Zinnias

While I was in Albuquerque I practiced taking pictures. Can you imagine that?! These are in Sue and Marty's backyard. We also used the mister to keep cool.

I hope you can see the bug.

More Summer

It's hard to believe summer is half over. One Sunday I decided to take a ride up to Pie Town. If you blink, you'll miss it. There are two places that serve pie. I stopped at one for lunch; no pie. Silly me!

On the way home, I couldn't resist getting a picture of one of the Very Large Arrays and the clouds above the Plains of Augustine.

Since I'm going to be around this summer instead of traveling as previously planned, I decided to take some interesting pictures of the local area. A portion of the newly renovated courthouse and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church caught my attention.

Then I went down to the little park next to the restaurant at Dam Site Marina. A few years ago they dedicated this statue of a civilian conservation corps worker.

This is my monsoon sunset that I used my poetic/artistic license to alter.

I went up to Albuquerque a couple of weeks ago so the medical community could take pictures of my perfect colon. On Sunday morning I drove up to the picnic grounds at the base of La Luz Trail that goes to the crest at Sandia Peak. The round building is the restroom, but someone left his/her shoe behind. I have no idea what the abandon building was.

This picnic table would have been a perfect place for breakfast had I thought ahead.

Yucca Time

All of the desert flowers were exceptional this, starting in February in the Arizona desert. I've never seen the ocotillo as lush as they were in my neighbor'a yard. Last year I had 18 yucca in my backyard. This year I only had 6. This is the yucca outside my garage door. When I took the shot, I didn't realize I was getting a lady bug and spider web. Can't fault dumb luck!

St. David, AZ

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I visited Holy Ghost Monastery which has an RV campground. It's a very quiet restful place with lots of trails to explore along the San Pedro River. The best part of the trip was experimenting with taking pictures not using the auto setting on my camera. The first pictures are of the grounds and buildings. 

Chapel

Courtyard

This is a statue of St. Benedict as it is a Benedictine monastery.

These were some glass grapes attached to the tree for what reason, I haven't a clue.

Beautiful restful meditation garden

This was a dead tree along the hiking path. The designs in the bark caught my eye.

The San Pedro River runs north to south out of Mexico. In this case, it's subterranean right behind the monastery. About 20 miles south, I got these shots along the river and bird refuge.

This is a bark pattern that caught my eye. Don't know the name of the tree.

Just more strange pieces of bark.

The following pictures were taken at Ramsey Canyon outside of Sierra Vista.

Mule deer

Tree lips

Tree huggers

Time to get busy on some scrapbooking projects and ignore those pesky wabbits.

Where did May go?

Well, here it is the middle of June and I've no excuse but laziness. Marty and Sue came the weekend before Mother's Day, and we did our first boat trip of the season. We did some exploring, played with a couple of fish and called it a day. Marty planted my Mother's Day cactus. It bloomed before they brought it, but it's the perfect addition to my new cactus garden.

These are my new ones that bloomed so beautifully, but only lasted a few days.

This is my rose that I photo-shopped. The rabbits are eating my rose bushes too.

Will get back to posting my St. David trip shortly.

Tumacacori and Tubac

Tubac is a mission encampment full of history, art galleries, and craft shops. This a shot of the museum schoolroom and St. Anne's Church.

The people who run this museum do an excellent job. The tour is self-guided with excellent information and displays like the work area above.

Then I went down the road to Tumacacori, a similar settlement. This time we had a wonderful in-the-flesh guide. This is the church that was never really finished. I have lots of pictures of the inside, but I found I was more interested in the buildings and ruins outside.

This is the garden where we met our guide.

Naturally I found the flowers fascinating.

Pretend you've gone back in time and these are your windows that you're looking through.

The picture above was more ruins. The coloration of the stucco makes it almost look like a painting.

This is the inside of a mortuary. The architecture was particularly compelling. The bottom picture is a close-up of the hole that line up with some holes or windows in other buildings.

A storage area complete with pots but, of course, no roof.

I definitely want to visit this area again. I didn't see everything there was to see.