Why Do Space Rocks Taste Better Than Earth Rocks?

Maya had four days off in a row last weekend so we decided to make one of our big planned trips to another part of Arizona. He decided to go north to see what we could see in the Flagstaff area. On Friday, this was exactly one week ago, we dropped Asher off at the pet resort and sped on up I-17. Interestingly, though I-17 is an “interstate,” it only runs from Phoenix to Flagstaff. That makes it more of an intrastate highway… We did hit a little bit a slowdown again. That’s 0 for 3 for smooth travel on I-17. We had intended to get an early start, but per our usual, we didn’t we got lunch just north of Phoenix.

The drive was fairly amazing. It’s only 150 miles so you would think that things could change that much. However, the route rises over 5,000 feet from Phoenix’s 1,092 to Flagstaff’s 6,905 feet above sea level. The terrain in the same: flat plains broken by low hills and the occasional mountain of shattered boulders. The thing the really changes is the flora. Just outside on the manicured and watered lawns of Phoenix metro the terrain is once again the natural desert. Saguaro cacti dominate the hills. There are smaller, shrubby plants too. Then all of a sudden there are no saguaros but lots of this hearty tree called a paloverde. It’s green, as the name suggests, so it doesn’t need as large a left to get it’s photosynthesis on. It looks something like a very feathery willow. This goes in a while then you dip down into Verde Valley, going below 4,000 for the first time in miles. There are actual deciduous trees in the valley. They are in fall color as you might expect for this time of year. Next you start to climb again and the broken hills are covered in yellow grasses and pine trees. Yes! Pine trees! Whole hillsides of them! It actually strongly reminded us of the upper peninsula of Michigan. We didn’t know how much we had been missing real trees until we saw them again.

We drove right on past Flagstaff on that fist day. We headed east along I-40 to Meteor Crater. It’s about 30 miles from the city. This is also known as Barringer Crater after the man who championed it as a meteor crater. Previous observers had suggested a volcanic origin. There are a lot of volcanoes in the area. The highest point in Arizona is Humphreys Peak, just north of Flagstaff. It’s an extinct volcano. What Barringer kept pointing out is that aside from the crater itself there was no evidence for volcanic activity right in that spot. Also, the little bits of iron laying around everywhere were a big clue. His interests in the crater started as purely economic. As a mining engineer, he hoped to find the giant chunk of iron that had made the crater and thus mine it. He didn’t find it (as it was mostly vaporized in the impact), but by the time he gave up looking he had become dedicated to proving that it was indeed an impact crater, or astrobleme, as nerds like Matt like to say. He was largely successful and his work was instrumental in identifying craters as impacts sites on other bodies like the moon and Mars.

Seeing the crater is a little hard to describe. Very memorable for us is how quiet it was there. It’s a long way from anything so there is almost no city, car or animal noise. Quite surreal. On one hand the crater is amazingly simple. It’s just a big hole in the ground. That’s it. There is nothing else to see besides the hole. It is a big hole, but still just a hole. On the other hand is all the stuff about how it formed, about other impact craters on Earth that are less well-preserved, about the effects of impacts like, um… the end of about half of all life 65 Ma (million years ago). In that light the crater is not so impressive for what it is, but for all that it represents. It practically resonates with significance. Matt can now cross off a mid-level item from his life's to do list.

Why do space rocks taste better than Earth rocks? Because they’re a little meteor! If you like that joke, you can thank Futurama. In fact, you can thank Futurama by buying the new DVD movie Bender’s Game. We thought it was the best Futurama yet since the show ended.

Park of the Canals

Last Wednesday we wanted to go out and do something but we didn’t want to do a big thing. It was Maya’s only day off after working two days and working yet another day. She actually gotten to the point that she’s having fun at work. It’s a balance thing. Where there are enough resources (time, mostly) to care for her patients as she’d like, it’s a good day. When time is taken up by minor details that someone else should have taken care of or by adding another patient to her load, it can be a terrible day. She’s been having more good days than bad recently. That’s part of the reason why she’s decided to extend our time here in Arizona. We just officially found out that we will now be staying through January. Hopefully that extra time will allow us to see more of what the Valley of the Sun has to offer.

Speaking of what the Valley of the Sun has to offer, we went to a public park over in the city of Mesa. Matt had found out about Park of the Canals that, as you might suspect, contains canals. This little park had shelters and a playground as are typical for public parks. They are set in between prehistoric Hohokam canals. There are three inside the park. One is hardly more than a ditch. The second is still quite well-defined, but of an average size. The third is huge! Instead of being dug down into the earth, it’s actually two walls running parallel to each other. While these canals are a run down and overgrown, knowing that these packed earth and clay constructions are 800-1,000 years old only make them all the more impressive. That anything has survived this long is impressive.

As with Phoenix itself, the original European settlers thought it was impressive too. And convenient! Mormon settlers were the founders of Mesa and after a little bit of renovation they used some of the canals in what is now Park of the Canals in their own irrigation efforts. Within the park’s 20 acres are supposed to be several ruins both from the early settlers and (one presumes) from the Hohokam. We didn’t go look at any of that, but there is network of trails for visiting the sites.

The other really interesting feature of Park of the Canals is that the people who donated the land to the city also wanted a desert botanical garden to be part of it. So there is. The Brinton Botanical Garden is a fairly nice little garden. We’ve seen several desert gardens at this point and for one that is free and open to the public, this one is impressive. While small it had a lot on display. Possibly inspired by this picture which was on display at the Phoenix Museum of History, Matt wanted his picture taken next to a large saguaro. We also saw golden barrels, lots of different types of cholla, bunny ear cactus, a Joshua tree and… a rabbit! There were at least two rabbits that we startled out of hiding. One took off like a shot across the dirt, through the fence and gone. The other hid under a different bush and we approached very carefully. We managed to get fairly close and took a shot of it hiding in the shadows. Rabbits are the best rabbits!
After the park we went and joined our local library. Maya has an absolutely voracious apatite for books. She has read all of her books that are along with us and all of Matt’s that she finds even remotely interesting. Rather than acquire more books that we’d have to move (and pay for) we just got a library card. She came home with a pile of Christopher Moore books. Yay libraries! When she went to work the next day a patient asked if she’d done anything fun on her day off. Maya said she’d been to the library to which the patient responded, “Oh, that’s okay,” in a very consoling tone. Some people just like books more than others.

Camera Traps Work!

So, camera traps really do work. They can capture images of rare giant squirrels in Indonesia. They can demonstrate that bait hung in trees is not eaten by gigantic Australian goannas, but by birds. Camera traps have yet to capture proof of sasquatch, but they catch law-breakers all the time.

There are signs up all over here about photo enforcement of the traffic laws. Maya hears people complaining about it all the time at work. In the invasion of privacy versus protection of public debate we tend to come down on the side of cameras at intersections. If you aren’t speeding or running red lights, what’s the harm right?

The only problem with all this is that you have to know what the speed limit is. When you don’t, you become the law-breaker and the photo surveillance camera trap catches you! Matt knows, he got photographed going over the limit sometime earlier this month and we just got a nice letter from the Traffic Enforcement Office asking us to place pay their hefty fine. There is a statement of technology information page included that actually makes for pretty interesting reading. Apparently, at the moment of the offending speed we were having a good time talking about something. They also include a copy of the pictures they took of driver and license plate, to show they really mean you. Matt looks very happy in the photo.

He says that all those arguments about privacy, the anger at being spied on and the suspicious “Big Brother is watching” feelings that we had dismissed as valid arguments before feel a lot different when it happens to you. That anger passed though and we both still support photo enforcement, we just pay closer attention to posted speed limits now. That is the point of the enforcement, after all.

Arizona's Living History

Last weekend (15 November) we tried to go to the Pioneer Living History Village again. Last time turned into a bit of a frustrating mess. This time we made it! We did have a bit of slowdown on I-17 because of construction, but not a bad one. Unfortunately, after all that anticipation, the place was a little underwhelming. We thought that the village was the remnants of an old town that just happened to all still be there. Not so. There were only one or two buildings that might still be where they originally built. The majority of the buildings have signs that clearly state they were moved to their present location from other places in Arizona. A lot came from Prescott, but there were also buildings from Globe, Wickenburg and others places too. Somehow it is not as interesting to have a collection of buildings that were assembled together to appear as a cohesive town, but on the other hand, it’s neat that these buildings have been preserved at all.

Near the entrance is a former general store that now serves as an opera house. It was moved brick-by-brick from its original location. Nearby is a carpenter shop. The walls are covered in old tools and it is quite packed with various machines, tools bits of furniture. It features a lathe from back in the day that was powered by a huge fly-wheel. The tools are assembled from all over the place. They are not one person’s collection.

The place is supposed to feature re-enactors in period dress going about their Old Westy tasks. They have a gun fight daily, but we arrived after that day’s show. The only place we did see people in period dress was at the Victorian house. This was not a fancy Victorian like the Rosson Mansion, this was a more modest home. From the outside it looked basically like your average modern wood frame house, painted yellow. Inside it was decorated with all the trapping you would expect of a place more than 100 years old. The main hallway of the house was very wide with very wide front and back doors. The cross-breeze made the house feel quite comfortable. The re-enactors we saw didn’t even appear to the re-enacting anything. It was just two young ladies making sandwiches on the back porch. They may have also been stoking a fire, but we couldn’t tell. That was the extent to recreation. There is a working blacksmith shop and a working blacksmith as well. He, however, made attempt to be “in character” for the 1880s. His forge was gas powered and stoked by a big air compressor fan. He was working on trinkets for sale in the gift shop. This is not to say that watching someone beat out steel isn’t cool. Maya got a little wizard face key chain he had made.

Walking over to the far end of the place we paced the miner’s shack, the abandoned mine shaft, a narrow cage railway, a stone circle with a label we couldn’t read, the church, the cemetery a burned-out bakery. The bakery may be one of the only buildings this is original to the location, we reach this conclusion only because it was one of the few buildings that did not specifically say it had been moved from elsewhere. It was not in very good shape. Apparently, there used to be a Chinese laundry above the bakery, back in the days when there was a second story. Other than the building itself, most of these places had little to see. They each had a sign telling what you were seeing and a short history of the building it self, but there was little to give a sense of how the buildings were lived in. For a “living history” village, they could have done a better job of bringing the lives of pioneer Arizonians to life. Next to the church was the school teacher’s house and the school. They did a better job of interpreting the past. The one-room school house was originally a residence. When the family got too big (after the coming of their eighth child) they moved on to a bigger place and the old cabin became a school house. It was used until 1920! See? That story makes an old building pop into life! It helps that the school house is the first building to be moved to the site and preserved. Maybe they’ll get around to the other buildings eventually…
Over on the far side of the village, past the rock walled corral and the pair of 1,000 pound man-eating pigs, was an old ranch house. It had the very familiar log cabin look. There were several of these log cabin type homes on the far side. One was the childhood home of Arizona’s first U.S. Senator. Another called the “Flying V” cabin had gun slits cut into the walls because it belonged to someone near Apache land. The Indians are known to have attacked the house in 1882. Coming back around to the front of the village we looked in on the sheriff office/jail/courthouse and the bank. Both of there buildings are not original, but built from period photographs and they are populated by really bad mannequins. There were also some goats and a mule behind the sheriff’s office.
So, all in all, there was a lot of stuff to look at and we spent a few hours there. We weren’t really sure what to expect, but what we found didn’t really meet with expectations. While some stuff was nicely preserved and nicely presented, a lot of stuff was there just because it was old. Lots of mine cars, wagon wheels and old faming equipment were littered about. More than one building was in very bad repair. Also, there wasn’t much that made this collection of buildings unique. Nothing that seemed to say, “This is Arizona, only here could this have happened.” Maybe there isn’t anything like that in Arizona, but there has to be. Maybe we just go to too many museums and nerdy history-related sites, but this one didn’t really impress us.

What is Domo?

Since we have been traveling we haven’t had much in the way of decorations for your apartment. We are really missing the festive stuff as the year bends toward the big year-end holidays. For example, we went out and got a table-top Christmas tree the other day. We also bought a pile of felt. We’ve decided that the Domo we bought for Halloween will be our all-purpose holiday Domo. What is Domo? Officially, he’s the mascot of a Japanese television station, but he is popular enough to have his own show and spin-off products all over the place. We discovered him as part of Target’s Halloween promotions. You likely saw him too, if you shop at Target. He came in a pumpkin costume, but for Thanksgiving Maya suggested we make a turkey costume. Matt thought this was a great idea and we set about making it.

There really isn’t much to say about it. We divided the work up quite naturally. We’ve never really worked on a creative project together like this, but we seem to work well together. Maya made the feet, the beak and the body of the costume. Matt made the feathers and assembled the tail with some suggestions from Maya. He also dressed up the hat we bought with the belt and buckle to make the pilgrim-esque hat. We thought one Domo was indulgent back in October, but now we wish we’d gotten two. That way we could have a pilgrim and a turkey, or next month Santa and a reindeer.
The blog isn’t caught up yet. There are a couple of other places we’ve been in the last few weeks that we haven’t talked about. However, we’ll be leaving tomorrow for our first weekend trip in Arizona and we wanted to at least mention it before we go. We’re heading north to the Flagstaff area. We plan to see Meteor Crater and the Grand Canyon! We’ll have more to say when we get back. Happy weekend!

Heritage Square²

A couple Fridays ago we went back to the Heritage and Science Plaza. This time we went to the Phoenix Museum of History. With all the other history-related places we have been lately, it was actually a bit of a lack-luster museum. There were a few Indian artifacts to start with, then a few pieces from the early days of turning the desert into a sleepy farming community, next a showcase of the town’s rapid growth to a thriving metropolis, and lastly a display about how it is the duty of all of us to continue to preserve the past for those that will come after us. All in all, a very standard little history museum. That is not to say that there weren’t a few interesting things in the museum. One of our favorite items was Phoenix’s first jail – the jail rock. It’s a set of shackles, set into a rock. That was more effective then walls made of mesquite branches or adobe. The frontier was so brutally efficient. It’s just sort of amusing to look back on now, but what a hard life it must have been.

Life got a lot easier when the railroad finally connected Phoenix up with the rest of the country. After that, anything that could be had, could be had here. There was a whole section of the museum detailing the various specialty shops that imported these goods and supplied them to the Victorian-ear Phoenicians. That’s right, according to the signs in the museum, residents of Phoenix are slash have been called “Phoenicians.” This is not something we have encountered anywhere else. We don’t hear it on the street, on the news, don’t read it in the papers. To put it in Maya’s exact words: “Phoenicians are dead – all of them.”

In the lobby of the museum was a very large and detailed model of the USS Phoenix (CL-46). The ship’s service record is extremely interesting. She was built in the late 1930s and was stationed in Hawaii during the attack on Pearl Harbor. She suffered no damage in that attack and became one of the ships to undertake a search (unsuccessful) for the Japanese carrier fleet in the immediate aftermath of the attack. She saw a lot of action in the Pacific, but was never heavily damaged. In one engagement, she managed to dodge two incoming torpedoes! After the war she was decommissioned and sold to Argentina in the 50s. She was re-named ARA General Belgrano and was still in service in 1982 when she saw action again against the British in the Guerra de las Malvinas (Falklands War). When HMS Conqueror struck her with two torpedoes on 2 May General Belgrano became the first (and so far, only) ship be sunk by a nuclear submarine. Somewhat ironically, the type of torpedoes used had been in service since 1925. The 323 lives lost in the sinking accounted for half of Argentina’s casualties in the conflict. So it goes.
Across the plaza from the museum is Phoenix’s only reaming Victorian mansion. The doctor at the nearby military fort, one Roland Rosson, retired to Phoenix in 1879 to start a medical practice. He was successful and also got into local politics. About the time he became Mayor, he build a house on the very edge of town. Literally, the edge: there was nothing past 7th Street. He didn’t live there long because a dispute with the city council lead him to leave the mayor’s office, then Arizona, as he felt Los Angeles offered better “educational opportunities” for his children. The house then became the home of several upper-crust “Phoenicians” through the years. Eventually, as the city center crumbled a little the house was converted to a flop house and later rooms rented mostly to collage students. Our tour guide said that this was all actually good for the house because wall paper was covered up, linoleum was put down on top of the cherry-inlaid floor and the pocket doors in the dining room were just plastered inside the new dividing wall. It was “out of site, out of mind” for the tenants, but when conservations got hold of the house all that cool Victorian decoration was still there underneath - and in perfect condition!

Some interesting things about Victorian live and times we learned at the Rosson House Museum: If you called without being invited you got no further than the lobby until someone decided whether of not they wanted to see you. No guest ever went up stairs; that was family only. The huge stair case was a mail-order item, shipped in on a train in three giant sections. The kitchen was almost as decorated as the parlor, because while your guests for parties and such wouldn’t see the kitchen or panty, delivery people coming to the back door would. Red glass panels meant wealth because the glass gold dust was sued to make the glass red. Nails were not driven through the expensive wallpaper, but into special “picture rails” mounted just below the crown moldings. Nearly every room had a large window that went all the way to the floor and would slide up out of the way to reveal a doorway out onto the porch or balcony. These windows were as close to climate control as you got in 1890s Arizona.

This post is almost two weeks out of date. This is mostly because Matt is deeply into his efforts to write a novel in just one month. He spends a lot of his time working on the novel and blogging about the process. That’s right, there a whole month worth of posts, one for everyday! If you are longing for more The Longest Commute, try some Words Are My Sword. He’s got 30,000 so far and that’s right on schedule.

The Art of Art

On this past Thursday we went to the Phoenix Art Museum. It’s a real high class place, and absolutely huge. They have something like a dozen different galleries spread across three floors. Huge! We don’t go to a lot of art museums (Louisville’s Speed is about the only other one) so we don’t know how this one compares, but we were impressed with the size and the scope of this one. So many of the museums we have been to of late are packed full of artifacts that are all interpreted for you. Here’s the thing in its case, here’s what we know about, here’s what we think about its place in the whole scope of artifacts on display here. The difference between that and an art museum is striking. At an art museum, at least this one, you get the object and a little card with its name, the name of the artist and the date. The work may or may not even be connected to the other works in the gallery. Each is encountered in isolation. All interpretation is left up to you, the viewer. That’s just the way art is (“Good, it’s supposed to be that way,” says Matt). It’s just so different from all the other places we have been.

We started, for no particular reason, in the Asia gallery. 2000 years of Chinese pottery, Hindu deities, lots of Japanese wood block prints. It was all pretty nice. After that it was the Ullman Center for the Art of Phillip C. Curtis. Curtis was a local Arizona artist and founded the organization that eventually became the Phoenix Art Museum. He work was surrealist in the Dalí tradition, but, as you can see, his work is considerably warmer. There is an almost nostalgic quality to his paintings of suited men bearing gifts and groups of women waiting for the train. Curtis seems to be expressing a fondness for a bygone world rather than a rejection of the modern world. Both have the sadness of alienation, but it flows from very different springs. One of the largest galleries at the museum is currently filled with the annual exhibition of new work by the Cowboy Artists of America. There were many, many pictures of Native Americans, “vintage” cowboys, modern cowboys and desert scenes. Also there were a lot of sculptures in the Remington vein. A lot of it was interesting to view once, but neither of us really like western scenes all that much.

We spent a lot of time in the galleries for Modern and Contemporary art. There is a lot of love and lot to hate about art since 1930 or so. They, or course, had examples of both. The black metal strip running down the wall titled “Zot” and the series of canvases painted with orange squares: that’s what there is not to like. The wall-sized photographs of public interior spaces and the “pop-ish” wire and wrapping paper sculptures: that’s pretty likable.

There were two installations in particular that we liked. Apparently, they are considered some of the museum’s most popular works. The first of these is You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies by Yayoi Kusama. It’s a pitch black room hung with mirrors and strings of colour-changing LEDs. You walk in and the endlessness effect of the mirrors reflecting each other surrounds you in a true swarm of fireflies. You are reflected in the mirror too, of course, but only as a dark outline where you block the lights. You are getting obliterated. It’s a really neat piece. Humorously, it was voted “Best Place to Make Your Move” in 2007. The other installation was Mass (Colder Darker Matter) by Cornelia Parker. It’s a series of wires from which are hung bits of burnt wood. The whole thing creates a true cube in three dimensions, yet because of the thinness of the wires it looks like a flat shape from a distance. It’s something like an explosion suspended in time. It’s totally awesome. At least Matt thinks so. It was probably his favorite piece in the museum.

The museum is so large that we didn’t get to see all of it. We though we would be there a couple hours but after three and one half it was closing time and we had to go without seeing any of the European, Colonial Spanish or American art. We’ll try to go back and finish up on a Tuesday night when the museum has free admission.

Dolls of the World, Unite!

We need to get back to the Living History Village. We also want to go to the Superstition Mountains but we’ve decided to go to some places closer to home this week. On Tuesday we went down town to a small (tiny, actually) museum called the Arizona Doll and Toy Museum. This is something Maya read about in our AAA book. Matt was amiable so we went. It is one corner of the only block of houses left from “original” Phoenix. This block of late Victorian era houses is known as Historic Heritage Square. The blocks immediately south, southwest and west are covered by museums and a parking structure. The streets through the area are blocked off to form an expansive promenade. The whole complex is called Heritage and Science Park.

As we mentioned, the Doll and Toy Museum is tiny (but they still validate parking!). It occupies one small house on the southwest corner of Historic Heritage Square named Stevens House. Inside hangs an award from a local paper naming the museum “The Best Museum You’ve Never Seen!” This sentiment rings true. It’s not the kind of place very many people would be interested in. We overheard the docent talking on the phone saying that more money goes out than comes in. We were only the second visitors of the day. While we were still there three other people came. So, maybe it was a good day for them after all.

As one might imagine, the museum specializes in dolls from between the 1880s and the 1930s. The dolls from this period are wax, or porcelain with elaborately crafted dresses, costumes and hats. Dolls from this period have a certain otherworldly, disconcerting look. They are not realistic children or miniature adults. They aren’t really idealized children, either. At least they are not what we want our theoretical future children to look like. People had different aesthetic sensibilities in the years around 1900, but really? Many of the dolls were donated by local doll collecting groups. Some bore ribbons from various doll show competitions. All this amazed Matt, who had the impression that all this doll connecting stuff was a thing of the relatively distant past. Maya on the other had insisted that obsessive colleting of antique dolls is alive and well. Dolls of particular note: one taller than Maya, one dressed in a traditional Native Alaskan costume made by a Native Alaskan who happened to be the maid of the doll’s owner and an original Cabbage Patch doll with a cloth face instead of plastic one.

It was definitely a DOLL and toy museum. There weren’t really very many toys at all. A wooden scooter here, a small mechanical bucking bronco there… There was one room that had two boy-toy cases. One contained the original G. I. Joe figures and accessories. There was a jeep, an inflatable raft and even other soldiers like the French Resistance soldier and the German sergeant. There were also several issues of the official G. I. Joe fan club newsletters dating from the early 1960s. Neat! The other case contained in impressive (possibly complete) collection of original Star Wars action figures. These would be the poorly articulated (shoulder and hip only; no knee, elbow or waist articulation) toys that appeared along with the original releases of movies. There were multiple versions of Luke, Han and R2-D2 plus a myriad of the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary characters. Matt had some of these as a kid, but they are so obscure he didn’t realize they were Star Wars figures. Something for everyone at the Doll and Toy Museum!

The other element of the museum that we both found really interesting was all the doll houses. It makes sense that a doll museum would have them, but we didn’t think about them. There were none of the pre-fab or plastic types. One summer when she couldn’t get out to putter about in her garden, Matt’s Grammy made a doll house from plastic canvas. That was a neat thing. These houses blew even that one away in scope and detail. One had real working electric lights inside and another was a full four stories tall with a game room, full dinner spread in the dining room, bathrooms, bedrooms and the gardens outside. One of the most detailed was a combination hat shop and fabric store. It contained realistic, fancy ladies’ hats decorated with fly fishing feathers, individually rolled bolts of cloth, miniature scissors and belt buckles collected from all kinds of sources. It was amazing. We both found it impossible not to be sucking into the tiny world. Anther made by the same mother-daughter team was an old-style medicine shop with hundreds of tiny bottles. Apparently, the ladies contacted an actual owner of such a shop in order to get the arrangement of bottles and the Latin names for the various concoctions correct. Truly an amazing piece of work. A work of art.

How the West Was Won

We celebrated Maya’s birthday on 30 October with a classic combo: dinner and a movie! For dinner we went to Blue Nile Café. It’s an Ethiopian restaurant. We discovered it by accident weeks ago when we went to the Indian grocery store next door. Unfortunately, having just been to Queen of Sheba, we were not very impressed with the food at Blue Nile. Their prices are great and the food is good, but not even close to amazing. Apparently, there is another Ethiopian restaurant in town. We’ll go there next time. For movie we saw Burn After Reading. It too was something of a let down. We expected something a little more funny and a little less dark. It was funny. We were entertained, but the undercurrents were pretty close to disturbing. Maybe that’s too strong. The ads made it seem like a slap-stick comedy of errors about spies and international terrorism. It’s not. It’s black comedy focusing on highly flawed people with a few touches of CIA surveillance. It’s good to know what you are getting into.

The next day we went downtown again to see the Wells Fargo History Museum. Wells Fargo, which these days seems to mostly a bank, was originally two guys who invested in the Butterfield stagecoach route from St. Louis to San Francisco. The route opened in 1858 and after that Wells and Fargo continued to expand their business connections throughout the southwest getting into shipping, security, telegraph lines, railroads, and eventually banking. They way they tell it, the west wouldn’t have been “won” without them. That’s okay, everyone is the star of their own history. Since this story is somewhat unique in the annals of huge financial corporations, they have several museums in several big western cities that preserve both the history of the area and Wells Fargo’s involvement in that history.

The museum here in Phoenix has a real stagecoach on display. It’s one that originally made runs on the Butterfield route. It was sold off as the stagecoaches fell out of use, but later tracked down and bought back so that it could be put on display. In addition to this coach is a replica one with a TV screen outside one set of windows. You push one button to travel from the forests of the Midwest to the desert of the west and other to travel back again. The changing scenery flashes by on screen to the sound of hoof beats and jangling tack. Neat! The real 2,800 mile journey took 24 days with round-the-clock travel at an average of five miles an hour. Stops were made every 12-20 miles for fresh horses and fresh drivers. Meals were had three times a day mainly consisting of black beans and coffee. Sometimes jerky was also available.

There were several other replicas in the museum: a replica telegraph office, a general store, a gold dust smelter, even a mine shaft. All of these are filled with info about life in the “old west” and photos of Arizona towns like Tuscon, Tombstone, Yuma and Phoenix. In the back was an art gallery featuring paintings and sculptures from western artists like N. C. Wyeth and Frederic Remington. It was a nice little museum. It was all free of charge too. When you are a huge financial institution, you can offer public services like free history museums.

Maya is finally getting settled into her job. Our time in Arizona is 1/3 over! It just takes a while to learn all the ropes at a new place. She actually had a day she enjoyed not too long ago and that’s the first time that’s happened in a while. Also, sleep comes easier here for some reason. Matt has started on his WriMo – that’s his quest to write a novel in one month. He talks about it on his own blog.