Today, our elder dog, Cabela, is approximately twelve years old. I say that since when we adopted her from the Humane Society here in town, she was estimated to be about two years old but her actual birth date was unknown. That was ten years ago this month at the time we were having our Arizona house built.

Cabela is probably a pure bred miniature pinscher “blue” but we have no history on her other than she was found near the rodeo grounds up in Constellation Park here in Wickenburg. We figure she was cropped and bobbed by her original owners who managed to let her run off somehow. I pity their loss. At the same time, we feel fortunate to have this little dog despite her high-strung personality and a tendency to bark at most everything. She truly must think she’s ten feet tall and bullet proof.

At twelve, Cabela shows few signs of growing old. She is quite active, can still jump and run at full speed and when on a leash can drag “The Daddy” along to where she wants to go. Despite being headstrong, she can be a nice companion here at home and still sleeps on the bed with us, sometime stealing the covers. She is quite the character and we love her.

Image - Cactus Wren perched on Saguaro Flower Buds. Click to enlarge. For a full-sized image of the wren without the titles, click here.

As we said last year, we’re back to post about our 14th anniversary of vernabob.com/blog. During the past year, we have posted about various topics, intermittently of course. Some of the topics concerned, diet, flowers, wildlife, ancestors, wanderlust, a couple or three 3D pictures and so forth.

Since most of the last six months has been weird with COVID-19 and other disturbances, we haven’t been able to get travelling like we might have wanted to do. We hope that those things will soon be resolved so we might be able to get in a few miles on the road. We have a notion to head out to Texas and Oklahoma to visit whatever we find there.

So, again, we will be puttering along with the blogging until the fifteenth blogiversary.

Happy Independence Day from the little flag-waving town of Wickenburg, AZ!

Our local American Legion Post religiously plants flags all over town on every holiday as seen in the background image above. That image was taken (credit Verna) along the main part of Wickenburg Way (a.k.a. US 60) in the old historical part of town. I added the greeting with a graphics utility I use from time to time.

To celebrate the holiday, Verna prepared Star Spangled Chili for dinner yesterday. The dish included a medium-hot chili base with lean ground beef, sliced Hebrew National kosher franks and chopped beef tenderloin chunks garnished with avocado, sour cream and an olive. It was pretty awesome.

The beef tenderloin chunks were leftover meat from a whole tenderloin I butchered myself. Once you separate the “chain” and the “wing” from the main tenderloin, I set those aside to be chopped into the aforementioned chunks.

I cut the rest of the main tenderloin into steaks, a couple of small roasts (Chateaubriand) and tenderloin medallions or small steaks. There is a bit of fat and silver skin that goes to waste, but most of the meat gets used in some form or another. Considering that butcher shop tenderloin steaks (Filet Mignon) are upwards of $20 per pound, butchering our own saves us a considerable amount of cash.

There are a couple of pretty good videos on You Tube (here and here) that guide you through the process of butchering a whole beef tenderloin.

In the meantime, despite all the COVID-19 and BLM/ANTIFA chaos, we’re having a nice holiday weekend here in our little piece of the good old USA and hope that everyone else will be able to enjoy it like we are doing. Happy Birthday America - may she keep on going strong!

June is another colorful month here in our Arizona abode in which we have many late spring flowers opening. Upper left above is the Arizona State Flower of the Saguaro Cactus. Our big saguaro had many of these since May and there are a few late comers yet to open. Upper right is the showy and colorful Red Bird of Paradise flower. This is a close up of one of many, many currently open in the courtyard. Lower Left is our reliable old Bishop’s Cap cactus with too many open flowers to count, which is a regular thing for this little barrel cactus, even in the other months of the year. Finally, at lower right is the little rescued Fish Hook Cactus in a pot out back with two open flowers. There will be several more to come as June continues. Click on any of the images to enlarge.

Even though the Fish Hook and Saguaro Cactus Flowers will disappear soon, the Red Birds will continue to adorn our courtyard throughout the entire Summer and into the Second Spring months of Fall. The Bishop’s Cap will produce flowers on and off when it feels like doing so.

Update: 16 June - Some of our Cherry Red Cactus Flowers opened today:

It’s been quite a while since I posted an anaglyph photo. Verna took an image pair of the riverbed way back in November of 2015 as we crossed the bridge over the Hassayampa River. I combined the images into the 3D anaglyph above. Click on the image to enlarge.

The river is dry above ground most of the year and looks as it does in this image or in its 2D counterpart (at the link in case you don’t have red/cyan glasses). During monsoon season or at other very heavy rainfall periods, this river gets quite full and flows with vigor downstream. This view is looking toward the north and upstream.

I have been babying a gardenia bush that we bought a couple of years ago at one of the garden shops locally. This year, I moved it from the courtyard where it gets a lot of abusive sun to a nook in the back patio where it gets some sun, but not too much. Pictured above is one of several (6 maybe) open flowers on the bush today.

This is the first year since we bought the bush that it has produced many flowers and buds. They might all open soon and I’m hoping that second spring will bring more on October or so. Click on the image to enlarge.

The blog header image we were using here has become obsolete because the appearance of our house has changed quite a bit since eight years ago when the original header was created. I went out today and got the image above with a 17mm wide-angle lens on my Canon SL1. I added the graphic titles and cropped the image as shown in the new header at the top of the page.

The old header, shown below for reference, contained landscape items no longer seen and much less mature xeriscape items. We removed several creosote trees and added a retaining wall by the lower RV drive and in front of the house by the road.

I also updated the banner on our Food Blog.