Round Robin: Those Who Are Gone - Sort Of

When I posted the topic for this week's Round Robin Challenge: Gone, I wasn't thinking of the prehistoric culture known as the Hohokam. I was thinking more along the lines of 1950s architecture and signage for Tucson businesses that aren't there any more. Something like this:

(Click once on any photo to see a bigger version.)

But last weekend, in my continuing quest to find fun things to do with my Dad, I decided to drive him to the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, about an hour northwest of Tucson, not quite on the way to Phoenix. I hadn't been there since 1986, when John and I first came to Arizona. (Well, actually, John lived in Arizona as a kid. But I'd never been here before.) One of the many memorable places I saw in the very memorable year was the adobe remains of a large abandoned Hohokam settlement, named in Spanish for the "Big House" - Casa Grande - that still stands above the half-buried walls of the rest of the ancient city.

These are truly the remnants of something important that is gone - long gone.

The people who built Casa Grande are a bit of a mystery. We call them the Hohokam, which more or less means "all used up" in the O'odham language. Nowadays the preferred term for the Hohokam and other ancient peoples of the area, the Anasazi and the Mogollon, is ancient Sonoran Desert people. We don't know what the Hohokam called themselves. Their civilization lasted over 1400 years, with irrigation of the desert, crafts and trading - but without the wheel or the written word. They are thought to be the ancestors of the Tohono O'odham nation of Southern Arizona and several other tribes - and evidence of their own ancestors goes back thousands of years before Christ. Rather romantically, they used to be known as

"Those Who Are Gone." But obviously, with their descendants living around Tucson, the Gila River of Central Arizona and elsewhere, they aren't truly "gone." They've just moved! And wouldn't you, in a persistent drought so bad that even your clever irrigation couldn't sustain the crops anymore?

Now, hundreds of years of abandonment in the desert tend to be fatal to the integrity of adobe walls. You've seen my pictures of the Ft. Lowell ruins, and they're less than 150 years old!

Add to that the tourists who stopped by for a few hundred years after Padre Eusebio Kino discovered the Casa Grande ruins in 1694, and, as often as not, carved their names in its walls.

Clearly, something needed to be done, and something was done. In 1890, the U.S. Government began to shore up and repair the ancient Big House, and  and "in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison set aside one square mile of Arizona Territory surrounding the Casa Grande Ruins as the first prehistoric and cultural reserve established in the United States," according to the National Monument's web site.

 In 1932, that modern-looking steel roof was constructed over the ancient house, ruining the aesthetic but helping to preserve what was underneath it. According to Wikipedia, there's a pair of owls living in the roof now.

The ruins extend far beyond the Big House itself, though. In a wide area around it are foundations of other buildings - entire compounds, including ball courts! Some of these are still visible. Others have corn planted over them. They're not gone - just buried.

Now let's see what else is gone!

Linking List
as of Midnight MST,
Saturday, August 24th, 2013

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Jama
Sweet memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis

http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

And it's not too late to show us what's gone from where YOU are!

Karen

Round Robin: Listen to This Picture

For this week's Round Robin Photo Challenge: Listen to This!, I asked to see pictures of persons, places or things that have a memorable and distinctive sound. I didn't manage to get anything spectacular along these lines, but let's see what I did come up with!

 flap-flap-flap-flap-flap!

 rrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrr!

chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga Woo! Woo!

Ffft! Ffft! Fft! Fft! Fft! Fft! Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! Boom!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Tromp Tromp Tromp Tromp Thud.

Not a big list of participants this week - unless you care to join us!

Linking List
as of Saturday, August 10th, 2013
12:30 AM MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

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

Karen

Into the Clouds

As mentioned in the Round Robin entry I just posted below, last weekend I took Dad for a drive and ended up on Mount Lemmon, as usual. Only this wasn't the usual views in the usual places. It's monsoon time in the Old Pueblo, Tucson's rainy season. Last Saturday I had the perfect opportunity to get a close-up look at the clouds that cover parts of Mount Lemmon on wet July afternoons.

Near Seven Cataracts Vista, or maybe Thimble Peak Vista.

It's one thing to sit and watch the clouds roll by overhead. It's quite another to watch them roll by right in front of you. Yes, the fog/cloud was really like that.

Near Middle Bear the cloud was actually obscuring the road a little bit.

Karen

Round Robin: Gladly Beyond

somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

--from Somewhere I Have Never Traveled by E. E. Cummings

For this week's Round Robin Photo Challenge: Someplace I've Never Been, I asked to see photos of someplace you've never been, whether it's a new restaurant half a block away or a whole new continent. (That's not exactly what I said, but you get the drift.) My inspiration is this: I've been going on long drives with my Dad, and exploring museums with him, sometimes on the same day. The idea is to try to keep his mind engaged with new experiences, and mine too. So where did I find to go last weekend that I'd never been before?

Well, here. I know it doesn't look like much; it's just an obscure little restaurant called Seoul Kitchen in a strip mall called Crossroads Festival, which sounds more festive than the shopping center deserves. I was looking for someplace different to take Dad, preferably something that would also work for RRPC. I'd seen the name of this Korean restaurant while driving by. Seoul Kitchen! Cute name! But when I initially chose it over Smashburger (what an exciting name for a burger joint!), parked and went up to the door with Dad and his walker, I almost chickened out on going in.  My tastes in food are not very adventurous, and I got pretty nervous when the posted menu items had names like Spicy Squid, Bi Bim Bap and Mandu Guk. Furthermore, I was not at all sure my dad could handle such choices; he barely copes with a menu in a familiar American chain restaurant. But he surprised me, pointing at menu items that had relatively familiar names and ingredients. "I think it's all right," he said, or words to that effect. Thus he very nicely shamed me into trying the place after all.

Having taken the plunge, I looked the menu over and actually went with an entree with a delightfully exotic name: Bi Bim Bap. This was a rice bowl with a little shredded beef, nicely crisp mung bean sprouts and other veggies, and a fried egg on top. I was a little disappointed there wasn't more meat, but that was my fault for choosing Bi Bim Bap over some of the meatier items. Dad had chicken with Yakisoba noodles, which is to say that he ate the chicken and left most of the noodles. That's exactly what he does with all pasta dishes, so I wasn't a bit surprised.

The neat thing about the meal was the extras. We started with miso soup, which was minimalist but nicely low carb. Then with the meal we had individual dishes of marinated veggies as seen above. I liked the cucumbers, and Dad actually liked the kimchi, which turned out to be fermented cabbage. That was a little too spicy for me, but Dad ate most of it. The service was excellent and the prices were right, so overall it was a successful adventure in going "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond."

After lunch we went to the Ft. Lowell Museum at Ft. Lowell Park. I'd certainly been to the park before and photographed the ruins somewhat extensively, but I'd never been inside the actual museum. It turned out to be a total bust in terms of interesting Dad in its people or contents, but I enjoyed photographing a docent who wore period clothing and demonstrated how to load a period rifle.

Another docent was also connected with the Pima Air and Space Museum, which Dad and I had visited the week before. The part of it devoted to World War II is currently closed for expansion and renovation, but that was the area of this docent's particular interest. He was very interested in my Dad's history as a B-17 navigator and Stalag Luft 1 POW, which, by the way, my dad no longer remembers at all. I gave the docent Dad's particulars and my contact info. He promised to do some research and get in touch.

After that we went for a drive, as the monsoon got ready to start monsooning. I went looking for a back way to Mount Lemmon, and found myself on a section of Snyder Road that is definitely "Not a Through Street." Kind of pretty, though!

Eventually we made it by all-too familiar route to Catalina Highway. I took one more detour, onto a road less traveled, by me at least. But I'm not quite certain that I've never traveled it.

After that I couldn't resist driving up Mount Lemmon, a place I go all the time. But it doesn't usually look like it did that day! I brought back lots of pictures from that, some of them quite striking, I hope. But they definitely don't fit the "somewhere I've never been" criterion, so I'll post some of those in a separate entry.

Meanwhile, let's see what new places our other Robins photographed!

Linking List
as of Saturday, July 27th, 2013, 12:52 AM MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

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

Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com


Karen

Round Robin: Only the Car Gets Wet

When I posted the topic for this week's Round Robin Challenge: Get Wet!, I was frankly hoping that sometime during these past two weeks there would be an awesome monsoon storm here in Tucson that I could catch people and/or dogs getting wet in. But most of the rain so far this season has happened at night, often when I'm asleep. Usually there are lots of little storms in the late afternoon, but the few daytime ones I've seen recently, aside from the first one (which I forgot to photograph), have been, well, less than awesome. So it's on to Plan B, right?

The main reason I've known about the nighttime storms is that I come out in the morning and there are spots all over the car. Clearly the car has been getting wet - just enough to get dirtier instead of cleaner. I've had the car washed twice in two weeks, but look at the driver's side window as of this evening. All the dust in the air gets on the car, and the rain turns the dust into dried-on dirt drops.

Okay, so I have no great monsoon pictures yet for this year. But on the Fourth of July I started the day with a walk with the dogs down to the nearest part of the Boneyard, where the retired aircraft are. I carried a collapsible mini bowl for the dogs' water, and filled it at a water fountain under a ramada (a sort of canopy, in this case over a couple of concrete picnic tables). Kito drank two bowls of water almost by himself, and then got the concrete slab under the ramada more than a little wet by knocking over the bowl.

Cute, but not impressive. Clearly I'm going to have to go to the archives to get something decent here!

Back in April I took my Dad on a tram ride up Sabino Canyon. It was already hot enough that people were cooling off by getting wet in Sabino Creek, the closest thing we have to a beach around here.

Now let's see what other Robins found that was getting wet!

Linking List
as of Saturday, July 13th, Midnight MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Holly (Canceled due to family illness)
Easy Living the Hard Way
http://easylivingthehardway.blogspot.com/

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

And it's not too late to jump in on this topic yourself! (What do you mean, this Challenge is all wet?) ;)

Karen

Round Robin: This Is Not Here

For this week's Round Robin Challenge: Not Real, I asked to see "something that isn't real - an optical illusion, a fictional character on stage, fake pearls, a toy sailboat, a tofu hamburger...really, anything that looks like something that it isn't." For my example photo on the RRPC blog post, I edited a photo of a dragon figurine, inserting a background that was part Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, part Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. I plan to do something similar here.

At the same time, though, I have stuck in my head the title of an art exhibit that was at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in October, 1971, when 14 years old. The artist behind the controversial exhibit was Yoko Ono (guest artist John Lennon!) and the name of it was This Is Not Here. I've always regretted that I didn't take the bus downtown to see that.

Without further ado, here are some things that aren't here. Or rather, they are, but they aren't where they appear to be, and they aren't what they kind-of appear to be!

The four cars of this train through the Molino Basin picnic area are from my Dad's old N scale set-up in Wilmington, which I snagged when we were clearing out his place before moving him here. They are actually on our mantle in the den.

This diesel train was running around a track at the Gadsden Pacific Division Toy Train Operating Museum last weekend. The background is Verde Canyon, where we rode on a real train that does nowhere in particular, back on my 50th birthday trip around Arizona in March 2007. I've tried to suggest that it's emerging from behind some vegetation.

This didn't work, but I had to attempt it. When I was in college the first time, back in 1978 or so, I attempted to make a student film that double-exposed images of lead Dungeons and Dragons figurines superimposed over my friends dressed in fantasy clothing against a real world background. I still can't quite manage the effect! This is a counter top, a real face (part of one, anyway) and a real sky.

This wooden decoy duck was decorated by my Dad about 20 years ago. The little yellow guy with the hat, Desperado Duck, starred in a series of photos I posted years ago, following him downstream as he really floated along in Reid Park. I added them both to a shot of geese in one of the Reid Park duck ponds.

Turnout is light this time. What do you think? Dare you try to show us something that isn't real? Post it and I'll add your name below!

Karen

Linking List 
as of Saturday, June 29th, 2013
1:54 AM MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Round Robin: They Make My Heart Sing

For this week's Round Robin Challenge: Wild Thing, I asked to see any sort of wild thing - human, creature, hair, whatever. But for my own entry, it was always going to be some sort of bird or critter, or both!

My Dad at the top of the road, Madera Canyon AZ

So a week ago, on my weekly outing with my Dad for "lunch and adventures" (that's what I always write on his whiteboard for Saturdays), I drove him all the way down to Madera Canyon, southeast of Tucson. John and I visited the place together several times in the 1980s, and I'd gone down there on my own more than a few times during that same era. It's a great place for hummingbirds, owls, nighthawks, and even a rare and colorful tropical bird called a Trogan. In years past I've also seen rock squirrels, deer, rattlesnakes and a skunk (and not the usual kind of skunk, either). Last fall I took the dogs along a nature trail and saw two deer along the way. So I had high hopes of being able to show Dad something interesting, and get shots for the RRPC at the same time. If nothing else, he would enjoy reading the road signs on the long drive down.

This was not my first try at showing Dad the local wildlife. I've driven him to the top of Mount Lemmon, only to get rear-ended on the way down by a motorcyclist without a helmet, who then had to be evacuated by helicopter. I also took  Dad on a tram ride up Sabino Canyon about a month ago. I love driving out into the mountains or into the desert, and seeing all the wild things I can, whether they are birds or cacti or critters, or even just the wilderness of rocks and dry creek beds.

A week before the Madera trip I took Dad to Saguaro National Park East. It turned out I could get him a lifetime senior pass for next to nothing that was good for all the National Parks and recreation areas. It even gets me and the car in too when I'm with him. Good deal!

While I was in the visitor center, the rangers recommended that I bring my Dad inside to have a look out their back window:

These are javalinas, also known as collared peccaries. They were waiting out the heat of our first official 100 degree day (my car had recorded higher than that for at least a week) in the shade of the building. Look closer:

There's a half-grown one in the foreground, and lying up against the adult, a little javalina "piglet!"

None of which meant anything to Dad. But he liked being out with me, and reading the road signs. So I tried again with Madera Canyon.

The easiest place to look for wildlife in Madera Canyon is outside the Santa Rita Lodge and gift shop. They have (mostly) shaded benches and chairs spaced in front of a variety of bird feeders, trees and a running water "bird bath" feature. If you look at the large version of the photo above, you can just about make out a Mexican Jay on the horizontal beam above the bench. But what are those big, black things on the ground?

Why, it's a flock of wild turkeys! Ten of them! And they were huge!

And Dad was bored, because there were hardly any signs to read. Ah, well.

I did better two weeks ago with an outing to the Gaslight Theatre to see Arizona Smith and the Relic of Doom. The wildly silly show (no pictures allowed during performances) seemed to make a bit more of an impression on Dad than any wild animal. It was fun, but it's not something we can do every week.

Tomorrow I think we'll go back to the Pima Air and Space Museum. Or maybe the Titan Missile Museum. Or...?

Karen

Now let's see what other Wild Things the Robins have captured with their cameras!

Linking List
as of Saturday, 6/15/13, 7:30 PM MST

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

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Kara - Posted!
That's the Way the Cornbread Crumbles
http://thatsthewaythecornbreadcrumbles.blogspot.com