fanbloomingtastic

Be afraid, very afraid......of the (dum dum dummmm) TUMBLEWEED TREE!

Since 1957 our city (Chandler) has been lighting up a Christmas tree peculiar to Arizona. We don't have the tallest cut Christmas tree in America (that's just down the road in Anthem, Arizona), or the widest, most lights etc.

We build our tree from desert tumbleweed:

 

If you're interested here's the long and laborious process they take to construct it:

 

 

Obviously this 'sport' of hunting tumbleweeds at the end of summer, smashing them into a Christmas tree shape, spraying them with fire retardant, painting them white and tieing them up with Christmas lights is seen as retribution for their pack attacks on human territory.

Oh, you don't believe me that tumbleweed are cognitive creatures capable of hunting in packs and man's mortal enemy in Arizona.....how little you know.

Look I caught one of their hunts on camera...

 

See what I mean. Tumbleweed.....evil.

And I was very concerned when I went to see this year's Christmas Tree being built from them to see that some of the crafty ones were escaping whilst the city workers weren't watching:

 

See, they even have to put up CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER tape to keep members of the public being mauled by the tumbleweed inside!

My concern was that any escapee tumbleweed might hand around our town centre (down town) and get their revenge on Saturday night, the Chandler Parade of Lights and lighting of the Tumbleweed Tree (with christmas lights, not as in torching them, we're not that barbaric)....but luckily for me and my family we escaped off home (and out of the rain before any attack occurred.....I've yet to read the newspapers to see if my predictions came true.

Phoenix sunsets by Goth Child

I was going to pick one of these to Silent Sunday but I didn't want to pass them off as my own and was having trouble choosing just one. So here are some of Goth Child's latest photos of Saturday night's sunsets (we do have rather spectacular ones out here in the 'Valley of the Sun'). Her doing photography as one of her school subjects is seriously paying off..........plus she's slowly teaching me stuff about our camera which will hopefully result in better photos on the blog......eventually.

Enjoy!

Btw there are no filters or photoshopping on these, this is exactly how it looks:

 

Back To School (and haboobs)

I know this is going to seem like madness to all you Brits, but our school summer hols finished last week (or vacation as they say here - 'holidays' only applies to the time at Christmas, say 'holidays' in summer and the Americans think you're nutty). Yesterday was back to school......yes, just as the British hols are starting!

 

 

The girls definitely don't look like this going to school anymore... this was them off to school in the UK in 2007. You'll have to wait till later this week for me to get a pic of them together now.

School break/vacations/summer hols aren't the same across all of the USA, but earlier in the year hols make sense in Arizona as the peak of our summer (the weeks when the temperature sits around 108-115F, or 42-46C) is now over. They figure that it's best to have kids at home running up their parents air conditioning bills rather than the schools.....and playtimes (or recess) are pretty much impossible in the oppressive heat.

Now we're into the monsoon season, the temperatures are coming down but the humidity is rising and we're prey to the haboobs.

No, I'd never heard of a haboob until recently either. This is what happens to us here:

 

The Phoenix Haboob of July 5th, 2011 from Mike Olbinski on Vimeo.

Mike Oblinski takes some amazing photos and I really do recommend following him on Twitter if you're interested in photography or weather/storm chasing.

If you're interested in seeing what happened to us (a series of time lapse photos taken a bit nearer our house, taken on an iphone that went viral on news programmes around the world) then check out Scott Wood's photography site for this amazing video. I also follow Scott on Twitter for amazing photos (and heads up about bad weather heading our way ;))

So anyway, the girls are back to school and I'm spending lots of time dying in the heat clearing desert out of our pool (I know, I know, 1st world problems).

I'll tell you a bit more about what we've been doing over summer in posts later this week (summer camps aren't all sending your kids off to forests/lakes for weeks on end), plus how American schools prepare kids for new years/schools and stuff about Goth Child's first week at High School.....and how she's not really a Goth or a Child anymore.

But now it's time to go and wake up Melchett and get her off to school, so more tomorrow....no really, things are going to get back to 'normal' now hols are over, or at least my version of normal.

Oooh ooh and I've got to tell you about Vegas and the Burlesque Hall of Fame too (it's all coming back to me now).

Even freakier weather in Phoenix

So yesterday I told you about the monsoon sand storms we get here. And Fiona from Notorious Kitsch commented:

"That sky is so weird, thanks for sharing that, I always imagined Phoenix is just hot hot hot and clear skies all the time!"

Well, nope. I'd have thought that too before I came here - I expected desert = very high dry heat. In fact we joked that the weather reports here would be like on the Fast Show - "scorchio!" and nothing but "scorchio".

I was wrong.

I didn't know before we got here about the monsoon season that Phoenix gets as a pay-off for the 6 months of 100+ temperatures, and I definitely didn't expect what KPHO News were saying in the way only journalists can "some people are calling 'the worst storm on record'".

Yesterday had been a lovely 86°F (30°C) most of the day; it felt Autumnal at last, it felt like home :)

Then it went dark, and the rain started.

Now the amazing thing about Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun as it's known here, is that we can have totally different weather to stuff happening 20 miles down the road. So we had this:

 

Very heavy rain, fair enough. 1.22 inches of rain in less than two hours.

But what we had was NOTHING to some of the rest of Phoenix:

 

 

and even possibly a tornado less than 10-15 miles from us:

 

 

Trees were uprooted, power cable masts toppled flattening houses, huge sections of the freeways seized up due to flooding, houses and streets were flooded too, people had their cars chipped by quarter (2p) size hailstones, others had their windscreens smashed, hundreds of homes were left without electricity - crazy, crazy weather.

There are some amazing photos here on the KPHO.com website.

And today....well, driving around there are plenty of tree branches down still and lots of water still sitting on the roads, but it's sunny....not quite 'scorchio' but it is back sunny again.

Freaky.

Another reminder that we live in the desert - we get sand storms

Normally when you look out our back door this is what you see:

 

 

Blue skies, trees standing upright, sunshine.

But during the monsoon season here in Phoenix, every so often and usually very suddenly, the world outside turns into something that looks like it belongs in a sci-fi show about life on Mars:

 

It's really strange. The whole of the house fills with an orangey light. Where there was blue sky, it's suddenly an orange sky. The trees whirl and whip in the wind. And there's a strange heavy atmosphere - the type of atmosphere that tells you thunder and lightning is coming (and it does, a big thunderstorm usually accompanies the sand storm).

 

 

Unfortunately it means that for the day or so afterwards I'll find even more sand in the house than I usually do, and we'll have to do some diving to the bottom of the pool to clear the leaves, branches and tree bark - I know, your heart bleeds for me doesn't it ;)

 

 

And there's also the weirdest smell, which I still haven't gotten used to yet - wet sand, which also smells a bit like damp dog.

But at least the sand storms, the thunder and lightning, and the rain signal that each day we're getting closer and closer to bearable temperatures - we've moved this week to temperatures between 89-97°F (32-36°C) and that sounds fantastic to me after the 2nd hottest September on record.

(All photos today were taken by Goth Child, she wanted that mentioned).