Meridian, Idaho

I got quite an eyeful last night while sitting on the back porch.

Two robins, Romeo and Juliette, had a little fling. Actually they had FIVE flings within about three minutes. 🙂

While watching their trysts, a couple of noteworthy things happened.

After their initial coupling, the male flew about twenty feet away. The female bounced towards him about four times cutting that distance in half. Then she just stared at Romeo and waited.

He paused about thirty seconds, all the time staring back at Juliette, and then flew back for another special visit.

Their staring pauses were almost the equivalent of each having a cigarette… 🙂

This was repeated until they had a total of five cigarettes.

Then after the Romeo flew away the fifth time, Juliette turned around started looking for worms. She must have gotten the munchies.

And, apparently, the honeymoon was over.

He came back and tried to share dinner with her by nibbling on her worm.

But she took it and flew away never to be seen again…

I wondered:

If Romeo had brought Juliette a new worm instead of trying to eat hers, would he have been rewarded rather than dumped?

Meridian, Idaho

Women are supposed to have a little black dress in their closet ready to wear for nearly any occasion.

I don’t have one for a couple a reasons.

One, I seldom wear dresses.

Two, my weight’s too volatile for me to trust that anything “little” that fits today will fit tomorrow…

I do have something in my closet ready for most any occasion.

BIG BLACK PANTS

In fact, I’m wearing them today as I get ready to go have brunch with my good friend Sharon.

The last month has been a tad stressful and I tend to overeat when I’m stressed.

So my big black pants will fit just perfectly!

Meridian, Idaho

We need to sell some extra furniture, so we’re using Craig’s List. We’ve used it before, but I never really thought that much about how it came to be.  So of course, that lead to a question that I had to Google…

Here’s its history from Wikipedia:

Craigslist is a classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, items wanted, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.

Feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something for local events. In early 1995, he began an email distribution list to friends. Most of the early postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software and Internet developers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Soon, word of mouth led to rapid growth. The number of subscribers and postings grew rapidly. People trying to get technical positions filled found that the list was a good way to reach people with the skills they were looking for. This led to the addition of a jobs category. User demand for more categories caused the list of categories to grow. It became a web-based service in 1996 and expanded into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000, and now covers 50 countries.

And here’s the Craigslist headquarters (prior to 2010) in San Francisco.

Craigslist fast facts:

• Over 80 million new classified advertisements each month.
• Craigslist’s main source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities—$75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area; $25 per ad for New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Orange County (California) and Portland, Oregon—and paid broker apartment listings in New York City ($10 per ad).
• eBay owns approximately 25% of Craiglist.
• The site serves over 20 billion page views per month, putting it in 37th place overall among websites worldwide and 10th place overall among websites in the United States (per Alexa.com on March 24, 2011), with over 49.4 million unique monthly visitors in the United States alone (per Compete.com on January 8, 2010).
• We sold our bar stools within two hours of posting them. 🙂

Boise, Idaho

Two days ago, it was unseasonably warm.

In fact, it was nearly 80 degrees in most of the Treasure Valley.

Then in the middle of the night, a cold front started moving through.

The 61 degree high for yesterday was reached at midnight. The low for the morning was reached at six bottoming out at 39.

It snowed several times during the day, and between the wind chill and humidity it felt bitterly cold!

How cold was it?  I’m not sure. But it felt this cold:

I actually took this picture many years ago in Fallon during a pogonip.

Pogonip is a type of freezing fog that occurs when liquid fog droplets freeze to surfaces. This is very common on mountain tops which are exposed to low clouds. It is equivalent to freezing rain, and essentially the same as the ice that forms inside a freezer.

In the western United States, freezing fog may be referred to as pogonip. It occurs commonly during cold winter spells, usually in deep mountain valleys. The word pogonip is derived from the Shoshone word paγi̵nappi̵h, which means “cloud”.

In The Old Farmer’s Almanac, in the calendar for December, the phrase “Beware the Pogonip” regularly appears. In his anthology Smoke Bellew, Jack London described a pogonip which surrounded the main characters, killing one of them.

I haven’t seen pogonip in Boise, but it felt cold enough for it yesterday…

Boise, Idaho

I talked with Richie the other day and asked him what he did over the weekend.

He did something with some friends that I’d never heard of that sounded like a lot of fun.

It’s called Room Escape Adventure! 

And here’s a blurb about it from the company’s Web site:

Prepare to be locked in a room with up to 11 other people and a Zombie that is chained to the wall!

Hidden in the room is a key that will unlock the door to your freedom.  To find the key you must locate numerous clues and solve riddles.

Every five minutes the hungry Zombie’s chain will be released another foot.

Within an hour, the Zombie will be able to reach you.

You have 60 minutes to the find clues, solve the puzzles, unlock the door and escape the room without getting eaten!

Are you smarter than a Zombie?  Find out!

So what you do is

~FOLLOW THE CLUES~
~SOLVE THE PUZZLES~
~FIND THE KEY~
~ESCAPE THE ROOM~
~DON’T GET EATEN BY THE ZOMBIE~

Richie and his friends worked hard to complete a series of puzzles in order to escape from the Zombie.

What type of puzzles?

Remember the famous water jug scene from Die Hard 3? (I’m a die hard Die Hard fan.) That was one of the puzzles.

Richie and his friends didn’t make it out in time and were eaten by the Zombie. Can’t believe I forgot to ask him what that actually entails. Only about 30% of teams actually escape the room.

I asked if the Zombie was scary, and Richie said that the actress did a very good job! The situation was very tense.

This is something I definitely want to do next time we’re visiting with Richie in Seattle.

Boulder City, Nevada

While exploring around Lake Havasu the other day, we were lucky enough to come upon a couple of dozen burros.

Oh my goodness… They are so gosh darned cute!

The Wild Burro was first introduced into the Desert Southwest by Spaniards in the 1500s. Wild Burros have long ears, a short mane and reach a height of up to 5 feet at the shoulders. They vary in color from black to brown to gray.

After researching them for this post, I learned that burros are especially suited for life and work in the desert. They can tolerate a water loss as much as 30% of their body weight. And they can replace that loss with only five minutes of drinking. (Humans require medical attention if 10% of body weight is lost to dehydration and require a full day of intermittent drinking to replenish this loss.)

According to a Bureau of Land Management site, there are just over 8,000 wild burros in the western United States. Over 4,000 of those live in Arizona, and almost 2,000 live in California. Just over 300 live in Utah, and just over 1,500 live in Nevada.

We saw five burrows in Arizona a few weeks ago and about thirty in California the other day. So by my calculations, we saw less than 0.25% of the Arizona burros and a whopping 1.5% of the California population. Amazing…

They were so plentiful that the groundskeepers for this golf course don’t even have to mow! 🙂 

This burro and Sophie were having a stare down. The burro won. 

This one was the cutest one we saw. I think she’s old because her fur is very long. Just look at her eyebrows.

I swear if I see any more burros they are going to replace my favorite animal to see in the wild–buffalo! 

Maybe I can have two favorites, right?

Indio, California

My favorite desert plant isn’t cactus. Actually I hate cacti…

But I love ocotillo!

Ocotillo can grow up to 15 feet tall and 15 feet wide. They are usually leafless through most of the year, and they produce leaves after significant precipitation. When drought happens, they shed their leaves to reduce plant evaporation. Given sufficient spring rain, ocotillos produce bright red-orange flowers on the ends of their branch tips.

I love their shape when they are leafless.

I love the color of their leaves when they first come out.

I love the way the leaves grow out of the tops of the thorns on their spines.

And I love their  blossoms.

But now I have a confession to make…

I really do love ocotillos, but the main reason for this post and all of the pictures is so that I have all the images and informationI need so that I can have Rich make me one out of metal once he has a shop again.

But then we went to Shields Date Garden, and I saw this!

I’m pretty sure Rich can make me one with red blossoms! 🙂

Gold Canyon, Arizona

I needed a good laugh last night, so I watched a video of a comic prepping for and getting a colonoscopy.

Why this video?

I remembered it while we were talking about Blazing Saddles at the dinner party the other night…  🙂

Enjoy!

Gold Canyon, Arizona

Sophie and I went for a long walk the other day, and several unique things happened.

To Rabbit or Not to Rabbit

Sophie lagged behind. Actually that’s not unique. When it’s sunny outside, she’d rather not exercise.

Anyway, she was lagging so far behind that I hid behind a tree to scare her a bit. Once she figures out that I am out of sight, she usually trots along the trail until she finds me.

But on her way to meet me that day, she smelled a bunny rabbit. From my hiding place, I watched her come within four feet of the rabbit. She didn’t realize she was that close…

She was torn between chasing the rabbit and finding me. I watched as she weighed the pros and cons of each side of the equation. I could tell that the rabbit was winning, so I called her and she reluctantly caught up to me.

Too Tired to Walk but Not Too Tired to Jog

If there are people around, I keep better track of Sophie than if we’re virtually alone on the trail. She’ll catch up eventually…

She was, again, lagging behind. We were at a place where there are curves and dips, so we lost track of one another.

All of a sudden I heard two sets of footsteps from behind jogging towards me. Two young women were out for a morning trail run.

And guess who was jogging right along with them?

Yep, Sophie, without a care in the world. Happy as could be. 🙂

Apparently she was too tired to walk with me but not too tired to jog with her new friends.

Cardinals Time Two

There’s a gully that we cross with lots of shrubs and trees that is perfect for bird cover.

I had my first cardinal sighting there, and it was a good one!

I saw a pair of cardinals and they were ORANGE! Even more brilliant than the ones in this picture.

I was hoping to see some cardinals while we were here, but I was expecting them to be cardinal red.

What a pleasant surprise to see two orange Northern Cardinals. From what little bit of research I’ve done on the ‘net, the orange plumage is most likely caused by a diet that’s specific to this area.

Whatever’s causing it, they were simply amazing!

Now that was an American Beauty moment.

Gold Canyon, Arizona

Shocking news from our neighborhood:

There is a criminal in our midst!

The victims felt that this theft was serious enough to warrant a call to the local sheriff’s office who sent a Citizen on Patrol in an official car to take statements.

 While you might think that the criminal would be stealing jewelry or other valuables from these wealthy retirees, you’d be wrong.

He (or she) is stealing “do not poop here” signs. At least a half dozen of them.

Within our park, there are definitive pet zones. Pets are allowed in about half the park, and that’s including both cats and dogs.

I’m not sure if parakeets or guppies are allowed in no pet zones. 🙂

There are some residents who live within pet areas that are not happy about Rover or Fluffy (a surprising number of people walk their cats daily) using their lot as a private bathroom.

I get that, but they are renting or leasing the lot. They don’t own it, so I’m not sure if they have the right to ask pet owners to tell Miss Kitty to walk crossed legged on her daily walk past the lot.

PS No word on how the actual criminal hunt is going. I know the first person I would look into is the woodworker who is making the signs and selling them in the resort gift shop. Perhaps they aren’t selling fast enough. 🙂