On Tuesday we met the neighbor across the street, who came over as we were doing a little yard work. I barely heard her call out, because Budd was using the leaf blower. The yard is terraced up off the street about 3 or 4 feet I think, and E was standing in the middle below us. Now that I think of it, it was probably inhospitable of me not to go and open the gate and invite her up. E's house was built by her now-deceased husband, and from the outside looks to be as nice as the one we were fortunate to rent. There is some beautiful and colorful tile work in the Spanish-style outside entry that I admire each day when I open my curtains. She also has a grapefruit tree still laden with fruit in the front yard, and another of the curiously bare fig trees. She graciously invited us to enjoy some of the fruit from the grapefruit tree.
Getting out into the yard made me realize that I had missed a few of the cactus specimens in my list. There is also what I think of as a barrel cactus, but don't know whether that is correct, and a prickly pear that's in sad shape. The chain-fruit or 'jumping' cholla has a crop of babies around it, too. This is an interesting plant. It looks fuzzy from a distance, but up close you can see that the 'fuzz' is actually a dense arrangement of spines, each with a tiny bend at the point. It's called jumping cholla because the bends, or hooks, create an opportunity for the plant to grab anything that comes within a few inches, and it readily sheds the small segments those spines are attached to. Something I read in the park visitor's center leads me to believe this is a method of propagation the plant developed because its fruit isn't attractive to birds and insects.
The planned power outage on Tuesday came right on the dot at nine, or maybe 30 seconds earlier, because we were still trying to get through our DVR recording of the American Idol broadcast, skipping judges' comments and commercials as the program went right up to nine anyway. We didn't think to turn everything off ahead of time, so both UPS backups started screaming, and we had to fumble for the LED lantern before we could see to get them quieted. Then we each pulled out our new booklights and tried to read, but my eyes fatigued quickly, so I went to bed. Only to be violently awakened at 4:10 a.m. by my bedside lamp. I'm usually a light sleeper, and I wake up easily, but this must have caught me in a deep sleep cycle, because it was brutal.
Don't know why, but I've been having vertigo attacks ever since. Every time I turned over before finally getting up at 6 a.m. felt like I was falling out of bed, and I've even had a few episodes while walking around the house. Budd says it's probably from trying to read with the booklight in an otherwise inky blackness. Or it could be because I had to go back to my old glasses when the newer ones (different prescription) fell apart in my hands the previous morning--I just thought of that. Either way, I'm a dizzy gal.
I had a bit of interesting conversation with my landlady about the Tohono O'odham tribe of the neighboring reservation. Apparently they were called Papago until about twenty years ago when, according to C, they changed their name. Probably back to what they always called themselves before the white man came along, would be my guess. Hope I can find more information, especially on whether they are linguistically related to the Athabascan group of southwestern tribes.
We've received a piece of mail, so I can now go to the library and have my two-book limit raised. Maybe I can find some books about the desert plants and the Indians.
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