I had a therapist once who told me she thought that this was one of my more endearing characteristics, but I wasn't married to her. The one I was married to would turn her back, leave the room and close a door. So I would put away the maps and books, and try to find something useful to do. And not have as much fun, until the fun actually started. The one I was married to finally left, (with someone far less fun than I, as far as I could tell) and I can now stack the maps and books beside my chair in front of the TV, and have some fun before the fun starts, and again it is one of my more endearing characteristics. I hope. The sweet lady who claimed me for the duration of our lives seems to understand.
It's time to go to the desert again. Well, in three weeks it will be time. We like going to the desert as much as going to the mountains and the seashore. I figure that makes us lucky, because we can go to places that make us happy. And that leaves all those other places that make us less happy, like Paris and New York and Honolulu, to those folks way different than us. I truly hope they have as much fun studying the maps and guidebooks before going to those places as I have looking at mine. Sure, we have to go to Las Vegas this trip, which must be endured, because I can't just go out to have fun without getting in some class learning time to justify shutting down the clinic for a week. But just you watch...
We'll find us some nice places going and coming, and enjoy some quality time with my dad in the process, all crammed into one well-organized week. That's why I plan these things so obsessively. Quality time. Can't be wasting that time, ya know, cause you only live so long. That said, this will not be a week laid out to the second, where if it is Tuesday 1PM, we must be in Wickenburg. Nope. We have to be in Vegas for a certain time, and we will be with Dad as much as possible, but in between we will turn left or the other left as feels right, and all that research I do to get ready will provide the fodder we will chew upon as we make these decisions. And that often results in taking the road where we have never been, and we have no idea where we may come out.
I spent some time on the computer today, stolen from the short gaps between client appointments. I was trying to learn more about a bird called a phainopepla. These birds live in the Mojave Desert in California, in southwest Arizona, and in Mexico. If the plan comes to fruition, on the way to Vegas we could spend a night and a day or so in a campground surrounded by desert hills, a shallow river, the train tracks complete with trains, and some brush thickets just teaming with phainopeplas. And if we are lucky, the place won't be so packed with low achieving kids riding dirt bikes and ATV's that we cannot hear the voices of these busy birds.
Phainopeplas are small birds, a bit taller than a sparrow while weighing about the same. You see the males most often because the ladies are shy. The males are very black and they carry a fine crest upon their heads. They like to eat seeds and berries, particularly feasting upon mistletoe seeds when the price comes down in season. Flying insects fill out the menu when the seeds aren’t around. So when in the desert you can find these pretty fellows perched atop the various armed and armored plants, that crest on the head visible in silhouette, just waiting for the errant fly to buzz past. Then they zip up and nail the little pest.
And they talk. Quite a nice talk, if you ask. The pervasive quiet is one reason we visit the desert, but that hardly means we don’t wish to listen to birds. We just don’t find too many songbirds there. That’s how things go. But when we go to where the phainopeplas chirp, we have desert music. And that’s a trip worth planning.
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