Desert in bloom

In case you needed a hint to guess the state tree from my last Wordless Wednesday post, the state in question is spring training home for about half of major league baseball. And that, rather than its fine, exotic vegetation, is what drew us there last weekend.

But that vegetation was pretty spectacular, and exotic enough that you sometimes feel you've traveled a lot further than just from Texas to Arizona to see it.

So before I get to the baseball part of our trip, I want to show you some more of the lovely trees, flowers, and other flora of the Phoenix area. (The handsome bed at the right is on the grounds of Scottsdale's performing arts center.)

First, about that state tree. Rather fortuitously, late spring training just happens to correspond with peak blooming season for the the Palo Verde. Its blossoms are really spectacular, and the trees are simply EVERYWHERE in Phoenix. But its the smooth green trunk, very different from our local mesquite that its foliage sort of resembles, that is the tree's most distinctive, and exotic, feature. (I couldn't help thinking of the Orion slave girls in Star Trek; it's about the same tint...) It also is what led me to a quick identification of the species; just google "tree green trunk Phoenix" and up it pops.

The ubiquity of the tree doesn't diminish its showy attractiveness. I should have gotten more pictures of it in various landscape settings, but here's one shot on a hospital's grounds. We were walking through from the Scottsdale stadium to our car.

Note the palm trees, too, of which there are also thousands in the area. But there are many more nice trees around, many of which were also in bloom. Here's a fine specimen, probably some sort of fruit tree in flower, also on the Performing Arts Center's grounds:

Not all the nice trees were blooming, but most provided some welcome shade. Shade that I'm sure will be even more welcome as Phoenix' summer approaches. (For us the temperatures were just pleasantly warm during the day.) This big guy is a super-shade-provider...

It is also on the Performing Arts Center grounds, and it has a plaque at its base. But unfortunately it just commemorated its planting, and didn't tell you what kind of tree it is!

Soon after our stroll through these lovely grounds, we made our way to Scottsdale Stadium, where we saw the Giants come from behind to beat the hapless Royals. Here's the view from my "seat" at this game, when I took a break between innings to lie back on the soft grass:

We opted for the cheapest (although still ridiculously expensive) "seats" in the stadium, on the lawn. It was crowded, but that shade made for a very pleasant way to watch the game.

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I didn't go to Phoenix expecting to be impressed by trees and flowers, so that was a pleasant surprise. However, I was expecting to see lots of cactus, and wasn't disappointed on that point either.

Here's a rather odd-looking, bumpy variety, that's part of the landscaping at the Rockies' lovely ballpark...

...and a more familiar-looking specimen right next to it:

The landscaping here, as well as the other amenities in this new, sparkling ballpark (official name: Salt River Fields at Talking Stick) was impressive overall. Here are some flowers we saw on our stroll around the concourse:

I didn't take enough pictures of all the lovely other flowers around town. They are particularly big on bougainvillas.They use these showy guys as bushes and almost hedges sometimes...very impressive.

But back to cactus. Of course the most impressive cactus in this part of the world are the saguaro, and there are plenty of those wonderful, alien-looking plants all over town. They seem particularly fond of them in street medians, and I even saw a rather nice planting of them in front of a Taco Bell (which seemed rather wrong, to me).

The only place I got pictures of them, though, was at a location I'll let you guess (although there is a clue in one of these photos; more about it in a later post):

I could have taken a thousand pictures of these lovely, stately, and somehow other-worldly, flora. But I'm just glad I got to see so many of them.

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I'll close with a photo that could have been taken in Phoenix, although it wasn't. It just happened to be in my camera when I left on my trip. Not a thousand miles away in the exotic desert, it's just on the St. Mary's campus, next to the trail I walk from the bus stop to the Library every day for work.

A good example of my blogging philosophy that the world really is so full of wonderful things, both home and abroad. Especially in the spring.

Wordless Wednesday: Whose state's state tree?

Working too hard

I know that I have been very remiss about blogging lately. But I have an excuse, or two.

First of all, I haven't been anywhere interesting, to speak of, all year. (But some blog-worthy trips are coming up before too long, I promise.)

And second of all, I've been really, really busy at work. So busy that, while not actually working overtime hours, much of my creative juices have been spent thinking about work even while at home. But our big project is done now (at least the big showy phase is done). So I should be able to focus some of my ever-decreasing brain power on blogging ideas now.

Plus, I can show you what I've been so busy with.

This is what you would have seen, looking down one of the rows of my government documents collection, just a couple of weeks ago. "My" docs took up two long sets of stacks, prime real estate in our building that we all decided could be put to better use.

So I set upon a massive "weeding" (library jargon) project to clear enough shelves so that one of my sets of stacks could be emptied. That's about 600 shelves worth of documents. A big job under any circumstances, but I wanted to do it in a thoughtful way, and not lose useful material that isn't available somewhere in digital form. Then, we decided that since the final move and dismantling of the shelves would be a noisy affair, that it would be best to get it done over spring break. So a time constraint was added in. 

A big job, but one that went smoothly and amazingly fast, thanks to all the library staff and student workers that pitched in to help. Altogether we shifted 1500 shelves, give or take a few, of documents.

The picture above shows how you move this much stuff so quickly: trains of book trucks. At the end of the aisle you can see shelves already starting to be taken down. We had a machine-like efficiency going: a couple of people loading up trucks by taking docs off the shelves marked for disappearance, then a couple more putting them in their new homes at the other end of the floor, followed up by a crew taking down the now empty shelves. It did make quite a racket, so I'm glad there were few, if any, students trying to study while this was going on.

Even though I had lots of help with the heavy lifting (and believe me, it is heavy...quite a nice workout, with no gym fees!) I still had lots of planning and shelf-counting and supervising to do so that the items getting moved got put in the right places, with enough space left at the end for the last few hundred docs. Whew! I'm not used to having this kind of pressure at my usually pretty laid-back workplace!

But it was worth it, in the new space gained for quiet student studying. As some of you might remember, over the summer of 2012 our first floor was transformed from periodical stacks into our wildly successful Learning Commons. It's so successful, in fact, that it's almost always full of caffeinated students and that makes for a rather noisy—although cheerfully noisy—environment. And we didn't really have enough attractive quiet study space for those students, and those times, when quiet is needed.

Voila! The little-used and electronically duplicated documents that I withdrew made space for a new quiet study area. From this...

...to this...

...to this...

In just a few short weeks. I hope you can understand why I've had to neglect the blog while this was going on and preying on my mind. But spring is here and I hope to be doing and seeing more blog-worthy activities and sights in the weeks to come.

Wordless Wednesday: moonset on the way to work

Wordless Wednesday: that time of year again!

Holly

I wonder if anyone's ever been temped to carve moon letters onto this wall? And then, say "friend," and enter?

Wordless Wednesday: greenery

A royal neighborhood

Nothing beats a walk in a beautiful neighborhood on a warm weekend after several days of cold weather. Add children visiting from out of town, and it's a darn near perfect activity.

The neighborhood in question is King William, an almost surrealistically gorgeous little enclave of Victorian mansions just south of downtown. Our major target there last weekend was the very handsome structure pictured above. 

It's the Villa Finale, formerly owned by Walter Mathis, one of the prime revitalizers of this amazing area. We have not only those efforts to thank him for, but also for the fact that he set up his house, along with his extensive and eccentric collection of art, artifacts, knick-knacks, and otherwise delightful doo-dads, to be a public museum. It has the distinction of being the only National Historic Trust site in all of Texas.

The kids weren't up to an inside tour on such a nice day (although I hope on a future visit to do the full walk-through), so we contented ourselves with strolling through the handsome gardens and grounds. Here are some of the items that caught my blogger's eye during our walk:

the house is well-defended!

a plain stone wall just wouldn't do, would it?

one of a couple of pet cats...

"roof" of the gazebo, augmented by winter trees

an appropriately fancy car for such a fancy house, no?

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Mr. Mathis' house, of course, isn't the only one worth ogling in King William. Here are a few more that we strolled by...

Steves "Homestead," which you can also tour

we know the folks who used to live here; the inside is just as marvelous as the outside!

I love the two-story porches on this King William house

Fantasizing about living in houses like these, enjoying them as works of art, or just soaking up the warm air...a perfect weekend activity.