Tucson Trip

February has been an incredibly busy month. I'm just realizing that it's almost over. This last week I realized that I'm going to have to find a better way of managing things, because I'm doing so much that I'm forgetting things. I forgot to pay a bill! That's a serious first for me. The company even said as much when they called. "You've had this card 18 years and never even been late on a payment . . ." , etc. On top of that I forgot a deadline to get a housing form in to one of my organizations. *sigh* Time to get some additional organization into my life I guess. Which is a little scary, when I think about it. I'm already like the world's least spontaneous person, and I'm talking about being more organized. *laughing* Seriously no hope for me.

This month I went to a meeting in Tucson, at a place called the Loew's Ventana Canyon Resort. Awesome place!! The resort is built in a canyon (obviously), but it was built without harming any of the several thousand saguaro cactus that populate that area. Plus it was built to blend into the canyon, so it's weirdly shaped and spread out, and totally awesome. My room was on the third floor, and yet I had a patio that you could step up out of and be on ground level. They also created a nice walking trail behind the Resort. The resort itself is somewhat vaguely shaped like a large "V", and the pool is inside the V and the walking path is partially inside and extends out of it and leads to an 80 foot waterfall. The waterfall is natural some times of the year and artificially maintained the rest of the time. The top of the waterfall can be seen in the first picture in this entry, with the saguaro all around it.

Along with the landscaping, I have to give the Resort staff some serious credit. Every single person I dealt with went out of their way to be friendly courteous and helpful. The food was great. the people were great, the little shops were great. cst was seriously happy.

Besides the purpose of the trip, I learned something about saguaro cacti while I was there. Those babies are old! They don't begin to get arms until they are between 50 and 75 YEARS old. So when you see arms, those are old cacti. There are two in front of the resort that may be close to 300 years old. I managed not to get pictures of those two, but did get quite a few saguaro pictures, like the hillside shown here. I kept meaning to go out front and take pictures, but something kept distracting me every time I thought about it.

Of course, it's February, so the area was very brown and mostly dormant. I'd love to see it when things are growing. Cacti don't go dormant, so that was fine. Plus I like the desert-type landscape or I wouldn't hike out there, but I'd still like to see it growing some day. One of the things that really struck me on the drive in from the airport was the yellow-green trees. Leafless of course, but the bark is a bright yellow green. This picture doesn't do them justice, but you can kind of see what I mean. I learned from walking the path at the resort that those are called Palo Verde. The walking path had small signs naming various plants, and a couple of larger signs explaining all about the saguaro and the building of the Resort.

There was a cactus wren in the area behind my patio that I watched for a while. It ran past when I was out there taking pictures. At first I thought it was a roadrunner, but it was too small for a roadrunner and not the right color. It was large for a wren though, being slightly smaller than a robin, but not small like the Carolina wrens I see around here. Plus it doesn't have the little up-turned tail I've come to associate with wrens, but a longer tail, which is why I first thought 'roadrunner'. I tried to get pictures of it, but like most birds, it wasn't holding still for it. This picture is looking out from my patio and the wren is sort of visible, blurring past, running on the ground to the right of center. I got other pictures that were slightly less blurry, but nothing really good. That wren and a little plain hummingbird were the only wildlife I saw on the trip, but then, I didn't spend a lot of time outside the hotel meeting room.

The meeting was good also. I'm a newly elected member of this particular group so I wasn't sure how it would be, but I'm going to enjoy being a part of this group. They are serious and enthusiastic about their involvement and the dialogues flowed evenly among all members. The group and the organization are well worth the effort to be a productive member.

At work things are moving smoothly also. *laughing* Well, of course there are politics going on there, but that's a given. I've gotten better at becoming part of the flow. I'm still extremely busy, but things are on track, (except a certain book with a colleague who continues to drag his feet on his part) and I've begun swimming smoothly rather than treading water with my nose barely free.

Hmmmm. I seem to be into water analogies this morning. Strange in a blog post filled with pictures of desert landscape. I took a lot of pictures of different types of cactus, but I really liked this "fuzzy" variety shown in this picture.

I guess that's about it. February flew by, but that's nothing new. The years rush past almost too fast to notice.

Later.

It's COLD!!!!!!!!!!

This has been one really hard week, weather-wise. I have to keep telling myself that this is Texas. It's too frigging cold!! This picture is my backyard this morning. The sun's finally out, so the snow should be mostly gone later today - I hope.

Let's see, last weekend was pretty if a little cool, but Monday night changed all that. We got a nice ice-storm Monday night into Tuesday morning. I gave it a shot - the driving in to work thing. I managed to get out of my neighborhood, but not to the highway. I hit a still slushy patch, it sprayed up on my windshield and froze. So I had little visibility as well as little traction. Yes, my defroster was on and functional, but the ice on my wipers themselves kept smearing ice across my field of vision. I gave it up. I just wasn't up for 28.5 miles of it, so I turned around and went home. I worked from home on Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday, I braved the still frozen conditions and made it to work and back both days, although Thursday afternoon going home I gave up on the highways and took back streets. The high temperature between Monday and Friday was 24 degrees (low of about 12), so nothing melted. Street and highway conditions only improved marginally, with passable ruts in heavy traffic areas, but the highways continued to have continuous wrecks, and disabled cars, abandoned cars and cars in ditches. Friday when I got up, Nature had added 5 inches of snow on top of the ice! So even Momma Nature isn't above adding insult to injury. I totally didn't expect it. Yes, the meteorologists were forecasting a 50% chance of a "dusting' of snow. And yes, I know they can't really forecast what it's going to do. But 5-7 inches in the metroplex is a significant difference from a 'dusting'. I drove in on the highways, and traction was actually the best I'd had all week, as long as you were careful and remembered there was ice under that snow. Friday afternoon the temperature approached freezing and roads started to melt. Lots of water, lots of slush and lots of ice still. I did the non-highway route most of the way. The bottom line? The fastest trip to or from work I made this week, not counting Monday which was a normal commute, was 1 hour and 15 minutes for that 28.5 miles. The worst was 1 hour 45 minutes. So not only does that add to my work day, but that 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours is extremely tense time spent - death grip on the steering wheel, watching all the other cars intently for slippage. I'm glad the week is over.

I'm equally glad I don't have to be anywhere this morning. All that water from melting snow and ice will have frozen solid again (temp of 21 overnight). This just doesn't seem like Texas to me this week. And they're forecasting more weather like this next Wednesday. That should about give it time to melt before we go again.

Another "interesting" weather-related development: It's been cold enough long enough for my pipes to freeze in my house! Nine and a half years I've been here and never had this happen before. My kitchen sink and my master bathroom shower froze. Both are opened back up now so hopefully there's no burst pipe damage. The shower I should have expected since it's on an outside wall, but since I use it every day, I didn't think about it. The kitchen sink is not on an outside wall so that one surprised me. The only other pipes I have on outside walls are the ones to the washer. I'll run that today after the temperature comes up over freezing and see how it does. The temperatue is supposed to get above freezing today.

Just so as to not have the entire blog be about the weather, things are going well at work and going not well at work. *laughing* Yes, those can both be true. I got all my lectures in on time and my colleague got me his half of the book, and I'm getting it whipped into shape to submit. Those are the good things. On the side of the bad things, we discovered incorrect units of measure on 1100+ test results that we released. So the lab gang spent two days correcting them, and I spent two days contacting 200+ doctors. Luckily the numeric results were fine and they matched the numeric reference ranges, so the units of measure correction was essentially clerical. A pain in the ass, but not affecting patient care. A worse issue was that a tech placed the incorrect fluid on a main analyzer, resulting in 60 incorrect test results that DID impact patient care. Those are still being followed up and require dealing with the doctors and with Risk Management. I'm not sure why errors of this nature tend to cluster. I can go long periods of time with no lab issues, then seem to have several at once. Something in the water?

It's gorgeously sunny out today, sparkling off all that snow. Yesterday afternoon was the first time all week the sun came out, which is why things finally started to melt. I have hopes that the melting will continue today, with all this sun. Oops, talking about the weather again.

I brought more lectures home to wok on over the weekend. These are resident CP lectures, so I should just be able to update them from previous lectures. Since I've been focusing on the book and those other lectures at work, I decided to bring these home and update them here. Shouldn't take too long, but it saves me the time doing them at work.

My poor garage is semi-flooded. I've really been trying to knock all the major ice off my car before pulling it into the garage, but each morning when I go out there's a mini-flood in the garage from melted ice from the car. I'll have to trash some of the cardboard boxes that are sitting in water right now. Everything that I care about not damaging is up off the floor, but some things are wet. Still, a semi-flooded garage is better than scraping ice and snow off a car as it defrosts in the morning.

My cats don't appreciate snow either. Here's Addy checking it out. Neither of them has ever stepped into snow, although Addy walked out on it this week when it was just solid ice out there.

Guess that's it for now.