Fire on the Mountain - More on the Monsoon

Have you ever noticed that the longer you live somewhere, the fewer pictures you take of it? John and I have been in Tucson since 1986, and the vast majority of our pictures of the place were taken from 1986-1990. These days, most of our pictures are taken by digital camera, someplace else.

I went looking for more pictures of dramatic weather in Tucson, but the notebooks are in the bedroom and John's asleep. I sneaked in (snuck?) and got a couple of neat pictures, though, to illustrate further explanations about the Tucson monsoon and the season that immediately precedes the summer monsoon: fire season.

The two pictures here are of a particularly bad fire on Mount Lemmon, circa 1988-1990. Mount Lemmon is part of the Catalina Mountains, which form the northern boundary of Tucson. If you think this fire is dramatic, let me tell you: the one in June and July, 2003 was much worse. It wasn't as visible from the city, but it did much more damage on the mountain, and ruined Tucson's air quality for weeks.

Now it's fire season again, and there are restrictions on campfires and smoking in National Forest lands all over Arizona. Most of the worst fires in recent years, including the one that destroyed most of Summerhaven on Mount Lemmon, were caused by humans. At the moment, though, the fires around the state mostly seem to be caused by lightning--lightning, but no rain. Remember, it's a dry heat.

It's been clouding up, though, and I found more evidence of minimal overnight rain on my windshield this morning. So now we've got both heat (high 90s to low 100s) and humidity--not at Houston levels, but more than the 11% humidity we get in April and May.

There's a formula the weather people use to tell us whether the monsoon has arrived, involving so many days of a certain dewpoint level, or something like that. We don't really need to know the details. It's pretty clear to everyone in Tucson that the monsoon has not yet arrived. And I've lost track of whether it's supposed to be El Niño or La Niña or neither this time around. I never could keep those straight, anyway.

In a previous entry I mentioned arroyos, those dry washes that channel muddy, fast-moving water during and immediately after a big rain. Here's one of them, next to our old house on Grannen Road. I used to call it 'Cassional Creek. The dog who's checking it out is either a neighbor dog, Cheyenne, or Kirby, who belonged to John's business partner, Walt.

To finish things off for now, here's a rainbow over the desert, just off Grannen Road.

I'll save the pictures of Tucson's only recorded White Christmas for another time.

Karen


National Weather Service - Tucson Monsoon page

Another Mavarin (several, actually)

From time to time I check the word "Mavarin" in Google, partly to see which of my blogs and web pages and postings turn up, partly to see what real-world uses of my made-up place name may exist.

Major appearances of the word that don't come from my brain include:

A "Luxury" French Chalet near Mont Blanc.

A person named Marc-André Varin (M A Varin), marketing director of the Palais des congrès de Montréal (Montréal Convention Centre).

A cape that juts into the Bering Sea from (I think) Alaska.

An untranslated word in a bilingual poem in French and Mégevan patois. The Google translation of this page is quite wonderful nonsense. I originally posted two stanzas of it here because I love it so much, but I think you should really follow the link and see for yourself. Best line: "Sometimes, of 1 small air rascal/She begins to move the Kidneys." The untranslated original is attributed as "a 'bilingual' song created by the group 'Memories mégevans' in January 1999." © Jean-Marc Lord 1998-2004.

I notice belatedly that the song mentions Megève, which is where the chalet is.

It seems to me that a Google search used to turn up a non-English Harry Potter fanfic story also, but I don't see that now.

There's one more Mavarin I know about. My friend Sara Geer is working on a novel in which, as it happens:

"Mavarin is the daughter of Marlin, a pirate from the Island. ... She ends up running river trade on the mainland when she grows up due to some favors he does for Nia during this novel, and she's known as the Pirate Queen of the three rivers."

That's enough. Good night.

Karen

Cross-posted from http://mavarin.blogspot.com.

Shopping by TARDIS

This is a painting by bandleader Xavier Cugat, title unknown. Based on the colors, and the fact that one of the doctors is holding a copy of Playboy, I'm guessing it dates from circa 1960. We bought it at a thrift shop several years ago for $27.50, at the height of our yard sale and eBay period.

It hangs in a room full of furniture and decor of roughly the same vintage, midcentury modern vinyl couches and strange lamps and a fake tv minibar. A vintage bowl holds somebody's collection of old matchbooks. One of our many Tiki mugs, a glass one, holds our vintage swizzle sticks. Were it not for the fact that the room has since been overloaded with junk from my mom's estate, you could almost believe it's 1960 in that room.

We bought our vintage furniture, decor and toys on the cheap, at yard sales and estate sales, in thrift shops and at auction. Many of the pieces were inexpensive because of condition: torn fabric, mostly. Even the Cugat has a tear in the canvas.

There's a better way to get this stuff, if only we had the right equipment. You see, when I wrote about vacationing by time machine a couple of weeks ago, I left out a very important part of the itinerary.

I want to go shopping in the 1960s. So does John.

What I actually want is to shop in January and July of each year from 1955 to 1969. John and I would make our purchases at Sears and J.C. Penney, Weber's Department Store in Manlius NY, Economy Books and Ed Guth Hobbies in Syracuse, and at the Art Corner at Disneyland. We'd buy comics and original cells and Micki Mouse Club Magazine issues with Annette and Zorro and Spin & Marty on the covers. We'd buy Miller clocks and Eames chairs. I'd get two of each Barbie, Midge, et al. issued from 1958 through 1969. John would complete his collection of Warriors of the World figures. I'd get a Jane West, and all the bone china animals I had until Ethel and I gradually broke most of them.

We'd get mint condition crayons with all the original, politically incorrect color names, in both the 128 crayon box and the 64 crayon box with the built-in sharpener. We'd get the original Enterprise model with the light-up nacelles, and a complete set of Tinykins, and Steiff plush. Then we'd have to get a bigger house to display it all.

The closest we've come lately to shopping in the 1960s has been when we've visited our local Ace Hardware. This particular store has been around for decades, and carries much of the same stuff I used to see at local hardware stores before there was such a thing as Home Depot. They have jadite bowls and metal signs, model cars and trains, and zillions of other items, some of them quite nifty. A couple of years ago, we bought a white Christmas tree there.

The other great retro place here in Tucson is Yikes! Toy Store, which sells repro tin toys and Hula lamps and Freud action figures and other amazing things.

But I still want to go shopping at 1957 Disneyland, and Weber's, and Sears, and buy all those things we once had or never got but wanted, all shiny and new at pre-inflation prices.

And then, I suppose, we would sell the extra Barbies at 21st century prices, to finance our next stop: shopping in the future.

Karen

Arizona, Rain and Those Hazy-Crazy Memories of Summer

Flash flood at Old Tucson, circa 1987. Photo by KFB.

Here’s my response to another weekend assignment from John M Scalzi in By The Way....  He wants "the perfect summer song."  I'll give you two of them that work for me personally--and I can pretty much guarantee they won't be anyone else's picks.

Probably nobody under the age of 40 even remembers Nat "King" Cole's Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer.  I'm 47, and I remember it fondly.  I distinctly recall hearing it on WSYR radio in my mom's Rambler as we drove past the pharmacy near the bottom of High Bridge Road in Dewitt, NY, on our way to a vacation on Lake Ontario.  WSYR was the Syracuse station for my parents' generation, and they controlled the radio on family vacations.  I didn't really start listening to the Top 40 rock stations (WNDR and WOLF) until the early 1970s.

My other specific memory of Nat "King" Cole's 1963 summer hit is from years later.  I was at the home of  some friend of my mom's, hanging out with other kids I didn't know well.  The parents were off in another room or out to dinner or something.  I came across a 45 of Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer, and played it at least once.  My memory is that I did so while reading the original hardback edition of The Beatles' Illustrated Lyrics, a book that belonged to my mom's friend (Anita? Jean? Lillian? I don't remember which). 

It wasn't the first time I'd looked at that book while at that particular house.  The first time I saw it, I had Peggy Lee's Siamese Cat Song stuck in my head because of the lady's two (you guessed it) Siamese cats.  I'm sure I learned the song from an episode of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. 

Anyway, the second or third time I spent an hour or more looking over The Beatles' Illustrated Lyrics, the woman loaned it to me to take home.  I still have it, that very copy, along with a copy of The Little Prince that was also originally loaned to me by a friend of my mom's.  Sorry about that.  I would have returned them 35 years ago given the opportunity.  I suspect that at some point, the books' original owners decided to let me keep them.

Now that I've confessed to my illicit possession of that Beatles book, I should name one of their songs as an alternate summer song in case only rock and roll counts.  All right: Rain.  No, it doesn't mention summer, but it's perfectly appropriate for summer in Tucson, where there are no beaches and no sane person dives with the top down in July or August.  A hot wind when it's 100 degrees or higher is not refreshing. Rain, though, can be very refreshing in such circumstances.

"Wait a minute," you may be saying. "Tucson?  Rain?  Isn't Tucson in the desert, a place reputed to have 360 sunny days a year?"

That's right.  But twice a year, it starts to rain for a month or two, not every day, but enough to get almost all of our 11 inches a year into two brief periods.  Each season is called a monsoon, after similar weather patterns on the other side of the world.  One is called the "male" monsoon, and the other the "female" one--at least, they used to be. The winter rainy season is no big deal, just a bit of rain now and then, with a little hail or snow mixed in once every couple of years.  It's in summer that we get the real monsoon.  It starts in June or July, and it's a big show: dramatic thunderstorms, lightning, pouring rain, and flooded roads.  Tucson Boulevard turns into a river.  People drive into washes (small river beds, also called arroyos, that are dry except during major storms) and get stuck or float away.  When someone unwisely drives into a dip in the road and has to be rescued, the city bills them for the cost.  It's called the "Stupid Motorist Law."

The coolest thing about the summer monsoon is that it's like the weather in the song Camelot. It usually only rains between four and six PM, or at night.  Late in the afternoon, I hear the rain pounding on the roof, and rush to the window to admire the downpour.  By the time my work day finishes, it's all over, and I can drive home. The temperature has just dropped at least 20 degrees.

Anyway, here it is late June, and everyone in Tucson is waiting for the monsoon to start.  So far we've only had a few drops when we weren't looking, just enough to make the cars filthy. When the rain comes, we'll run and hide our heads, only to watch the show from the safety of our homes and offices.

What's that, John?  You also want a song for the last day of summer?  Okay, with cooler weather only a month away--sometime in October--it will finally be time to listen to the Beach Boys, Fun Fun Fun.

Have a nice summer. 

Karen

fun facts about the Tucson monsoon - NWS

Another Blogger for Kerry - A Defense of General Purpose Journals

Photo courtesy of JohnKerry.com. (Hotlinked - now long gone.)

I was a caller on NPR's All Things Considered again this week, this time putting in a word in favor of literary and general purpose blogs and journals. Neal Conan's guest, a journalist and fan of political blogging, dismissed essentially all non-political ones as "I got up this morning and I brushed my teeth," in other words, dull and pointless.

He's mistaken.

One has only to look at the lively discussions on Making Light and Electrolite to see a blog community in which politics is only part of the equation. Aspiring writers swap ideas, techniques and news of their progress on Within the Qelenhn, Presto Speaks! and many other individual journals. The friends function of LiveJournal enables journalers to keep up with several blogs at once, and add their own comments to each. And over on AOL, John M Scalzi's By the Way helps to keep journalers motivated to write on a wide variety of topics. True, a few of his posts run a little toward the tooth-brushing end of things, but even that has value, as we peek into the life of a writer who works out of his rural home, far from any AOL HQ.

Such goings-on do little to get John Kerry elected, but frankly I doubt that political blogging will tip the scales in the upcoming election. I'm much more interested in the results of Neil Gaiman's and Harlan Ellison's respective lawsuits, the dubious merits of POD, and how Sara Geer's tv production is coming along.

But okay: yes. You should vote for John Kerry this fall. Satisfied? You shouldn't need me to tell you that. This truth becomes clearer with every news report. Anyone who isn't thoroughly disgusted with George W Bush by now probably has been getting his or her news, if any, exclusively from Fox and other conservative media.

If you actually like what Bush and his cronies are doing, I'm not going to change your mind by blogging. All I can do is suggest that you pay more attention to NPR and other news sources that do more than skim the surface of stories.

Next subject, please.

For more cool not-necessarily-political blogs, follow some of the "Other Journals" links at the right, or visit the ones mentioned in the comments below.

Karen

Otherworld Book Excerpt: from The Book of Alef

Cross-posted from Messages from Mâvarin.

The following is a fictional excerpt from a nonexistent religious text, part of the beliefs of most Mâvarinû. It should not be construed as an endorsement or condemnation of any real-world belief or practice,except as a general parable about understanding vs. self-aggrandizing power. - KFB

Alef and Varshti were talking with Lokvanishmû.

"The Lord is eternal, but our lives are short," Varshti said. "By the time we get to know each other at all, our mortal lives are over."

"There is still the Afterworld," Alef said. "This is when we grow closer to the Lord."

"Why not just go there to start with, then?" Varshti asked.

"The Afterworld is not a place for beginnings," the Lord said. "Would you learn to farm and ride before you learn to walk and talk?"

"Will you tell us about the Afterworld, at least?" Alef asked.

"You cannot understand it until you are there," the Lord said.

"And once we are there, we cannot come back here," Varshti said.

"I did not say that," said the Lord.

"Let me have an immortal life, Lord," Varshti said. "Let me come and go between this world and the next, and never sicken or die. That way you will have a friend through all time."

"If I do as you say, will you indeed be my friend? Or will you decide you are a god yourself?" the Lord asked.

"I will be your friend and servant," Varshti promised.

"Let it be so," the Lord said. “And what of you, Alef? Do you wish to be immortal like your brother?"

"You have already promised immortality in the Afterworld, Lord," Alef said. "I am content that you have ordered things as they should be. I ask only to know and understand you and your creation better."

"Your desire shall also be granted," the Lord said. “Yours is the better request.”

This is the last one, I swear

For convenience in posting to LiveJournal blogs by Sara, Sarah and Shelly, I've started one of my own. The journal you're looking at right now, Musings from Mavarin, will continue to be the main one. The blogspot one (Otherworlds) will be an archive of fictional entries by Mavarin characters, and the LiveJournal one will be mostly about writing, plus postings of misc. short pieces of mine that don't fit elsewhere. It's called Lost in Mavarin.

First up: an abandoned song of mine called Real Life (the melody didn't work out well enough), three Bulwar-Lytton sentences from a couple of years ago, and thoughts on dogs' thoughts.

Karen