Mountains. Biking. Nectar-thief.

Next Friday is the City of Tucson's Bike-to-Work-day.

So this morning I thought I'd check out how long it would take me to bike from home to where I work: twenty minutes. Not bad. Before the 100-degree days arrive, I should 'go green,' then.

Riding back, I decided to make a loop instead of backtracking...

...which took me by an animal feed-store with this mural on its side wall (cell-phone-cameras are pretty convenient, eh?):

Ahh--a twinge of 'homesickness' for the Pacific Northwest hit--Mt. Shuksan, in the North Cascades National Park, arguably the most photographed mountain in the world. (And now, coming to a SW-feed-store near you...)

Once, staying with friends-of-friends in the south of France, I noticed they had put together one of those thousand-piece-puzzles and framed it on the wall of their guest room. They thought it was a Swiss-scene, but it was Mt. Shuksan, in Washington state...And in Peru, a popular brand of muesli had, on its packaging--you guessed it--Mt. Shuksan. An Andean peak just won't do, I guess...For whatever reason, Mt. Shuksan is a glaciated mountain-super-model...

(This, alas, is not my photo...it is courtesy of: http://www.peacham.com/travel/)

I've been there twice, but have never been able to see it completely cloud-free.

Oh, yes, clouds...part of the reason why we moved to Arizona...

So, continuing on my loop back home, I took the Rillito "river" trail, which gives you views of the majestic Santa Catalinas and the 'river.' It was flowing a few weeks ago. Really. I promise.

No waves lapping at the shore as I pedaled today...

I loved riding my bike as a kid, but I got away from it in middle- and high-school...Then, one summer while in college, I visited a friend up in Québec City, and we went biking one day--From the old city, dominated by the Château Frontenac on Cap Diamant, up the St.-Lawrence for quite a few miles to the Montmorency waterfall.

(Incidentally, this year marks the 400th-anniversary of the founding of Québec, which remains the only walled-city in North America...and in late June and early July, my wife and will be there; it'll be her first true 'immersion' in the French language since she began studying it in earnest...)

So, when I returned home to Georgia from that trip, I got a bike, and riding along the Augusta Canal (built in the 19th-century with Irish and Chinese-immigrant labor) became a favorite way to escape from reading-lists...

No mountains or French-Canadian-colonial-fortifications in East Central Georgia, but plenty of green...and it's also the northern habitat-limit of alligators and Spanish moss...

===================

Yesterday afternoon, we did see some flowing water along some trails in Sabino Canyon:

...and the wildflowers continue:

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A couple of days ago, we looked out our living-room window, through the curtain, and saw this:

Decidedly not a hummingbird.
I carefully moved the curtain to the side, trying not to scare the bird away, and got a better look. A Gila Woodpecker was sipping the nectar! I wonder if he's the same guy who was pecking on our roof--which is tile--the other day? Has the nectar fermented?

And that's all the minutiae for tonight.
Signing off from our corner in Tucson...

--a shoeshine?

Lunchtime reading--
I've come across a column in yesterday's International Herald Tribune...
(www.iht.com: you can read it in its entirety below...)

Instantly, I think back to living in Nicaragua--
how many times I would be running errands in downtown Leon,
with boys as young as 7 or 8 years old chasing after me, offering
to shine my shoes...

...and I would be torn between the notion of 'giving the kid honest work' and
'not wanting to enable' a broken system in which the shoeless (!) kids
should have been in school instead...

Then again, maybe the kid's family couldn't even afford to buy the mandatory uniforms...or textbooks...
...or there might have been an unscrupulous guardian keeping the kid out of school on purpose
so that he could make a few cordobas to bring home...

I actually would consciously wear sandals instead, sometimes;
no one offers to shine your sandals for a cordoba.
(At the time, one cordoba was equal to about US$0.17.)

================================
Shoeshine politics
By Roger Cohen
International Herald Tribune
Thursday, April 3, 2008

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of societies: those where you can get a shoe shine and those where you can't.

France falls into the latter category. Search Paris high and low for a seat to kick back and "se faire cirer les bottes": You'll search in vain.

There's something about the idea of having someone stooped at the feet of a client applying polish to his or her boots that rubs the Gallic egalitarian spirit the wrong way. It's just not what 1789 was about.

In the United States, of course, it's a different story. Unlike humor, which is in short supply, or banned, a shoe shine is freely available at U.S. airports. Walk a few Manhattan or Chicago blocks and someone will be there to make your shoes gleam.

There's something about having someone applying polish to a blithe client's boots that comforts American notions of free enterprise, make-a-buck opportunism and the survival of the fittest.

But free enterprise is a little suspect in Europe. The Continent prefers free-ish enterprise.

Germany is much like France in its resistance to the shoe shine. That makes 145 million Europeans or so, spread from Bordeaux to Berlin, with scant access to this particular micro-service. Odd, when you think about it.

Or perhaps not, for the shoe-shine rule goes something like this: If you can't find one, you are probably in a society with a developed sense of egalitarianism and social solidarity, high taxation, a broad safety net, universal health care, extensive entitlements and high unemployment. Read: A European society like France or Germany.

If you can find a shoe shine, you're probably in a place with low unemployment and little of the above social security, a place where capitalism is crueler and more vital. A place not unlike America.

What I find interesting right now is that no-shine countries are taking a hard look at the state-heavy system that created societies where the incentive to take a job like polishing shoes was low to nonexistent, while shine-rife nations are asking if unfettered capitalism's hidden hand might not need a little more state guidance.

Call it a rare case of trans-Atlantic convergence.

The Sarkozy revolution in France, of still uncertain outcome, was essentially about the French realization that a country where it was often more profitable not to work than to work was a country with a problem.

It was about the admission that the pursuit of a 35-hour week, as the Chinese and Indians strive for a 35-hour day, was suicidal. It was about looking at facts and trashing taboos, not least one that made praise of U.S. business punishable by (political) death.

President Nicolas Sarkozy and his finance minister, Christine Lagarde, have had the courage to say that tax cuts, the curtailment of unemployment benefits and other entitlements, later retirement, and incentives for those working over 35 hours are essential to usher France from the Big Sleep of the Mitterrand-Chirac years.

Like other European countries that have beaten high unemployment, including Sweden, France is waking up to the fact that good education is a better way to cut income inequality than high taxes. France has been a country where an entrepreneur ready to shine shoes would have been taxed out of existence before polish hit leather.

In the United States, rethinking is moving the other way. President George W. Bush has pushed for an America of "low taxes, weak government and strong religion," in the words of David Schulz, an attorney. That's been the culmination of a 40-year period in which Republican administrations have governed for all but 12 years.

No wonder the country is skewed! What you get over time is collapsing bridges in Minneapolis, decaying infrastructure, massive national debt, rising inequality, a derisory dollar and the unregulated financial markets that have produced the current mayhem - all "under God," it's true, but scarcely more lovely for that.

Even the Bush administration, trying to trump yet another Democratic election card, is now proposing more oversight for financial markets. But only the Democrats have the courage to say that more government and more equitable taxation are needed if you're serious about better schools, new infrastructure, health care and minimum social cohesion. It's past time the balance swung back from Republican excess.

So, do I prefer shoe-shine or no-shine societies? I favor the former because they give freer rein to the human spirit, but of course I'd like some attributes of the shine-free world, especially universal health care. That's doable while avoiding the entitlement-excess that sent France into its protracted doze.

If convergence goes far enough, look for shoe shines in France (as long as polisher and client are placed at the same eye level), and a tax on your U.S. shine. I'll believe it when I see it.

today, after work...

...I stopped by the Tucson Botanical Gardens--less than 5 minutes
from where I work...
I was just going to browse in the bookstore for something,
but I decided to walk around the grounds before running errands on the way home.

For whatever reason, I've been finding the apricot-hued variety of desert globemallow fascinating:
...How would Monet have painted the desert? Tucson ain't no Giverny, but the spring floral
displays are nothing, (ahem,) to sneeze at.

...a variety of purple sage:

...and when I saw these, I thought surely they were fake...but I've forgotten the name...anyone know? Is it a kind of zinnia? ...and some penstemon and yucca:

a few 'firsts' from this weekend...

The day before yesterday--out of the city, hiking in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains by the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum...

My wife saw her first rattlesnake-in-the-wild; it warned her as she walked by:

...later in the day we spotted our first blooming cactus of the season--a hedgehog cactus:
...and the first Ocotillos are sending out their 'matchsticks' on fire:
...at the Desert Museum itself, my wife saw her first javelina--not a wild pig, but a closely related 'collared peccary:'
...and we saw a Harris' Hawk in flight--amazing birds; they hunt in packs, 'wolves of the air:'
...such intense eyes--can spot a cottontail rabbit from a mile away:

...these small wild lilies are actually wild onions:

...and this is a Mariposa Lily...

...in June, this Saguaro's 'hand' will be covered in creamy blossoms; bats used to pollinate them, but now bees do the job:
...and I can never resist taking pictures of the unusual poses of these prickly giants:

Flora & fauna, near & far

Spring is ripening here in the Sonoran desert.

I'm continuing to learn, slowly, what the 'non-automatic' things on my camera will do,
if I fiddle with them just right...extreme close-ups can be fun...

Our citrus trees are blooming--heady in the warm afternoons...

No, it's not an undersea creature with clasped tentacles.

It's a lemon blossom, just before opening.

...and as soon as orange blossom petals fall away, a baby citrus orb reveals itself...

...I've never had a tomatillo plant before; my mother said that she remembers, as a child, having these in Korea as ornamental plants--nice flowers; they didn't realize that the tomatillos were edible!

...the first roma tomato of our patio garden...I love the 'peach fuzz,' noticeable when you focus this close...

...apricot desert globemallow...It was growing on the side of our street...

...and this is what it looks like in its natural state, on a trail in Saguaro National Park...

...a desert bluebell...

...and this little potted mini-barrel-cactus next to our phone just began blooming; the blooms close up at night...

...Monday moring, I was hiking around the Tucson mountains in Saguaro National Park, right as the sun came up...

This is cleftleaf wildheliotrope, also known as scorpionweed, growing beneath some brittlebush and saguaros...

...even though brittlebush is common, it's still amazing to see entire hillsides covered in yellow...

...by mid-day, the desert is shimmering with color...

...one section along Picture Rocks Road still has a carpet of Mexican gold poppies and lupine under the cholla...

...and these are desert chicory blooms...

...some fiddleneck staring at you...

...and some desert hibiscus...

...and another color variety of desert globemallow...

(incidentally, globemallow was used by native SW tribes as a poultice for wounds and also as a diarrhea remedy... )

===============

Last week I drove down to Sierra Vista, where I lived as a kid...

Just four miles from my old house is the San Pedro River riparian reserve--it wasn't accessible to the public back when I lived there, but now it is a nature reserve--a corridor of cottonwood forest along one of the few remaining flowing desert rivers; it is one of the most important migratory-bird-routes in North America.

The high grasslands (four to five-thousand feet above sea-level) are still brown; spring is just barely arriving in this area, compared with Tucson, which is two to three thousand feet lower in elevation. The Huachuca mountains still have a lot of snow on their northern slopes...

The cottonwoods are just beginning to get a tinge of green above the river. (It's more of a 'stream' really, but in the desert, this qualifies as a river, since it flows year-round.) Until a couple of decades ago, jaguars would occasionally be spotted in this area, visiting from their more traditional habitat in Mexico! In the nearby Chiricahua mountains, there used to be a native species of thick-billed parrot...SE Arizona is truly an environmental crossroads...

...a great blue heron:

...and a red-tailed hawk...

...I've not yet looked up what this yellow-bird is:

======================================

...and that's it for this posting; a few of my points-of-view.

'morning bike ride'...or, 'why going to the gym is an exercise in A.D.D.'

I'm developing the habit of going to the gym several times a week,
in the early morning, to ride the stationary bike.
(I say 'developing,' because a 'habit', by one definition, only becomes a habit
after fifteen consecutive repetitions...)

The recumbent bike allows me to read in relative comfort while pedaling away.
Twelve miles, and the morning paper and a good chunk
of whatever book I'm working on get read.
I put the bike on 'random hill mode' to vary the intensity.
Yes, I do appreciate the ironical absurdity of driving in the car
to then go sit still indoors in a big-box-building while 'biking.'
But morning traffic and darkness make a pre-work bike ride less than practical...
and how else am I going to get to read the paper AND exercise all before 6:30 a.m?

The gym has many TVs of course.
From where I sit, I can see nine screens turned to nine different channels.
So I can glance up from the paper to learn that Barack Obama is related to Brad Pitt.
(This is "news?")
Then I see that there is actually a "Miss Bimbo" website aimed at 12- and 13-year-old girls.
Sick.
Today's high in Tucson will be in the mid-80's.
The bike next to me suddenly is occupied...and after a couple of minutes,
the person asks me--"how long do you have to pedal before this thing starts?"
I reply--"um, you actually have to push the 'start' button."
"Oh."
There's a pile of celebrity gossip magazines next to my bike.
Which I shun.
Of course.
(After I've scanned the 'headlines'.)
I find the TVs both fascinating and annoying. I fancy myself in 'anthropologist-mode.'
Oh, and now CNN says that Hillary Clinton is a distant cousin of Celine Dion.
(mental flashback to "Titanic" and SNL skits...)
And up, there comes the sun over the Rincon mountains out the window to my left...
Letters to the editor decry the coming development of one of the few remaining areas in Tucson where the water table still allows year-round springs to flow.
(When the first Anglo settlers arrived in southern Arizona,
they only had to dig 50 feet to hit groundwater.
Today, you have to go down over 350 feet to have a productive well.)
My right shoelace has come undone. Drat.
Walter Mead Russell is an engaging, if somewhat biased, historian, when it comes to explaining the 'whys and hows' behind the rise of the Anglo-American world power in his book "God and Gold."
I'm glad we live close to a branch of the library--I love how they just deliver my 'wish list' to the local branch, and I pick it up for free, after I've typed in titles on their website-search-page.
But nothing beats the serendipitous finds of aisle-browsing.
Like the Nicaraguan-vase I saw at Bookman's yesterday afternoon.
I think the next book I pick for my bike-read will have to be a novel; 't's been a while since I read some good fiction. I'm getting pickier?

Huh?

Not just some stream-of-conscious-gibberish, although the blog is often a forum for that...but I'm saying that my gym-experience is hardly mind-clearing.

Some people exercise to hit 'the zone,' where they focus on breathing and rhythm, and de-stress from thinking about stressful things. I rather enjoy, though, the haphazard mental volleying that occurs when I go to the gym.

Perhaps I'm a bit A.D.D? When I younger, I was able to keep more focused...perhaps going to a high-school that had a seven-period day, with the option of half-period electives, gave me enough variety to keep my attention. But I can focus...when I want to...it's just that I enjoy darting about as well. I can sit at the piano, occasionally, and play for long chunks of time...but while I'm in the shower, I'll often feel the impulse to look up a word in the dictionary...(What IS that word in Spanish for 'click and drag'? And in Korean?)...That's what bathrobes are for, no?

Yes, self-diagnosis can often be the worst kind. Misleading. Narcissistic navel-gazing maybe. Omphalocentric. Inaccurate.

So much in today's society is teaching us to have short-attention spans. Commercial breaks for everything. Talk-show hosts asking a panel of 'experts' to give us 'in thirty seconds or less' a definition to a complex issue. Political soundbites. Txt msgs on the small screens of cell-phones. The three-minute pop-song. (What? I have to listen to a symphony that lasts for over half-an-hour?! JK...no really, I'm 'just jk-ing.' Ay.)

At times I wonder if perhaps I have too much empathy for my distractible students? Channel the mental volleying, have fun playing with it, but keep it in the game, I guess...(I'm horrible at tennis, by the way.)

But on the recumbent bike, I can burn calories...
and when I go early in the morning, I feel energetic the rest of the day...

Sunrise keeps getting earlier and earlier. Like it does every spring.

(Please don't analyze this posting.)

Spring break just ended here in Tucson...
The Monday after Easter is a day-off from local schools, too, since many many families travel back to Mexico for the holiday to be with family.
So, I went hiking in the mountains on the western edge of the city on Monday--lots of spring wildflowers.
Photos coming soon...

Then I drove out to Kitt Peak and its forest of white domes and telescopes at 7000 feet above the desert.

In parting, for today, then,
a random cartoon, e-mailed to me...
well, not overly random, I guess--the cacti are 'local:'

Always take extra water with you into the desert.
In mid-summer, the ground can heat up to literally 200 degrees Fahrenheit.