellow. Teddy Bear cholla, Chain Fruit cholla, Staghorn cholla.

Every time I see a cholla, I think of my mispronunciation, and I think of how many undisturbed years a plant had to sit and endure the harsh, dry, bright desert to gain its size and majesty.  Some of these cholla’s are the size of trees.  Every time there is enough rain, at the exact right time, they make a daring growth spurt. Sometimes their green new parts are too much temptation to resist, and they get clipped off by wood rats, or javelina, or birds.  Sometimes they get snagged on the cloth of a photographer.

I carry a comb with me in my pocket, when I walk the dog, or take photos. It is the most realistic way to un-pluck a section of cholla that tries to hitch a ride. Lodge the comb behind the cactus, and fling it off quickly.

And they do try to hitch a ride, oh, yes, they do.  That is how they get from one place to another. Like desert magic.

Leslie

I hesitated at first to overwhelm you all with the color yellow.  Then I thought…nah…overwhelm them!

This is the time of year for yellow.

Our spring is brief. We are already experiencing hot days, and it is always dry. Very dry. Whatever blooms, or seems to thrive, even briefly, is cause for celebration.

I took the dog for a walk this evening.  A pair of lesser nighthawks were flirting in earnest, low over the road, making call and response noises, flapping casually as if it only took one wing flap to stay aloft forever.  He was being a forceful showoff, his bright white throat evident in the low light, and she was thinking he looked good doing it.  Their talking was intimate.

The dog and I stood and watched them flying just overhead while they decided that this was a good place to make a nest.

 

Twilight is enchanting here this time of year.

The dog was overly excited to see the coyote pups silhouetted against the dusk, while they waited for their mother to cross the road behind us. There are three pups, and they look grown, but they wagged their tails and acted like puppies when she decided to ghost across the road and up the hill to join them.

I tease about how harsh Tucson is, and it is harsh. But it is also magic.

I saw my first bat of the season. It was also silhouetted against the sky. I’m sure they have been busy already this season, but I haven’t been out to walk in the evening until tonight.

Leslie

 

 

The Blue Palo Verde trees in Tucson, Arizona, begin blooming in April.

They are just now finishing their blooming. The photos in this post are all Blue Palo Verde. They were all taken within a quarter of a mile of where I live.  

The Blue Palo Verde Tree is the Arizona State Tree.

When the Blue Palo Verde trees finish blooming, the Yellow Palo Verde trees begin to bloom.  Yellow Palo Verde are covering all of Tucson right now. It is just beautiful.

Leslie

 

WARNING.  This post contains LINKS that are gruesome.  You are warned.

This is an OPINION piece.   MY OPINION.   Never being one to be opinionated, I thought I’d start. 

If you find MY OPINION similar enough to yours, then there’ll be no need to do mental gymnastics, or deep breathing exercises to keep from losing altitude.

If you find MY OPINION dissimilar to yours, then I hope that you will share your opinion without yelling at me too much. Oh, you can yell, but not too much, please. I am a demure, sensitive, weak minded little thing that can’t handle too much CONTROVERSY!!

Here goes.

I have a dog blog.  Well, I write a dog blog for my dog.  Well, I pretend my dog is having me write it.

It’s cute, and funny, and very non-controversial.

So that is why I am writing this over here, instead of over there.

I will give you all a minute now to go look at all the cute, sweet, endearing doggie pictures over at The Black Dog Diaries.  Don’t forget to come back.

OK.  I do not want to have anybody be mad at me, but I am willing to risk that to express MY OPINION.

Here it is.

I think  Greyhound Racing  should be against the law.  For that matter, Horse Racing should be against the law, but I leave that to your extrapolation.  And Zoos and Circuses, too, oh my.

I am NOT  anti - gambling.   Deal those cards!  Pull that handle!  If that is how you might wish to dispose of your excess income, so be it.

I am NOT  anti - Greyhound adoption.  Let me repeat myself…  I am  NOT  ANTI - GREYHOUND ADOPTION.

I am NOT  anti - Greyhound.

I am NOT  anti - dog rescue adoption, or their groups.

What I am against, and fearfully so, is breeding of Greyhounds for the express purpose of racing them.

 In MY OPINION, the breeding of Greyhounds for racing, and then the wanton disposal of them, despite the courageous, overwhelming efforts by rescue groups to “find good homes” for them, is similar in scope to dog fighting. These animals are bred to make sport money. Full stop.

MY OPINION is that if there were not the demand for racing dogs, there would be no demand to breed exorbitant numbers of them, and the resultant need to create racing Greyhound rescues.

Now go back to my dog blog. Look at all the Greyhounds. They are obviously ecstatic to have real lives. They are beautiful, wondrously athletic, happy, lovely, soft coated dogs. All colors, all sizes, all dispositions. And the adopters are all Saints, in MY OPINION.  

But there are too many Greyhounds to rescue, and there are too many because there are too many being bred for racing.

These dogs are NOT being bred to create companion dogs for families. These dogs are just damned fortunate that their disposition in most cases is, “sweet couch potato, with occasional outbursts of lightning speed” , which renders them adoptable. Not so their brethren Pit Bulls, who are also bred at exorbitant rates, but with the disadvantage of being the “non-adoptables”.

Lest you think I have a particular place in my opinionated heart against Greyhounds, understand this… I don’t think we should be creating a demand for exotic birds as pets. Nor snakes. Nor monkeys, nor Easter chicks and duckies, nor tropical fish, nor lizards.  No imports for the pet trade. No Hybrid wolves, no ocelots, no tigers, oh my. Seriously folks,  why do you need to import an animal as a pet? And try to convince me we need zoos. I will tell you to stop ruining habitat instead. 

There are so many domesticated dogs and cats of unknown breed and origin that are literally dying to be adopted. Why add to the problem by creating the demand??

I am not a Pollyanna. In my best dreams, I would win. I don’t expect that.

I am a pragmatist. We have a problem, and I would like to express a desire to end the problem, and offer MY OPINION on a partial solution.

STOP CREATING THE DEMAND FOR THESE ANIMALS.

Spay and Neuter any dog or cat that you have as a pet. Don’t let your doggies and kitties breed so they can, just once, “experience the joys of motherhood”. Hooey.

And please, realize in some small way, that demand for a ‘product’ creates the ’supply’.

I will now accept your outraged comments…

Leslie

http://www.tucdogtrak.com/

http://ai.arizona.edu/papers/dog93/dog93.html

 http://www.azgreyhoundrescue.org/html/bert-ernie.html

http://www.idahocage.org/

http://blog.tucsonweekly.com/?p=861

http://www.greyhoundracingsucks.com/grs_ArizonaHeadlines.htm

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid%3A90739

http://www.kold.com/Global/story.asp?S=6623987

http://everythinggreyhound.ipbfree.com/index.php?showtopic=458

http://www.aact.org.au/greyhounds.htm

http://www.greyhoundaction.org.uk/iaustraliaintro.html

http://www.petrescue.com/spay-neuter.htm

http://www.sniksnak.com/stop_s-n.html

 

 There are some numbers associated with the ‘hippie’ story.  Nothing to do with numerology.  Just numbers.

“It took…four months and between $900. and $1000. to build the two-room fully-insulated home.” Quoted from The Glenville Democrat, page 6, March 14th, 1974.

We spent $432. cash one year, for all our living expenses.  One entire year. 

 The overwhelming portion of our living expense was for the operation and upkeep of French Fry, the 4 wheel drive truck… gasoline and oil,  an inordinate number of U-joints,  tires,  registration. 

 The  pivotal knowledge  in my entire experience in striving to return to the land, was that having to maintain that  vehicle   was what kept us tied to the world.

 Money, albeit a small amount, required its’ earning.  Having to earn money required cash paying work.  Cash paying work required a certain work performance, such as being to the work on time, which would require a dependable vehicle.  Maintaining a dependable vehicle, so that you can maintain a certain work performance at your cash paying work, requires money.

Mike loved to do masonry work.  He took jobs close to home.  A foundation.  A retaining wall. 

The change happened slowly at first.  The more he worked away from the land to earn cash, the more money was needed to work away from the land.   He began to work farther and farther from home.  He worked in Parkersburg, laying block, building grocery stores.  He was amazing to watch laying block.  If you have ever tried to do it, you quickly realize what a strenuous art there is to it. 

Things didn’t get done on the land.  It was easy to not want to do any of our own work when he got home.  I was handy, but not able to keep up.  Our needs began to exceed our efforts. 

Mike got suddenly homesick.  He wanted to go back to Jersey.  I knew he was hurting.  He went back to New Jersey.   I stayed on the land, with the baby.

I am not a person that gets lonely.  I like to be alone.  What  I remember about that time was how singularly lonely it was.  It was painful.  I should have been frightened about my physical welfare, because it was the middle of winter, and I was a mile and a half off a hard road. It was eight miles to the nearest town, population of about twenty four people.  There was no  911 telephone to call in an emergency, and if there had been, the nearest emergency agency was almost an hour away.

Instead of frightened, I was just lonely.  Dreadfully, abjectly,  inconsolably lonely.

The creek was full of winter runoff, and it talked as it ran.  It had a melancholy voice that couldn’t be escaped.  I found myself darting to the window often, expecting to see people walking up the road to the house, talking and laughing.  I was sure I heard those voices.  It was the creek.

There was wind.  Not sustained, loud wind, but occasional gusts, with no specific rhythm, that would hush through the trees, then fall silent.  There was patchy snow on the ground, and it added to the loneliness.  It was neither white, or soft, but frozen and unforgiving.  It was separated from itself.

I kept the familiar around me.  The wood stove creaked and hizz-ed, and made quiet tink sounds as the logs turned to red patterns of embers.  I cooked some, but mostly let the wood stove slowly make beans for me, the pot situated on the back of the Ashley.  Cooking smells were a comfort.

I split frozen wood for the stove. 

I drew a picture of the maple tree outside the window.   I do believe the tree saved my life.  I slowly traced the outline of the tree with my eyes, and let my hand move the pencil over the paper without looking at it.  That had been an ‘exercise’ in observation learned at art school.  Practicing how to “see”.

I saw what was happening.

My relationship with Mike wasn’t working.   He was unhappy.  We were two totally different people, trying to do something that required that we be one.

Our relationship with the land wasn’t working.  It required two similar people, all the time, trying to be one with it.

Our numbers weren’t adding up to the total I had hoped for.

We had lived and worked on that land for over two years. 

In September of 1975, with a promise to return to the root cellar on the land as soon as we could, we moved into an apartment in Spencer, to be closer to work.

Leslie

 

It has been a while since I posted a hippie story.

I have had, what I consider to be, the “last” episode written for a while now, waiting as a draft. I have hesitated to post it, because I want to be sure I don’t have one more funny story in the events of those years that could be posted before that “last” one.

I am pretty sure I have run out of the funny stuff.

I have learned a few things about myself by writing this series.

When I began writing the hippie posts, I found myself using the word “we” for all references to my experiences. I would type something out, and then on the re-read, I would become aware that I had included Mike collectively in the emotions I had experienced in all those situations.  I know definitively, that Mike had a totally different experience of the events of those years, yet, there I was writing “we” like he was having an identical experience. It took a number of posts before I got the hang of the fact that it was my  experience I was writing about.  I gave myself more than one ”we”-ectomy, as I was writing, and it has lifted a great erroneous perception from my mind. It has been enlightening, in the truest sense of that word.

I was having a sense of failure, too, at not having remained on that piece of land. A friend reminded me, accurately, that I hadn’t failed to live on the land, but that I had, instead, decided to move away from it. Knowing that I didn’t “fail” my endeavor has also been enlightening.

I have re-visited my experiences of those years, from 1971 through 1975, and told you the funny and peculiar stories. There were volumes more going on in between all those funny stories…  sad, confusing, infuriating, political, religious, ethical, outrageous and sometimes illegal.  Some of it I will never write about.

What I will do, after the last “hippie” post, is to write randomly, if I recall them, my memories of that time.  I will also write some experiences about the year of transition that I spent “in town”, Spencer, West Virginia, after having moved away from the land.  Most of those experiences are strange, and bizarre, and some decidedly not  funny.  I’m not sure how much of that I want to write about yet.

The hippie saga has essentially come to an end.  I have been pleased to get it written down. I hope you have enjoyed the trip, and the floor is now open for questions…

Leslie

 

 Alas! Tagged again! This time by Minx.

I tried valiantly to escape. I struggled to extract myself from the papyrus of the Nile… The cloying silt of the meme held me, as the crocodile of psychic protection pulled and twined, and I finally slipped below the surface…

Oh.  Hello.  Just daydreaming. I just visited Minx’s Blog, and you know how it is. Minx puts a spell on you, and you have to comply. She’s such a Minx!

I threw a  link snare  at her feet to slow her advance. She dodged adroitly with a backstroke of guilt…”Sorry, Leslie, but surely you are reading something else by now?”

I didn’t have the chops to tell her that I don’t keep books near the computer. I keep them next to the bed. And lately, rather than books, I have been amassing a small collection of folded back Time magazines that I am trying to keep up with.  I can get about three articles under my eyelids, and then I’m asleep.

I know, too, that Minx does not  want to know that the last book to have been on my night table was Rowling’s The Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series.

She has no idea how her taunting is torturing me…

In my efforts to be a blogger of virtue, I was checking a reference for a comment I was adding to Ian’s blog,  Or So I Thought , and lo and behold, after checking my reference, I find that it results in a book, right next to my computer.

So, to break the Minxian spell, I followed the instructions of her incantation, and opened the book to page 123, counted down five sentences, and now I am going to copy onto my post the next three sentences onto the page.

Here it is, Minx!

“… men have difficulty winning custody of their children after a divorce. Such fathers have to prove that they are suitable parents and that their spouses are “unfit” to rear the children.  Psychologist Sidney Jourard has suggested that men’s difficulty with self-disclosure may affect not only their ability to form intimate relationships, but also their health.”

It’s hardly scintillating reading , is it?

The sentences are from “Personal Adjustment: The Psychology of Everyday Life” by Derlega and Janda. It was a college textbook.

Whereas it does contain some interesting information, it also contains some strongly biased social mores standards that I can hardly believe were considered state of the art in 1986 when the book was published.

What have I learned from this?

To hang out at Minx’s house. She obviously reads more interesting books than I do!

No. I am not going to tag anyone.

No. It doesn’t mean that I have a hex on me for not passing it along. Right, Minx?

It just means that ” surely I need to read something else by now, heh?”

Leslie

 

These are in my yard.

For most of the year, they are prickly and formidable cactus. For a brief time in spring, these cactus bloom with an astounding beauty. 

#1 opuntia with interesting bi color flower

#2 red flower on a staghorn cholla  (cylindropuntia versicolor) 

 #3 yellow prickly pear cactus bloom  (opuntia engelmannii)

Thanks to Firefly Forest for the scientific names.

Leslie

 

 

One million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.

Chris Jordan’s  art is brilliant.  I have posted about him before. There is no way that you can view any art from his Running The Numbers series and not be stunned by the implications of consumerism.

Leslie

voodoolinks:  batteries not included

                         Chris Jordan

It’s Earth Day tomorrow.

I moved my Earth Day post from 2007 up to the front of the blog so we can read it again. It starts below the next picture…the picture of Earth Rising.

Have we gotten any smarter? Has anyone had an epiphany since last year about the fact that we have only one earth, and can’t afford to mess it up?

There is presently a media frenzy about “greenness”, and if you aren’t living quietly off the grid somewhere, you can’t help but have heard the drumbeat. It is the new, hip, popular thing to do. It is the fashion.

I have hope that some people will be changed in a positive way, but I fear that the hype will deteriorate to being a concept that is no longer in style. I guess that is the cynic in me thinking that way.

I have been annoyed with the language usage surrounding “Green” awareness.

The “green” concept is being presented as a sort of “style” or “hip” thing to be adopted this season, all rallied behind the color green.  I fear that this focus on use of a “color” to represent our earth’s peril, relegates the concept to the same level of importance as choosing a paint color, or the color of your new car.

If I had my way, I would insist people would use the term ”climate change” instead of “global warming”.

I have heard people pooh pooh the notion of global warming, and use the extra cold winter they are experiencing as proof that it doesn’t exist, but then will engage you at length about how “so unusually different” the weather patterns have become.

Politics and religion have entwined themselves neatly around the “green” issues, and I expect that when the value to those institutions decline, so will the attention.

Poor Earth. it is such a pretty, marvelous planet. It looks blue to me.

Leslie

 

 

This is the Earth Day 2007 Post, revisited…

It is Earth Day.

I typically watch the ‘telly’ on Sunday mornings, and drink coffee. My favorite program is CBS Sunday Morning. I particularly like the last 2 or 3 minutes of the program, when they visit some lovely natural locale, and just sit there with the camera. No talking, just nature, and nature noises.

Recently, though, they don’t stay long enough for a mood to set in. I have been feeling ripped off by the hurried nature of the ending moments lately. Oh well. That fits right in to my post for today.

The sun comes over the mountains here in Tucson, Arizona at an early hour. We don’t fool with changing our clocks back and forth with ‘daylight saving’ time in Arizona. We are the only sane place in the country , save for a few counties in Indiana. I digress.
I get up with the sun, and that means I am up fairly early. Earlier than the CBS Sunday Morning that I watch. So I watched some other large network morning programs on ABC and NBC.

It started my Earth Day off poorly.

On ABC, their ’solution’ to our impending global doom is to buy and drive a red electric sportscar. Just plug it in to the wall socket.

NBC promoted their brand of saving the Earth by having spokesperson Cheryl Crow and her girlfriend driving about the country in a big ol’ honkin’ biodeisel bus for two weeks.

What am I missing here? Have I lost touch?

The networks’ dialogue, or is it monologue, seemed to imply that saving the planet required that “someone” had better get on about fixing the problem, and pretty quick, so the network reporters could report the problem solved by this time next year.

My head is exploding.

What ever happened to plant a tree, use less water, bike to work, recycle, think globally act locally? Hell, they didn’t even wave the Earth Flag. You know, the one of the NASA photo of “Earth Rising” that was taken from the moon?

Solar, wind power, zero population growth. Am I alone in thinking it an oversight of immense proportions that none of this was mentioned on EARTH DAY???!!!

It takes a lot to ruin a coffee drinking Sunday morning for me. I was off to a bad start.

There was some mention of the first Earth Day being in 1970, some 37 years ago. I saw some footage of a frighteningly ‘hip’ looking Mayor Lindsay of New York City saying something about the demonstrations, and about the need to have cleaner air.

But then the segue/segway ( that’s a 2 wheeled vehicle, yes? ) was to the red electric sports car.

OK. Cut to CBS Sunday Morning. Bless them. They led off with Rachel Carson and the publishing of her book, Silent Spring. The first copies of that book rolled off the presses on September 27, 1962. The book was viewed back then as ‘alarmist’. I remember my very organic, compost-making grandfather receiving that book from my mother in his Christmas stocking.

I don’t think my mother realized that he took it seriously. I think she gave him the book because he liked to garden, and it was a gardening book, so she thought. Maybe she knew more than I realized.

Silent Spring took all the fun out of running behind the ‘fogging’ trucks that would envelope our summer evenings with their clouds of mysterious DDT.  The fogging trucks were an “Event”. A slow moving truck would drive throught the neighborhood, spraying voluminous, roiling clouds of DDT everywhere. The “event” was that we were allowed, no, encouraged,  to run through the stuff, “to keep the mosquitoes off”. That was in lieu of parents having to slather  children with “OFF”, the oily, liquid bug repellent that was sold by the gallon in New Jersey. Silent Spring made some parents wonder. Of course it made others say, “Oh, that DDT stuff can’t hurt ya. That woman is just a looney”.  My mother was encouraged by my Grandfather to “not let the kids run through that stuff anymore.”

Phooey.

Growing up at sea level in New Jersey (swamp level) made for some healthy mosquito populations. You could set your watch by the sound of people beginning to slap their ankles and arms to combat the mosquitoes. “Mosquitoes are out. Time to go in.”

Again I digress. Maybe I’m regressing.  That’s probably caused by overexposure at an early age to a chemical soup of questionable creation.

In all actuality, the DDT was likely the least  of my exposure. The area of New Jersey that I spent my childhood in , was originally very pastoral. (Read  “trees, ponds, vegetation, and mosquitoes.” ) It rapidly grew to be developed, and the nature of the development was not homes and people, but chemical factories, truck depots, and warehouses for substances of questionable chemical structure. It became a frightening repository of all things deadly.

I “ran away from home” in 1971. I ran from New Jersey to save my life. I was so broken hearted to have my beloved woods, and ring necked pheasants, and rabbits, and cardinals, and daisies, and the babbling brook, and the skating pond, all become a waste dump. The brook ran neon colored chartreuse one day. I stopped drinking from it. The skating pond now lies under a book distributors warehouse.

I went “home” to visit my father, a few years after my mother died of cancer at age 59. That was in 1983. I was jolted awake one night of my visit by a horrid chemical smell. It was choking. I ran to my fathers office to see if I could find a phone number for the EPA, to report it. I flipped open his rolodex, and the EPA number was taped to the inside lid of the box. The number was in big bold letters. Seems he had it very handy.

I had a conversation with the folks that were awake at the EPA at that ungodly hour. They said they had a push-pin map of the area, and as complaints came in, they marked the location of the complaints, and would trace the smell back to the smallest convergence point of the push-pin indicators. I learned the next day that a chemical truck had ‘cleaned out’ his load across the street from my father’s house. The truck was long gone by the time the push-pin method became useful.

The next morning, bleary eyed from no sleep from sitting up gasping and holding a wet washcloth over my mouth and nose, I asked my father if it had bothered him. He said, “What?”  ”The smell!”, I said. He said, “I didn’t smell anything. Musta slept right through it. I’m used to it.”

I have never been back.

My father lived there until last year. The factory next to the house was declared a “Superfund Site”. The ol’ boy is going to be 86 this year. Maybe he is  used to it.

I wish I could say my ‘rant’ here is over. It isn’t. It won’t be over in time for next years Earth Day, either.

I don’t do as much as I’m capable of, ‘carbon footprint’ and all.

 But I recycle everything, and take my plastic bags back to the stores that collect them.

I take my bad chemicals to the collection place, rather than throw them in the landfill.

I drive a very small pickup truck that is a 1990 model, and not very often. It sits unused way more than I drive it.

I don’t use pesticides, or herbicides. My yard is full of bugs and wildflowers.

I buy a live, rooted Christmas tree when I buy one, and plant it in the yard.

I plant trees on Arbor Day.

I don’t have a brick in my tank, but I have a low water use flush.

I don’t own or wear make-up. I don’t dye or spray my hair.

I wear cotton.

I have one child.

I’m not doing this out of some sense of martyrdom, or cosmic sacrifice. It’s just who I am. I have come to be this person through my life experiences. I am hardly perfect at being ‘green’.   I am better than most. There’s lots of room for improvement.

Not messing up the earth for good is an individual effort. We are each  responsible.

Wasn’t it Goethe that said, “Let each person sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.”?

Think globally, act locally.

Happy Earth Day.

Here’s a list of links to places good for Earth Day, and some others.  I have mentioned some of these before. They are worth mentioning again, and again.

Leslie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/coffee

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_savings_time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodbridge_Township%2c_New_Jersey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_land_movement 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Power

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpower

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Windpower

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_turbine_manufacturers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_population_growth

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