Intersection Logs

So we turned 90 yesterday, for the first time this year. The campus saguaros are thickly crowned with buds and have been opening a flower or two; the air is still sweet and heavy with pollen, but that shouldn't last too much longer. I hope. The air conditioning at work hasn't quite caught up yet; it was 83F in the office this afternoon.

Sunday, on the other hand, was all wind and blowing dust, about the worst I've ever seen it on I10 in the afternoon, and a multi-vehicle accident that closed the southbound side and dumped three lanes of freeway traffic onto a badly-maintained, single-lane frontage road with predictable and interminable results. Someone died, and presumably several others had a much worse afternoon than we did, but taking four hours to get home from Glendale is not fun.

The Sun is being unexpected, as usual. Flavor of the month seems to be middling flares from little active regions that barely even qualify as sunspots; today's flare-productive region managed a C-class before it even got a number, followed by two more Cs and a (just-barely) M. It's also ridiculously far north -- 41 degrees -- but it's going to be gone over the limb in another day or two. (Unfortunately, that positioning is going to make it difficult to do much with its subsurface flows.) Granted, I didn't really start getting up close and personal with sunspots until after the last solar maximum, so most of my intuition is attuned to big declining-phase regions, but colleagues with much more experience seem to concur that this is all a bit odd.

I have my copy of C.J. Cherryh's latest, Deceiver, and started reading it on the bus home. I didn't realize until after it shipped that Amazon is playing games again, this time by deep-discounting the hardcovers of their latest adversary, Penguin, so it was quite a bit less than I expected. Fortunately, Ms. Cherryh has a donation button on her website ...

Finals are looming, and the students around campus seem to have their studies -- or at least their grades -- on their minds more than usual. I seem to have grown out of picking up the free-floating exam anxiety, though.

I went for a nice walk in the sunshine this lunchtime. I saw a cardinal in passing, a flash of scarlet disappearing into the bushes, and a rose or two in bloom, and a family of European sparrows came for the crumbs from my sandwich, darting in to snatch a bit and then jumping back to what they thought was a safe distance.

I spent my lunchtime stroll chasing a roadrunner in the middle of campus. This is not something I get to do every day; it's pretty unusual for these to be seen this far into Tucson, and prior to the encounter outside my office a couple of weeks ago I think the only one I'd seen was up at the Kitt Peak Observatory. But there it was, perfectly at home and attracting a fair bit of attention from the passers-by.

It had a rather jerky, freeze-and-dash way of moving, and several times it was perfectly posed only to move before I could get the camera lined up. Eventually it pounced off into the shrubbery, possibly on the track of one of the little lizards or maybe just looking for some privacy.

It broke 100 degrees in Tucson today, for the first time this year. Classes are over, and the campus was eerily quiet. The landscapers whipped out the wilted pansies around the building where I work, and replaced them with zinnias, which are somewhat more summer-proof. On my way home, I was chatting with a security guard who had stopped to admire the new flowers, and mentioned that I grew up in England. So, as one does, she asked me if I'd ever seen the Queen.

As it happens, I have. Twice. After all, it's a fairly small country, and being seen is in a sense her job, so the odds against it aren't that high.

The first time was on purpose, ( and it happened on this wise. )

The second time, almost twenty years later, was more or less by accident, ( and this was the manner of it. )

For some unfathomable reason, there was a TFD fire truck exercising its ladder outside my office from mid-afternoon until well into the early evening. Maybe something to do with the softball stadium across the street?

The student union bookstore has posters, of course, and today I noticed that they had a couple of the lovely Kinuko Craft designs -- the covers for A Song for the Basilisk and The Book of Atrix Wolfe, I think. I was almost tempted, and would have been more so if it hadn't been windy and raining outside. Afterwards, though, it occurred to me that I really don't decorate my home with pictures of people, apart from small family photos (and the 8x10 of Richard Basehart as Admiral Nelson on the top of the bookcase near the computer), and never have; it's landscapes and flowers all the way, and a few animals, just like the pictures in my parents' home and just like my own photos. (I was a bit boggled when I first encountered American SFF cover art and realized the images were supposed to depict actual characters from the books, too; I'm much more comfortable with the more abstract or landscape-based UK designs.)

Am I weird? Or does anyone else think there's something rather uncomfortable about the idea of a stranger's face looking at you from your bedroom or living room wall every day?

The campus bookstore is spacious, and it carries many things besides books: university apparel, of course, stationery and art supplies, dorm-room bits and pieces and expensive purses/totes/backpacks, DVDs and mobile phones and a few mostly seasonal toys and games. They also have ... strange things. Expensive strange things, mostly; foot-tall parrots sculptured in semi-precious stones, bronze eagles, colorful Oaxacan wood carvings. I bought one of the eagles myself in a moment of weakness when I'd just had a large pay raise, but I don't know who, if anyone, buys most of these things.

The last year or so, they've been carrying the collectible "painted ponies", both in tabletop and tree-ornament size. Those have a certain kitschy poetry to them; the life-sized versions that did a tour of the local malls a few years back were actually quite impressive. The cows and wiener dogs are similar in concept -- figurines in colorful thematic costume/decorations -- but jokier in execution; three-dimensional cartoons that raise a transient smile, and I'm not sure what to make of the wolves, though I think those are supposed to be more in the poetic line. Now they've been joined by small, rather fat, penguins, definitely cartoonish. I suppose someone must want to own a shelf-full of such things, but why? To my jaundiced eye, they're a funny-once, if that, and thereafter a dust-trap. I like to get a story with my discretionary spending, not just a one-liner, or if not that, something that will occupy my hands and spare brain-circuits while I make up my own stories.

Not that anyone's listening on a Friday night, but I need to start using my words again sometime.

The students are back. They're young, slender, tanned, loud, brightly dressed; the girls wear sundresses or sleeveless tops and tiny shorts, the boys mostly basketball gear; they travel in gaggles and packs.

The barrel cacti -- particularly the orange-flowered ones -- are going crazy with bloom, and the beavertail on the chaplaincy corner has put out its second flush of hot-pink flowers.

It's ridiculously hot and humid; I'd been successfully avoiding being here at this time of year for so long that I'd almost forgotten. Another few weeks, and the monsoon will segue into bits-of-leftover-hurricane and then into the last phase of summer, the second hot dry season that swings smoothly (but never quite as fast as one would like it to) into the crystalline light and cooler temperatures of autumn.

The temperature on campus reached 96F today, with single-digit humidity. That's a little too hot for my comfort, though still noticeably less awful than 100, 105 or 110, all of which seem to be recognizable points on my personal scale. The saguaros are busily blooming, the night-flowering cacti are budding, the Mexican bird of paradise bushes are a splash of flame-color, and the oleanders are weighted down with slightly scorched blossom in red and pink and white. The university year is just about over.

On the bright side, we're still getting night-time temperatures in the low 60's. I just wish my neighbors would realize this and not run their a/c all night. The a/c in these apartments is not exactly whisper-quiet, and I dislike white noise enough to avoid running my own at night as much as possible, only to be kept awake anyway by the intermittent grinding sounds from next door or downstairs.

Wandering around campus this lunchtime, I was accosted by someone wanting to know if I was registered to vote in Pima County (no, and as I'm not a citizen it would be highly illegal if I was), and someone else, apparently an overseas student, who wanted me to explain one of the words in his book for him.

The Mexican restaurant in the Union has added sauteed fresh veggies to its repertoire of sides, which previously consisted of beans and rice.


And it rained this evening, though not with any great enthusiasm.

Now to see if I can achieve wordcount this evening ....