Feeling Puny

No, it's not the flu, not yet anyway. It's vertigo. I had an attack of dizziness last September and now it's returned but it feels different this time, more menacing, with nausea. The onset was different also: I woke up Thursday morning, sat up, and was immediately knocked back down onto the pillow by some unseen force--ka-whump! I thought I had sat up too suddenly and lost blood flow to my head, so I laid there for a minute and everything seemed okay. I went into the house and was puttering around in the kitchen when I became dizzy and had to sit down. But it didn't go away this time.

According to one web article I found, which I am unable to find again, the cause is likely some sort of flotsam floating around somewhere in my inner ear, a calcium flake from my mastoid bone or something, and it's got into my semi-circular canal, irritating the nerve endings. One treatment is to lie down with my head hanging over the edge of the bed and wait for the junk to float up into the vestibule, out of the canal. I haven't tried it yet but my sister says a friend of hers who suffers chronically with this condition uses the technique.

Anyway, long story short: Since symptoms were present upon rising and improved throughout the day, I decided to see what would happen if I slept sitting up on Steve's couch. It worked, so I did it for two nights. No symptoms yesterday or today. Tonight I will return to my bed and hope for the best. If it happens again I guess I'll find a doctor. Cross your fingers.

Yesterday Steve and I visited the local Arboretum, which was rather a disappointment except for the raptor show. Click to enlarge.

This is a Harris Hawk.










In flight. Beautiful










American Kestrel. So tiny that a house cat can bring it down.










Siberian Eagle Owl, largest of all the owls. Its predominant feature is it's beautiful orange eyes.












It can turn its head even farther around than this: about 270 degrees.












That's the nature lesson for today, boys and girls. There will be a test tomorrow.

Catching Up Again...Again

It certainly is easy to get busy with other things: sleeping, eating, sight-seeing, helping my brother organize his photos, making earrings with the beads I bought in Sedona, organizing my own photos and sending them to friends and family, etc. It's not that I don't think of you often, you know, I just keep putting you down a bit farther on the To-Do List. Please don't be mad; I couldn't bear it. (Is anybody out there?)

The photos are up, so I'll try to give a bit of commentary to go along with them. BTW, another tip about viewing the slide show: when you open the blog page the slideshow begins a couple seconds later, and since I try to put them in the order that they were taken (usually), you might want to view them in the correct order for them to make the most sense. I've explained how to do this before, but here's a refresher if you need it:

Single click on any photo. It will enlarge and show in the upper left corner which slide it is (e.g., 3 of 42). You can either use the arrows above the photo to move back or forward to the beginning, or you can choose 'View All' and the entire gallery will open up. Then click on the slideshow icon, the farthest left one above the photo gallery, and the first photo will enlarge and the slideshow will run. A menu bar will appear at the bottom of the slide so that at any time you may increase the viewing time of the slides (e.g., in order to read the captions more easily) by increasing the seconds (click on the + sign). The default is 3 seconds but you can change it to any number. Or you can view the slides individually for as long as you like by NOT choosing the slideshow icon and just clicking on the arrows.

Anyway, here's what happened after I left Seligman (pronounced with the accent on the middle syllable, by the way). I drove to Flagstaff on I-40 where I met up with my brother Steve at his house,

and with my brother Larry who had arrived by car from Memphis the previous day with Steve's son Austin. They had taken the scenic route through Utah and Monument Valley, a trip that is definitely on my agenda for next year.

Larry appeared to be suffering from some unknown malady that was causing a hacking cough (Austin had some kind of crud, too) so he was feeling rather puny. The next day I stayed at the house with him (I was feeling a bit under the weather myself) while Steve and Austin drove to Phoenix (some two hours south) to pick up the rest of the Wellses at the airport: my youngest brother Jay and sister Marcia.

Next day all except Larry did some sight-seeing in Flagstaff, shopped a bit (ugh) and Steve grilled big ol' steaks for dinner. That night Larry was up with fever and lots of coughing, which I diagnosed as the flu (swine or otherwise, I couldn't say) so everyone became hyper-alert to germs and the correct procedure for coughing, etc.

Sunday we went to Sedona by way of Jerome. Since we are all rather large people, ranging in height from 5'8" to 6'4", with girths to match, we decided to take two cars. Steve and Jay were in the lead in Steve's pickup and he led us on the "scenic route" through the back country, much of the way on an unpaved road. We talked to each other on walkie-talkies ("Checkmate King Two, this is White Rook, over") and felt just like explorers in a new land, kinda-sorta. It was an extremely bumpy, dusty road and I thought it would never end. I was driving Larry's Saturn and he and I decided that there was no way we were going to be able to keep up with Steve at the pace he had set in the pickup, so, of course, the trip was even longer. But it was mighty pretty, and so was Sedona, with the late afternoon sun on the red rocks.

Monday was Grand Canyon day but we didn't have to hurry because Steve wanted us to be there at sunset. So we stopped off at Sunset Crater Volcano (the whole area is jumping with currently-dormant volcanic activity), two native pueblo ruins, and a roadside native crafts stand on the way.

Brother Steve traveled to Grand Canyon from Memphis with a group of friends (sometimes including brother Larry and son Austin) every year from about 1981 until he moved to Flagstaff permanently in 2001. He's probably traversed every known trail, and run the river twice, so he knew exactly where he wanted to take us for our first view. He had his spiel all worked out as well, about how Coronado and his men came to America in search of the Seven Cities of Gold, dispatching Garcia Lopez de Cardenas to find a large river they had heard about. De Cardenas led his men through the scrub pinion and juniper, right up to the edge of the biggest hole in the ground they had ever seen. They saw the river far below them, estimating from the rim of canyon that it was about 10-20 feet across (it is actually about 100 yards wide) but they couldn't find their way down to the river, possibly because their native guides were not anxious to show them the way, and so were forced to move on. It would be another 200 years before two Spanish priests explored the Canyon again, and another 100 years until Major John Wesley Powell led a Colorado River expedition through Grand Canyon, mapping and studying its geology as he went.

We ended the day at Mohave Point, next to last stop on the shuttle that runs westward along the south rim. Again, Steve led our little expedition through the scrub to the edge of the Canyon, this time far above what has become known in our family as Ryan's Peak. Ryan was Steve's younger son, who was killed in a car crash on Labor Day, 1999, at the age of 15. His ashes are mixed with the soil of Grand Canyon on top of the little peak. We stayed until the sun turned the rocks to gold and finally sank into the western sky. Rest in Peace, young Ryan.

Just Grand!

I got the photos organized and they're in the right sidebar. I promise I'll write something tomorrow.

Oh My, It's Hot

Greetings from beautiful downtown Seligman, Arizona, on Historic Route 66, home of the Roadkill Cafe and some really beautiful clouds. I wouldn't be surprised to have the first rain I've experienced since June in Wyoming (in fact, here it comes now).

It's 98 degrees in the shade but I don't care, 'cause I got air conditioning--woohoo--and all the electricity and water my little heart desires. I am a happy camper!

My Las Vegas contact didn't work out: no electricity and temps in triple digits so I had to leave early to find a place where I could run the A/C. Here's my favorite photo from Vegas (click to enlarge to full effect).

What you see here, among other things, is the base of a replica of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Casino, and also an old-world fountain, packed cheek by jowl with other casinos shaped like Greek temples, the New York skyline, the Taj Mahal and other unbelievably tacky things. Check out the number of people on the streets; I think you can tell how hot it is. I drove down the strip and took photos from inside Michelle. Just the thought of trying to find parking and then being out in all that made me sweat (don't believe what you hear about "dry heat"). Been to Las Vegas, don't need to go again.

But I'm supposed to be filling you in on San Francisco, which wasn't hot (I just missed a one-day heat wave, fortunately), and has great public transit so it was easy to see the sights.

Before that, however, there were the Biting Ants of Oakland! OMG, I was so freaked I didn't even think to take photos; all I wanted to do was get the little buggers out of my space! The first day I found a couple inside: no big deal. The next morning one was in my bed and it bit me: still no biggie--one little ant. One day and several bites later I discovered they were coming from the garbage cans I was parked next to (duh) and I realized that squishing them one by one was not going to work; they were in my food boxes and I needed poison, which I hate to use, but I had no choice. The really freaky part was when I saw some crawling on my little Christmas Cactus. Upon closer inspection, the plant was teeming with them, and when I picked up the inner pot and look into the outer pot, it was like something out of science fiction: I've never seen so many ants; the pot was black with them, all running around as fast as their little ant legs would carry them, shouting, "Run for your lives!" They died a horrible death and I felt bad and triumphant at the same time: "Leiningen" writ small.

Here's my favorite shot from my neighborhood walk in Oakland.

This is the tallest corn I've ever seen, and growing in the city! I grew up in Iowa and this stuff made Iowa corn look stunted.

The next day it got really hot in Oakland and since I didn't have electricity, I headed to San Francisco. I was unable to find a contact who had a driveway, SF being what it is, but an RVing Women contact led me to free parking on the street, right on the ocean, on a busline that went downtown and transferred to wherever I wanted to go: all for $2 each way. It had a great time, and because I was living on the cheap I blew $50 on a second balcony ticket to see "Wicked."


Here's one of my favorite SF photos, taken in The Castro; those ladies are no ladies.

Here's another: a "Lila's-eye view" of a crowded Chinatown bus. And no, I was not holding the camera above my head (well maybe just a bit); I was hanging onto a strap, the only 5'10" Anglo on the bus.

From San Francisco I drove to Sacramento for my souvenir Capitol Building postcard (and a tour: The Governator was out); then to Lake Tahoe where I camped in a state park, again without electricity so I couldn't blog; then to Carson City, Nevada, for my souvenir postcard of the Capitol Building (it was Saturday: no tour); then to an overnight stop in Hawthorne, NV, in the parking lot of the El Capitan Resort and Casino (again, no electricity); and finally over Hoover Dam and into Arizona.

It will take the rest of the day, practically, to get a new slide show up and running, and you may not be able to see it until tomorrow, but it's coming. Thanks for sticking around.

Oh, I've also included the following tiny pile of self-absorbed drivel that I wrote longhand during my stay at Lake Tahoe Thursday and Friday of the Labor Day weekend. It's not pretty, but if you want to know what was going on with me then, you can read it when you have absolutely NOTHING ELSE to do. Rest assured, I am way over it, thanks to Eckhart on CD through most of my journey from Lake Tahoe to Seligman.

It’s Labor Day weekend, Friday to be exact, and I’m here in the William Kent Campground for the second night. I’ve been practically alone all day and I guess I thought I would be until my stay is over tomorrow at noon. But lo and behold, the campers are here. Glory be, I think, for now I won’t be alone on Labor Day. Alone on Labor Day, I’m thinking now, how bad can that be? Well, I’ll tell you how bad: it’s the families and their campfires and kids shouting and parents running to and fro carrying the camping gear and the dinner fixin’s and so I go outside with my wine and cheese and crackers I bought from the little store up the road and I think I’ll just watch the action. But I can’t really see very well from this vantage point so I sip my wine and eat my crackers and cheese and read my book. I’m reading ‘Tis by Frank McCourt. It’s the sequel to his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes, and in this book he has come back to New York City from Limerick, Ireland, and it’s Christmas. I’ve been in New York City at Christmas so I know what it’s like: it’s fucking gorgeous is what it is. And there’s the hustle and bustle of shopping and visiting friends and family and eating and drinking and parties and presents and family. Only Frank doesn’t have any family and he’s telling about going to mass on Christmas Day and being kicked out of the pew of some rich family by a guy in striped pants and all of a sudden I can’t stand it another minute. I look around at the families enjoying their camping escapade and I want to cry because I remember those camping trips with my daughter and that time is gone. I would call my daughter and tell her how much I miss those camping trips but she’s too busy working (nurses work Labor Day weekend, you know) and she wouldn’t even pick up the fucking phone. So here I am in my little home on wheels pining for days gone by and getting all weepy. I don’t know how much longer I can do this alone. Maybe it’s time for that dog. For sure I should not have had that second glass of wine. And to top it all off I have no fucking electricity so I can’t even watch a movie. I should get the generator fixed but even if I did I’d feel like a fool running it with all these tent campers about. I should go for a walk…

So I walked a big loop to see if I could find someone to take me in and share their campfire. I walked by cars with tents and trucks with campers and people with the kids having dinner or finished, and one group that was obviously a middle-aged couple and someone’s mother, playing cards. I almost stopped but they were so engrossed in their game I didn’t want to interrupt. They were the most likely hosts and so I came home. I noticed that some people in campers were inside like I tend to be most of the time. I think we’ve lost that camping feeling. I know I have but for me I think it’s mostly because I live in here too. Most folks probably wouldn’t think of building a fire in their backyard so they could get that camping feeling, although I do know some people who have fire pits.

So I am going to eat chocolates and read Frank McCourt and hope I don’t get the woozies again. Maybe I should read a different book…

Las Vegas, Here I Come!

It's been many days since I had enough time/electricity to bring you up to date on my travels. Unfortunately, today is not good either. I'm sitting in a little cafe in Tahoe City, CA, juicing up the laptop and reading emails to see if someone answered my plea for a place to park Michelle when I get to Vegas. Got one! A Lesbian Connection CD (contact dyke) responded so I am much relieved. When I get there I'll put up my photos of San Francisco, etc. and tell you about being terrorized by biting ants in Oakland. It's a chilling tale.

Here's a teaser:

Don't ask because I don't know...