Brick cheese

Things I miss about southwestern Pennsylvania (in no particular order).

#3 Brick cheese

I can't find Brick cheese in Tucson. (Read my rant.) Sure I can live without it, but I wish I didn't have to!

And for all of those people who have never heard of "Brick cheese," here are photos to prove I'm not making this up!

Here it is in a Pittsburgh grocery store deli.



Sold by the brick.



And pre-sliced and prepackaged.



At the Super-Wal*Mart in Pittsburgh.



At the Super-Wal*Mart deli in Pittsburgh.

Merlins at the pool

I can count on seeing a Merlin around the house at least twice a week. (Read the first blog post.) Today I saw three of them lurking around the pool. One of them posed for several minutes so I was able to snap this shot with my cell phone.



Hmm, it must be a fledgling since it wasn't very camera shy. Sure enough, I spotted the nest up in the palm tree.

Colorado River toad

This evening presented another monsoon light show accompanied by actual rain. It wasn't a torrential downpour, but it did indeed rain. I didn't head out on my walk until after the storms cleared through the area.

Just up the street I encountered this guy. I snapped his mugshot with my cell phone (at night) so he's hard to see, but this Colorado River toad is as big as a small dinner plate!



He was so huge he couldn't heave his girth up onto the curb though I tried to shoo him in that direction. (I didn't want him to get smashed on the road!)

I knew not to touch him (or her?). Around here, you just never know what's poisonous. Sure enough, this guy is poisonous--enough so that its venom can kill a full grown dog.

And its venom also has hallucinogenic characteristics. Uh, huh. I don't want to BEGIN to imagine how THAT trait was discovered...(Let's smoke a toad...)

In case you're wondering, those other things in the picture are seed pods from a Velvet Mesquite tree. They're everywhere--especially after a storm!

Winding back roads

Things I miss about southwestern Pennsylvania (in no particular order).

#2 Winding back roads

It's a mistake to think that you can ride a motorcycle 12 months out of the year in Tucson. When the temperatures climb into triple digits, most bikers park their bikes. Air temperature of 103° is easily 140° in the sun. Add the heat reflected from pavement, and heat emitted from car engines and...well, let's just say it's not fun. My bike will stay parked until sometime in September.

Back in PA, I mapped out the BEST commute to the office. Unless it was treacherously icy, I always skipped the main roads opting instead for nine miles of winding back roads.





Summer was perfect for either a top-down convertible drive or a ride on my Ninja. These kind of roads are almost non-existent through much of the West. If there is a "back road," it's usually flat, straight, and the only way to get from A to B. Not very challenging to ride.



My current commute takes me right through downtown, and it's stop-and-go traffic all the way. It is what it is, but I miss my ride time on these roads.



No matter how bad the day was, I could always look forward to the drive home.

Jacarandas

I drove to the sovereign nation of Barona for a two-day meeting. What an awesome drive! The desert scrub, the sand dunes, the boulders, the mountains...every 30 miles it seemed like I'd ventured into a new world.

Closer to San Diego I saw the Jacaranda trees in bloom. I don't recall seeing them in bloom on any of my many trips to southern California, but I'm not sure that I've ever been to there when they bloomed.

Lightning Bugs

Things I miss about southwestern Pennsylvania (in no particular order).

#1 Lightning bugs

Lightning bugs were a fixture of warm summer nights. I remember evenings when the glitter of lightning bugs winking in the trees turned even the most bland backyard into Mother Nature's Christmas tree display. Lightning bugs thrive in warm, humid weather which means you do not see them in southern Arizona.

Rain!

Tucson has had some rain the past two and a half days. This is the first time it's rained since at least early March. We needed it. Yesterday we supposedly broke a record for the most rain that fell on that day (0.5 inches) since they've been keeping track of such things. Fortunately, it didn't dump on us all at once, but instead rained steady all day. I actually saw a few puddles of water in the "river."

Of course, all this rain meant that roofs all over Tucson were leaking since Roofing 101 seems to be lacking from the education of local construction crews. Why worry about rain drainage when it only rains 6 or 7 times a year?

Weather forecasters are calling for an early and wetter than normal monsoon this year. That should make for a great spring flowering season NEXT year.