Featured Strange Sights For Strange Times--what Weirdness Have You Seen Lately?

EEK! Saw this little guy (gal?!) lying on the road during my my daily walk this morning. COVID-19 perhaps?

 

I’ll bet that’s it, Duck! I should’ve stopped to check. Or at least to move his little dead body off to the side of the road before I got squashed by a car.

 

Yes, Dartplayer, flowers on cacti are gorgeous--even more so when set again the rest of the prickly plant.

I've gotten so that I don't mind the "oven temperature" so much but, that said, I'd certainly feel differently if I had to work outdoors or if our house didn't have a great AC system. I grew up in Minnesota and really don't like cold or snow and would far rather live and deal with hot weather than cold. 120ºF+? Yikes! That is REALLY over temperature! Tucson doesn't ever get that hot but here and there the temps in Phoenix can spike up near that. More people, more concrete, fewer plants is the reason I think. Our humidity is so low that the actual temps always feel about ten degrees "cooler".

 

Well, things are getting strange again. Not that they every stopped being strange.

These photos are from my walk on the path yesterday morning. I'm not sure what was up in the first photo. "Yield" actually may have described it.

The next three photos are pretty self-explanatory if you've seen the U.S. news anytime in the past week. I saw each of these chalk drawings on the paved path that runs along the Rillito River.

The last photo is a screen shot from the online edition of the Arizona Daily Star, our local paper. Even in our little city there were two nights of rioting downtown. And more up in the Phoenix metro area. The state of Arizona now has an 8pm curfew until June 8th. Holy shite. Strange times indeed.

 

So there's ALWAYS something strange or interesting--or sometimes disturbing--to see these days when I'm out on my morning walks. In the past week I've seen two critters that I couldn't snap photos of because they ran (or slithered) off so quickly. I saw a very large snake about 10 feet in front of me zoom across the road into the brush in the median. I did walk over to the median to see if I could see it but then thought, "What the heck am I DOING?" So, no pic but you'll just have to believe me.

The other critter I saw which, again, ran across the road quickly enough that I couldn't get my phone out for a photo was a bobcat. I was hoping to snap a pic but it ran down into a ravine and was gone. Both encounters did make me realize I'd best pay a bit more attention to what's up ahead of me while I walk.

Another strange sight right now that I do have photo "proof" of is a fire up in the Catalina Mountains. Mt. Lemmon, which I've posted ride photos of, is at the east end of the Catalinas and the fire started on the west end but has moved rather rapidly to the center of the range. The fire was started by a lightening strike last Saturday night. The amount of smoke generated and floating about in the Tucson basin is stunning. We can actually see the smoke and--at night--the fire itself from our back yard. I'd estimate the actual fire is approximately 5 or 6 miles from our house. Sort of like hurricanes, fires are given names and this one is the Bighorn Fire because it started in an area with a substantial bighorn sheep population. The fire has burned approximately 3,280 acres as of this morning and containment is at 10%. Interestingly, the firefighting effort Incident Commender said that the acreage burned has increased largely due to illegal drone incursion. He said, "If you fly, we can't".

This was taken from our back yard.



On the walking/cycling path where we walk Annie each morning.



This bridge is about 20 feet from our back gate.




This photo was from an online news report and was taken further to the northwest of where we live.

 

The Bighorn Fire in my beloved mountains has become huge over the past 24 hours. It's moving steadily east and is heading towards Mount Lemmon area that I've posted about. I took this photo from our backyard about two hours ago.