Before the Storm (and During, and After)

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a shot of something unusual on the street where you live. The challenge? It can't be a shot of something of yours. Which means you'll have to, you know, walk down the street a bit. The definition of "unusual" I leave to you. My only suggestion is that it should be in public view, unless you can convince a neighbor to let you in their house and take photographs of the freakish stuff they have there. And if you can, well. Good on you.

There's really only one thing on our street that I find particularly unusual, and it's not on our block. Here it is:


This old double decker tour bus obviously hasn't been used in years and years. The lettering on the words Tucson and Tour is the same style as the old Tucson Toros baseball team logo from the 1980s. I'm guessing this bus last carried tourists about 20 years ago.

Now, the rest of what I'm going to show you isn't as impressive as I'd hoped, but it is unusual for us. Exhibit A:


See all that dirt in the street? That is left over from flooding on Saturday night. According to a rain gauge at nearby St. Michael's, we got 1.25 inches of rain that night. Considering our annual rainfall is something like 11 inches, that's a lot!


This isn't technically my street, but I'm going to cheat a little and show it to you anyway. It's about two blocks behind our house. It's as close as I got to capturing a dust storm in progress at lunchtime today.


By the time I started back from lunch the dust storm had given way to rain, and the dirt and gravel in the street was weighted down by water.

And yes, okay, this is good old Wilmot. I don't technically live on Wilmot, but I practically do. I live half a block off it, spend my days driving on it and working on it and going to church on it. Besides, I love taking pictures of the clouds when they hang below the top of the Catalinas. And this shot even happens to have an old car in it.


On more Wilmot shot. I took this through a rainy windshield, but even so I'm not quite sure what that ring shape in the middle is. Pretty unusual, huh? Yeah, okay, I'm stretching a bit, but it's still pretty neat!

Karen