Cutting the Wedding Cake
This year was the year of Tanzanite and Verna got several small, but pretty, jewelry items made from it. Next year, we will be having our quadranscentennial anniversary, and we look ahead to celebrating the Silver Jubilee.
About a half hour before sunset this evening, this beautiful prismatic rainbow appeared in the ice crystals of high clouds west of our house. There were a lot of clouds over California and Arizona due to Hurricane Kay, currently making its way up the Baja California Coast.
The weather forecast for us over the next couple of days will be cloudy with possible thundershowers. In California, there are forecasts for flash flooding and high winds that may cross over into Arizona. We’re ready for it, however, having recently gone through our annual monsoon season.
I ran across this 3D image in an archive somewhere a few days ago (frankly, I don’t remember which archive) that I took several years ago during the time that Verna and I were in Congress, AZ, shopping for our courtyard gate. This gatepost is in front of a business on the main road between Wickenburg and Yarnell, along AZ HWY 89. The wagon wheel and old wagon next to it seemed like a good target for a 3D photo. Click on the image to enlarge.
If you don’t have a pair of 3D glasses available, you can see the 2D Image here. Of course, you are missing the stereoscopic effect without the glasses.
Because our courtyard gate latch is a bit wonky, we prefer that packages be delivered to the rear of the house by the patio. Now, most carriers allow you to specify delivery instructions, but some of the drivers don’t get the message and try to open the courtyard gate which is a bit difficult. A lot of the time, they just dump the package out front outside of the courtyard. We saw this as a minor security risk, so today we installed the sign in a location that can be seen from the driveway and courtyard walkway.
Image: Verna recording the sign installation for posterity. Click to enlarge.
The sign is installed on the electrical box where the house’s circuit breakers are located. The box is made of steel, so I needed a good drill bit for drilling four holes to accommodate #6 sheet metal screws. I also needed a center punch to locate the holes. We gave away most of my old tool collection to family when we left our old home, so I had to buy the tools again. Although this is not my first time to do “handyman” chores around the Arizona house, this was the first time that I had to get special tools.
So I went to the hardware store and bought some #6 sheet metal screws, a couple of 7/64 drill bits (they did not have a number 36 drill unless I bought a set) and a center punch to indent the locations for the drills. I previously got the sign from Amazon, so we were now ready to do the installation. It all went as planned and you can see the resulting installation in the image above.
That was our morning courtyard chore today, casting the poisonous seed pods of our Red Bird of Paradise shrubs. When we say “casting,” we mean into a trash receptacle. We remove the pods, as seen growing on the raceme flower stalk in the image to the right (click to enlarge), and dispose of them. If we don’t remove the pods, they could fall to the ground in the courtyard and, while we generally don’t allow the dogs access to the courtyard, one of them might take a notion to eating a pod that has fallen, God forbid.
The Red Bird Flowers themselves, on the other hand, continue to be as beautiful as ever this year. The showy flowers dazzle our senses every spring through late fall. See for yourself in the image below.
Our neighbor to the west had an address placard on her fencepost that, unfortunately, got blown away by one of our famous Arizona Monsoon Thundershowers. She is a schoolteacher and a single woman living in her home. Her brother, who usually does chores around the residence is off to their homeland in Minnesota for the summer. So, we decided to take on the task of restoring her address sign to a readable state again.
We had a can of white paint that I was going to use to touch up the rusted spots on our mailbox stand, so I used a little of it to paint the sign. Bob got some numerals at the hardware store and we placed them on the sign after it dried. In the image above, I am driving in the last of the little tacks that hold the numbers to the wooden sign. This installation should survive many storms in years to come. Click on the image to enlarge.
