Fusion Panda

So, due a somewhat odd set of circumstances, I will be in Arizona even a bit longer than I thought.

The short version of the story is that I have two sites remaining - both pretty small. A day each, or I might even be able to get both done in a day. Only there's a problem - they're gated. At one of the ones I went to today, the gate was open, but it was going to close in an hour, and it will be closed all day Sunday. The nice woman at the gate told me it would reopen at 5:00 am on Monday.

So I can't really survey them until Monday. I was somewhat concerned about just sitting out here "doing nothing," but in communicating with the office they seem ok with that. You gotta do what you gotta do. In the meantime I DO have work to do anyway, and I can draft on my laptop.

What this means is I'll probably be coming home Tuesday. I've already been promised the rest of the week off, but we may play with that a bit. I'm going to Boston and Maine with Emily next weekend - I was going to take a vacation day on Monday, but now that I have days built up I can probably just move them around a bit.

Anyway, I have pictures to share.

One thing I've liked here in Phoenix is the sky viewing is just incredible. The dry air means you can see much father, much more clearly, than you can in Ohio, and the monsoon weather pattern leads to all sorts of great cumulonimbus and even some lenticular clouds. A lot of the best lightning images I've ever seen were taken in Phoenix. The other day there was this really striking effect where the sun seemed to illuminate a fading raincloud from within:

Yesterday, when driving to Ajo, I drove on a 40-mile section of roadway between Gila Bend and Ajo, which passes through an Air Force bombing range. It was one of the straightest, most desolate stretches of roadway I've ever been on (with maybe the exception of Wyoming). Most of it looked like this:

It was a strange drive - there were cars, but not many, and there were all sorts of strange things - if you look at the Google Maps imagery for the area, you can see all sorts of strange shapes in the desert. At one point I swear I saw what looked like styrofoam fighter jet decoys. On the drive back, I saw a lot of really cool looking dust devils, but I resisted the urge to take video of them, because a) there wasn't really anywhere to pull over, and b) taking video of a military installation didn't seem like a good idea, given the threatening nature of signs along the road :).

I did, however, break what I believe was a Dave land speed record. I drove 70 most of the time. Most of my urge to speed has bled out of me with time, for a multitude of reasons, but mostly because it's horribly inefficient, it wastes gas, I'm a more patient person and it's just not worth it. However, I was really curious to see what I could do on a road like that, so at one point I just punched it. My rental car is a Toyota Camry; I've noticed that the speedometer seems to be reading 3-5 mph low at all times (according to my GPS receiver), but I got it up to 117 miles an hour before I got nervous enough to let off. I was: a) 20 miles from any sort of help if I blew out a tire or went off the road, b) it was 105 degrees in the middle of the desert, c) I'm pretty sure you're only supposed to take a car over 80 if it has sport tires, and c) I swear it seemed like I could actually see the gas gauge dropping before my eyes. The speedometer goes up to 140 - but I didn't want to really find out if it could get THAT high. It could have definitely gone faster though, whether or not it would have stayed on the ground is another issue.

Oh, this doesn't really fit here but I'll forget it if I don't write it right now - the other day in Mesa an Apache Longbow attack helicopter flew overhead at about 200 feet! I'd never seen one in the air before - what really struck me was the size, it was larger than I had imagined.

Ok, I'm really babbling here, I'll try to hurry it up a bit.

I've been doing some reading and Ajo itself has a pretty interesting history. Basically, it was a boomtown that sprung up around a major copper find in 1910. There's a really neat historical district in "old" Ajo, with a plaza built around a square with the post office, shops, restaurants, etc.

From what I'm reading it seems the copper mine closed in 1985. But the huge open pit remains. It's visible on the (low-res) satellite image of the town. It's HUGE, the picture just doesn't do justice to the scale:

Finally, I have a picture of the Maricopa County Courthouse, which is in downtown Phoenix. Now, strictly speaking I think this is the Old Courthouse, but it's still a part of the county offices, just not the main courthouse. Thankfully it seems that Maricopa County was forward-thinking enough to preserve their beautiful courthouse and build the newer, much uglier one across the street. Incidentally, Maricopa County is the fourth largest county in the United States in terms of population. This makes sense though, Arizona counties are huge in terms of land area and Phoenix (which lies entirely in the county, as well as almost all of the metro area) is the sixth largest city in the country.

I also meandered out to Taliesin West, which was Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio. It was prominently mentioned in some books I read recently (Endymion and Rise of Endymion) so I thought I'd go check it out. I just went in the gift shop though, I didn't really feel like paying for the tour.

Oh and Dad: the new Cardinals stadium appears to be somewhere out in Glendale, although I'm still not entirely sure where. I guess they had a bunch of opening ceremonies there today, and it was opened to the public for the first time. I still say that a retractable-roof domed stadium that actually rolls a natural grass field back and forth between the inside and outside is the height of human hubris and decadence.

In other words, I think I like it.

current weather: Clear, 95, Wind: NE 1

Tags: ajo, arizona, flickr, phoenix, photos
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