Category Archives: The Basics

Arizona was, and still is, the Wild West.  This week the Gunfight at the OK Corral celebrates its 126th anniversary in Tombstone which is less than thirty miles from our house. 

It is not uncommon to see people walking around packing heat.  When we first moved here, I saw a woman in the grocery store talking to a friend near the produce section.  Her toddler was secure in his little seat and her cart was loaded with foodstuff.  A holstered gun rested on her hip. 

Later on, I saw a man in front of the post office talking to a friend.  He too had a holster with a gun and was just nonchalantly chit-chatting away. 

I asked our real-estate agent if it was legal to carry a gun out in public.  She said yes and I burst out laughing.  Annoyed, she asked what was so funny.  I told her that I grew up around the greater LA area and lived in downtown Chicago for ten years.  There, I could imagine having a gun but here…what are you going to shoot at?  The Javelina?

She was not amused.

People in Arizona totally exercise their god given right to “protect themselves” by owning and carrying a gun.  Ray and I have had people do a double take when we tell them that we live four miles from the border without firearms in the house.  They think we’re nuts.

Ray’s brother Donald–a gun-toting Californian who recently relocated to Tucson and loves the relaxed gun laws–had the same feeling about our lack of firepower so he did the only thing an older brother could do; he gave Ray a shotgun for his birthday. 

Donald, along with our nephew Tyler, came down from Tucson this morning to give us instructions on how to use Ray’s new shotgun.  Donald has had guns all his life and is definitely not some yahoo when it comes to firearms.  Tyler is a West Point graduate and, well, I would trust his judgement when it comes to this kind of stuff.

After being shown all of the general dynamics of the shotgun, the four of us went outside to try it.  I got to shoot first. 

I am of the left-handed persuasion but I golf, bat and, well, shoot a shotgun with my right hand.  I loaded the gun, aimed and pulled the trigger. 

Now, I’ve had friends say the first time shooting a gun is a memorable experience–almost like sex or something.  When I shot the gun, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I was surprised that it wasn’t difficult or scary.  It was sort of anticlimactic from a sexual standpoint.  I didn’t have the urge for a cigarette afterwards.  It wasn’t much of anything really other than being loud.  Very loud, and my ears–which are already messed up from tinnitus–rang even harder. 

OK, it was kinda fun. He he he…

I blasted the little target man with buckshot.  That’ll teach him to listen next time I say, “Git off mah property.”

Ray went next.  He was a bit more accurate in his aim than I was but at that point it didn’t matter.  Little target man was full of holes and wasn’t about to go anywhere.

Tyler, the smart one, protected his ears.

So now we have a shotgun.  I was ambivalent about having a gun but it was the kind of thing where we felt like we should at least take it to a range and shoot a few times before we formed an opinion of guns and the people who carry them.  As far as being inside the house, you don’t even have to keep it loaded.  <<In my shotgun ownerspeak>> “All you really gotta do is stand by the front door and cock the mother fucker.  Whoever’s outside trying to break in will hear it, get the idea rightquick and leave.”

That sound is quite universal.  I know if I heard it, I’d think twice about breaking into a house. 

If someone would have told me years ago that I would someday move to a remote spot in Arizona, grow a big old stache, get a motorcycle and a shotgun, I would have laughed in their face.

Guess they got the last laugh…

I am the Database/Web Specialist (webmaster) for the county I live in.  I don’t go into too much detail about our web site because we’re (translation: I’m) about to embark on a ginormous web redesign project and I’m not ready for the “before” site to be seen.  I’m sure it’s not too hard to figure out what the county site is since I frequently mention a certain town that I live close to (and no, it’s not Tucson).

Duh.

Anyway…our IT department had an off-site meeting yesterday at a place called Sunglow Ranch .  It was so nice to get outside.  Most of the time, actually all of the time, I am trapped in a room with two programmers baking under awful fluorescent lights while the air conditioner has me donning a sweater in July.  There are windows in our room but the other programmers close the blinds. 

I will never understand that.

I absolutely hate it when people who sit near a window shut the blinds.  It’s awful and depressing.  I totally loathe working in fluorescent lighting hell but right now there’s nothing I can do about it other than use the law of attraction and keep thinking about my private window office that lies ahead for me in the future.  The very near future.  (Yeah, yeah; I read The Secret.  The idea behind the book is no secret though.)

Breakout session in progress.

Clowning around while I present our ideas. 
NOTE: IT geeks are not good spellers.

Sitting by the teeny tiny lake after lunch. 

It was a productive meeting and we got a lot done.  After work, I had a different meeting for the Mule Mountain Relay For Life to be held here next year.  I’m on the Committee and the, you guessed it, online chairperson.  I’m getting our site ready to be launched next month.

Once I got my two meetings out of the way, I dashed home to hang out with Homer and his friend Forrest who came down from Tucson.  We sat around, talked and ate.  I heart talking and eating.  Homer brought a Homer-made pumpkin pie.  It was really good.  We didn’t eat the whole thing so he left the rest of it here which is sort of evil and lovely at the same time.

I was very, very tired by the time I got to bed.  Fortunately, Ray and I have every other Friday off so I was totally able to sleep in this morning.  I slept for ten hours. 

Now I’m off to have a three-day weekend.  It’s supposed to be 85 today!  Tomorrow, we’re off to Tucson to see Avenue Q!

Ray got a juicer today.  The first thing he did when we got home was make carrot juice.

Hamilton Beach – can’t go wrong!

The blade thingy is really sharp.

Washed and chopped carrots.

The juicer was surprisingly quiet.

Yum! No really! Yummmm.

Ray also made apple juice.  Afterwards, there was this interesting leftover carrot and apple pulp.  Knowing Ray, he’ll find good use for it. 

For dinner, he whipped up some black beans and brown rice with avocado, green onions and tomatoes.  I scarfed it down while we watched a couple of episodes of Weeds.

I’d like to say something about how my life is so full and rich but that might come across sarcastically.  It’s not.  Doesn’t take much to make me happy. 

I’m going to bed now…

Oh yeah, I think I have resolved my photo dilemma.  I found a plug-in that re-samples the images on my blog so they don’t look quite so jaggy.  It’s all good.

I’m having a photo dilemma.  Whenever I post a photo directly on my blog, it can either be a full sized image or a teeny tiny thumbnail.  To fix this, I have to go in an resize the photo making it look distorted.  I really hate that.

I have seen people upload photos from Flickr accounts to their blog.  I admit it looks infinitely better but then it’s just another step in the blogging process and you have to wait longer for the Flickr page to load when you click on the photo. 

I’m a purist when it comes to photo quality.  I can’t stand pixelated lossy compression.  That being said,  I am a realist when it comes to added layers of complexity in the blogging process.  I don’t care much for layers.  I guess I’m going to post mediocre quality images…for now.

Carrie and I had to go to a training thing in Phoenix for the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life held here in Bisbee.  Carrie drove her convertible BMW with the top down.  Afterwards, I picked dirt out of my hair.

The Mule Mountain Relay For Life will have a website this year.  I am the Online Chairperson.  I figured since I have lost so many friends and family members to cancer I could get involved with the ACS Relays as a way to help my community. 

Carrie dropped me off in Tucson the next day.  Ray picked me up so we could visit Lori and Beth who had just relocated from Chicago.  While I was driving home on I-10 late that night, the alternator on our car died.  The good news is that it was right where we get off the freeway.   The bad news is that we were still about 60 miles from home and had to spend the night in a Motel 6.  The really bad news is that it cost $500 to fix.  The really-really bad news is that we have to make the trip out to Benson after work to pick up the car.

Today has been such a Monday.  Aside from having an all-day headache and puncturing my thumb with a mechanical pencil, I have been working with some software at work that totally sucks.  I just want to crawl into a hole and hibernate. 

At least I can look on the bright side; Friday is my flex day. 

This weekend I was faced with a tragedy.  My beloved Olympus E-20N digital SLR camera died.  It had been in a coma since the shutter locked up while I was photographing my cousin’s mural unveiling in Prescott.  I had traded in my entire Nikon F10 film camera outfit and supplemented extra cash to buy that camera.  One minute I was sitting there shooting photos and the next, everything went black–literally.  Now it’s gone and I’m afraid I don’t have the resources to replace it.  No joke, I am beside myself with grief.

It would have been five next month.  I was planning on taking it to my friend Colleen’s wedding in Chicago. 

After trying everything I could think of to make it work again, Ray took it to the Olympus repair shop in LA while I was visiting my mother.  They wanted over 220 bucks to fix it.  It doesn’t seem to make sense to pay that much money when they’re selling one still in the box for $300 on eBay.  The Olympus technician implied that it could have been caused by impact or shoving the memory card in too hard.  How could she say such a cold, cruel thing? 

I know exactly what it was–the death chip.

Have you ever noticed that electronic equipment doesn’t last very long these days?  I have gone through countless computers, electric clippers, coffee makers and cordless phones over recent years.  My Dell flat-screen monitor fried just after two years of use.  Fried as in the screen went black and the little light went out–its pupils fixed and dilated.

I suspect a consumer conspiracy is all around us.  We are so conditioned to get the latest and greatest iPhone that the manufacturers of our electronic gadgets secretly program them with a limited life span.  Logan’s Run meets Panasonic.  God forbid I should ever have an artificial heart.

Ray has his uncle’s old General Electric alarm clock.  On the bottom there is a date.  1949.  It still works perfectly.  Our sound system in the living room is powered by a 1977 JVC receiver.  That thing has been to hell and back–but it still works like a charm.  While today’s technology is amazing, the craftsmanship is for shit. 

Goodbye my Olympus E-20N.  Your demise is bittersweet.  I will miss you but deep down inside I am angry because you were a poorly manufactured camera that I paid way too much money for.  You will live on in vain through your accessories that I can no longer use.