Movin' on down the road

Today was one of those day's you're glad to be alive; the sun was shining, the air was clear and cool, and everything was just perfect.

Since it's barely November the campground hasn't started to fill with the snowbirds, so we obtained a river front site. The picture here is of the expensive homes across the river, including one owned by a retired race car driver whose name escapes me at the moment. I imagine I appreciate my view of nice, expensive homes more than they like their view of our campground! Actually, we rarely see people in these homes at all when we're normally here in January, February or March, so perhaps these are just summer or weekend homes.

We got set up quickly, but the DW Internet satellite wouldn't go through its test so we ran into town for a late lunch at the China Garden and when we returned we were online. It seems the system tested itself while we were gone and passed. We tweaked it anyway to obtain the best possible signal and that was done. While we were in town we hit Beall's Outlet for some new clothes as we've both lost weight and I knew they would still have summer items as what we needed were new shorts. They were having a special discount sale in addition to the Monday "senior" discount so we walked out with a big bag of clothes at a very ridiculous price-yay!

The next couple of days will be spent trying to figure out my newest toy that arrived in today's mail, a Nokia 6102 flip phone. There seem to be all sorts of bells and whistles, but since you have to wait 8 hours after charging the battery to turn it on so that it can activate itself (and that might take an additional 2 hours) I won't be able to play with it until tomorrow morning at the earliest. I love toys, don't you?

The hummingbird feeder is up to see what we can attract. I did see one flying around an oleander bush as we were leaving for town so perhaps we'll end up with a hummer or two feeding here. I'll try to limit the number of hummer pictures this time, unless I get a really striking one.

By the way, here's our new location for the next two weeks.

Time to move on

We're not going far this morning so I'll have the opportunity to do my water aerobics after our morning walk and breakfast. We'll be traveling a whole 50 miles up the road today, which certainly helps save fuel. The local Flying J's diesel was down to $2.71 yesterday so we filled our one empty tank (we have two; a 34 gallon tank and a 50 gallon tank)and thought we were paying a "good" price since our last fill up in Lake Havasu City was at $2.97 a gallon. In February we paid $1.99 a gallon at this same Flying J; sometimes keeping good records just ticks you off.

Some friends will be arriving at the same campground on the 3rd (gosh it's hard to believe it's going to be November already) and I'm looking forward to seeing them. Which gives me an idea of a couple of lists to post later...

Safe travels to all.

Yet another quiz

It appears that traveling hasn't influenced my "dialect". Although we have been accused of sounding Southern by those living in the West. Which is better than being accused of sounding like we're from Cleveland. Shudder.

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

20% Yankee

15% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Fun football picks

As the men in my family will tell you, I am not into football (as they roll their eyes exclaiming "DUH!"). However, my youngest son has been listing his football picks for the week in his blog and even though I don't catch half (okay, 99%) of the references I do enjoy the humor. Check it out at The Token Liberal

A new taste treat

Knowing that we won't be back in this area for a long time, we stopped at the small Mexican market down the street from the campground to pick up a few pounds of chorizo to freeze. We discovered chorizo at the Pine Restaurant in Williams, AZ a couple of years ago and having tried mass-produced and store-made versions we were very pleased to have found this great source of beef and pork varieties. While there we also tried some Mexican white cheese and ceviche de shrimp. A quick explanation is that it's diced tomatoes, onions, peppers, hot peppers and shrimp "cooked" in lemon juice, which makes the diced shrimp very tender. And it's spicy, which is just what we like. Basically, it's a shrimp salsa that's muy bueno!

Now, to figure out how I want to use that queso blanco...

A update on Tim and Rosie

Some of you might remember my blog entry of August 14th about running into Tim and Rosie outside of Bend, Oregon this summer. I decided to check to see where they are currently and discovered the most recent update is an e-mail from someone on the 24th who spotted them in Porterville, CA. I'm hoping we'll cross paths again if they cut across Arizona en route to Texas as this time I'd like to have the opportunity to offer Tim a hot meal and some carrots and apples for Rosie. Wouldn't Tim have some great stories to tell?

We try to go geocaching

Denny actually volunteered to take me geocaching yesterday, so I grabbed the GPSr and my backpack full of goodies, pen and ID labels as well as the camera and off we went. The good news is the road was gravel and not sand, the bad news is that it was washboard rough which really rattles our teeth due to the stiff suspension of the truck. Denny wasn't real pleased with that, but sooner or later it's going to sink in for him that these caches are placed for the pleasure of folks with jeeps and ATVs and 4X4s, not folks driving around in monster trucks. It just means we have to hike in a lot farther on foot than most folks.

So we discovered the first cache of four I had plotted, but as I was pulling out the box to see what kind of goodies were inside I heard a beep from the GPSr which made me grimace; low battery. And guess who walked out the door without any spares? Duh. So the rest of the afternoon was aborted due to stupidity.

Oh well, next week is a different town and new possibilities for geocaching. But the roads to the caches won't get any smoother, guaranteed. And Denny will growl and grumble. 'Tis the nature of the beast, don'cha know.

The JibJab guys are at it again. I love it.

Check out the "Big Box" clip.

Some early morning silliness

Which Dr. Seuss character are you?
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I'm definitely no computer geek

I fought all day yesterday with the new template here on blogger, trying to make my profile picture fit in the side panel to no avail. I e-mailed the template designer for assistance but it seems that the folks at http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/ used her templates without her authorization so she does not provide any tech support for those who download the templates from that site. So I was scanning the comment section of that site to check to see if anyone else had used a similar template when I came across Dean from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan,Canada. And before you think that's some kind of joke, look at the picture of Denny; he is standing underneath Mac the Moose, the town mascot. Yep, we have indeed visited the town of Moose Jaw, which is near Regina. Hmm, material for another blog entry!

Getting back to the point of this entry, I e-mailed Dean and he made a couple of suggestions about resizing which ended up working after I finally found photo-editing software on my computer that had the capability to resize by pixels. Six different photo programs on the computer and only one does that. Sigh. So the template is set for now, although I guess I better look for a different one since this is now officially a bootleg copy of a template per its designer. That'll teach me to try to be creative. Double sigh. Is it time for some cheese with that whine?

The Blythe Intaglios

Intaglio n. (in TAL yo) a design or figure carved or engraved below the surface.

Our first knowledge of the existence of the Blythe Intaglios came from a list of area attractions at our campground in Ehrenberg, Arizona. We have been to see the pictographs at Seminole Canyon near Del Rio, Texas and the petroglyphs near Laughlin, Nevada, but we had never heard of intaglios. Geologist also refer to them as geoglyphs and they are of three known forms; one, where the design is created by aligning stones together to form a shape; two, where the intaglio is created by scraping rock and soil away to expose lighter soil underneath and three: by tramping into the earth thereby forming an indented impression or form.

The Blythe Intaglios were created by the scraping away of rock and gravel to expose the sandy soil. They were discovered in 1931 by a local pilot, George Palmer, who was flying over the area. The area is now managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has put up a few small interpretive signs and has fenced the area around the intaglios. According to a couple of web sites, there are three sites and six figures, but in the main area there are two sites and four figures. The third site must be farther back on the trail but we didn't attempt it in our large truck as the main drive in is a very rough dirt and crushed stone road that has become rutted from wash outs.

There are two human figures and two animal figures at the two sites. The first site you arrive at has a human figure and a figure of a mountain lion (some non-Native Americans believe it to be a horse) and a serpent. The human figure is assumed to be a male as there is a phallus on the figure although that is difficult to see from ground level. This figure is 102 feet tall and the arm span is 64.9 feet wide. The arms on this figure have elbows and one leg is slightly bent. Original aerial photographs show a large circular path enclosing the upper half of the body but much of that has been destroyed before the figures were enclosed in a chain link fence.

The mountain lion/horse and serpent are very close to each other, perhaps signifying a battle or some religious meaning. Little is actually known about the age or meaning of these intaglios and local Native American oral history gives only a hint or possible meaning to their creation. The interpretive displays make no mention of what tribes existed locally nor any historical information about Native Americans in the area.

The next site is a single large figure is believed to be a figure of the Creator, according to local Native American oral history. The figure has its arms outstretched and original photographs showed fingers and toes and several lines extending from the head believed to be hair, but over time these were scuffed away. The arm span on the Creator is 91.8 feet wide and the length of the figure is 176 feet. The size of this intaglio in relation to the size of the first human figure is the reason it is assumed to be a figure depicting the “Creator”.

While there's not a lot of information about the site on site there are a couple of web sites that have aerial photographs that show the intaglios much better. I have to admit that we brought along a stepladder to take the photos show below as we had visited the site last year and wanted to try to get better shots than what we could get from ground level. I guess the BLM people figure that if they build viewing platforms someone would use it to climb into the enclosed areas.

A male figure intaglio. This one has an obvious phallus and is encircled by a large path around the upper half of the body.  

The mountain lion intaglio. Some people believe this to be the figure of a horse, which would mean it was created after the Spanish explorers brought horses to America. 

The Serpent intaglio at Blythe, a coiled figure 23 feet long and eight feet wide. 

This is an Anna's hummingbird. He is very difficult to photograph as he is a hit-and-run feeder. His color is much more brilliant in the sunshine but he prefers the shady side of the feeder. 

I have been trying to snap this little Anna's hummer in the sunlight for five days but he prefers the shadier side of the feeder. A bit of sunshine turns his entire head and neck bright magenta. 

A female Anna's Hummingbird. She didn't get to feed much as the male would chase her off whenever he saw her around. 

Notice anything different?

I've never been real happy with the original template of this blog, but since I'm self-educated in computer "stuff" I went with what was available. Thanks to Christina (too funny) I discovered another page of templates and decided to attempt the changeover. This was not easy for someone who is basically clueless, folks! The main information switched over seamlessly, but I had to deal with getting the ads to line up in the side column and that was an hour-long struggle of making a change, previewing the page, deleting this code, switching that code (and these choices are all guesses), previewing the page, over and over. Finally got it. Whew.

I think it was worth it, wadda ya think?

An early morning treat

Yesterday for some reason Denny was up with me at 5:30 and happened to be looking out the living room window shortly after sunrise when he noticed what he thought was a duck floating downstream. He asked me to get the binoculars and see what I thought it was, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the floating creature was not a duck but a river otter! How cool is that?? We spotted him again near the shallows of a side channel of the river during our morning walk and watched as he attempted to catch his breakfast. We were absolutely thrilled to see the otter in a natural habitat instead of penned in a zoo in a concrete pond.

The older I get the more I despise the idea of animals being penned up in small enclosures for the enjoyment of man. And don't even get me started on training killer whales, dolphins and seals to do tricks and shows when these creatures are used to swimming hundreds of miles in their normal habitat. How cruel to enslave other living creatures for our entertainment. Okay, off the soapbox.

Sunset over the Colorado River in Ehrenberg, AZ