(no subject)

[which_chick]

Where have I been? Yeah, one-a-day and all that, but there have been many days and nada, zip, zero. WTF?



I went to Arizona to see the Scottsdale Arabian Show (which is just outside of Phoenix) and to visit La's friend in Tuscon (which is about two hours away from Phoenix (at least it is the way La drives) and to see the sights.

I did actually go to the horse show. Really. Two days of it. I saw show horses in the ring and doing stuff, but since it was a covered ring and since I don't have a three-hundred dollar flash on my cheap-ass digital camera, you're going to have to imagine that part. However fancy things might look in the show ring, though, things at the wash rack are the same at every show. Here's a picture.



An unexpected delight of our trip was that the underpasses and assorted freeway abutments and shit were decorated. Some had petroglyphs and some had geckos or cactus rendered in the concrete. Mostly, since we were blowing by them at ninety miles an hour (not kidding -- it's a big place and a lot of the roads are dead flat and dead straight and you can drive dead fast on 'em. At least, dead is what happens if you hit anything while going ninety. But it was a rental.), I did not have the opportunity to get pictures of 'em. This one, I snapped at a stoplight.



I think that perhaps the Arizona board of state tourism or whatever should make a point of mentioning how nifty their roads are. Not only are they decorated, they're mostly tastefully xeriscaped and colored to match the local rocks and stuff. The roads try to blend in. It's kind of neat and I'm sorry that I don't have more pictures of the decorations because they were pretty cool.

En route to La's friend's house in Tuscon, we stopped at a roadside attraction where this horse feed



cost five dollars for this big of a cup



to feed to these...



That was worth every penny of the five dollars. (And that's MY PICTURE that I TOOK BY MYSELF. I didn't steal it from anywhere. Yay me! Full disclosure: I have about sixty shitty pictures of ostriches that you aren't going to get to see. But this one? Teh hawtness.) Persons who have never met an ostrich (for that is the these pictured above) should know that they're right sudden birds. They're big, yes. They're also fast like chickens when they're pecking. It's kind of disconcerting. They can also snake their necks around like... like... well, the thing that they reminded me of most was those three green pointy bits that live in the holes in Half Life and peck you to pieces if you make any noise. They move JUST LIKE that, as fast and in the same kind of way. I could not actually capture this on film, but I tried.



The little white cup of stuff (refer to the feed cup picture above) was some kind of food for small, brightly colored birds called Lorikeets. (It was included in the five dollars at the ostrich place.) You go into the very-large (huge barn-sized walk-in) bird cage, double-doored and screened, and open the little white cup of stuff and then you are attacked by small brightly-colored birds who duel each other for the right to slurp up the liquid.



They will also sit on your head.



It being the southwest, they offered hot peppers for sale in jars at all sorts of tourist venues. I took a picture because the colors were lovely I didn't figure they were for eating, just for looking at. I ain't be paying seventy dollars for looking-at food.



The scenery was kinda hostile.





Well, really, it was very hostile.



But some of it was photogenic.



There was really rather a lot of scenery going on, which was good because they didn't have very many trees to liven up the place. There was a distinct shortage of trees. Along the roads, they had some scruffy things with green trunks and some mesquite (but both of these were not what I'd call trees. They were only slightly larger than shrubberies) and stuff, but that was about it. Also, some damn fool thought it would be cute to plant freaking palm trees all over, so there were a lot of those, too. But anyway, there was scenery.



The trees are blurry because we were blowing by the scenery at ninety miles an hour. We went by some scenery more slowly but the light was fading and all my damn pictures came out grainy because of the low light levels...

Except this one.



They do really have pretty surgical-appliance-pink sunsets out there. That's the colors the camera saw -- I didn't tart things up in an editing program. Anyway, I'm home again and the usual round of postings will resume in short order.

Also, I ripped out the totally unsatisfactory 1x1 ribbing on the HoHI and cast on again and put on 2x2 corrugated ribbing and it is both totally right and acceptable AND better than halfway done. Go me! (Nothing like a plane flight to attack those not-particularly-thrilling knitting jobs. Now I need to rechart the pattern for the socks so that it meets the (new) 168 stitch requirement. *sigh* That's going to suck.)

Comments

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

As somebody who graduated from The University Of Arizona, I have to confess that these pictures made me a little homesick. I miss the desert a lot more than I thought I ever would.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Wanna go see the Joshua trees? It'll be hot fun! We'll get to see snakes cacti! There will be endless hiking scenery! The park has lots of informational signs, every one of which I will stop and read trails. It's only for two days (which will seem an eternity of sun, rocks, and hostile landscape).

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

I still have scars on my legs from hiking in the desert with shorts on. There's a tree-ish plant called a "cat's claw acacia", which has these blades of doom all over it, and it grows everywhere. You don't realize you've been sliced up until you notice the blood running down your legs. Good times.

And I'll be happy to come along on the next trip, but I have nearly zero interest in seeing Joshua trees. Add in the fact that I'm still broke as hell, and it's a no-go. But if you like the desert enough to want to go back after this upcoming trip, I'll gladly suggest some out-of-the-way type spots. Good scenery, no tourists.

That also means, of course, that there's no trails or helpful signs. How do you feel about getting most of your daily water intake from cacti?

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I'm not in love with any sort of outing that requires me to drink from plants (barring outings wherein drinks are served in hollowed-out pineapples and/or coconuts) because that moves from fun to hardship right quickly. As well, I kind of think that trails and helpful signs are kind of important for dumb-ass east coasters (like yours truly) so that we do not wind up dead in the desert.