Days and Nights

Not a lot of exciting stuff happening today. The weather cooled off a little. It is more comfortable for Brenda for sure, but it portends a trend that I fear might be hard to stop. For a kid from north of the Medicine Line coooling trends to bring up that ancestral fear of WINTER, so there is that. Let's just hope whomever is controlling our climate conspiracies these days doesn't get carried away with this cooling phase to quickly. All things in moderation. I continued my morning visit with the desert today, so got a few shots that I will share with you on that ramble.

I head out early, usually just before sunrise and it is all about the way the light plays on the landscape that makes the place so beautiful.

Well, that and seeing new places, or the same old places from a new perspective.

I have taken to just carrying my phone with me on my wanderings, getting old I guess, and the big old lens are heavy and cumbersome, and the new phones take pretty decent pictures, especially for this format, where size doesn't really matter. But curiousity drove me to crack out my Canon and tripod last evening and shoot a little bit of the Milky Way. Now the Canon still does a better job for full size images but that little iPhone does a pretty decent job even of night shooting for sharing here on the interwebs.

The image above was shot with my iPhone 15, while the one below was with my Canon R5, both with similar post processing although not identical.

Although you can't really see it here the Canon image survives enlarging it better than the iPhone, but how many of us blow up our shots and hang them anymore anyway. Oh by the way, those little specks of light you see, our sun is just another one of them, not even a significant one, and we are just standing on a little rock traveling around that tiny speck. to lend a little perspective to the whole thing.

Hot, Hot, Hot

And that is the reason most folks come to the desert. But if you have CRPS, as Brenda does, it is not always a good thing. CRPS reacts to cold, and to hot, both causing flares so finding a happy medium is sometimes a challenge. And hot weather like it is here today is nowhere near that zone of comfort. Now we can move around the site and find cooler places with the breeze, but sometimes even that doesn't work that well. Our rig can deal with cold a lot better than it deals with heat. Our solar system runs the furnace quite handily but Air Conditioning is another matter entirely, not to mention the fact that another trigger is noise, and anyone who uses RV Air Conditioners knows that if you want it to cool things off, it is going to be roaring away up on the roof.

I have missed my time in the swimming pool for the past couple of months, September is a maintenance month for the Spray Lakes pool I usually swim in and that last until just days before we pulled out on our southward migration this year. And laziness has taken care of the rest of the days since, but today I harkened back to a time a dozen or so years ago when we first came to this spot. Back in those times walking was my exercise of choice so I thought I would go for a little walkabout this morning. The desert is a great place to walk, you can basically go where you want, and change course whenever you like. I wandered about the desert for an hour or so and covered about 3 miles, so we will see how my old knees hold up over time. Some shots from my walkabout.

And today was the final day of the Canadian Finals Rodeo so that occupied most of my afternoon, I found a shady spot in the cool to enjoy a little outdoor rodeo time.

Another Desert Day or 2

Pretty relaxing out here in the desert. Other than our morning walks there is not much exciting going on to report on. Monday morning Ron and Edy moved on down Yuma way as they have appointments to keep and it appears that they may have inadvertently taken the sun with them. Shortly after their departure it clouded over and if we were home I would have said we were going to get some rain. But other than a few far off sounds of thunder there was no moisture in the air.

I made a journey into Quartzsite and picked up a couple of power bars so that we can have our electrical load under a little more control. The Discovery has a 2000 watt invertor so with the extra batteries that Woody’s installed for us we are able to use most of our appliances just as if we were hooked to shore power in a park. The sun has been largely absent the last couple of days but we have a good sized generator onboard so if need be we can supplement the sun with that. Not so easy on the carbon emissions though so we’ll restrict that to an “as required” basis.
Yesterday after our walk we headed into Quartzsite with Bill and Margaret for breakfast, it was excellent. After that we wandered around some of the vendors in town and although there is a lot of intriguing stuff, I didn’t find anything that I couldn’t live without. Brenda however did a little to help out the economic well being of the town at the Beall’s store.

The afternoon was just spent relaxing and enjoying the warm weather and some good books. Even under cloud the desert is a beautiful spot and there is much wildlife activity about, mostly quail, doves and hummingbirds, but I believe a coyote visits us after dark, as our scraps disappear religiously every night.

Last night we got a few rain showers and I got up in the night to roll the awnings in as there was a pretty gusty wind blowing and rattling them. This morning we are heading over to Blythe to pick up some shirts I left at the laundry there and from the ingredients on the counter it appears that Brenda’s famous meatball soup is on the menu for later today.