in which we discuss the primal urges of a non-crazy bald man

Rows of lettuces and spinaches with a smattering of green onions up there
at the top.

The winter garden's up and running.

At the pitiful pace it's setting, however, we'll have to pull it up to put in the bell peppers before anything's edible. It's all very, very small currently, but now that Miss Lila has kindly refrained from pawing through the seedlings for a couple weeks and I have remembered to water it a couple times, it's coming up beautifully.

There's lettuce and spinach and carrots and brussels sprouts and green onions and radishes and a mystery plant. (OooOOOOoooo...)  (And that was a scary ghost noise because there's no point in blog without sound effects as far as I'm concerned.)

Mystery plant.
It's beautiful and purple! Like Cinderella!

Infant spinach.

I don't mean to insinuate that my garden is haunted. I'm just saying.

Speaking of mystery plants and haunted gardens, my sister and her husband Graham recently came to visit us. They came just before New Year's Eve. A great time was had by all, and there were a lot of illicit fireworks on account of Graham and Raphael egging each other on. (Boys!)

Julie's an old hand at being unpleasantly shocked by the desert, but because G. didn't make the mistake of arriving in the humid part of August seven minutes after the return of our power following a three-hour outage caused by it being probably technically hotter than Hell, his reactions were positive compared to what I've witnessed in the past. I'm looking at you, Julie.  And I'm making some kind of weird face. You don't want to know what I'm doing.

The following is a brief run-down of the primal urges G. succumbed to while in the desert:


He had a shot of tequila at 11:30 in the morning. Or maybe it was 11:00. Or maybe it was whiskey. Don't judge him! He was in the desert! That's what we do! He's probably not doing it now.

He stuck soggy old dog toys onto the prickly pears while singing Johnny Cash songs presumably because he could. Doesn't everyone do this the instant they arrive in the desert and see a cactus? The desire to stick things onto the cactuses is certainly a primal one.

He made like a saguaro. Because that's another one of those primal urges: standing in front of a saguaro with your arms bent up. I dare you to stand in front of a saguaro and not do it. See? Can't be done. I win.

He made a lot of fire in the hand-me-down chiminea we just got from friends who left us for Dallas. (Dallas! We're better than Dallas, aren't we?!) G., it turns out, loves fire in a primal sort of way.

He had beers in the sun, angling his cute little bald head (bald on purpose - he'd probably want me to tell you. But he's not anything scary like a Nazi or a crazy bald person) up towards the blue desert sky to develop as much sunburn as possible. (Bald people!) (Also, beers + sunburn = way primal.)

And he marveled in general about how it was gorgeous and cloudless and seventy-five degrees the whole time they were here. (Jealousy is also a primal emotion.)

Of course, thirty-five seconds after they left, it clouded up and started to rain, and it's been mildly chilly ever since. I'm not complaining, however, because rainy weather means it's kind of like I've gone on a vacation myself. ("What is this?! This is not Tucson!") And it means I can accidentally forget that I have a winter garden without it being necessarily detrimental to the health of the plants.

(And garden-related laziness...? I don't think I have to tell you what that's all about.)