Kids On The Beach

I needed my Kid Fix. It has been two and a half months since I kissed those little boys good-bye last January and made my way to Arizona, and I was getting lonely for them. So Bill bought me a plane ticket the day after Easter and I flew home to see them. Turns out, they sorta needed a Grandma Fix too, so it worked out fine. They were off from school the week after Easter and the weather was lovely, high Sixties - low Seventies, not as warm as the desert maybe, but perfectly Playable Weather. So we played. Big Time!

Pam's grand kids were visiting too and there were neighbors out of school as well, so most days, it wasn't just Grandma and her two grandsons on the beach, but a whole slew of kids eager to tramp the beach and get sand between the toes or waves splashing up on pant legs. I emptied more sand out of Sage's shoes last week! He must have carried in a shoe box full or more from the walks on the beach.

Plus, there were puppies. Kerry has a new baby Aussie cattle dog, a red one, born last December she's named Maggie. For three months old, she proved quite resilient in keeping up with the kids on their romps through the sand dunes. Haley and Garrett's nine month old chocolate Lab, Maco, is fat and sassy and must weigh close to eighty pounds by now. Chuy will find his old 'chew buddy' to be more than he can handle when he returns this summer. (Yes, Chuy had to stay in the desert with Bill. The boys were delighted to see me but said the visit would have been better with Chuy there too.)

Charlie and Sage got to have a Sleep Over with me too. So that first night, Daddy had to bring us a box of Macaroni and Cheese to fix for dinner. My pantry was bare. What is the allure of mac and cheese with the grammer school crowd? When Charlie proudly crowed to Pam's grand kids that HE was having mac and cheese for dinner, the two of them groaned and said, "Oh you're so lucky! I wish we could have mac and cheese for dinner!" Boppy and I could probably survive very nicely all year long without ever eating that stuff, but Charlie and Sage would gladly swill it every night. I did make them eat salad too. Just because I'm Grandma. (And they ate it, because I'm Grandma.) But the next night, when I put a salad on the table with their pizza, Sage said, "Grandma! You served salad last night!" "Yes, Sage! And I'm serving it again tonight!" (Now, if that had been mac and cheese.... hmmm...)

And the next morning, of course, we had to have pancakes. They just adore pancakes. And then Thursday morning when they came tearing in at nine AM, we made cinnamon toast. Cinnamon toast is one of those childhood treats that just taste better a) if you're between five and nine years old or b) you eat it with a child between five and nine years old. So we did. And it was.

We made cupcakes. My friend, DeLores sent the boys a jar of fish shaped sprinkles. There were dolphin, sea turtles, sharks and tropical fish, in all array of colors. The sharks were even gray colored. So one afternoon we made and frosted cupcakes, and then they parceled out the sprinkles. It's still funny to me, but when it comes to eating the treats they've artfully decorated, the boys inevitably choose the ones with no sprinkles or the very least sprinkles. Yes, they love to use them, they just don't like to eat them. So Grandma gets the ones with the most sprinkles!

A few memorable funnies: Walking through the sand dunes, Sage finds a treasure. "What's this, Grandma?" "It's a bone, Sage." I peered at it closer. "It looks like a back bone to me." He turned the vertebrae over in this hand. "And this other side is the front bone?" he asked.

Charlie was waiting for an answer from his dad who had to confirm it with Mommy. "I don't know the answer yet, Mackey. Because Daddy hasn't got to conversate with Mommy yet." (That conversatin' is heavy stuff!)

Okay, so now I'm home and replete with photos and pictures the kids had to draw for Chuy before I left. Charlie made a video using Sage as his Star Actor too. It was a good trip, though a short one. But at least the kids know Mackey still loves them. And it will only be two more months before I'll be back to the beach for the summer with them.

A Pretty Corpse

Once again, I'm going to blog on the proposed Resolution Copper Mine that wants to get started in Superior. Every time I write about it, I get read by folks in Virginia and Washington DC and sometimes in faraway countries around the world. I'm not doing this to gain readership. I'm doing it because something doesn't smell right. And it seems there's very few people that really know what is going on.

This week, some friends back in California sent me an issue of the 'High Country News'. The February 18 issue. It had a six page article on the perplexing problem of whether or not Superior, Arizona should accept the proposed mine Resolution Copper has for it. The editor and writer spoke to economists and townsfolk and miners and Indians and the copper company itself. And their conclusions? The copper mine probably isn't the best thing that could happen to Superior. Because of the short intensity of the high tech mining that is done these days, the area won't be able to sustain the Boom it needs and within a very short time, will be back to hard scrabble times. The Big Money the copper mine is promising Arizona and the US in return for the Land Swap (still before the Senate) won't be enough to sustain the local economy and the few jobs that will be available for the locals during the short term, aren't going to be there for long. So any big growth for Superior won't be sustainable.

Then the news gets worse: IF the Land Swap bill goes forward, Senator McCain made some environmental provisions for the British owned Resolution Copper (partly owned by Rio Tinto, a global mining company). The part I had heard about that gave me chills was that NOTHING would befall the copper company if worse came to worse and the Apache Leap mountain imploded under the block caving methods they mean to do at more than seven thousand feet deep under the mountain. That part just leaves me numb! But now, there's more. Under the Land Swap bill, McCain would exempt Resolution Copper from following the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). There would be no public oversight on copper smeltering or how much groundwater and Central Arizona Project water would be used. The company has said they would pump the billions of gallons from the old Magma Mine mineshaft down to the valley in Pinal County where it will be purified from other water, but again, with no NEPA public oversight, nobody will know how much good fresh water is being diverted.

I don't understand why the citizens of the US are expected to conduct their business in an orderly manner and follow all the environmental rules and regulations set down by the Feds and the State, but that some big global company can get away with not following the same rules. NO FAIR!

I think, and again, this is my opinion, but I think this Land Swap bill needs to be folded up and put away in somebody's desk. Resolution Copper will just fade away and go down to Indonesia or Mongolia to reap (rape?) what it can from those countries coffers of copper. Superior doesn't need it. It has had its mining. It still has its looks. It's going to be getting better from the good folks who are willing to work to change it for the better. But it's not going to be from another "Copper Boom".

I guess we need to tell Senator McCain and the other senators that might be inclined to vote for the Land Swap Bill that you can dress a corpse up in pretty clothes and make her look good, but... she's still a corpse. Superior doesn't need this mine. There's better days ahead of her than that road.

Geode City

We didn't discover the vast amount of new and different wildflowers we expected to find today on our trek. Instead, we discovered a vast hillside, actually two of them separated by a canyon, of geodes. There were few of them that you could actually break open with a hammer and see the quartz and crystal inside. Instead, these were all molten and spread out on the hillside for everyone to see. It was like you took a giant geode, five or six acres in size, and spead it inside out on the hill. There were many broken bits of them in the tumbled rocks down the hillside, but the best ones were still embedded in the hill, showing off their stuff.

We still had our picnic. We still took a few pictures of wildflowers. But here we were so hot to find new and different wildflowers and instead stumbled on this geologic wonder. I guess it never works to make plans in advance, for the next turn in the road, something better turns up. And today it was rocks. And lots of them!

A Season of Picnics

When we were young, growing up on the Northern California coast, my sister and I delighted in picnics. If we weren't going to school, then just about every lunch was best eaten outside. At that time, we lived on a ranch a mile away from the Pacific and Glo and I would carry sandwiches and cookies to "Fairy Rock" on a gurgling stream on our ranch and lay out our offerings there. If we were really fancy, we'd carry a bottle of water that would be poured into doll size tea cups, but usually we just ate our sandwiches plain. On week-ends, every week-end, our mother and grandmother would tote big picnic lunches to the boat landing my dad and uncle worked and another, bigger lunch would be eaten outdoors on Saturdays and Sundays.

My favorite picnic from my grandma was her cold fried chicken, with buttered white bread sandwiches and deviled eggs. Grandma always had a tin of cookies that was passed around. Her favorites were inevitably Snickerdoodles. My mother's were Molasses Crinkles. Both ladies made them weekly. My sister and I ate them all diligently!

As we got older, the picnics at the Landing continued but got more involved. Somebody, usually Mother, would make a big pot of chili beans. When my Aunt Dolores married into the family, her favorite (being's she was from a big Italian family) would be a big pan of Minestrone Soup. Aunt Dolores was a fan of Biscottini. So our education into being cookie connoisseurs grew too.

Picnics became more sporadic as I became a young mother and continued working in the boat landing. Bill and I liked to pack picnic lunches for our day offs when the boys were little and we'd fly somewhere or go fishing and there was always something stashed away to eat outdoors. In Baja, where we took our vacations, we had some great al fresco picnics with boiled shrimp with mustard sauce, buttered bolillos, tortilla chips and salsa. We never starved eating outside.

And this past winter season, whooping it up in Arizona, has seen its share of picnics too. Once again, my sister and I are reveling in the warm winter weather and trekking out to exotic desert-y areas with our husbands and .... packing picnic lunches. We've made it a point not to tell each other what we'll be bringing and only a couple of times, have brought the same thing. Usually, it's blocks of cheese (I've been a bit unhappy with the paltry choice of good cheese in Arizona! California got me spoiled, I guess.), some sourdough or tortillas or crackers, fresh grapes and apples or dried apricots and figs, sometimes a beefstick or jerky, once I splurged and made a gorgonzola focaccia that we swooned over. And we always top it off with some kind of cookies. Glo and I are big fans of butter cookies and oatmeal-raisin. We haven't made Grandma's Snickerdoodles yet.

So tomorrow will be another trek out into the desert to look at wildflowers and sample another picnic. The purply red fairydusters are in bloom as are the allium, also purple, some reddy purple clover type flowers, and the blue straw flowers I don't know their name, as well as the lupine and poppy. There's a lot of stalk-y type flowers blooming after the rains too, and more of them I don't know their names, just that it's fun finding new ones. So if I'm not too busy stuffing myself on picnic food, I shall take some pictures and show you What's What in my next blog.

Party Animal

Chuy is modeling a new pinto cowboy hat today. It's really fancy and has stars on the band and a nice elastic band under his chin so it won't come off easily. Chuy is less than enthusiastic about it. That's about as excited as he got with it. At least, he's suffering through with it and not trying to chew the darned thing off.

We celebrated Bill's birthday with a Mexican dinner at Los Hermanos. Most of us ordered the Machaca Chimichanga Deluxe, so here was a huge fried pork filled delicacy swimming in mounds of gaucamole and sour cream. (Hey, if you only indulge every other week or so, it won't show on your hips and thighs too much, will it?) Then we came back here for a decadent Mocha Cheesecake drizzled with dark chocolate coating to top off our arteries even better.

No, Chuy had to miss the restaurant dinner. But he loved having company. Mother and Dad came up from Casa Grande with Glo and Al and Tom came up from Apache Junction. So all of our family that's in Arizona shared in today's celebration. He performed all the of tricks he's learned so far: Shake; Sit; Stay; Fetch; Catch and a bit of Bang, Bang, You're Dead! but he's not fond of that one. He is fond of treats however, so will patiently endure when it comes to that one. Mostly he was just glad of having fresh blood around to play with. Even the puppy is getting tired of just Bill and me, I guess. Wishes he had some little boys around to play with. And like Chuy, so do I!

Road Hazard

We finally found some time for a ride today. It's been several weeks since I've been onboard the Harley. And Bill has only had a few solitary rides since we've been here. It certainly wasn't because the weather was lousy. It's not. It's even warmer today and was begging for one of the motorcycles to be ridden.

So we left Mr. Chuy on his honor in the house (he was a perfect gentleman-dog, thank you) and loaded up and headed to Globe. At first, we were going to ride the Deuce but we discovered the battery was less than full and it wouldn't turn the engine over, so Bill dashed upstairs to get the Road King's keys and we took it. I had time to unzip the liner out of the riding jacket and ended up leaving it half unzipped even up the hill. The air was more humid than usual and in the low Eighties, it felt soft and warm. Traffic was heavy going over the mountain into Miami and we got behind some Yahoo who must have thought he was leading a parade, drooping along about forty all the way down the hill with a great line of traffic behind him. There were ten wheelers and motorhomes along with cars and motorcycles in his parade. He kept up a slow progression and flashed his hazards all the way down the hill into Miami.

Once there, traffic split into two lanes and we found ourselves behind an impatient pickup pulling a trailer. At the second stop light, we found ourselves splashing across a liquid pool of what appeared to be cream colored latex paint. It splashed all over our bike and leathers before we knew what happened. Our first thought was that it was muddy water. It was so big it stretched clear across the double lane of traffic. But it was amazingly resilient.

It took two more miles before we found a car wash and pulled in to hose ourselves off. And once again were more amazed and upset when we found that the pressure hose and hot soapy water failed to budge the stuff! It was strewn up on the King's saddlbags, the undercarriage was practically solidly covered and the chrome exhaust pipes were thoroughly embedded with the stuff. It might as well have been cement for all it was going to get dislodged with a good pressure wash!

Both Bill's and my boots and lower part of our chaps were covered with it and Bill's jacket and helmet were messed up as well. Now, we were not only annoyed but upset as hell by what had happened.

"Isn't it illegal to dump paint?" I asked, plaintively, rubbing futilely at a spot on the seat.

"Not if you're not caught, I guess." Bill was pissed but he was being real good about it. I was raging for both of us! Tomorrow is his birthday and that's not how he wanted to spend it, scraping paint or plaster goo off his bike, one tiny speck at a time!

"I wonder how many other vehicles got plastered with it," I said. "There was a line of them."

"We'll go back and report it to the Miami police," Bill told me. "We probably won't be the only ones. In California, if this had happened, they would have closed the highway for a hazardous waste spill."

"Well, I find it hard to believe nobody knows anything about it! Paint this deep that gets splattered up on us this bad can't be an everyday occurrence!"

"It looks more like plaster the drywall guys use. Maybe a truck carrying a load splashed some out when they went through town. It's the color of thousands of houses down here though. They'll never be able to trace it down."

"The poor bike!" I mourned. Very darned little had been cleaned by the pressure hose. "But we better go report it."

It was almost an hour from the time we got 'splotched' until we returned to Miami to report it to the police. We were surprised to find the location of the 'crime' was only a block away from headquarters. And even more surprised to find that nobody else had reported it. A very obliging policeman walked across the street with us and inspected the bike. We told him in a rush what had happened and he had Bill fill out a property damage report. When Bill was almost finished,he suggested maybe we'd better try washing it off. We reminded him once again, that's what we had done immediately after it had happened and the damned stuff wasn't washing anywhere! He smiled and said he was sorry. Damned if he knew what the stuff was.

Well, it was a far cry from what would have happened in the Environmental Green Empire of California. And I've been touting Arizona these past two months for being such a free place to live, compared to the confines of California. So now, I guess I'll have to amend it a bit. Yes, Arizona is a freer place to live. But we spent the 'free' part of our afternoon trying to scrape paint off our chaps and leathers and cooling pipes of the Road King, and I gotta tell you: we're going to be riding around blending in with ninety per cent of the houses we see. This stuff ain't coming off!

Ghosthunter

I had a visit from a ghosthunter yesterday. It's not every day that a ghosthunter calls at your home. And it's not a typical occurrence to get to speak to one. But I did. And it was spooky fun, just the same. Currently, he's not an active ghosthunter. He started a unit of ghosthunting while he was in college and has a good bit of notoriety because of it. He told me his full name so I could Google him and darned if he doesn't pop right up there. Since he isn't actively ghost hunting now, why did he come to my home for a visit? Well, he's a security device technician and was there to install some widgets on the windows so if we had an Unwanted Visitor who tried to get in, it would set off our alarm.

He said he had visited our home once before, last summer, after we'd been broken into at Memorial Day. He came back to install a loud siren on the roof and our friend Tom was there to let him in. I asked him if he got any 'vibes' from our front room.

"I didn't today," he said, "but I did last summer. Your house felt old. Or at least like there was a lot of activity there. A lot of people. That kind of thing."

"It's not that old," I defended. Actually, the house is younger than I am, built in 1956 and since I was built in 1949 that's probably why I think of it as a new house. "But there's a lot of history in this area and that may be why it feels like there's a lot of souls or spiritual presences around."

I told him a bit about my early attempts at channeling and receiving information. He was more of a pragmatist.

"I'd like to prove there's a definite link between what the scientists know and can point to definitively and what the spiritualists believe. We're getting better at it all the time with more specialized equipment. And there's lots of proof in some of the better digital recorders and thermal units out there." He launched into some highly technical jargon about some of the equipment they got to use when he was in the ghosthunters association back in Chicago. I could dimly understand what he was talking about. Technical stuff is fine but I believe more from a gut level sort of thing.

He commenced to telling me about a Victorian house they had studied one night at the insistance of the owner who felt it was haunted by Al Capone. He said they recorded a powerful E.V.P., a loud intense whisper on a digital recorder that was screaming for Amanda to get out! Out! OUT! The hairs stood up on my arm. (I find other people's ghost stories so much more interesting than my own.)

"Did you find out who Amanda was?" I asked, breathlessly.

"Nope. Never did. But we found out later there was a fire in that house. So we figured that urgent 'shout' must have been for Amanda to get the hell out!" he grinned. "I'm a big fan of E.V.P.'s."

Hmmm, I've never actually recorded an E.V.P. And I've never actually seen a ghost either. But if I had to choose, I believe I'd rather record the E.V.P. than see a spirit. Just me, mind you. I have no qualms about talking to spirits on the other side and sensing their information or the signs they give me to see. I've even felt sensations they want me to feel, at times. But whenever I hear of my friends or loved ones having actually encounters with those who have passed, like seeing them I mean, then I get shivers down my spine and the hairs on my arm stand up. That's just me.

So we chatted for a few more minutes, and I urged the young man to spend a bit of time writing down his experiences for it would make a grand book. He's got one cohort who has a show on Sci-Fi of ghost hunting and here he is in the Arizona desert installing security devices for those of us trying to protect our assets.

You never know who you'll meet, do you?