Sprucing up the neighborhood

One of our neighbors on the 800 block of Douglas (where our RV lot and the casa are located) organizes a group of guys to clean up and paint the garbage can lids every couple of years. This year, he recruited Carl to help!

It is "interesting" ("odd", "different") that the trash cans in our community are buried in the ground. The trash men open the lid and use a hook to pull the trash bag(s) out on pick up days. 

Usually there is one trash can shared between two houses, but at this location, there happened to be two trash cans near each other so all the volunteers could be captured in one picture. Carl has cleverly identified the trash can lid to be painted and is pointing it out to Al (Al and Shar are renting the casa this season). The other two volunteers are working on the lid behind Al, and Doc (the organizer) is supervising.

I think Carl is making sure Al knows exactly what to paint. 

Doc provided the cardboard pieces so no bricks would get over-sprayed.

A couple of days before the painting, the guys had gone through and sanded lids that had rust on them and primed them, so on the painting day, they only had to paint.

Interesting feature on a UPS truck

When a UPS truck was delivering in our neighborhood...

Carl took a picture because he was wondering what that round white thing was on the roof (the rectangular white thing at the top is the roof of the house beyond). It appeared to be rotating, and we wondered if it was a sensor like we had seen on the Waymo self driving cars (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2026/02/some-views-from-closer-to-phoenix.html).

Carl had thought he would ask Jimmy, but we did an internet search, and we think they are probably a ventilation fan for the cargo area of the truck. From what I read online, these vents are intended to pull the hot air out as the trucks don't use air conditioning but rather drive with the front doors open when it is warm. Other comments indicated that, regardless, the fan doesn't help much to decrease the heat in the closed-in cargo area...

Kitty Litter

Am I "scraping the bottom of the barrel" with the subject of this post?!?!? 

When we stopped at Walmart recently, we were looking at the kitty litter options available...

This one indicates that it is a "Tofu-Blend Cat Litter" -- it was rather expensive, but... (personal opinion) we might think that this is a better use of Tofu than for food!

Then we saw this one -- Plant Fiber clumping litter. We are looking for a more satisfactory choice of kitty litter (we want it to clump, but *not* to attach to the walls of the litter pan and *not* to get tracked through the house). We decided to give this one a try!

Oh the joys of kitty servitude (because, of course, we are Miss Kitty's servants!). When we return from being out for a while, we always report that either, "The hunt was successful!" (aka "we are bringing home cat food"), or, "The hunt was unsuccessful!" (aka "no cat food was acquired"). On this trip, we indicated that the hunt was moderately successful as we got something for her needs!

Out for a drive -- wildflowers

When we had gone out with the hiking club a few weeks ago, one of our fellow hikers had recommended going to see wildflowers at the intersection of Bush Highway and Route 87. After striking out on seeing the wild horses, we decided to continue up Bush Highway to see if there might be wildflowers to see...

... we did see some Brittlebush...

They were blooming but weren't particularly impressive...

We stopped at another spot along the road where we could see lupine ...

some lupine and brittlebush beyond...

Close-up of a lupine -- though Google is telling me that this is a bluebonnet (Texas has a *lot* of bluebonnets which are generally in mass patches along the highways!).

When I heard from the fellow hiker that the wildflowers were really great there, I was expecting the masses of wildflowers that we would see in Texas. The flowers were more singles that were separated from each other, but we were glad to see what we did!

Out for a drive - Salt River

Last Thursday, we had one of our normal events cancel during the day, and so we decided to head out to try to see the Salt River horses. We had read that they are often visible down near the river near dawn or sunset, so we thought we'd try to locate them...

We parked at Goldfield and walked down toward the river. As we were walking down, we saw a guy coming up with a camera and long lens and asked if he had seen the horses. He said that he had, but that we needed to walk upriver a little ways (Carl heard a mile, and I heard 1/8 mile). As we got down to the river, we saw herons in the water...

Pretty view of hills on the other side of the river

Heading on up river, we saw pretty reflections in the water from the land on the other side, but no horses. The land on the other side here is undeveloped; I don't know whether it is part of the We-Ko-Pa reservation or not.

We continued driving up Bush Highway and stopped at Saguaro Lake...

This is a lake formed by a dam on the Salt River; there is a marina and a boat cruise (Desert Belle) that goes out from the marina.

Looking up the hill on the side of the lake

We have seen postings from other visitors who saw horses on the day we went, but I guess we were either at the wrong time or the wrong place (or both!).

Miss Kitty

Miss Kitty is still with us...

Isn't that an innocent face?

We're not sure what keys she is pressing while on top of his keyboard, but she frequently gets Carl's computer in a strange condition so that he has to work on it for a bit to get it to be usable again!

Miss Kitty is still losing weight. We weigh her about once a week and she has lost 11 ounces over the past year. She still seems to feel fine, still gets zoomies sometimes (but not very frequently), is still very loving, but she is very bony. She is just barely over 5 pounds now, will probably be under 5 pounds in the next few weeks. Her high weight was just 7 pounds, so she has always been small. She used to eat just "kibbles" and we could leave food down for her and she would self-serve and stay at a good weight. About 3 years ago, we noticed that she started drinking a lot more water and peeing a lot more -- symptoms of kidney disease. Since then, we've tried a lot of different foods to try to get her to eat more and maintain her weight, but, I guess her body tells her to drink water, and that makes her feel full, so she doesn't think she needs to eat much. Carl reminds me that, when we were first dating, I said that she was not food-driven -- and she wasn't. She ate her kibbles, the same kibbles day in and day out. Now, however, because we are wanting her to eat, we have created a food-driven cat -- she doesn't really want to eat, but she wants to be fed! It is discouraging to open a can of a food that she used to eat well and now she might lick it a few times or maybe just sniff and walk away. Ugh! Finicky cat! 

Valentine's Dinner and Dance

A week or so ago, we enjoyed participating in the Valentine's Dinner and Dance.

The tickets went on sale when we were out in Quartzsite, so our friends Jan and Dan got tickets for the table and invited us to join them.

Upstairs in the ballroom the tables were decorated with candles and flower petals.

The event is sponsored by the softball club, so they serve the tables down in the bistro (black tie, white shirts, black slacks) and they and their wives do the set up for the ballroom and host the event.

We have gone the last few years and enjoy having a nice dinner and dance for Valentine's Day. The event sells out each year so you need to get your tickets early!