A "who knew?" moment

I love when you travel to a new town and serendipitously discover an unexpected tourist attraction, to add to the things you knew you wanted to see there.

While doing some Google-map exploring in Phoenix, checking on the locations for the various stadia we planned to visit, I happened upon Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard in Scottsdale. And right off this thoroughfare was Taliesin West, his desert companion to the famous house in Wisconsin, designed to fit perfectly with its surroundings.

Since the house wasn't too far, in Phoenix terms at least, from Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, we made a quick visit after the Rockies game.

We knew we were too late for the last tour, but we enjoyed visiting the gift shop and taking in the house exteriors that we could see. Everything looked fabulous in the late afternoon Arizona sunshine.

I'm sorry I can't tell you much about what's represented in these photos, but we thought what we could see was fascinating even if we didn't know exactly what it was...

part of the house, with embedded rock walls

a handsome statue and cactus

looking down the walkway into the house

a close-up of the very odd, but lovely, carving at the front "gate"

A special treat was getting to take pictures of some of the impressive saguaro on the property. I showed you some of these in an earlier post, but you can never see too many of these fabulous plants. Here are some more shots...

This is definitely a place that deserves a closer look. It's on our list of non-baseball activities for our next visit.

Wordless Wednesday: A major award*

*Not anything like this.

Best seats in the house

As I indicated in my last post, although we saw lots of neat things, and did lots of neat things, over our long weekend in Phoenix, baseball was the primary attraction.

Not surprisingly, the weather was perfect, as you can see above. And we thoroughly enjoyed the games, the parks, the fans, and just the general spring-time surroundings. When every team, it seems, is a potential pennant-winner.

Our first game Sunday was at Scottsdale Stadium, spring home of the Giants (which alert readers will note we saw last summer in their real home in San Francisco. The weather was much more pleasant this time, even if the views were not as spectacular.)

nice, but not exactly San Francisco Bay

We opted for both games to buy lawn tickets, not only because they're the cheapest in the park, but also because it's fun to sit out there. (Price was definitely an object at the Giants game; we feel that they charge unconscionably high prices for everything. From $7 bottles of water to $25 "seats" on the lawn! By contrast,

the Rockies' lawn "seats" were only $11. And the water was only $6.) I mean, I can't remember when I last walked barefoot on grass. Ours at home is usually not all that comfortable, even when it's been recently watered.

The Giants park had one huge amenity that, perhaps, almost justified those sky-high prices: trees. As you saw in my last post, it was just about the pleasantest thing in the world to lie back on the grass and look up at the trees in between innings. Even though the view was somewhat obstructed when there was action going on:

Although it's not as bad as this picture indicates. All you have to do is stand up and you can see the field just fine. And standing up occasionally is a very good idea for old joints and bones that aren't used to sitting cross-legged for lengths of time.

Plus, it was most crowded early in the game...

...in the later innings, when a lot of the not-real-fans had left, we moved forward to the front of the berm and had both shade and a view.

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The Rockies' park the next day (which they share with the D-backs during the spring) lacked the trees, but in all other respects (including prices) was a much better experience.

What a gorgeous place! And the lawns are about 4 or 5 times as big. Plenty of room for everyone, with no crowding; and they're steeper, too, so there's virtually no view-obstructing.

The rest of the park was equally well-designed and fun to stroll around in. There was imaginative and lovely landscaping...

interesting native plants adorn the batters' eye

the yellow foul pole looks perfectly matched with the Palo Verde blossoms

...all they need to do is plant some trees out on those expanses of lawn!

The stadium is officially called Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. And unlike some other stadium/team names with "at this" and "at that" in their names, this time it actually makes some sense. It's part of the Talking Stick resort that's on Native American land, specifically the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Community. (You might

notice on the website a motto: "Two Tribes, Two Teams, One Home," that refers to the fact that the Rockies and Dbacks share the facility.) 

One of the other attractions on the property is a very nice-looking hotel that we are considering using as a base of operations for future spring training trips. There's also a couple of golf courses, and what looks like a full calendar of events when spring baseball isn't happening there.

(I was a little disappointed and surprised that the park's website didn't have more information about the tribes and the location's uniqueness. There's a little more information in this Wikipedia article. But they do have a nice marker out front that identifies the tribes and explains what a "talking stick" is. Here's the ever-helpful Wikipedia article on that subject.)

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Watching the fans is always an attraction by itself at ball games, and spring training games are especially good people-watching venues. Most of the folks at these games are real fans, and they aren't shy about showing their loyalty...

Giants fan with appropriate-colored hair

Rockies fan (his face was covered in purple, too)

Giants fan who might need to watch the ballpark calories

Giants fans taking selfies

It's great to see baseball fans from all over the country, coming out to support their teams. But these were my favorite fans...I really appreciated being included in this burgeoning spring tradition of theirs!

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Stay tuned for more about our non-baseball Phoenix activities.

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