The Romance of Campaigning

Because of the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot last night, I don't think I remembered to tell you what I was going to do today. Let's catch up with a snippet from my Obama blog, Outpost Tucson:

Oh, drat, their site is down again.

Well, anyway.

I wrote recently that being shy (and adverse to confrontation, although I didn't mention that), I'm not up for making phone calls and going door to door for Barack Obama, or for anyone else. I figured my only contributions to the cause would therefore be the little bits of money I managed to donate before my unemployment made it impossible, plus any blogging I'm inspired to do on the subject.

But on Monday afternoon, I got a call from a volunteer, asking me to volunteer. When I told her I wasn't comfortable with making phone calls or ringing doorbells (the latter activity is called "walking and talking," or a "walk and talk," apparently), she suggested I could do office work. "Can you do data entry?"

I told her that as an accountant, half of my professional life involves data entry. (As much as accounting processes should be automated by now, you'd be surprised how much raw typing is involved sometimes, or copy-pasting.)

"Are you familiar with Excel?"

I think I laughed. She immediately said, "That's probably a stupid question, isn't it?"

Anyway, bottom line is, I agreed to come in and do data entry from 1 PM to 4 PM on Tuesday through Friday of this week. I didn't commit beyond that, in case lightning strikes and I get a job.

So today I found my way to an odd little discontinuous stretch of 1st St. behind Speedway. I had been a little surprised that there even was an Obama HQ in Tucson, since it's John McCain's constituency and the new statewide Obama office in Phoenix was just announced in email last week, with no mention of a Tucson one. When I actually arrived at the place, though, all was revealed. It was the Pima County Democratic Headquarters. There were so many campaign signs on the wall outside for so many different races that I looked them over three times before I found the Obama one. It was buried in something like the third row down, the smallest sign.

The table I worked at, in a room with many campaign signs.

Inside, though, it quickly became clear that much of the activity was centered on getting Obama elected. I found myself speaking to several people and being gradually conducted counterclockwise around an entire rectangle of rooms with tables, a few cubicles and a couple actual offices. I filled in a form, and they hoped to put me to work updating lists of volunteers. One problem: they didn't have a computer available for me to use.

No problem. I drove home and brought back mine.

I ended up working until just after 5 PM, sharing a folding table with several other volunteers doing similar work. One of them joked that we were a table of Old White Women (which in my mind, I immediately abbreviated as OWW). I refrained from mentioning that I'm not even close to 60 years old. I'm not sure I got as much work done as I should have, because of a very minor learning curve, a few technical issues, and (mostly) because we were enjoying each other's company a little too much. I'll do better tomorrow.

The guy in charge was smart and funny and appreciative. He said that the retro shirt I was wearing reminded him of Good 'N' Plenty. From now on, that's my Good 'N' Plenty shirt. He said something about some people not wanting to do volunteer work once they learn it's "not glamorous. It's appreciated, but not glamorous." Once people find out it's not about getting to meet George Clooney, he said, they don't want to do it.

I said that it might not be glamorous, but there's a certain romantic idealism to it. I mentioned my childhood friend Joel, who was working for Eugene McCarthy's election back when we were in sixth grade. I didn't give details, but here in the blog I'll tell you that I never thought I could get involved in social or political causes the way Joel did and and still does. But I admired him for doing in, and still do. The coordinator said that McCarthy came to Tucson in the 1980s for a poetry festival.

I see Rose Mofford, and Janet Napolitano, and...!

In the front of the HQ are books and framed photos. The photos are of past and present Democratic presidents and governors and so on. Three of them are of JFK: a portrait, an enlarged photo of him with two men I don't recognize, and a 1960 campaign poster. I don't want to call the area with the campaign poster a shrine, but in a secular way it almost is, at least for me. As a lifelong democrat who actually remembers the day JFK was shot, I was impressed to be working in a room decked out with vintage Kennedy stuff, and nearly 50 years of party history.

Drat. I messed up with the flash.

It's probably facile to compare JFK with Barack Obama, but I'm going to do it anyway. In 1960, Kennedy had to deal with mistrust on the part of some people because he was *gasp* a Roman Catholic. Obama is carrying a similar burden several times over, as a black man with a mixed parentage that I think was still illegal in some places in 1960. If that's not enough, xenophobic idiots get all aflutter about his Muslim-sounding middle name, and accuse him of being secretly part of the one religion it's socially acceptable to hate, at least in some quarters. Throw in an anti-intellectual charge of elitism and other spurious claims, and you have an effective bit of what John calls "hate porn."

I bet these guys were inspired by their candidate too.

But if Obama has an exaggerated version of Kennedy's challenge as a member of a mistrusted minority, he also has some of Kennedy's strengths. He's smart and articulate and funny, with great rhetorical skills. He has relative youth, charisma, and a rare combination of optimism, idealism and pragmatism. Like Kennedy, Obama inspires others to do for their country, to believe they can do more than they ever thought they could accomplish. From what I saw today, I'm just one of millions of people who are inspired and enthusiastic and accomplishing things after decades of depression and disappointment and cynicism.

Will it all translate to a win in November, or fall before the constant onslaught of lies and hate porn, and all come to nothing? Can we overcome both open and hidden bigotry, ignorance and greed, honest disagreement, voter fraud, deliberate falsehood and reckless disregard for the truth? If he's elected, can we expect policies to be made and laws enacted that start to make things better than they are now?

Okay, so it's not a certainty. Far from it.

But yes we can.

Karen

EMPS: Is It Autumn Yet?

Carly's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot this week is a tricky one for me:

EMPS #4: Welcome To Autumn!

She wants to know what the beginning of Autumn looks like where we are. Umm, well....

Perhaps an hour before sunset.

Distinguishing autumn from summer in Tucson is a tricky proposition. We pretty much haven't got an autumn. Very few trees change color at all, and I don't think any of them lose their leaves. As for cooler weather:

Cayenne is not concerned about the temperature.

The temperature at about 4:30 PM Monday, according to my car, was 95 degrees.

No better at 5:45 PM

The temperature in my car as sunset approached was still 95 degrees.

Mind you, 95 degrees actually does constitute cooling off. In summer it's usually more like 105 degrees. Another change: the monsoon is over. There were clouds in the sky - there were clouds all weekend too - but unless we catch the edge of a hurricane, it probably won't rain again until January.

So if it's not cool, and the leaves don't change, and the sky is the same as it's been for weeks, how can I tell it's autumn? Well, even here, the days are getting shorter. I can try to time the sunset at the equinox. First, let's look up some relevant details on the NWS Tucson site:

Local news and information
Fall began today (September 22nd) at 8:44 am

Okay, so the day should be about 12 hours long, right? And the sun should set around 6 PM, give or take wiggle room for latitude and longitude.

Here goes:

No, not yet.

Sunset did not arrive while we were at the dog park. So I dropped off the dogs and headed over to Safeway:

Close enough.

The naked eye gave the impression that the sunset was at 6:17. Or maybe 6:18. I've had to fudge this photo a bit; my camera could not get the sky and the phone in focus in the same shot.

A couple of minutes later. Score!

Turns out I was only a couple of minutes off. From another site:

Rising and setting times for the Sun

			Length of day
Date	Sunrise	Sunset	This day	Difference
Sep 22, 2008	6:12 AM	6:20 PM	12h 07m 23s	− 1m 57s

Be sure to stop by Ellipsis and play along, especially if, unlike me, you actually have a seasonal change to photograph! Carly will post the results next Sunday night/Monday morning.

Karen

Fighting the Smears, One Email at a Time

Reposted from my Obama blog, which just got its first comment. Yay! With a few tweaks for the Outpost readership:

Fighting the Smears, One Email at a Time

By Karen Funk Blocher - Sep 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 am EDT

Does this happen to you?

I have this friend - well, more of an acquaintance, really, but at least a borderline friend. (Put it this way: she's got my last name wrong in her address book.) We met at work, before the company we both worked for collapsed in the mortgage crisis. She's the sort of person who likes to forward the Joke of the Day, chain letters involving prayers or pictures of flowers or kitties, virtual hugs - you know the drill.

And political claptrap.

Most of the rumors on the Fight the Smears page, I recognize from F.'s email forwards. She's also sent a few that haven't even hit Snopes, let alone the Smears page. One or two of the major smears she's sent on more than once, even after I sent her back the debunking, with the link to the relevant Snopes page. It's as if she accepts forwards completely uncritically and passes them on, but ignores what is said firsthand by someone she actually knows. Or maybe she accepts whatever fits the worldview that has somehow been inculcated in her, and ignores whatever doesn't.

For over a year I've been deleting most of F.'s forwards unread, the jokes and virtual hugs and cutesy graphics. I don't want to offend her and hurt her feelings by asking her to stop sending them. It's only the ones whose subject headers seem to indicate allegedly factual content that I even bother to open. If indeed an email contains some kind of wild claim(s), I then Snopes the darn thing and send back the result, along with a plea that she think about what she's reading and do at least minimal research before she forwards this junk. (I do this with any factually challenged email forward, no matter who sends it.)

I never, ever see a forwarded retraction. I almost never hear back at all. All I get is mailer daemons from a few addresses if I dare to "reply all."

And now I see that there are right-wing rumblings accusing Snopes of pro-Obama bias. Funnily enough, I've also heard at least one person bitterly accuse Snopes of right-wing bias.

A week or two ago, I took my Snopes-based reply tactic a step further. Rather than burden the other recipients of one of these junk emails (this one implied that Obama was the Antichrist), I sent my debunk and my plea for critical thinking to every person listed in the subject headers as having actually forwarded the thing, as far back as the headers went. I think there were literally six degrees of separation between me and the first sender listed. At least I would be reaching some of the people who were actually spreading the lies around, even if they didn't heed me. As usual, there was no reply. Except...about a week later, I got an email directly from (I think) the first person listed on the older forward, linking to an alleged (and of course totally bogus) Obama sex video. This is actually a virus, so presumably this Obama hater now has an infected computer, unless of course she acted on my email warning her of this. Schadenfreude, anyone? How about some Schadenfreude Pie?

Yesterday, F. sent me two new email forwards. One was a relatively sane but logically flawed attack on Obama as an employer. The other tried to blame all our economic woes on those darn immigrants.

"Fwd: FW: Obama practices gender pay inequity in his Senate Office" uses carefully documented but misleadingly applied statistics to "prove" that Senator Obama as an employer doesn't practice what he preaches on equal pay for equal work, using the fact that many of his top advisers are male to show gender inequity. This leaves out the "for equal work" part of the equation, folks. If a President McCain made more than a VP Palin (and let's make sure this never happens), would that be gender inequity? Heck, no. That would be a pay scale based on the job positions, not on who fills them.

Similarly, if you have, let's say, seven top-paid advisers and only three of them are women, that proves you're a sexist hypocrite, right? Um, actually, no. Nothing short of a strict quota system would ensure that at least 50% of employees at every pay level lack a Y chromosome, regardless of other qualifications. (Good luck getting three and a half women among the seven execs!) Otherwise, there will always be the possibility that the right person for a given executive job might actually be a man, in more than half of the cases. This is especially true in a relatively small staff, where there aren't hundreds or thousands of employees to make the sample statistically significant, and even out probability. McCain's laudable record on pay scales among his staff shows that he doesn't exclude women from consideration for top posts, and that's a good thing. But his numbers are no more statistically significant than Obama's, and do not prove superiority in his policy or practices toward equal pay for equal work.

The sane and reasonable alternative to strict quotas that ignore qualifications is to choose the best person for the job regardless of gender, and not adjust the salary based on whether the successful candidate is male or female. And if Mr. Jones and Ms. Smith are both hired on a given date to answer phones or screw in a light bulb, they should earn the same wage, and get raises based on identical criteria. That's what "equal pay for equal work" means. Give equally-qualified women and men the same shot at the same job for the same pay, whether as CEO or dogcatcher, and watch the glass ceiling shatter.

The other recent email tries to prove that "$ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR" is spent on illegal aliens in this country, directly or indirectly, based on benefits, education, law enforcement, remittances to other countries and ill-defined lost wages for Americans; and that these costs, not Iraq or Wall Street, outsourcing or the mortgage meltdown, are "what's bankrupting us." I passed that one on to Snopes, because they have nothing like it yet. My gut reaction is that most of the statistics are likely to be news reports featuring people who spout distorted or made-up numbers. Also, it's a logical fallacy to say that if A is a drain on the economy, the unrelated factors B and C must be irrelevant to it, particularly if you don't research the numbers for B and C.

This weekend, I decided to risk F.'s annoyance with a new tactic. I sent her an email forward of my own:

Hey F. --

Instead of just forwarding anti-Obama emails that try to scare people on the basis of ethnicity and logical fallacies, creative use of statistics or outright lies, none of which have anything to do with the issues, why not listen to what he actually has to say about the most important issues?

(Canned text follows)

This week, the economic troubles that have long been simmering on Main Street boiled over to Wall Street, putting our entire economy in danger.

Barack Obama laid out a plan to address this crisis and offered strong, practical solutions for American families.

The Obama team put together a short video that speaks to these problems and describes Barack's plan.

Watch the video now:

http://my.barackobama.com/economicplan

Thanks

***

Karen again: from now on, every time I receive an anti-Obama email from you, I will counter it with factual information on what he actually stands for. You deserve to know the truth!

Karen

And I just adapted this entry as a reply to the equal pay email, and sent it to the three people who forwarded that one.

Will F. read the emails? Will she watch the video? Will it inspire a change in attitude, or just get me kicked off her email forwarding list, which would be more relief than punishment? Stay tuned. Based on my experience to date, it's more than likely that nothing will change.

Karen

Link | Comments (2)

A Tale of Two City Parks

Pepper checks out a ruckus at Miko's Corner Playground.

Yes, I know I've already appropriated the Dickens title once in the past week. It was this or "Dog Park Afternoon." Would that have been better?

Palo Verde Park: it's less green than Reid Park,
but it's closer to me, and it has an off-leash area.

In researching last night's entry, I learned that there are a total of six off-leash facilities for dogs in various Tucson parks. This afternoon I looked up where the nearest one was - 1.8 miles from my house, according to Google Maps - and took the dogs over to check it out.

Mixed signals: keep 'em leashed in the off-leash area.

It was grim.

Much of Tucson is laid out in such a way that many neighborhoods are built in a one square mile grid, with a park or a school or both in the middle of it. Palo Verde Park is at the center of a neighborhood roughly one grid north of me. Being only a neighborhood park (albeit one of the larger ones in the area), it's not as ambitious as Reid Park. It's not quite as green, doesn't have as many trees, and there are no major attractions to rival what Reid Park has. Still, it's got a baseball diamond, tennis courts and so on - and an off-leash enclosure for dogs.

Now, I wasn't expecting anything fantastic at a park like that. But when I drove around the perimeter of it, I knew I'd found my destination when I reached what amounted to a sand pit. The off-leash dog area (and is that a misnomer? See above) is the one part of the park, aside from the tennis courts, that has no grass whatsoever.

Just in case, I left their leashes on.

I let the dogs in there anyway, just for a few minutes. Unable to parse the conflicting rules (or maybe I was just being too literal, or a smark-aleck), I left their leashes on. The ground was a pitted expanse of fine gravel, almost sand. (This actually makes sense; if you can't afford to irrigate enough for grass, it's better to have lifeless rock underfoot here than dirt, from which pets and humans can pick up Valley Fever spores.) There were two concrete picnic tables, with concrete benches. There was a two-tier water fountain like the ones at Miko's Corner. And of course there were tools and bins for cleaning up after dogs. That was all. No shade, no trees, nothing to interest a dog beyond a smell or two, nothing to interest a human except in a negative way.

Where is everybody?

You know what else wasn't there? Other dogs. The only signs of doggieness that were visible to this human were a couple water dishes by the water fountain, and a single pile of dog droppings illegally left behind by someone. There was a man with a dog just outside the gate, but they didn't come in until we left. I told him that Reid Park was much better, and worth the drive; he didn't seem interested in my opinion.

A fountain aerates one of the ponds at Reid Park.

From there I took the dogs over to the real dog park. We took the scenic route, west of Broadway past the golf course with its little hills and magnificent trees, and down Randolph Way past a neighborhood once featured on This Old House. I pulled into the Hi Corbett parking lot and took a few pictures, but with the dogs in the car I was too impatient to do a good job in composing them from the right distance and angle. Then I took the back way out, past the zoo, a wedding, this fountain and the Cancer Survivors' Plaza. I'll give you a proper tour some other night, after I do a more careful photo shoot with no dogs bouncing around in the car.

The edge of Reid Park as seen on Country Club Road.

Eventually we came out back on 22nd, and I turned right on Country Club and drove up to our usual entrance. It was a good hour later than we usually arrive...

Pepper at the aftermath of the ruckus.

...and the place was full of dogs. But one of the many nice things about a well-equipped, two acre dog park is that it can easily accomodate a hundred dogs and not be truly crowded.

Zoom!

I took many photos today, but most of them aren't very good. Carrying the camera in my pocket, I tend to knock the settings out of their default positions, and realize this only after snapping several pictures. Plus it was nearly sunset when we arrived. My camera just doesn't do low light conditions very well, especially if something is moving.

Sunset at Miko's Corner Playground.

Still, it was a new place for me to try for some sunset shots. None of them quite worked because of the contrast between the darkening grass and the bright sky, and the fact that I wanted dogs (who where mostly on the move) to be visible in the foregound. The shot above was the best of these attempts.

Are you bored with the dog park yet? If so, rejoice, because I think I'm done with the topic for now.

Karen

RRPC: It Isn't Easy Being Green - If You're a Tucson Park!

A green and pleasant place for Cayenne and Pepper!

Yes, it's Round Robin time again! This week we're indebted to Julie of "Julie's Web Journal" for the topic "It Isn't Easy Being Green!" Conveniently for me, it's a perfect excuse to post some of the photos I've been taking all week of one of Tucson's few green spaces.

More or less in the center of town in Tucson, Arizona is a complex containing two city parks, Randolph Park and Gene C. Reid Park. Except for a nice older neighborhood in the northwest quarter of the grid, the two parks take up the whole square mile from Broadway Blvd to 22nd Street, from Country Club Road to Alvernon Way.

At the Alvernon end of things is Randolph Park, which is basically a golf course and tennis courts. An annual charity tennis tournament used to be held there, and for years before they moved it I was able to swoop in on the weekend and interview actors there, or at least chat a little and get their autographs. Somewhere, I think, I still have a photo of William Windom playing tennis.

"Elvis" and Tuffy the Toro (disco version) on
Turn Back the Clock Night, Hi Corbett, circa 1997

The rest of the complex is given over to Reid Park. There are some parks and recreation buildings on Randolph Way, next to my beloved Hi Corbett Field, once and future home of the Tucson Toros! Yes, my favorite team is coming back with the old name and in the old ballpark, but this time as part of the Golden Baseball League. Maybe tomorrow I'll photograph the venue again for you, but just know it's the heart and soul of the complex for me.

Cayenne, Pepper and friend at Miko's Corner Playground

Also are Reid Park is Reid Park Zoo, a Cancer Survivors's Plaza with sculptures, a bandshell in which open air concerts are sometimes held (I once attended a John Kerry rally there, but the candidate was nearly an hour late and I had to return to work), picnic areas, lots of trees and grass and a duck pond or two, and Miko's Corner Playground. Miko's Corner is where the dogs and I have been going all week in the late afternoon.

Follow the leader!

Miko's Corner Playground is Tucson's primary off-leash dog park, located in the northwest corner (more or less) of Reid Park. It is named after a police dog, Miko, who was killed in the line of duty on 2006. Miko's Corner Playground just opened on December 1st, 2007, replacing a much more basic facility, a rather dusty fenced area a short distance away that was converted from a Little League field. That had to be closed because the grass just couldn't be kept going there due to inadequate irrigation and all the dogs coming through. It was turning into a dust bowl.

Are you done drinking, or just distracted?

For Miko's Corner, they built a beautiful walled and fenced 2-acre enclosure, with trees and grass and covered picnic tables and park benches, a dirt track around the perimeter, and two water fountains built to accommodate both dogs and humans. Several sets of rakes and hoes are set near big green trash cans, so people can clean up after their dogs (this is required).

Pretty green and idyllic, isn't it?

And it's great! There's a small dog enclosure and a large dog enclosure, side by side so the dogs can sniff each other through the fence without being harrassed. People come with their dogs several times a week, chat with each other a little, and pet each other's dogs. Frisbees or the equivalent are thrown for the dogs who like that sort of thing, and the place is littered with green tennis balls for dogs to chase. Dogs who don't chase balls, including Cayenne and Pepper, will often chase the dogs who are chasing the balls.

Look again! Even here, the grass gets rather patchy.

But there's a problem. This is Tucson, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. It's very hard to sustain a carpet of green grass around here. Only a few kinds of grass are hardy enough for the 100+ degree summers, and you have to water the entire area, thoroughly and frequently. Over at Tucson Electric Park, where the Sidewinders played and the Diamondbacks have spring training, the county has repeatedly gotten into trouble with the ball clubs for not adequately maintaining the grass in the infield and outfield, which both hurts the quality of play and can be rather painful for the ballplayers.

Paw prints in the dirt, extending into a once-grassy patch of ground.

Even using the right kind of grass (presumably), even with the expensive drip system, Miko's Corner has lots of places where the grass is patchy at best. Every day, a few hundred dogs are running over it, humans are following with the tennis balls and the pooper scoopers, the sun beats down and the grass is pounded into the dirt. The parks and rec people may be doing everything right, but you can't reseed every bare spot the moment it appears.

Still, it's, well, mostly green, isn't it?

Really, though, it's still a lovely, green space in the middle of the city. The trees and grass make the place a little cooler than city streets, the dogs are safe and having fun, and people have a place to exercise and enjoy their dogs. It's not perfect, but it's certainly good enough.

Besides, dogs like to lie in the dirt!

And dogs seem to appreciate the variety!

Now let's go see everyone else's photographic impressions of being green:

Linking List

Julie - Posted!
Julie's Web Journal
http://www.barrettmanor.com/julie/journal.aspx

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mavarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Wammy - Posted!
The Ellis Family Cincinnati
http://theellisfamilycincinnati.blogspot.com

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com

Martha - Posted!
Perception
http://journals.aol.com/lifes2odd/perception

Maryt
The Work off the Poet
http://workofthepoet.blogspot.com

Marie - Posted!
Photographs & Memories
http://journals.aol.com/mariebm56/PhotographsAnd Memories

And

Photographs & Memories Too - Posted!
http://photographsmemoriestoo.blogspot.com/2008/09/round-robin-challenge-its-not-easy.html

Maria **Welcome New Member**
Maria's Space
http://reesspace.blogspot.com

Valerie **Welcome New Member**
Soulfully Blond
http://soulfullyblonde.blogspot.com

Jennifer Robin - Posted!
Robin's Woods
http://robinswoods.blogspot.com

Vicki - Posted!
Maraca
http://mymaracas.blogspot.com

Erin **Welcome New Member** - Posted!
Life of a College Student
http://erinminusguidedogs.blogspot.com

Gina - Posted!
Gina's Space
http://journals.aol.com/rbrown6172/Ginasspace

Momma - Posted!
Sandcastle Momma
http://sandcastlemomma.blogspot.com

Em Dy - Posted!
Captured Beat
http://capturedbeat.blogspot.com

Ourhomeschool - Posted!
...Through the Eye of my Camera
http://ourhomeschoolinthewoods.blogspot.com

Kiva - Posted!
Eclectic Granny
http://eclecticgranny.blogspot.com

Steven - Posted!
(sometimes)blog
http://www.sometimesblog.com

Connie **Welcome New Member** - Posted!
Far Side Of Fifty
http://farsideoffifty.blogspot.com

And yes, you're welcome to join in too! See the Round Robin blog for details.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #234: It's a Good Thing

The new Weekend Assignment is so simple, the only trouble you're likely to have is narrowing down the possibilities. Ready? Here it is!

Weekend Assignment #234: Tell me one good thing about the area where you live (city, town, or whatever). It doesn't have to be the best thing, just something that's in the plus column for you.

Extra Credit: How could that good thing be even better?

Pepper enjoys a good run with the poodle in the small dog enclosure...

...and so does Cayenne! Definitely a good thing!

My initial thought when I came up with this topic this afternoon was, "One good thing in Tucson is the dog park" (Miko's Corner Playground, to be specific). That's where I was at the time, and yes, I count it as a very good thing. The dogs love it, and the people are mostly friendly, and love dogs as much as I do. But surely many places have a dog park, and I spent many years here never visiting the park at all. (It wasn't Miko's Corner until a few years ago, though.) Much as I like it, it's not a major part of Tucson's appeal.

How about this, then? One good thing about Tucson is that even in the city there are signs of nature. On any given day, in any part of town, one may see cactus, lizards, a ground squirrel or two, or some bird other than the usual city birds - a raven, a hawk or a vulture in addition to the doves and sparrows and such.

The gecko in my bathtub.

Last night, for example, I went to take a bath, and found this little feller in my bathtub. First I photographed the gecko, and then I caught him and set him free. Lizards turn up in our house about once a month, but geckos are a bit rarer.

Really, there was just one hawk and just one raven.

Then today as I was loading the dogs into the car at Reid Park, I noticed a smallish hawk wheeling around overhead. That was cool enough, but there was also a Chihuahuan Raven doing the same thing. They circled each other for a couple minutes as I tried to snap pictures of them. (The photo above is a composite of four different shots.) The hawk was probably an immature Red-Tailed Hawk, but it could have been an immature Ferruginous Hawk. The rule of thumb around here, even though we have many species of hawks here, is "90% of all hawks are Red-Tailed Hawks." Se we'll go with that. It was still neat to see.

Is that a nest I see?

The last photo in the series pretty much explains what those two birds were doing. The raven is at the top of the tree, and I see a couple of things in that tree that could be nests.

What could be better? As happens in many places, the wild patches in the city - "unimproved lots" and such - are gradually being filled in to slow down sprawl into the wild places at the edges of the metro Tucson area. I definitely see fewer hawks and vultures than I once did, partly because I live in the city now instead of on the outskirts, but mostly because there really are fewer of them around now than 22 years ago. And that makes me sad.

Your turn! What's one good thing you'd like to tell us about your town or city or little bit of nowhere? Write about it in your journal or blog with a link back here, and then visit the comments section below to leave a link back there. I'll be back in a week with a roundup of good things about the places we live.

Karen

Weekend Assignment Results: Online Gadgetry

Some of my current Firefox add-ons.

For Weekend Assignment #233: (Virtual) New Toys I asked whether there were any new online toys, gadgets, widgets or gizmos that you've found particularly useful or entertaining. Our response this week was a bit light, but highly informative:

Julie said...

Like Karen, I've tried Twitpic. Kinda cute. Possibly useful. I'm also using a new app called Twhirl, that lets me see my Twitter and FriendFeed feeds on my second display.

Florinda said...

I'm not really an "early adopter" when it comes to new tech stuff, but as far the online world is concerned, I'm willing to give something a whirl if it won't cost me anything and it doesn't require knowledge of coding, so I look for tip-offs on what's new out there. My source of information for new features in the tech products I use most is usually Lifehacker; I'm not sure how many truly essential blogs exist, but this is one of them, if you ask me. In addition, since most of my online life belongs to Google in one way or another, I've found the blog Google Operating System is an excellent independent resource for just about everything Google-y.

(Florinda has a bunch of great tips, actually - take a look!)

Mike said...

Okay, online things. Hmm, I do play around on Twitter, though I am mostly a follower. (That sounds so stalker-ish, I know). I have a Last.fm account now, though I got that for my Ipod Touch and it doesn't seem to be working after the last software update. I have a Flickr account that I will post pictures on occasionally. That is about all that is exciting. The rest of the stuff I have is pretty standard, Google Reader, and...um, e-mail.

Thanks, folks! I know I'll be checking some things out that you mentioned. Meanwhile, I'm tracking something called Widgetbox, which I was invited to by email but haven't tried yet. (It has you classify your blog in one of their "Channels" - e.g. Art, Music, Pets, Women - and so far there's nothing that fits a blog as diverse as this one.) And I've finally dumped FeedBlitz from my sidebar. It was a good idea at the time, but there are so many better alternatives now that everyone has long since unsubscribed from the Outpost on FeedBlitz anyway. Their front page makes it sound still vital and widely-used, even though it's not doing this particular blog any good. If you still find it useful, go for it.

The new Weekend Assignment will follow in an hour or two.

Karen