...warmest in the country

So, officially, yesterday afternoon Tucson was the warmest city in the U.S.: 91 degrees, a record high...hotter even than Phoenix! (but it's a dry heat...)

The day before, my wife and I took a family up Mount Lemmon--a resettled refugee-family from Congo.They've been here for a few months, and they'd never been in the snow. Even though the temperature was in the 50's at the summit, there was still lots of snow in the pine-forest and on the northern slopes--enough for their son to slide around in and make a few snowballs...


On the way down, this was the wintry-sky-view from one of the lookouts along the Catalina Highway: a panorama of Tucson--hard to believe it hit 91 degrees yesterday when looking at this:

Here are a few more weather statistics from this morning's paper:

Monday was:
• The warmest Feb. 23 on record, compared with a previous record of 87 degrees in 1989. The mercury hit 91 at 2:24 p.m. and was at least 90 for three minutes. The normal high for this time of year is about 70 degrees.

• A day when the low temperature was also the highest minimum temperature on record for the day: 58, compared with the previous record of 54 in 1920.

• The second-earliest 90-degree day in February on record, after a 92-degree reading on Valentine's Day 1957.

• The fourth 90-degree reading in February in Tucson since records started being kept in 1895.

• The second straight day in which Tucson had the warmest temperature in the country. On Sunday it was 83 degrees.

"It could be worse. It was 100 degrees in Hermosillo today," National Weather Service meteorologist John Glueck said.

A strong high-pressure ridge over the Tucson area has pushed temperatures up and will keep them high all week.
Today, the high is expected to be a 90. It will cool to the mid-80s on Wednesday, and stick in the low to mid-80s for the rest of the week.

In today's Tucson Sunday paper...

...ahh, the relaxing ritual of unrushed Sunday morning coffee with the newspaper...
what a nice surprise to open to page B-6 in this morning's Tucson paper to see this:

...just nine days after my other morning-newspaper-surprise (see below), I saw another photo of mine published! The caption read: "Joseph Cyr was in the right place at the right time when he captured this Guatemalan volcano and its shadow at sunset."

The volcano is the 12,000-ft.-high Volcán El Agua, between Amatitlán and Antigua, Guatemala. My wife and I were visiting an old family friend in Guatemala in February of 2006, (during the year that we lived in Nicaragua), and I'd just bought my first digital camera in Guatemala City. Trying to learn to use it, I walked down a street in our friend's colonia, and the humid sunset that evening ended up being stunning.

That same evening, from that same spot, another volcano, off to the south, was belching steam:

That is the Volcán Pacaya, (about 8300 feet high), pretty much continuously active...

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Also stunning are the budget cuts occuring at all levels of Arizona's education system, which inspired the local editorial cartoonist to draw this morning's remarks:

Gotta love the spatula, eh? Sad...

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(this was the photo that appeared in the local paper on Feb. 6th)

(Probably the most-photographed coffee-shop window in Seattle...nevertheless, during the decade I lived in Seattle, this was always one of my favorite street vistas, especially welcoming on a grey day.)

Sunday morning. Snow-on-the-mountains. Rain on the buds.

...rain last night...woke up to clearing skies and snow on the Santa Catalina Mountains...

...went for a brief walk in the neighborhood...
...yeah, it's the parking lot in Fort Lowell Park, with utility poles, but still...

...back home, fun with macro shots in the lemon tree...fascinated by pre-bloom-buds:
...and a few more buds, with raindrops...
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OH--

--almost forgot to mention my small thrill-du-jour from the other day;

I had another photo published in the Tucson newspaper; fun to be surprised, in my pre-coffee-stupor, by seeing my own photograph in the morning paper last Friday!

You Seattle readers might find the scene mundane, but as cliché* as the scene might be, it is iconic, especially to normally rain-thirsty Tucsonans...

*(incidentally, "cliché" is also the French term for a photo-negative. Quelle coïncidence...)

(and don't forget: http://www.exoculis.com/)

fruit of labor, after being home sick for two days...

Yesterday and the day before, I stayed home from work: sick.
Nothing serious, but enough to keep me from my daily getting up in front of adolescents...

And so, stuck inside, I fiddled with photography and websites...
...and the fruit of that labor is this:

http://www.exoculis.com

Within that website is a link to:
http://exoculis.dotphoto.com,
my fledgling attempt at turning a hobby into a small small business. (?)

Why "ex oculis," you ask?
Well, I figured, just like "ex libris" is Latin for 'from the books of','
"ex oculis' means, roughly, 'from the eye of''...

What do you think?

So, yeah, this entry is a bit of comfortably shameless self-promotion.

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In the 80's yesterday and today...
but Tucson is supposed to be flirting with snowflakes by next Monday...

catnaps

...a last-minute decision to go for an afternoon walk out at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum today, during The Super-Bowl-madness...
very quiet out there today.

So, a couple of catnaps, then--a mountain lion, and an ocelot:

...plus, a birdie--a cactus wren perched on the ribs of a dead saguaro:

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incidental:

the other night, we watched "La Misma Luna," or "Under the Same Moon." Has anyone else seen that film? We found it much more interesting, thought-provoking, touching, than we'd thought it might be...

"Wordle" of January

Below is a succinct 'wordle' of last month's blog.

(Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.--courtesy of www.wordle.net)

I was curious...

click on the image above for a bigger version

Interesting tool for an easy visual of a textual analysis, eh?

(If you're curious, here's a link to a 'wordle' I just did of the 119th Psalm; I wanted to know what the longest chapter in the Bible, which is also, incidentally, the 'middle' of the Bible, looked like as a wordle.)

Saturday morning. Almost live. "Border-ness."

Ahhh.....Saturday morning. Coffee on the patio...
Minutiae, courtesy of cell-phone photo:



(think of it as an 'ad,' trying to convince our friends to come visit Tucson in January/February, rather than just a gratuitous use of cell-phone-camera capabilities...Venez nous voir! Vengan!)
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My wife works, several Fridays a month, at the hospital down in Nogales, on the border.
The border-ness of it gets reconfirmed each time, in little ways.

For example,
well, first of all--my wife speaks in Spanish to almost all of the patients.
Even the Chinese nurse speaks Spanish.
Virgen de Guadalupe images abound. (It's a Catholic Hospital.)
Ladies come around to sell home-made tortillas, and even 'sheescake.'
A co-worker has told her about acquaintances and family-of-friends who have been victim to the increasing drug-cartel-related violence on the Mexican side.
The older female patients call my wife, not 'Miss' or even 'Señorita,' but rather "mija." ('mija' is a shortened form of 'mi hija,' Spanish for 'my daughter.')

And that's it for this Saturday morning, typing here--the first time I've sat
on the patio with the laptop...