Amazon Is Taking Over Tucson

I stepped outside this morning to a nice cool 76 degrees with a slight breeze.  Now I completely understand why all those people who were visiting the Oregon shores, wear gigantic coats.  Pretty soon 70 will be cold to me!!

On the way back from my foray to Lowes for stepping stones, I stopped to take a quick picture of this new development.  It's HUGE!!  I imagine at least 40 acres has been cleared of every speck of cactus and big lumbering pieces of leveling equipment have been taking a bite out of the earth.

I thought it must be one of the new subdivisions going in .... Tucson is growing like a weed ... but when this building started to rise up, I just had to stop and ask.  What in the world is being built here?  AMAZON distribution center, he said.

It's massive ... those tilt-up concrete walls are three stories high and a quarter mile long.  Not to say I go to town every day, but literally, one day this was a dirt field, the next day this building was up.  The railroad has a spur right into their parking lot.  I'm waiting for the RV park where the work campers will live.

So you think it doesn't rain in the desert?  I for one, thought exactly that.  Here's a radar image of that big storm that passed through a couple days ago.  Something like this has happened every single day, with the accompanying lightning show, followed by thunderous applause.  It's on the schedule again for today.  My chair is all set up .... all I need is a bag of popcorn.

Since it was semi-cool yesterday morning, I grabbed my shovel and went to work on the walkway.  You would think it's going to the gate, but actually, it's going to the sprinkler controls.  No more walking in the mud and looking for critters.

It's not perfect, for sure, but it's much better than it was.  At this point, the steps don't even wobble.  Hopefully a nice rain will set them in.  Now to level out the left side and find something to plant.  I know, the lawn STILL needs to be mowed.  Maybe today is the day!

With that accomplished, feeling like I was a waterfall of sweat ... or "glow" ... I headed down the steps to turn on the water.  Time to give Patty's cactus a drink.  This one certainly is happy with it's tiny pink flowers.  I'm sorry I can't say the same for a couple of others.  

So I donned my gloves (see, I remembered, only after working for an hour to get two tiny spines out of my leg) and headed out looking for another replacement.  I found this gorgeous fishhook cactus blooming one flower at a time.  The desert is happy.

Unfortunately however, I didn't find one single cactus small enough to transplant.  Up the hill and across the road there are hundreds, but nothing on my two acres.  I wonder why that is?

Okay, enough procrastination ... I'm going to mow the lawn with my handy dandy electric mower.  By the way, I found the circuit breaker box to turn off the power for my broken light bulb problem.  Now if I can only decipher the chicken scratch and turn off the right one.  Potatoes are on my grocery list.