Tucson Festival of Books

I spent most of the day at the Festival of Books, and caught this great balloon artist near the entrance to the children's area.

Sometimes it just works...

I have a new camera, and I've been terribly lax in posting new images. It's amazing going from a point & shoot digital to a shiny, new DSLR, but there's a pretty steep learning curve in the beginning. Luckily, I have quite a few subjects on which to practice. This past weekend, I spent some time chasing the cats around my friend's house. I was focused on one cat when I felt a whisker tickle my arm from behind. I swung the camera over my shoulder, and snapped a picture on the fly. I love the result - a cat candid without any the benefit of the viewfinder or LCD screen - and it worked wonderfully. As my friend said, having a great model helps, too.

Vintage planes

On Saturday, some friends and I visited the Pima Air & Space Museum. I'm not much of a gearhead, but I love museums, and I love the lore and pop culture surrounding aviation, so this was a great trip. Here's one of my favorite planes, an old TWA "Constellation".

Downtown Tucson

Ah, it's good to be back. A friend came in from out of town, so we did the whirlwind tour of the major sites in Tucson. A trip to the Pima Air & Space Museum led us to A-Mountain (Sentinel Peak) at sunset. It was breezy, and tough to take clear shots even with a tripod, but a few came out pretty well. Here's downtown as seen from just below the "A" on the mountain. The big white tents near the highway are for the upcomming Gem & Mineral Show - one of our biggest events of the year.

Why things are quiet around here...

It's National Novel Writing Month and that means I'm both writing a (minimum) 50,000 word novel, and playing Municipal Liaison to over 250 Tucson writers. This is my 7th year doing NaNo and my 6th year as ML, and even though I know what I'm doing, it's still a new experience each year. I'm up to about 44,000 words today, and on-track to finish by Thanksgiving. Trips to Sabino Canyon and places east should resume after that, so I'll have lots of new photos to share. In the meantime, here's one from this year's NaNoWriMo Kick-off Party.

Historic Tucson - The Presidio Site

Tucson began as a walled fort. The wall was square of adobe that featured a lookout tower and military barracks for the soldiers stationed there. The wall was meant to keep out Apache raiders, and to protect the earliest settlers to the area. Most of the wall has been lost to time, but an archaeological excavation in the 1950s revealed one corner of the wall mere inches below the asphalt of a parking lot. About four years ago, the City began plans to build a replica of the corner segment of wall and turn it into a living history museum. Before work began, they brought in Desert Archaeology to find out as much as they could about both the prehistory and history of the site. On December 15, 2005, a groundbreaking ceremony was held at the site to kick off the reconstruction of the Presidio. Staff from Desert Archaeology were on-hand to answer questions and walk people through the archaeological findings. This picture shows how the archaeologists had to work around existing utility poles and such, and also how close the historic and prehistoric remains were to the modern-day surface.

Historic Tucson - Cheyney House

I've been working in historic preservation for almost 8 years now, so I've amassed quite a library of pictures of historic places in and around Tucson. I finally got around to uploading a few to my flickr account, so I'll share some here. This first one is of the Cheyney House after the restoration was completed. This is a house that caught on fire sometime in the mid-1980s and was utterly gutted. It stood vacant for years, charred and crumbling. The neighborhood felt it was an eyesore, and the City was getting ready to demolish it when a couple from Wisconsin found the house, saw the potential in its blackened bones, and decided to do everything in their power to restore it. The restoration cost over a million dollars and was a combination of private and public funding - mostly AZ Heritage Fund money which comes from lottery revenues. The newly restored house is a treasure. It's historically accurate, and now home to people who are passionate about keeping it a viable residence for years to come.