The black highlighted lines are the roads Caroline and I have traveled across America since early 2000. We are planning an extensive northeast road trip in May when Caroline’s mother comes to visit us from Frankfurt, Germany.
Wildflowers
There’s been a glitch in the matrix, as the text accompanying this blog entry is not the original. What happened to what was written back on this day in 2005 is lost in time nor does Archive.org have a copy. Somewhere else on the blog, I believe I explained that I lost all of my posts and had to go to various cache sources to rebuild the posts, I wasn’t successful in recapturing them all.
Update: The photos below were added in November 2022 while I was updating some of my oldest posts, ensuring that my copyright was on the images and that the colors were properly adjusted. In some instances, I update the text as I go along. Regarding this particular post, only the top photo and the three sentences were in the original post due to bandwidth limitations. As those restrictions are no longer relevant, I’m taking the opportunity to add the ones that would have been posted back then had circumstances allowed it.
In the original post, only the flowers were posted, and those were photographed south of Florence on Highway 79 on our drive back to Phoenix. This shot was taken from a bridge over Highway 60 that continues on to Globe further east, but we are traveling south out of Superior on Highway 177.
Just out of town with Superior on our left.
From here, things get fuzzy, although that looks like part of the Ray Mine.
While I’m mostly looking for those beautiful aesthetic shots of the desert, there’s something to be said about the gnarled thickets of desert that also exist.
Considering our next location, this must be looking east from Mammoth, Arizona.
This was the San Manuel-Kalamazoo Mine in San Manuel, Arizona; within two years of me taking this panorama (don’t look too closely at the smoke stack seams; the stitching is less than great), the entire sight was wiped clean, and the land started being remediated. Back in its day, it was an underground mining operation, primarily mining copper.
Our snail neck pillow is always happy to offer us comforting support for a quick nap.
More signs of the recent heavy rains.
Almost home after an all-day out-and-back road trip.
The Salt River
The Salt River runs through Phoenix along the Tempe Border. Normally, this western side of the river is a dry river bed, but due to an extraordinarily wet winter, dams upstream have opened to make room for runoff. The river bed between Hayden Road and west of Mill Avenue was turned into The Tempe Town Lake back in 1999 with the building of inflatable dams on either end. In order to handle the 40,000 cubic feet per second of water flow, the eastern dam was completely lowered, and the 16-foot western dam was partially lowered for the first time since the dam was completed in 1999. The lowering allowed the Salt River to fill its banks for the first time in many years – a rare sight in our parched valley.
93rd Birthday
Today, Aunt Eleanor finished her 93rd trip around the sun – it was her 93rd Birthday. Joyce Moncrieff, her friend, and stepdaughter drove down from Colorado to celebrate the big day.
I made dinner, which was Auntie’s first time eating Indian cooking, I also made dessert. For dinner, we had Navratna Korma, Cholle, Batata Poha, and Roti (photo below), and for dessert, we ate Arroz con Leche with guava. Navratna Korma is mixed vegetables in a tomato cream sauce, Cholle is garbanzo beans in a tangy tomato sauce, and Batata Poha is parched rice cooked with onion, potato, nuts, coconut, raisins, lime juice, cilantro, and a few other things. The Roti was a whole wheat bread picked up at Indo Euro Foods. Arroz con Leche is a Mexican dish I learned to prepare from Guadalupe Silva. Arroz con Leche is rice, sweet condensed milk, cinnamon, vanilla, raisins, lime zest, soy milk, and canned guava – a Mexican rice pudding.
The full list of ingredients to prepare the dishes is as follows: peas, corn, carrots, mushrooms, cauliflower, potato, celery, onion, garlic, ginger, green chili, tomato, cilantro, curry leaves, fenugreek, garbanzo beans, cashews, almonds, sunflower seeds, raisins, coconut, guava, lime, lemon, tomato paste, rice, parched rice, cream, condensed milk, soy milk, Nestle Le Lecher (sweetened condensed milk), cinnamon, turmeric, chili powder, cumin, coriander, mustard seed, cumin seed, asafoetida powder, chana masala, vanilla, salt, sugar, grape seed oil.
Katharina and Jutta
Please note: this post was added to my blog in 2022. Don’t mind the copyright either; Klaus Engelhardt took this photo of his daughter/our niece Katharina and her “Oma Jutta,” a.k.a. Caroline’s mom. I’m adding this for continuity as we often received photos from Germany, but for some reason or other, probably because I hadn’t taken the photo, I never included any of them here. Over time I’ll be trying to insert a couple here and there.
Murphy
Our Cat, she’s not really the nicest cat around and she’s only about 12 years old. We had another cat, his name was Andy, but he passed away last year. According to Caroline, this is our last cat, cold, cold heart.
Driving Home
The 51 freeway driving home after watching Amitabh Bachchan’s new film, Black. Black is about a blind, deaf girl learning from her teacher how to see as he slips into Alzheimer’s. This was Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s newest film since releasing Devdas and is his second film dealing with a handicap following Kamoshi – The Musical, which features one of my all-time favorite Bollywood soundtracks. It was from Kamoshi where I fell in love with Alka Yagnik’s voice and what compelled me to buy tickets some years ago to go see her perform live here in Phoenix.