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.

Labor Day from Mount Lemmon

We wanted to get out of town and into nature on Labor Day, so the bf proposed a picnic and we headed up the mountain. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, and the mountain was alive with chasing light and shadow. Heavy monsoon clouds started rolling in around the time we hit Geology Vista, and by the time we got to Ski Valley, the skies opened up and it started pouring rain. We ended up eating our picnic in the car while the windows fogged and rain hammered on the roof. It was surprisingly fun. Once the rain let up a bit, we went to the north parking lot and took a look out over the valley to the back of the mountain. Thanks to the clouds, the valley was dappled with shadows, and it all popped out against the backdrop of our gloomy mountain top. I can't wait to get back up there!

Discovery Place

We had a day to kill in Charlotte, NC and since I'm not into NASCAR, the entertainment options were a bit limited. I was poking around on google and found a science center in uptown Charlotte called Discovery Place. As luck would have it, a touring exhibit of Pompeii artifacts was on display. I'm an archaeologist by training, so I couldn't pass up a chance to see a Pompeii show that wasn't likely to tour to my part of the country.
Unfortunately, it was a rather "meh" display, but Discovery Place had a LOT more to offer. One of the coolest exhibits was the dinosaurs. I particularly like this picture because of the skulls on the wall behind the stegosaurus skeleton. My NaNoWriMo novel last year was about dragons, and several of the skulls reminded me of characters in my novel. I might even go back to write in a few more details after seeing these bones.