More Arizona animals

It's been way too long since I last updated and a lot has happened, so I'll start with my Dad's visit in April. Here we are in Vegas in front of my favorite store, Sephora:

This was the morning after we picked him up from the airport. We stayed overnight in Vegas since his plane got in kind of late, then we went to Sephora to do a little shopping and then drove home. Dad stayed for four days and on the last day we went back up to Vegas and had dinner at the Top of the World restaurant at the Stratosphere hotel. Here's a view of the strip from the restaurant:

I've been waiting since last spring to see more quail babies and I finally saw some last week and was able to get some pictures, though they chicks are hard to see because they're so small and blend in with the gravel in the yard. The mother qual is running away because she saw me coming to the window and the chicks are bringing up the rear:

I've seen several more quail families during the past week and I usually see between 8 and 10 chicks. It's amazing, but they can move as fast as the adults can. I saw two other kinds of birds and one quail in the back yard yesterday tormenting a snake. I'm guessing they were trying to drive it away from their nest or something. I couldn't figure out what they were doing at first because they were jumping around and spreading their wings and just acting weird, but then I saw the snake on the ground.

We got the gravel in the front yard done right before Dad came to visit and we were sucessfuly in making a star/sunburst pattern with lighter gravel on top:

Here's another view from the street:

Unfortunately our bird feeders are too close to the design and the birds keep messing it up. They like to dig around in the gravel for bird seed that's fallen on the ground and they are amazingly strong. The rabbits do it, too. I've seen both of them actually pick up pieces of gravel in their mouth and move them, though the most damage is done by the quail when they scratch around on the ground like chickens and throw gravel everywhere. So that means we need to find a new spot for the bird feeders.

Lately I've been seeing birds and rabbits napping in the front yard next to the rosebushes. They've dug some shallow holes and they lay down in them, I guess because it's cooler there, especially in the afternoon when the rosebushes are in the shade.

These last two pictures I took out of my computer room window, which is on the front of the house. It was cute to see the quail and rabbits lounging in the shade together. There's one rabbit laying down and one with its back turned to the camera over on the right, then there's a female quail on the right and a male on the left right under the rosebush.

The rosebushes are doing really well and it's really gratifying since we took a lot of trouble to make sure they didn't get frost damage this past winter. They've been blooming like crazy and they'll all about three times the size they were last year. I have two little cactus plants that I got from Home Depot last year and I was surprised to see one of them blooming a few days ago. I didn't realize it would ever bloom, but it has pretty little pink flowers on it. I also have a challa cactus that I picked up off the ground in our vacant neighbor's yard next door and it's been growing like crazy. I'm so happy to see it growing because this is the third time I've tried something like this and it finally worked.

Speaking of the vacant house next door, someone finally bought it. It went up for sale and sold almost immediately, I believe at an auction of some kind. It's been sold now for several weeks, but no one has moved in yet, which is fine with me. They can take their time. Also, the woman with the noisy dogs behind us moved out back in April. The house isn't for sale, as far as I can tell, so I'm guessing it was being rented and just doesn't have new tenants yet. So it's been really quiet around here and we are so hoping that neither of our new neighbors will have noisy dogs. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

I made a new Ayumi gif that's over on the right here. It's from her video "Sparkle" and I love that she has dark hair in the video. I think she looks best with dark hair. You can click the gif to see the whole video on someone's Myspace page.

I've been seeing a new pain management doctor now for about 4 months and I've been pretty happy with him. I actually saw a physician's assisant at my last visit and then another doctor came in just briefly before I left to go over my file with the PA and both of them were really nice and actually seemed to be listening to me. I think this will be the first time that I haven't run out of medication before my next appointment because they gave me plenty.

The other doctor that I saw briefly suggested I try Lyric@, which is something I've been interested in trying for a long time, so I was excited about that, but unfortunately I wasn't very excited about the results. I didn't notice any improvement with my pain level and it made me really groggy in the morning (I took it before bed each night) and it gave me weird, unsettling dreams, so I stopped taking it after a couple weeks. That was disappointing, but the good news is that the other medication I have is working well, and like I said, I have plenty. I really hope I get to the see the same PA and/or doctor at my next visit, which is coming up next Thursday.

New gif

I made a new animated gif of Ayumi (on the right). Here's her newest video that I made it from:

Rule
Uploaded by Breat44

Woof

There are four dogs living in the house behind me, or three dogs and one puppy. Initially there were two dogs there, then suddenly a third appeared and now, after Christmas, a puppy has appeared. They are normally good dogs, but for some reason the third dog has been barking like crazy every time they go outside and he gets the others all riled up. It's kind of annoying when we're out in the hot tub at night and this dog won't shut up. If we yell at the dog, he (she?) just barks more. B is threatening to send the owner a letter, but I'm hoping the dogs will settle down before that happens. I remember they went through a phase maybe 6 months ago when it was just the two dogs and they were barking a lot, but that only lasted a few weeks. I don't know what was going on with them then and I don't know what's going on now.

My dad called this morning to tell me that he's snowed in and probably won't be going anywhere for several days because he shoveled his driveway and there's thick ice under the snow. I bet all the kids in the area are excited about being off school. In the meantime, I'm here on the other side of the country and it's been mostly sunny with highs in the 50s and 60s. When it's not windy, it's pretty nice outside. We've been trying to take walks every day, but my back has been hurting me and B's ankle has been hurting him. We're falling apart here.

Right after I got a couple books from W@l-mart a few weeks ago, B wanted to get some more books for himself because he burned through the books I got him for Christmas. So we went to the bookstore together and I ended up getting 5 more books; a couple more Stephen King novels, a couple by authors I'd never heard of and a used biography of Madonna. B actually found the Madonna bio and suggested it to me, so I added that to the pile at the last minute and that's what I'm reading now.

I finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle in about a week and that was pretty good. There were a lot of descriptions about dog-related stuff, which I was only kind of interested in, and the ending surprised me. After that I read Lisey's Story by Stephen King and that was pretty good, too. I decided I needed some lighter fare after reading those two kind of heavy novels, so that's why I'm reading the Madonna bio now. I'm finding out she was a real meanie, IMO. B has been watching a lot recorded football games, so I've had a lot of time to read lately.

Speaking of football, our home team is in the Superbowl this year! Whoo hoo! Pretty exciting, being our first year in Arizona. In fact, we are quickly approaching the one-year mark. We'll have been here a year in March. I don't remember exactly which day we moved in, but I know our house in NC closed on February 29th and we left NC on the 25th (I think).

Last weekend I kind of stole a little treelet from the foreclosed house next door. I noticed a little tree had sprouted in the front corner of the yard, very close to our yard, so I dug it up and then we replanted it in our yard. I hope it survives. I would've left it there to grow where it sprouted except every so often someone comes to that house to clean up the yard and I know they would've pulled it up and gotten rid of it, so really I did them a favor, right? I don't know what kind of tree it is, but we think it's the same kind of tree that's growing in the yard next door, which is not a very big tree. It has fragrant purple blossoms in the summer with tons of moths flying around it and the branches are kind of willowy. I suppose if it survives and gets bigger, we'll get to see if it's the same kind of tree or not.

I hope to get some Joshua trees for the front yard at some point. They don't grow in this area naturally, but they will grow if planted and taken care of because I've seen them in people's yards around here. We saw tons of naturally-occurring Joshua trees when we drove through Searchlight, Nevada on our way to Vegas in December.

We moved our bird feeders out into the yard so we won't have bird seed all over the front porch any more and they seem to have attracted a new bird; the Cactus Wren:


This is the Arizona state bird. It's a little too big to sit on the bird feeders, so it stays on the ground and picks up seeds that the finches drop. I've only seen one out there at a time, so I assume it's the same bird each time. We also get quail and sometimes doves and pigeons out there, but mostly little finches. Some of them are looking pretty fat and I wonder if they'll be laying eggs soon. I wonder how tiny the finch babies must be, since the grown finches are so tiny themsevles! I'm looking forward to seeing more quail babies and bunny babies this spring and I hope to get some pictures of them.

We've been trying our hardest to make sure our rose bushes out front don't die. We've covered them up several times when we had really cold nights and they seem to be hanging in there, even showing some new growth in places. I really hope they survive because we busted our butts (and almost broke our backs) planting them last year in this hard-as-rock soil.

I'm so excited that Lost and American Idol are finally back on, especially Lost. Last night was a real kicker, finding out that Charles Widmore is one of the Others. So that explains why he thinks he has a right to the island. I imagine he and Ben have been rivals for a long time, though it seems Ben is quite a bit younger than him. I wonder if Ben was alive in 1954 when Locke visited with Richard Alpert in last night's episode? And is Locke really dead now? Will the island bring him back to life somehow??

Britney on Japanese TV

This is the time of year when I get to watch all the end-of-the-year musical shows that are on Japanese TV every year. Ayumi always performs on all of them and I get to see all my other favorite Japanese singers, so I always enjoy seeing them. So far I've watched 3 of them and I'm still downloading the 4th one. I was surprised to see Britney Spears perform on one of the shows and I was even more surprised to see how much they love her in Japan. Even the other performers on the show were really excited to see her. Basically she came out and lipsynched a song, as far as I could tell, then said a few words through her interpreter and everyone was just going nuts over her. She was the second-to-last performer on the show and Ayumi was last. They always save the best for last. :)

I also recently got to see Ayumi's annual Countdown Live concert from New Year's Eve. Her Countdown Live from last year was probably the worst concert I've ever seen from her, so I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, but she sounded pretty good. It was a live TV broadcast, so there was no editing, unlike her concert DVDs.

I've been working on a website with all the Ayumi desktop wallpapers that I've made, but I still haven't got the layout quite the way I want. I have about 80 desktops that I want to include, and I haven't really had time to upload them, either. You can see what I have so far here. Ayumi is often featured in Japanese magazines, so I find the scans online and use them to make the desktops.

Monday B and I went to see a movie, which is the first movie we've seen since we moved. I wanted to see The Day the Earth Stood Still, but it was no longer playing at the one theater in town, so instead we saw Marley & Me. Oh, my goodness, what a freaking sob fest. We were originally going to have dinner after the movie, but neither of us were hungry and we couldn't stop crying, so we just went home. I hate that I cry so easily at stupid stuff like that. It kills me that, in the logical part of my brain, I thought the movie was kind of corny and definitely not cry-worthy, but yet I cried anyway and I couldn't not cry. Believe me, I tried. I never used to cry when I was younger, and then suddenly it was like a cry-switch was turned on and now everything makes me cry. It's so unfair.

Yesterday I had some time to kill while waiting for my prescriptions to be filled at W@l-mart, so I browsed through their books and ended up getting two; Duma Key by Stephen King and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. It's been a long time since I read anything by Stephen King and I always enjoyed his stuff, so I decided to try this one, and the other book was voted one of the best books of 2008 at Am@zon.

B had to start some new hours at his job yesterday. Apparently his employer is having to pay more for their insurance, so they're requiring everyone to work 8-hour days, instead of the 7-hour days they used to work, and B is having a really hard time with it. He's talked about going to part time so he doesn't have to work 8 hours (but he can if he wants), but then we'll lose our health insurance. He's expressed his misgivings with his supervisor and she suggested that he just stay clocked in during his breaks to get the extra time in, but this is something B is struggling with because he feels the need to be working while he's clocked in, plus he's automatically clocked out after 15 minutes of inactivity.

In terms of the actual amount of work he's required to do, he can get that done in 5-6 hours, so it's frustrating to have to be chained to his computer for an extra 2-3 hours a day. He's talked about looking for another job, too, but for now he's going to try it and see if he can make it work. If he can hold out another 6 months or so, he'll then have 2 years experience and a lot more doors will be open to him.

Here's a clip of Britney performing at the Japanese show I mentioned. You can see how excited the other performers are to see her at the beginning of the clip.