We finally got some decent rain yesterday when a monsoon emptied its thunderstorms in the area. We went all summer without a monsoon and finally, on the first day of autumn, we got a couple of inches of precipitation. In the aftermath today, we had some winds and a few clouds, some of which gathered to our west just as the sun was setting. I took the photo above from the courtyard with our front yard mesquite tree silhouetted against the colorful sky. Click on the image to enlarge.
The last sun ray of the afternoon shone through some of the natural desert vegetation on the west side of the house just before the sun went behind the hill over that way. There wasn’t a lot of pastel colors or any brilliant desert sunset, but a nice, mellow sepia-like photo portraying the brief event before fading to dark.
We had a great trip home from our August vacation to Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico. It was a lot of fun and we accomplished our objective of setting memorials on the graves of some of our ancestors. We came away with a good feeling.
Arizona monsoons have several redeeming qualities:
Verna’s camera caught this array of clouds and crepuscular solar rays a couple of days ago. Click on the image to enlarge.
After a recent rainfall, several hummingbirds can be seen browsing the Red Bird of Paradise Flowers in the courtyard here. I managed to capture this photo of one of the tiny birds as it was sipping nectar from one of the brightly colored flowers on the Pride of Barbados shrub nearest the Plum Tree by the gate.
Canon T6i camera settings: 1/1600 second, F5.6, ISO 640, Focal Length 135mm.
Click on the image to enlarge.
One of our transplanted Cherry Red (Trichocereus Grandiflorus) cacti has three new flowers today. These are the second to bloom on our cherry reds, the first having opened in late April.
These three flowers opened today on the “mother” cactus from which we separated several “pups” last October. A couple of the pups are also showing signs of flowers coming soon. Click on the image to enlarge.
Elsewhere in the xeriscape are flowers almost ready to open: two queen of the night flowers and a couple of Argentine giant buds will likely be open soon. Pictures to come for those as well.
It has been quite a long time since we first acquired the vernabob.com domain, so it’s not one of those suddenly we’re thirteen sort of days. In fact, we probably have had that domain name for nearly twenty years, but only started the WordPress© blog thirteen years ago today. I have the archives from the old websites on some media somewhere, but don’t really intend to revive any of them anytime soon, if ever.
Now that we’re retired and living in our lovely desert casita, we don’t blog as much as in the past. Social media and smart phone messaging keep us in touch with family and friends and let them know what we’re up to and can mutually know what they’re doing as well.
We intend to keep posting here for posterity (it is an online diary, after all) when the events or whims of the day seem like something we want to share or put in the blog for storage. Some photos Verna or I take are too good to not share in a couple of places, for example. We also plan to travel some and that activity ought to be recorded.
So we will be here sporadically until next year when we will post about the fourteenth blogaversary.
