Desert Life.

As an early birthday gift to Chris and Mike we’ve installed a gas powered pizza oven in the outside kitchen. There has been a number of delightful pizza like experiences with this new appliance and they are enjoying trying different doughs, toppings, and the like.

Always surround yourself with culinary inclined folks when you are not a part of the culinary inclined folks.

One of the pizza “paddles” that came with the oven didn’t survive the first pizza experience and a replacement quickly arrived. The oven company didn’t want the defective paddle back, so Chris and Mike decided to turn it into a wall decoration. Using the myriad of tools out in the wood shop, they came up with this design. It is now hanging in our kitchen and I think it looks fantastic.

I went on a hike in Saguaro National Park on Saturday. I was planning on going to hike with our friends Matt and Carver, but schedules got a little tangled up so I ended up going solo. It was a beautiful day.

The recent snowfall lent itself to water coming down the mountains and the waterfalls were going in full force. I took a different route than I usually do and much of the climb was along an active wash with the sound of water accompanying my hike. That hasn’t happened very often in my desert hiking experience.

The map of my hike doesn’t give a lot of detail, but the hike looked like this.

And here’s some discussion about the Douglas Springs Trail portion of the trail (the top half shown in my route above). Douglas Spring Trail on AllTrails.

My knees don’t appreciate cycling like they used to but I’m still doing pretty well on my hikes. It was a great day.

Now, here are the photos. I’m giving iCloud Photos a whirl, so hopefully this link will open a gallery. They’re also available right here.

We are fortunate to have a glass fireplace that faces both into the living room and out to the patio. I snapped a photo of the fireplace and found the reflections fascinating.

Lucky likes to keep it casual on a Thursday. I like to think his ears are a little bit country and a little bit rock ‘n roll.

We had a load of landscape gravel delivered to our home earlier this week. The load was seven tons and we all opted to move the gravel where it need to be ourselves. Today we finished the project and got the Yavapai (that’s the color designation, apparently) gravel where it needed to be.

I think the results are acceptable. My arms appreciated the work out.

I went for a ride to the southeast of Tucson and drove through Sierra Vista and around nearby Fort Huachuca. It was in Sierra Vista that I discovered the very first McDonald’s Drive Thru.

I noticed the “McDonald’s” in the main sign and the “McDonalds” in the little sign.

There are days when I really can’t believe this is actually our back yard.

A roadrunner stopped by for a bit to make sure I was working on a Monday morning. Once I snapped his photo he beep beeped out of here and went on to his next destination.