Some Music and Spoken Word

As some of my readers may be aware, last month Lee and I performed in a Stake Choir fireside. We are please to share this performance with you through the magic of youtube! It's a good Sunday listen, you might enjoy the music and I certainly hope you appreciate the message.
Please keep in mind this is an amateur ensemble, not a professional choir, so cut us some slack for not being perfect! You will find the whole production at the following link:

Cantata: Come Unto Christ

Enjoy!

Baby Bump

Having been harassed for maternity photos by no small number of friends and family members, we decided to take some. They are not professional by any means, but between Lee's photography and my photo editing, they turned out okay. I hope you are inspired by my rotundity.

There you go! It's nice to know that I've got less than a month to continue feeling like an ever inflating balloon. Then I can start feeling like a stretched out, popped balloon! I've mostly survived this past little while by doing crafty sewing projects. Here are the fruits of my labors:

BEHOLD! A collection of burp cloths, a blanket, and a car seat cover. Next I think I shall fashion myself a burp cloth poncho, just to be on the safe side.

This is Halloween!

I love Halloween. I mean REALLY love Halloween. And, I flatter myself, I really know how to get into the spirit of the holiday and have fun with it all October long. Here are a few activities that might enrich your Halloween experience this year:

1. Read some classic horror stories

Thanks to project Gutenberg, all the old classics can be downloaded and read for FREE! A few that I recommend for your spooky readings this year:

A Picture of Dorian Gray By: Oscar Wilde
The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde By: Robert Louis Stevenson
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow By: Washington Irving
The Phantom of the Opera By: Gaston Leroux
Frankenstein By: Mary Shelley
Dracula By: Brahms Stoker
Any given volume of work by Edgar Allen Poe (I downloaded one called The Raven ed., Vol. 2 as it contained some of his most recognized works)

Most of these classic stories are quite short, Sleepy Hollow could easily be read in an afternoon. And they aren't so scary that you couldn't read them before you go to bed!

If you have a library card, you have some more free options. You could pick up a Stephen King or any other modern classic. Not long ago I read Carrie (Stephen King) and, if I'm lucky, my hold on The Shining will be up before Halloween.

2. Halloween movies

For the whole family, I recommend The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline, and Hocus Pocus, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and Disney's Halloween Treat. You can rent, buy or borrow most of these, but you can also follow the links for the last two and watch them on youtube!

If you are more into mild-moderate scares for grown ups, Alfred Hitchcock is the way to go: Psycho, The Birds, Dial 'M' for Murder, and Vertigo, are all great. If you like zombie flicks, the 1968 controversial classic Night of the Living Dead is pretty great. It is also in the public domain, so you can watch for free. It's the granddaddy of zombie flicks and has far less gore and profanity than it's descendants. What about The Haunting? (not the 1990's crapfest, I mean the REAL one.)

If you want to just laugh, there are some great B-movie horror flicks that will fill your heart with joy...and confusion. Plan 9 From Outer Space, Troll 2,  and The Wickerman I have pushed for before and I will continue to encourage you to watch these movies.

If you are looking to be scared out of your pants, I am not sure I can help you. It's hard to be pee-your-pants-don't-go-alone-to-the-bathroom-to-change-em  scared by PG-13, and that is where the vast majority of my experience lies. I suggest you ask someone who likes still being scared after the movie is over, I am not one of those people.

3. Scary Listenings

Music to set the mood is a must! Just pop onto Pandora and create a Halloween playlist. A lot of great stuff will come up! "Thriller," "The Ghostbusters Theme," "Witchy Woman," "The Addams Family," "The Monster Mash," "Witchcraft," "I Put a Spell on You," and so many other songs that only crop up this time of year. Well, Monster Mash is horrible, but the rest are great! I also recommend you listen to some bits from Sweeney Todd (or just listen to the whole thing, it's great music!) "Night on Bald Mountain," and no Halloween is complete without Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor"! If you don't know which piece that is, it's the one you know.

Lee introduced me to another great listen: Three Skeleton Key, an old time radio program starring Vincent Price. It's fairly kid friendly, runs about 30 minutes, and can be found by following the link above. It did leave me kind of humming the song from The Great Mouse Detective for more than one reason, but it's a fun listen. (you don't have to download it, there is a streaming option that works great on the upper right side of the page.)

Please share with me what your Halloween celebrations might include so I can expand mine as well. I can't wait to get my costume ready so I can show off my creativity and how exceedingly rotund I am.

Desert Adventures!

This weekend we visited the Sonoran Desert Museum. It's kind of a zoo and a botanical garden and a museum rolled into one. There were native desert animals in habitats, but you might run into wild life just out and about because, well, you are in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

We started seeing wild animals right away! Actually, we started observing these critters before we even left our apartment. Look what we found right next to our apartment building:

Don't worry. We were about to climb in the car and drive off if it became hostile.

We have more unusual neighbors than we originally thought. Let's add Mr. Javalina to the list that includes dozens of hares and a pack of coyotes that howl in the middle of the night.

Here are some of the fun exhibits we saw:

A fox in her hidey-hole. And me.

Lee and the Black Bear.

Can you spot the coolest snake you've ever seen? He's camouflaged pretty well!

There was a lovely humming bird habitat. From certain angles his neck looks red, other angles it looks black.

Taking a rest on a giant tortoise.

It was much easier to climb in these shell things as a child...

The Aviary had some very friendly birds!

This little guy let us get really close.

A huge falcon we got to "interact" with.

Lee, a docent, and an American Kestrel (sparrow hawk)

No glass betwixt me and this diamond back! I am told we were "out of striking distance" though.

We'll take you exploring this fun little spot if you come visit us! You might even get to see some of these fantastic specimens running about on their own. I'm hoping I don't run into Mr. 3 foot Diamond Back any where but the Sonoran Desert Museum.

Disney Animals

Disney princesses get a lot of credit for their inexplicable ability to communicate with forest critters and vermin. Snow White won over birds, deer, tortoises, and squirrels with her squirrely little voice; Sleeping Beauty charmed whole flocks, even got an owl to dance with her; Cinderella had a bunch of rats...mice...probably lice as well. But, with the exception of Jasmine, the critters that befriend the heroine are lame sauce compared to the villain's animal sidekicks.

Iago the parrot can talk, to impressions, and make jokes. Maleficent's raven is crafty enough to find Sleeping Beauty when hordes of monsters and magic fail. I'd take that raven over all those chirping nitwits any day!

Ariel had a chubby flounder fish, Ursula got two creep-tacular eels. Flotsam and Jetsam could eat Sebastian, Flounder, and Scuttle for breakfast!

Though, honestly, the villains of The Rescuers films have the most awesome evil sidekicks. Madame Medusa has TWO GARGANTUAN ALLIGATORS. Alligators that do her bidding. I cannot even fathom that level of awesome!

However cool the alligators are, the poacher from Rescuers Down Under has the most hilariously crafty and disloyal monitor lizard in the universe. I would become a Disney villain if it meant I could hang out with Joanna the Goanna. She is the best animal character ever created.

Arizonian Labor Day

We spent our Labor Day at The Kitt Peak National Observatory. I don't know if you know this, but Astronomy is kind of a big deal down here. Tucson has city ordinances to limit light pollution, there aren't really street lights...yeah. Kitt Peak is a bit of a drive west of Tucson, but it was worth it to be at a high enough elevation to be out of the heat. Only 70 degrees! The National Observatory is a couple dozen large telescopes on a mountain top on a reservation. Apparently the local tribe was persuaded that the best way to honor the heavens was to built an observatory on their sacred tribal land. We got a guided tour of the solar telescope, and we walked ourselves around the 4 meter telescope, the largest on on the mountain. We enjoyed the scenery and the visitors center. Sadly, it was cloudy so none of the telescopes were being used. It would have been fun to see astronomers in their natural habitat! We took a few snapshots, ate all the snacks out of our cooler bag, and headed home. Nice way to spend a morning/afternoon.

You can see several domes in the distance, each one an enormous telescope.

Lee and the largest telescope. The 4 meter measurement refers to the size of the lens in the dome.

An awesome view of the "Belly Button of the World."

The solar telescope. That angled ramp is only the top half of the shaft, it's mostly underground. It has a big track in it so the lens can be adjusted. It looks like the beginning of the worlds largest, scariest roller coaster. For giants.

Sorry, no profile shots. I'll let you guess how grossly huge this growth on my abdomen has become. Suffice it to say, bending over is the worst and I'm really starting to waddle now.

A Break from Summer

Today we went hiking. You might be thinking "are you crazy? Isn't it a bajillion degrees there?!" Yes it is. In Tucson it is a million degrees, but in the Catalina mountains it is significantly cooler. In fact, our car thermometer claims the temperature to have gotten as low as FIFTY TWO DEGREES at the summit of Mount Lemon. It was Heavenly! It's all pine trees up there, we even stumbled upon a ski resort! Well, a single chair lift and one restaurant (no public bathrooms, those monsters.) It takes about an hour to drive from our house to the tippy tops of the mountains where it is so pleasantly cool, but I might insist we do it fairly frequently.

Since you wouldn't believe me if there were no pictures, here are a few lovely shots of our short hike. It's a good thing we found a short easy one, baby belly is starting to be a torment to my back!