Hurricane Otis ravaged across Aculpulco, Mexico today, hitting landfall as a Cat5 storm. We got the frontal rains yesterday, beginning at sunrise with dramatic clouds. It was a cool morning walk with the dogs; it was the first time my cheeks felt chilled this season.
Heavy rain was forecasted for 5pm, but the rains arrived earlier. My classroom has no windows so I couldn't see any rain, but all teachers were emailed a message just before the final bell to not dismiss the students at 2:45pm due to lightning. Dismissal was delayed by ten minutes as students were allowed to wait in the cafeteria. Students waiting for parental pick-up had to wait inside and have the parents come in and sign them out. I had a lot of angry students to deal with that last hour.
It had stopped raining when I got home. I could tell that the area was hit hard by rain. There were puddles in the streets. I came home to a very muddy front yard. None of the dogs was wet or had been in the rain. Gretchen has her dog house and Fritz and Gretel can go inside the RV.
Today, as expected, the morning temperature was 48F. What a contrast to yesterday's 55F! The autumn chill is now with us.
The official race is next Saturday, so Bill and I did our walk today. The town has already marked the route in white arrows on the street. The bold arrows were easy to follow and we didn't miss a turn.
There were already quite a few tourists here as well, and a few joggers along the route. Halloween decorations are up! Met a few friendly cats and some colorful flowers.
I took my new new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra to take photos with. What a difference from the Samsung S54 I picked up just last week. I have a lot to learn from this phone; it's the most expensive one I've ever bought and I plan on taking good care of it.
It was 54F at the 6:06am start and in the 80s two hours later. I stayed in town for another visit to the Kafka Cafe and the owners recognized me and remembered my order from two weeks ago. How is that possible? It takes me three weeks to learn all the names of my students.
I slept in this morning. Yesterday's hike up Carr Peak exhausted me.
I managed to get outside to see part of a solar eclipse at 9:35am, but it was too bright to see any detail even through a camera lens.
Susan called me at 2:43pm. She sounded sad. "I have some bad news" she began, and I immediately thought of Sweetie. "It's not Sweetie. I had to put Allie to sleep on Thursday."
Allie is gone?! I immediately got choked up. I had known Allie from the earliest days, five years ago when Susan brought her home from a local rescue. She was already an older dog, but still vibrant. She was gentle and tolerant of all my dogs. She was a barker and a fierce rat and gopher hunter.
I never got to say good-bye. She died from a mass on her spleen that had been growing over the summer. It had ruptured Thursday morning. That explains her lethargy on Monday. Neither she nor Sweetie went for a "walk-about" around the property that day. Susan wanted to give Allie's legs a rest and Sweetie is walking very slowly now and won't go without Allie. We called them the Two Golden Girls.
I never took a photo of Allie on Monday when I last saw her, but it now explains why she wasn't feeling well that day and just sat in the grass facing us. She had always welcomed me by the iron-wrought gate with a friendly bark, She didn't do that on Monday.
We talked about all the walks we did as a pack along the San Pedro river in 2019-2020. By 2021 Allie's back was getting too arthritic and we stopped the long walks . The dogs always enjoyed wading in the cool water.
I asked how Sweetie is taking the death. "She is confused," answered Susan. She had been sitting next to Allie on the grass the same morning Allie went to the vet. Perhaps Sweetie knew Allie was dying. Dogs can smell death.
We both agreed we expected Sweetie to go first. We both were wrong.
Susan is leaving for California on the 19th to visit her daughter Amanda and her mother-in-law Gayle, who is 96 years old and suffering from sarcoma. She will be on the road for ten days. Sweetie will stay at her place and will be dog-sitted by her friend Sharon, who will be staying at Susan's for three weeks while her own house is getting painted before she moves in.
Susan's place will never be the same without Allie there. Her nudging, her barking, her gentle antics with Sweetie. i will miss my step-dog.
We didn't even get to the trailhead until 1:30pm. I was hoping this would mean fewer people on the trail, and thus less tension for Fritz. It was a perfect day for a hilke, with some clouds and 71F at the start with a slight breeze.
My first reaction was seeing how dry everything was again. There were few flowers in bloom. Most flowers and all the grasses had gone to seed and many of the osk leaves turned brown but didn't fall off trees. The dead leaves created a dull brown hue to most of my shots.
I took a lot of time to stop and photograph flowers with my new Samsung A54. I should have studied the camera section better, though, as many of my macro shots were blurred.
I only met two people, a father and a son. They were coming down and told me that I wouldn't be meeting any other people on the hike. Fritz did very well as we passed them.s
It was 4:15pm when we finally got to the top. This didn't afford me much time to be on top. I took a few photos and at 4:30pm we were back on the descent and quickly in the cool shade.
Carr and Miller peaks' shadows were covering the valley, increasing in size as I descended.
I was worried about the waning sunlight. Sunset was at 5:50pm. tt was 5:55pm when I made it to the Sawmill trail insection. I was 0.9 miles from the car with 36% battery left. I had 30 minutes to make it back to the truck before the end of dusk. I made it by 6:15pm. By 6:55pm we were back home.
I had today's appointment set up for a teeth exam for a future cleaning. Sweetie's teeth are brown and Dr Jackson says she may have a gum infection. A cleaning is now set for Monday. November 20th.
I visited Susan at 1pm and drove off with Sweetie at 1:30pm. Susan originally wanted to go with me and ask questions for Dr Jackson, but Allie wasn't feeling well. She wasn't eating, either. That's never a good sign. Susan thinks she sprained a leg while walking in the garden over the weekend, so she opted to stay home with her.
The appointment was at 2pm and I arrived with a few minutes to spare. In June Sweetie weighed 44 pounds, which was on the thin side. Now she weighs 53 pounds! Susan is feeding her too well. She's well-rounded now and I felt the heavier weight when I lifted her into the truck. While some weight gain was good, even Susan agreed she should cut back on feeding Sweetie treats.
Dr Jackson is a good veterinarian and I will always recommend him for pet owners in the Sierra Vista area. He's folksy like Dr Jody Moffitt was (she moved back to Virginia last year). He gets down to the patient's level and talks in laymen's terms, and he listens to the human customers.
Sweetie is showing signs of dementia, but is not deaf, according to Dr. J. she is just an 11-year-old dog with severe arthritis. She had her nails clipped and her prescription for Galliprant renewed. The bill was $71 and we were out the door by 2:50pm.
It was a beautiful day weatherwise, an ideal day for a fall hike, but I'll leave the hiking for later this week. I stopped at Walmart for more canned food, then stopped at Fry's, and then returned at Susan's place at 5:30pm where I stayed for two more hours.
I bought Sweetie a large-sized Big Barker orthopedic dog bed that arrived last week. She lay on it a few times while I was at Susan's, but only time will tell if she likes the bed. If the 7" memory foam is too high for her, I can always get a thinner mattress and give the current Big Barker to any of the other dogs. It's a comfy mattress that even I find form-fitting.
We walked at length about the current war in Israel with Hamas. Hamas began bombing Israel Saturday morning and caught the intel community off guard. The loss of innocent lives, both Israeli and Palestinian, is too tragic to even comment here, but all I will say is that Hamas must be removed from this Earth. The Palestinians do not deserve such terror and neither do the Jews of Israel. I also have to wonder how much Putin is behind this, knowing that Russia and Iran are now allies in the war in Ukraine.
And what if Putin wants to engage nuclear weapons? He's another authoritarian psychopath. No one is a winner then. I don't want to live the rest of my life in fear, though.
Normally Susan bashes any Democrat (she hates Biden), but tonight she had neutral words for him. I don't visit Susan to talk politics anyway. We were sitting in her living room watching CNN and of course the only news was the news about the Israel-Hamas bombing.
All I added was that the US media is now going to focus on this war in Israel and no longer report on the war in Ukraine, or the 6.3 earthquake in western Afghanistan that also happened on October 7th, or any other significant event in the world because Israel is always #1 when it comes to US politics. All Gazans will be deemed terrorists. Prime Minister Benji NuttyYahoo hates all Palestinians and would rather they all be removed from Israel. And what about our national debt? How much more can American taxpayers endure to police the evil in the world?
I may give up current events and news for a while and watch nothing but senseless sitcoms on YouTube. Or maybe I should just give up watching anything and instead go back to listening to old Eagles tunes all day.
I looked forward to this event all week. I skipped a science lab with the Coronado National Forest themed "land use" to attend this all-day event.
I walked all three dogs before sunrise and took off at 7:40am for the hour-long drive to Dragoon, AZ. My previous visit to the Amerind Foundation in March 2021 familiarized me with directions, so I knew how to get to this hidden place. I didn't see any signs for it off I-10.
Volunteers guided all visitors to the parking area. I got there with ten minutes to spare, sitting on a bench waiting for the first Native singer, Leland Thomas from the Gila River Indian community, to open the ceremony. I enjoyed the music, but was disappointed in the turn-out.
It was a small crowd, about 100 people, and mostly older people 50+. The opening speeches were all nice, starting after Thomas finished his music. Laura Brown, chair, of the Amerind Board of Directors spoke first. Then came Angelina Saraficio from the Tohono O'odham Nation. Sirena Kana, who had a very informative hiking blog ten years ago, spoke next. She now is the CEO of Trails Inspire, LLC, She originally is from Chicagoland like me.
I was eager to get started on the hike! After the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Fulton Family Trail head, the hiking crowd was set free to explore.
All visitors received a colored map of the new preserve. I studied the map during the speeches. The trails are all connecting loops and are 3' to 5' wide. The trails are named after living things found in the preserve. I wanted to hike the perimeter trail as a big double lollypop route, combining parts of all the trails and getting at least eight miles in. I quickly moved to the front of the pack of hikers and got away from the crowd.
The trails begin at the picnic area. There is a trail sign at each intersection in English, Spanish and Hopi. A short connector trail listed as A on the colored map, named the 0.08 mile Mesquite trail, leads to the 0.69-mile Bear Grass trail listed as B. This trail loops around a dry pond that displayed a field of yellow flowers surrounded by hoodoos. This was a pretty view as the yellow contrasted with green grass and golden boulders. In another 0.15 miles I was on trail C, the 1.67-mile Oak trail.
I was finally away from other people, but there was a man behind me not too far away. Was he also hiking the perimeter? We both stopped to take lots of photographs, Perhaps he sensed my uneasiness as once I got on trail D, the 0.69- mile Sky trail, I was in solitude...until I met people who had started from the Scholar and Artist trailhead on the north side of the preserve. I was now one of many moving dots in the landscape and we were all moving in various directions. Many people were carrying big-lensed dSLRs. The views deserve to be captured by professional gear. My cheap Motorola often missed the contrast.
The northern-most part of the preserve ends at another dry pond marked by a tall, charred ash tree, victim of the May 2021 fire that burned 269 acres of the preserve. I rested here for a bit before starting the return hike along the northern trails that offers views of taller peaks along the interstate. The Sky and Coatimundi trails are two of the longer trails here. Both offer vistas and paths around hoodoos.
The heat was beginning to get to me by the 5th mile. The only wildlife I saw were vultures flying overhead, or flitting among the grasses. I finished the perimeter loop at 11:30, took a break to listen to a narrative by Jefford Francisco from the Tohono O'odam Tribal Historic Preservation office. He shared folklore stories of local birds and other animals, then I resumed my hiking to explore the Whale Rock trail on the south end of the property.
I was exhausted by now. It was 12:20pm and I was moving slowly. I was determined to finish that out-and-back trail that added 1.8 miles to the total. Unfortunately, the photo I took of the Whale rock wasn't saved on the camera.
I met another couple as I neared Whale Rock. "It looks like a Beluga whale!" said the man. He was right. The trail ended there so I turned around to head back to the art gallery, but when I came to the couple a second time, knew I had taken a wrong step and in my delirium didn't notiice my mistake.
I made it back to the third lecture on native flora. Dr Lyn Loveless, a botany professor emerita from the College of Wooster spoke last. This lecture lasted until 2;15pm but I was glad I got to hear most of what she shared. By the time the lecture ended, I noticed that most of the visitors had left and even the food tent was shut down. It was a long day for the volunteers and I was tired, too.
Hungry as I was, I had saved all my appetite for my visit to Rollie's Mexican Patio in Tucson. Today was the last day for me to redeam my free concha ice cream, so I rolled my trip to Tucson with my drive today to Dragoon, saving 80 repeat miles.
I even got back to the dogs in under 12 hours. I was too tired to do much else in Tucson but eat and then drive home.
I would have forgotten about today's stair climb had Bill not reminded me of it yesterday on my way to the science lab. We agreed to meet at 6am.
Cooler temperatures are now prevailing after a record-breaking summer heat. It was a mere 55F at the start. I never took off my fleece jacket during the walk. Bill and I chatted about the usual politics and the fate of Trump after he was found guilty of tax fraud in New York and may lose six of his biggest properties. Bill bought a new-to-him BMW motorcycle and he rode that this morning.
The orange flowers from two weeks ago are still in bloom, but slowly the Halloween skeletons are coming out of the closet. We only met one (very friendly) deer and later a Siamese cat and a few people.
For me the fun began after the walk. I stayed in town for almost an hour before the Kafka coffee cafe opened at 9am. I've been wanting to try that place out all summer! I ended up staying two more hours.
The cafe is owned by a couple. He makes the coffees and she talks to the customers. She is a wonderful hostess. She welcomes her regular customers by name and even knows what they have.
One such customer, Wanda from Gordonville, MI, sat next to me at the bar and we had a friendly conversation for a good hour. She told me several times that her sister would play the accordion, and she would dance to the music, all around small cafes around her home town. "I wish my sister would come visit me so she can listen to this music!" she said, several times.
My cappuccino was strong, but flavorful, and sweetened with vanilla-flavored sweet cream. Delicious!
And then classmates from my CCMN class started showing up: Kara, then Gordon and Lori, and then both instructors, Amee and Trevor. I stayed to listen to The Barn Swallows play their original music, but left at 11:20am when it got too crowded. But what a lovely Sunday morning.
